Month: June 2003

You get one word. Then you get one minute to write about it. Go!

Yahoo reports that

Models Nikki Ziering and Angie Everhart pose for photographers [go see the photograph!] at a news conference announcing plans for “Lingerie Bowl 2004,” a live pay per view event to be televised at halftime during the 2004 Super Bowl, June 25, 2003 in Hollywood. The event will feature two teams of models in custom lingerie taking part in a 7 on 7 tackle football game. Ziering and Everhart will be the quarterbacks [for] the two teams at the event, to be held next February 1, 2004.

Hmmm… crappy Superbowl halftime show, or Lingerie Bowl 2004? Not a tough choice, really…

Gotta love those Germans…

Slate’s Timothy Noah says, “Yes. There’s no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.” His excellent article examines some of the many lies exaggerations involving recent issues facing W, including the lack of WMD in Iraq and the upcoming tax cut that supposedly “would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax” but definitely will not.

Although I’m tired of the whole debate over whether the U.S. should have intervened in Iraq, I’m glad to see that articles where the central issue is “Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?” are more prevalent lately, because it’s about damn time. But will it matter? The New York Times article actually tries to qualify W’s statements, asking “Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?” The Slate article asserts that “In Bush’s case, the answer is painfully obvious. It’s because Bush is a functionally not-bright man.” Well, duh, that’s not exactly a revelation, but he is supposed to be our president. He’s supposed to know these things and act in the citizens’ best interest, not dupe them and claim ignorance, saying that “he knows what he doesn’t know.” I can’t believe that this idiot got elected; let’s hope it doesn’t happen again…

The most excellent author of X-Entertainment presents the Top 11 Animal Attack Movies!

Check out these Soviet-themed splash screens for Mozilla.

I’m feeling rather mundsoided, so I figured I’d mention this Random Word Generator that analyzes “the frequency of pairs of letters in 45,402 different words … to generate new words.” Very cromulent.

You’ve probably seen the targeted text ads that Google runs alongside its search results. Well, it seems that Google is now offering its “AdSense” technology “for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality.” The ads are supposedly targeted according to the content on your page; I found a very useful page that preview the ads for a particular URL. Here is a preview of ads for the blog/home page , and here is a preview for my ‘80s main page.

I’ve avoided banner ads and their ilk for some time now, although I have subscribed to several affiliate programs like Amazon, MovieGoods, and GEMM to help pay for ISP costs, web hosting services, and domain name registration. I’ve never made much money with any of those programs, and I have yet to come close to turning a profit on the site, but that was never the goal of my site anyway. Still, it would be nice to turn some of those hits into some money I could put towards offsetting my costs. On the other hand, I really don’t want to “sell out.” The text-based ads are fairly unobtrusive, at least, but I don’t know whether it’s worth compromising my site’s relatively noncommercial content. What do you think? I’ll see if I can direct some traffic to my message board; I’ve posted a poll there to let you guys vote, or post comments below and please let me know what you think. Thanks in advance…

The BBC reports that a team of geologists has discovered a meteor crater in Italy that dates back to around A.D. 300, which could explain a divine vision supposedly witnessed by Emperor Constantine in A.D. 312 during a battle for the rule of Rome. Traditional accounts of the event relate that a “radiant cross appearing in the heavens, with the inscription, ‘By this thou shalt conquer,’” inspiring him and his army to win the battle and convincing him to allow Christianity to flourish under his subsequent rule. One wonders whether a chance event like a meteor impact could have irrevocably altered history…

I was wondering why there haven’t been comments recently, but it turns out that the comment numbers just aren’t updating. Supposedly the code needs to be updated, but I’m still trying to figure this out…

Update: OK, I fixed the comments. It turns out that the new version of Blogger wasn’t playing nicely with the YACCS comment JavaScript, but now that I’ve updated the template things seem to be working properly. Sorry for ignoring your comments; I just didn’t think there were any!

BTW, I really like the new interface of Blogger. I finally have the “extra” buttons that were only visible in M$IE, something that pissed me off to no end. Things seem to be stabler and quicker, and I can finally edit my template within the browser rather than in a text editor, another bug that really annoyed me. What do you think, Shaft/Czar?