Thank goodness that Google started mapping Mars... Maybe people can look for "Martian" Luther King Jr..

I was laughing at this mistake the other day, when I realized that the source I was reading couldn't be the first to mistype it. Sure enough, at the time of this post Google shows nearly 550 links!

New project: I'm building an army. Won't you help me?

Friday I was chatting with my brother-in-law, Zach, and saw that he had a link to www.KingsOfChaos.com in his IM profile, so I asked him about it. Two days later I'm kinda addicted. Sheesh!

You can support me in the game by clicking on the link once a day (ha!). You can support Zach, too. Oh, and ask one of us if you want to get started in the game.

This afternoon I made some minor fixes to the home page theme here... long overdue. IE users may especially appreciate the PNG transparency in the logo, so there's no more color mismatch. Also, I removed the little-used "Polls" and added a "Now Playing" bit showing my Last.fm list for the week.

More to come as time allows, but this was a start.

One night a few weeks ago I was craving Chinese food—I mean the unhealthy, Americanized kind that Ains & I rarely eat—so we called up Lang's Express and some 80 minutes later some lukewarm digestion bombs arrived. Hey, at least it cured my desire for Chinese food!

Anyway, there were plenty of yummy fortune cookies—I confess: I love that lemony, moist-towelette fortune cookie taste. Inside was this message:

Today it's up to you to created [sic] the peacefulness you long for.

I can understand that. I remember that As someone famous said, "You must have the qualities of salt among yourselves and live in peace with each other."

Today is my last day as an employee at L.L.Bean's... It's a long and complicated story, little of which I will tell here, especially right now. Suffice it to say it was time for me to move on.

Mmm... Merry Christmas from Microsoft: New toys for SMS! And even better news: they're free, so there will be no credit card bills in January.

Do the rampages over 200-buck laptops at Circuit City surprise anyone? I once had a Best Buy sales floor employee all but confess to me that the company regularly does the ol' illegal bait-and-switch trick. As I asked about a sale item from the flyer I had picked up at the store entrance, he said, "Oh no, we don't have any of those... You know, I've noticed that almost every week the company will advertise these wicked good specials on products that we only have two or three of them in stock, so when the customers come in looking for them all we can do is show them other stuff..." Whoops!

Today's Spam Subject Line Of The Day (see previous) is for you math nerds out there to figure out:

Hiya cutey =),,.. decimal

At least it wasn't about "exponential growth" or something!

This past week, including the Thanksgiving holiday, has been altogether unusual. My darling wife and I had expected to have no family around and possibly nothing to do for Turkey Day, but as it turned out we had more than enough of both.

Ainsley's younger sister, Whitley, has been in the ICU at Maine Med for over a week now. Our friend Freddy took her in last Saturday, as she'd been fighting cold-like symptoms and couldn't breathe too well; soon they discovered her lungs were mysteriously and significanly infected; by the next day they had her knocked-out on a respirator. They (yes, the ambiguous "they": the doctors, I mean) still don't know what is causing it.

Oh, as for Thanksgiving: all of Ainsley's family came out here to be with Whit, and we had a little luncheon at the hospital cafeteria along with my parents, then more family dinner(s) in the evening. I think they pumped some brown stuff into Whitley's stomach, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't turkey... ick! (Thank goodness she's been asleep.)

In today's lesson, kids, we learn how free markets aren't free. Not for the consumers, at least. By now you've probably heard about the 31 million smackers that the poor stateside oil industry sucked up during that "difficult" quarter in which two hurricanes damaged so much equipment and hurt their ability to deliver to the thirsty cars and trucks. (Remember I wrote about this back in September?) Well, today some of their execs are "answering" to Congress... sort of. It remains to be seen if the lawmakers will do anything but ask questions, seeing that the bigwigs haven't even been required to testify under oath! (Not that swearing on a Bible would change their admissions any; it never seemed to make a difference for Enron, Tyco, or U.S. government hotshots either.)

The NY Times has published an editorial on the proposed Windfall Profit Tax [blood sample required, yada yada]—in favor no less, but with a caveat. In short, they suggest that it's the American consumer's fault for demanding so much oil and gas and driving up the prices: y'know, the whole supply-and-demand idea. Yet the unnamed author is still in favor of such a tax, as instead of letting the profits from such luck go to the oil companies "with no public benefit", it would go to the government... where presumably it would be so much better spent.