TrackBack spam? Grrrr…

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Well, here’s a first (for me, at least) — I just got TrackBack spam. One of the posts on my other site — this one, to be precise — just got a TrackBack ping (which I’ve just deleted) with no information other than a URL pointing to, of all places, the Thessaloniki Port Authority (http://www.thpa.gr/ — I’m not giving them the Googlejuice of a live link).

Bad enough that they used TrackBack to spam me, but the Thessaloniki Port Authority? That’s just wierd. And on a computer-related humor post, too. Just bizarre.

A few new Canadians

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It was bound to happen, really. I’ve known quite a few people who have at one time or another, with various degrees of seriousness, talked about moving to Canada as they got more and more disgusted with how things were going in the US. Heck, I’ve talked about it from time to time. Now, enough people have decided that this sounds like a good idea that it’s actually making news.

For all they share economically and culturally, Canada and the United States are increasingly at odds on basic social policies — to the point that at least a few discontented Americans are planning to move north and try their neighbors’ way of life.

A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.

“For me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Mollie Ingebrand, a puppeteer from Minneapolis who plans to go to Vancouver with her lawyer husband and 2-year-old son.

“It’s the most amazing opportunity I can imagine. To live in a society where there are different priorities in caring for your fellow citizens.”

For the moment, it’s not a thought I’d consider seriously. I’m quite content here in Seattle, and if nothing else, I want to stick around to see if we can actually manage to put a Democrat in the White House again. Should Bush manage to hoodwink America into re-electing him, though — Vancouver’s not that far away…

(via Brian Hess)

TPBETA 1505

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TPBETA 1505

My own little concept for marking my spot as a TypePad beta tester. A small badge, with ‘TPBETA’ on the left, and ‘1505’ on the right. 1505 is the ID number for my TP blog — obviously, the older the blog, the lower the ID number will be. Just another idea to toss into the mix of ideas running around right now. ;)

On the off chance anyone wants to duplicate this, I used the Kalsey Button Maker with the following settings:

  • Outer border: 666666
  • Inner border: ffffff
  • Bar position: 50 pixels from left
  • Left box:
    • Text: tpbeta
    • Background: 006699
    • Text color: ffffff
    • Text start: 5 pixels from left
  • Right box:
    • Text: 1505
    • Background: dddddd
    • Text color: 000000
    • Text start: 4 pixels from the bar

Update (prompted by Grumpy’s comment): You can find your blog ID# by logging into your TypePad admin page, going to your weblog editing screen, and checking the address bar of your browser. The end of the URL will look something like blog_id=1505 — there you go!

Is the day over yet?

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Today is just dragging on, and on…and on. Woke up with a bit of a headache, and it hasn’t gone away all day. Not enough to be extremely painful or debilitating, just enough to sit a couple inches behind my forehead and make sure that I don’t forget that it’s there. Urgh.

On the bright side, work is slow. On the down side — well, work is slow. I’m the only one in the department tonight, there’s nothing overly pressing coming down the pike, and I’m bored out of my mind. Hence this otherwise pointless post. I’ve bounced around some of the TypePad blogs on the recently updated list, randomly hit a few other sites, and so far, everything has completely failed to catch my attention. Just one of those days, I guess.

Okay, enough of this. Back to pretending I’m paying attention to work.

Maybe.

Sixteen Legs ;)

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Alfred Molina as Doc Ock

The first pic (that I’ve heard of, at least) of the villain in next summer’s Spider Man sequel — Doctor Octopus — hit the ‘net yesterday. Looks quite promising, from the one shot that’s up, I definitely like the design (though the arms do seem to bear a definite resemblance to the arms of the ‘squidies’ in the Matrix films).

Even better to find out, though, was that Tobey is still on board as Spidey, Sam Raimi is directing again, and Doc Ock is being played by Alfred Molina. USA Today has the details:

Alfred Molina, who has done wrong in everything from Chocolat to Dudley Do-Right, is the man bearing those malevolent arms.

“Alfred happens to be a great actor who has some of the qualities of a loved character,” says director Sam Raimi, who returns for a second spin with the web-slinging superhero reprised by Tobey Maguire and due next July 2. “Doc Ock had to have a commanding presence and intelligence,” Raimi says. “He’s got the look of a bodybuilder from 1954.”

Molina fit the bill as well as the costume, which includes dark goggles and a swept-forward hairdo.

