Via boingboing:

A link to posters you can get from Microsoft, aimed at helping educators teach their students not to open attachments on emails.

Conspicuously absent is the one that reads: DO NOT USE MICROSOFT PRODUCTS.

From there, a link to the three steps toward making your PC secure. Again, conspicuously absent is Step 4: Send an email to Microsoft telling them that being susceptible to an internet worm and thereby ruining the internet for everyone else isn’t worth being able to automatically run executables sent as attachments.

OK, so I read that pretty close to half of Americans still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.

I apologize to all my intelligent, literate, informed readers for lumping you in here, but…

Hey! All you reading this! Hussein was (and still is) a tyrannical motherfucker, but… HEY! PAY ATTENTION HERE, THIS IS IMPORTANT OK? So he was a tyrannical motherfucker but.. and this is for real… THE DUDE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.

GOT THAT? Hussein was on TV saying he was glad 9/11 happened, but HE WASN’T INVOLVED. The 9/11 commission couldn’t find any connection. The administration couldn’t, either, and not for lack of trying. If there was a connection, you’d have heard it from Bush’s mouth.

And by the way, you DIDN’T hear it from Bush’s mouth. He never said Hussein was involved in 9/11. If Hussein HAD BEEN involved, don’t you think Bush would have said so? WELL? DON’T YA, DUMBASS?

So if you are one of those people who are willing to assume that Hussein had something, nay, ANYTHING AT ALL to do with 9/11, please do something, nay, ANYTHING AT ALL to educate yourself on the matter. And if some pollster calls you, be sure and tell them that you’re ‘not sure,’ rather than a ‘yes, he masterminded the whole thing,’ OK?

So now that you’ve all been educated, be sure and tell everyone you know that Iraq didn’t back 9/11. Because, apparently, there are A FEW AMERICANS WHO HAVEN’T GOTTEN THE FREAKIN’ WORD!

(Sometimes you just gotta rant.)

Making Light refers to the fact that Long John Silvers is going to give away free shrimp if evidence of an ocean is found on Mars. And says some other stuff that is arguably more interesting than that single fact.

Because I went to Dusty Strings today, where I found a copy of Väsen’s ‘Whirled,’ and FINALLLY found a copy of Hedningarna’s ‘Trä,’ I present two items for your listening pleasure:

Väsen’s ‘Kapten Kapsyl,’ and Hedningarna’s ‘Min Skog.’

The lyrics to ‘Min Skog’ in English:

Why should I cut down my trees even if they look poorly
You all complain about the view
an’ nothing will stop it surely
All my trees I’ll let them stand, sear or supple does not matter
Yes they may rot and fall down on you
I wish they’d end your clamour
Mama’s darling walked in the woods
with cheeks of green not red
Spewed up all his blueberries
sickened by bark in his bread
All my trees they shall stand though they’ve lost every needle
Squirrel in a spruce shucking a cone
to the sound of a guitar tweedle…

via BoingBoing:

A really great ‘blog entry where a ‘slush’ reader for a publisher reads a web-board where people bitch and moan about rejection letters.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store to pick up some things. I intended to get some green tea, because I’m trying to moderate my coffee intake. I got this travel thermos thing, see, and I thought that I could stuff a tea bag down into it and put boiling water in there, and have green tea all day instead of drinking coffee.

So at the PCC I find yerba maté in tea bag form. And it’s Guayaki, which is the good brand. And it’s on sale. It’s not green tea (though it’s tea, and it’s green), but it’s got a really strong stimulant effect.

I got home and put a couple tea bags in the thermos with some boiling water. Drank some. Kept drinking it. Put more boiling water in it. Drank some more. Watched TV for a while. Drank some more. Did the internet, did some reading. Drank some more. Paid my bills. Cleaned the dishes. Watched some more TV. Read another thing. Sat around and talked to myself. Did usenet. Did some more stuff. Went for a drive.

The point being that there’s no way I’m getting to sleep before 11am.

I wanted to write something beautiful. I wanted to pull the fog out of the morning and let it cover your mind like the lake just before sunrise.

I wanted to take the smell of the forest floor and the taste of hot coffee from a thermos where you packed it because you knew you’d be here in the mountains at dawn… I wanted to take the feeling you get when you’re laughing with your friends at stupid jokes, and the profundity that stakes itself through you like a circus tent peg, driven through the very top of your head right down through and into the ground, all the way to the center of the earth. The unfolding thoracic rose blossom of heartbreak. The orange peel acid of surprise. I wanted to take these things and put them in a box, a tiny box, the kind you think might have a diamond ring in it. A box tinier than any the world has ever known.

I wanted to take those things and put them in the tiniest box and wrap it with microscopic ribbons, because they’re the only ones that will fit. I wanted to make a package you only have to breathe on and it disappears because it’s so fragile and delicate.

I wanted to take this tiny package with the microscopic ribbons and hold it on my outstretched palm, and give it to you as a surprise. And this is a measure of how cleverness will be my downfall, because I’ll know that if you breathe on it, it will float away along with the moisture of your breath, and if you think I want to shake hands, it will be crushed, obliterated. And if you think I’m offering you nothing, you will have totally missed the point.

And then I’d know.