Live from Austin!

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don’t hesitate to call my office. If it isn’t required by law then don’t bother asking, because I think that you’re a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn’t p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You’re a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn’t know you and believe that you’re more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don’t bother.

I do have a question for you. Do you have family and if so do they even like you?

—Mayor Jim Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio.

Followup story:

Asked if he regretted his language, Kalb replied: “I regret that he made it public. That was between him and me. It’s a bit harsh, but it was between him and me.”

A student in Canton, OH, asked a bunch of people in a chat room to go to his school’s web site and hit refresh a few times, thinking that maybe the server would crash.

He then posted a link to the server on a web page, encouraging people to go look at the page and hit refresh.

When a few hundred extra hits on the site were noticed, school officials contacted the police. The town Prosecutor charged the student with a felony, and the kid was taken to jail.

The story hit the web today, including FARK, Slashdot, digg, Boing Boing, and so on.

Curiously enough, the web pages of Lake High School and Canton Law Director Joseph Martuccio were offline when I checked them a few minutes ago.

Pity the kid wasn’t a town trustee, or the Prosecutor might just have asked him to apologize.

Online forum SomethingAwful managed to raise $27,695 to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Then suddenly, PayPal locked the account.

When someone finally managed to contact PayPal, they were informed that PayPal has an exclusive contract with United Way—and that United Way’s contract would not allow PayPal funds to be transferred to the Red Cross.

Yup: United Way and PayPal would rather block $27k in relief funds, than allow the money to go to the Red Cross. So the money had to be refunded.

A lot of people are blaming PayPal for this. They certainly deserve a big chunk of blame; but really, what kind of charity makes you sign contracts saying you won’t let people donate to competing charities? Can you imagine if your bank bounced a check because they had signed a United Way contract and you were trying to give to the Red Cross?

Please, I beg you: do not donate through United Way or PayPal. If you want to donate to charity, send the money directly to The Red Cross.

The United Way also fund bigotry—they give funds to organizations which practice deliberate discrimination on the basis of religion and sexuality. If your local United Way has a non-discrimination statement, don’t believe it—at least one regional United Way has continued to fund organizations that don’t comply with their written policy. You need to specifically check what organizations your chosen United Way is funding; for example, Austin’s United Way no longer funds the Boy Scouts as of July 2005—but in Ohio, the BSA is still getting money. It looks as if United Way regional groups cutting off the BSA Are the exception rather than the rule—even in Vermont some are still funding the BSA.

I’m all for religious freedom, but if you want to teach kids about your god, be honest about it and send them to your church. And don’t expect me to pay for it, and don’t try to con or force other people to pay for it.

To me, having to read through a list of grand recipients seems like a lot of hassle when you could give to a charity that focuses purely on funding things that are actually important, like feeding the starving, rather than one that may siphon off money to teach kids not to be gay and indoctrinate them to believe in Jesus. You can also check sites like Charity Navigator for advice on which charities use the funds effectively, and which ones waste them on overheads and fat executive paychecks. (Hello, American Cancer Society.)

The Boy Scouts of America are a pretty sleazy organization all round. Not only was their director arrested for collecting kiddy porn, they also lied about their minority membership to try and get more money from United Way, and the FBI is investigating whether they might have made up names to boost their membership. Many local BSA groups also lie that they will not discriminate in the hope of getting funding.

“Unfortunately, independent efforts by the NAACP, America Coming Together, John Kerry for President and the Capri Cafaro for Congress campaign have been illegally registering people to vote and apply for absentee ballots. [...] Please be advised that if you were registered in this capacity that you will not be able to vote until the next election.”

—Text from fraudulent letter sent to Ohio Democratic voters

The Black Box Voting web site has revealed that there’s an interesting ‘defect’ in the Diebold GEMS voting system’s central tabulator.

If you enter an appropriate two-digit code into a hidden part of the system, the software creates a second database of votes. The second set of votes can be edited without any safeguards, and the voting system will report the final tallies from the bogus database rather than the one containing the real votes.

A spot check against paper records will use the real data, and the machine will seem to be counting the votes correctly because the computer’s output will match the paper votes for all the votes checked. However, the totals reported for the district will be taken from the bogus database instead. This is, of course, exactly how you would want an election-fixing feature to work…

Interestingly, the dual-database ‘feature’ appeared in the Diebold system shortly after Jeffrey Dean was hired as senior programmer of the GEMS central tabulator. Who’s Dean? Oh, just some guy who pleaded guilty to 23 counts of embezzlement, performed by manipulating data in computerized accounting systems.

There are over 1,000 Diebold GEMS systems in place in over 30 states. They count millions of votes. The ‘problem’ was reported to Diebold in 2003, but they haven’t fixed it in any of their subsequent software releases. Now, isn’t that interesting?

Remember that last year, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell wrote that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year”, and urged people to donate to the Republican party.

At this point, we’d had three very active days with lots of walking. We were both pretty tired, it was Christmas Eve, and we were supposedly on vacation. It was time to slow things down a little and relax more.

We start off with breakfast at Krispy Kreme. I pick out three doughnuts for myself—one chocolate glazed with cream filling, one “classic” glazed fresh from the cooling rack, and one festive donut with red, white and green Xmas sprinkles.