“I’m told he’s one of the more popular villains,” says Molina, 50, who occasionally flipped through the comics as a kid. “It would have been foolish to have said no.” Originally a humanitarian, the doctor conducts an experiment that goes horribly awry and accidentally fuses a quartet of huge squid limbs to his spine.

(via Chaos Theory)

Sixteen Questions

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Howard Dean has published a list of sixteen questions that President Bush needs to answer, and has created a petition to sign asking that Bush address these questions. Sign the petition here.

The questions (along with citations, thanks to Steve Perry and John P. Hoke) are reprinted below.

  1. Mr. President, beyond the NSC and CIA officials who have been identified, we need to know who else at the White House was involved in the decision to include the discredited uranium evidence in your speech, and, if they knew it was false, why did they permit it to be included in the speech? (Washington Post, NY Times)
  2. Mr. President, we need to know why anyone in your Administration would have contemplated using the evidence in the State of the Union after George Tenet personally intervened in October 2002, to have the same evidence removed from the President’s October 7th speech. (The Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, 7/13/2003)
  3. Mr. President, we need to know why you claimed this very week that the CIA objected to the Niger uranium sentence “subsequent” to the State of the Union address, contradicting everything else we have heard from your administration and the intelligence community on the matter. (Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)
  4. Mr. President, we urgently need an explanation about the very serious charge that senior officials in your Administration may have retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson by illegally disclosing that his wife is an undercover CIA officer. (The Nation, Corn, David, 7/16/2003)
  5. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration persisted in using the intercepted aluminum tubes to show that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear program and why your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, claimed categorically that the tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” when in fact our own government experts flatly rejected such claims. (CNN, 9/08/2002, Knight Ridder News Service, 10/04/2002)
  6. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld created a secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon that selectively identified questionable intelligence to support the case for war including the supposed link to al-Qaeda while ignoring, burying or rejecting any evidence to the contrary. (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, 5/12/03)
  7. Mr. President, we need to know what the basis was for Secretary Rumsfeld’s assertion that the US had bulletproof evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a “meaningful connection” to Al Qaeda. (NY Times, Schmitt, Eric, 9/28/2002, NY Times, Krugman, Paul, 7/15/2003)
  8. Mr. President, we need to know why Vice President Cheney claimed last September to have “irrefutable evidence” that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, an assertion he repeated in March, on the eve of war. (AP, 9/20/2002, NBC 3/16/2003)
  9. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Powell claimed with confidence and virtual certainty in February before the UN Security Council that, “Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” (UN Address, 2/05/2003)
  10. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld claimed on March 30th in reference to weapons of mass destruction, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (The Guardian, Whitaker, Brian and Rory McCarthy, 5/30/2003)
  11. Mr. President, we need an explanation of the unconfirmed report that your Administration is dishonoring the life of a soldier who died in Iraq as a result of hostile action by misclassifying his death as an accident. (Time, Gibbs, Nancy and Mark Thompson, 7/13/2003)
  12. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration has never told the truth about the costs and long-term commitment of the war, has consistently downplayed what those would be, and now continues to try keep the projected costs hidden from the American people. (Miami Herald, LA Times).
  13. Mr. President, we need to know why you said on May 1, 2003 , that the war was over, when US troops have fought and one or two have died nearly every day since then and your generals have admitted that we are fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq. (Abizaid, Gen. John, 7/16/2003)
  14. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration had no plan to build the peace in post-war Iraq and seems to be resisting calls to include NATO, the United Nations and our allies in the stabilization and reconstruction effort. (Miami Herald, LA Times)
  15. Mr. President, we need to know what you were referring to in Poland on May 30, 2003, when you said, “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” (The Washington Post, Mike Allen, 5/31/2003)
  16. Mr. President, we need to know why you incorrectly claimed this very week that the war began because Iraq would not admit UN inspectors, when in fact Iraq had admitted the inspectors and you opposed extending their work. (The Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)

Sign the petition here!

Durn furriners

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“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq,” said Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.

How is this adminstration able to say anything with a straight face anymore?

(via Atrios)

Practice makes perfect

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Still, [Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon] and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

“We’re going to get better over time,” promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase” distinct from combat, he said. \”The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum.

“This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment,” he said. “We’ll get better as we do it more often.”

— The final three paragraphs of this LA Times article

(via Atrios)