Just a little refresher on COINTELPRO, hopefully to add some context to the current contention over FBI raids on the offices of Congress.

(via digby)

The Garbage Patch is a giant eddy in the Pacific ocean the size of Texas, full of floating plastic trash. It’s the kind of thing you’d think was science fiction until you read about it in the Seattle Times. Here’s another, more detailed article.

This patch, and others like it, show up here on shore as skim-feeding birds whose carcasses wash up on shore with a stomach full of plastic detritus.

Micropatronage: It’s what’s for dinner.

An interesting travel web site called 43places.com.

Browse around until you find a place you want to go, or where you’ve been. If you’ve been there, leave a blurb about it.

Xanga has a new ratings system.

Why is there a B or C rating if there’s no way to filter them out?

In other news: I found an open source RSS/Atom reader for Mac that will read Xanga: Vienna.

Two new DSLRs from Pentax, the K100D and the K110D.

They’re the *ist DL with anti-shake. I’m trying to figure out the difference between the 100 and the 110, but I can’t find it. I’m hoping the web site is wrong, and the difference is that the 100 has a pentaprism instead of a penta-mirror.

Anti-shake would be nice if I had any really long lenses (and if I didn’t mind carrying a tripod everywhere I go). I think Pentax is hoping their brand loyalists will upgrade, but it’s not that much of an upgrade.

The image of Katrina comes from a NASA project that visualizes all the named storms of 2005 in a movie. You can watch it here. The red ocean represents water that is warmer than 86f. If you watch Dennis and Katrina go through the Gulf, you’ll see them leave behind a trail of blue. Hurricanes eat water temperature like Pac Man eating dots.

The new gas tank arrived! Yay! One small problem: The outgoing feeder hose is too small for the existing hose. Grr. Now I have to figure out whether it’s a real problem (will it give enough fuel to the fuel pump?) and thus I should return it, or if it’s just a MacGuyver kinda deal, where making a hose size adaptor (which might leak) will be good enough.

Argh.

Maybe I could save my nickels and dimes and get one of these. Diesel-only (fine by me), but no 4wd option. Sigh.

Still waiting.

I ordered a part for the Vanagon from a place called Bus Depot, which was the only place I could find it. They said it would arrive in 7-10 working days. That was on the 5th. I called them last week and they said the inventory had arrived the previous day! It’d be one thing if they’d emailed me and said it wasn’t in stock, but they didn’t. It’s a gas tank, so it’s not an easy thing to find, or I’d have cancelled the order right then.

It should arrive Tuesday. Work Tue and Wed, on the road Thu.

Bus Depot: Big thumbs down.

Thanks to Xanga’s new ‘Footprints’ feature, I know that aisreply is spamming my guestbook from California.

Thanks, Xanga!