The chocolate frosted cream doughnut is light and fluffy, and the Xmas donut has the added crunchiness of sprinkles… but it’s the classic KK frosted plain doughnut that is of legendary perfection. Sweet but not too sweet, and so light and fluffy you can hardly believe you’re eating it. It makes Dunkin Donuts’ best efforts seem like a Clif Bar. Krispy Kreme’s coffee is good too—rich, with no trace of bitterness. It’s good enough to drink black, which is something I wouldn’t advise trying with Dunkin Donuts’ coffee.

Next we head to the middle of the strip to visit the Venetian, the Bellagio and the Mirage. The Bellagio is across from Paris—which, of course, has a large replica of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a cheat, though—the real Eiffel Tower has diagonal elevators which climb the legs, whereas the replica just has a conventional vertical elevator.

The Bellagio is known for its amazing water fountain shows. We catch a surprisingly moving aquatic interpretation of the US national anthem; the majestic towers of water really do seem to add something, and in the noonday winter sun they form a beautiful rainbow too.

The fountains have over 1,200 nozzles, which shoot water up to 75m into the sky. It’s truly amazing to see. They somehow get the water to look as if it’s a curtain of standing columns, then suddenly the entire structure collapses into mist.

The inside of the Bellagio is beautiful as well; it turns out to be decked out for Christmas. One giant hall has a small pine forest in it, with topiary reindeer and giant Christmas baubles, plus a small snow machine scattering occasional drifts of fake snow over the guests. Plastic icicles decorate the trees.

The Venetian’s decor is slightly more austere; in fact, it’s minimalist by Vegas standards. Marble floors and painted ceilings. Oh, and an indoor reproduction of a Venetian canal, with bridges across and shops on either side. Painted skies look remarkably convincing as gondoliers serenade their passengers.

The external architecture is quite Italian-looking as well, if you overlook the giant video screens which seem to be ubiquitous in Vegas. The canals emerge into the piazza outside the hotel.

In the evening, we head downtown. This is the “original” Vegas, containing the casinos you see James Bond speed past in “Diamonds Are Forever”. Nowadays most of Fremont Street has been closed to traffic and turned into a giant pedestrianized mall, with the world’s largest LED screen overhead as a roof.

“World class topless girls” are on offer, from “exotic locations” such as Cleveland, Ohio. There are also endless stores filled with cheap trinkets, so if you’re ever in Vegas and need to get small gifts for everyone this is a good place to do it.

We decide against taking our photo outside The Four Queens, and the famous Golden Nugget doesn’t have the neon to compete with its neighbors, so here we are in front of the Horseshoe.

Some old neon signs have been preserved as a kind of “museum of neon”. Most are still in working order.

As far as food goes, the cuisine on offer seems rather limited, so we decide to head back to our end of the strip to find food.

We drop in at the Tropicana, which James Bond namechecks in “Diamonds are Forever” (although the location shooting for the film took place at the Hilton). The Tropicana has made no attempt to become anything more than a casino with hotel, and pretty much still targets the James Bond market—its main attractions being things like topless showgirls and blackjack tables in the swimming pool. The food choices are decidedly unimpressive, so we end up eating at the Luxor again.

When we get back to the room, we channel surf until we end up watching “America’s Funniest (Holiday) Videos”. A clip of a kid trying out his new snowboard and sliding face first into a bush leaves me in fits of laughter.

“I can’t help it,” I gasp, “I’m a bad person, I always laugh at the ones where the little kids get smacked in the face.”“That’s why I love you,” replies sara, laughing.

After that we flip channels and end up watching a documentary about Mormons. Ever since that highly educational South Park episode, we’ve been wanting to know more…

A question from Dan

What are the top ten places you want to visit before you die (they can be places you’ve already been, if you want to go back)?

Well, I don’t keep a list, so I might miss a few important ones, but here are ten…

I’d like to go to Japan. I think it would probably require that I be accompanied by someone who spoke some Japanese, however.

Paris again.

Rome again, particularly the Pantheon. I could give the Vatican a miss second time around. Generally the Roman stuff in Rome is the stuff worth seeing.

I’d like to go to Dealey Plaza, and visit the book depository. Bill Hicks did, and said that it was obvious that there was no way even a marksman could have shot JFK from there, which intrigues me. I expect there’s not much reason to go to Dallas, though.

Amsterdam, to check it out as a possible place to escape to. [Done!]

The Moon, or at least low Earth orbit. I suspect I’m going to have to learn to live with disappointment, however.

When I was younger, I always wanted to go to Colorado, particularly Boulder. I’m not really sure why, I just did—rather like how I always wanted to go to Canada, and people would always ask me why.

I’d like to go to a Skunk Show. There’s one in Ohio and the big one down in Florida.

Las Vegas. Just to get the full-on USA experience. [Done!]

A cute couple of pictures from Yahoo: Life imitates a Pepe Le Pew cartoon.

Last weekend was a big skunk show in Ohio. One of the events was the skunk fancy dress contest. I gather from the mailing list that one of the contestants had dressed his skunk in yellow “Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape, and had actually managed to train it: when he said ‘dead skunk’, it would roll over and play dead like it was roadkill. When he said ‘live skunk’, it would jump up again. Amazing.

The 15th National Skunk Show is in Cincinnati, OH on March 23rd. I’d love to go, but I can’t really justify spending money on the air fare and hotel just to get the chance to pet some skunks. What I need is for some wacky publication to pay my expenses in return for an amusing article about skunks…