the party animals website is now up and running...allowing us to visit all the party animals in the district. i love the party animals, but you've got to wonder why it was easier to spread thousands of pounds of easily destroyable art through the streets than to get voting representation.

damn! couldn't have said this better myself. any consequences eh?

remember those heady days of meaningless news? well, they're back, if this article is the canary in the coal mine. maybe its the heat here in dc that's simply causing useful stories to melt...on the other hand, with thoughtful editorials like this, perhaps a rogue features editor merely lobbied the online folks to elevate the fish story. in other middle of the road news...my vbone idea received a serious boost in potential when motorola announced a new series of products called canopy enabling wirless access at 10mbs over a five mile range. here's the scoop. now i just need 30 grand and i'm in business!

first of all, let me once again strike out against the bizarre server maintenance that my hosting provider continues to perform. this time, they enabled the mindless frontpage server extensions, which conveniently broke php and the website along with it. grr. if it wasn't so cheap, i'd actually consider moving...

second, i did have the unusual experience of seeing a high-speed chase involving a minivan last night on the streets of the district. as i was walking along, a minivan passed me going about sixty miles an hour (on a residential steet), slammed on the brakes and pulled a hard right onto a one-way street, tires squealing the whole way. meanwhile, sirens started to blare and soon two police cars rolled by...i tried to point them towards the one-way street but they were going too fast to notice. next, a cop on a bicycle came by and i asked if he was looking for a minivan: he said he was. i told him which direction it had gone and he took off down the one-way street...a few seconds later multiple police cars came flying back down the street towards where the van had gone. the bike cop must have radioed them in. odd to see so many vehicles after a minivan.

after a busy weekend of doing nothing (including watching the very boring world cup finale), i returned to work to find the usual american shenanigans taking place. it seems like every day there's a new way we figure we can stick it to those dreaded europeans. at the same time, our own politicians are busy killing legislation they sponsor in an obvious manner. what i don't understand is why we can't simply tell things like they are: in the latter example, why not say, 'yeah, i'm holding up the legislation because d'amato ticked me off!' instead of couching it in obscure rules? it's much like the whole watchdog debate...even daily show host jon stewart riffed that (much like TPm did here) it would be nice if there was some sort of government agency designed to ensure corporate accountability, a commission of some sort relating to securities and exchange. and yet, even as the sec's toothless industry-loving head declares that only congress can do something to fix the markets, other conservatives are lining up to blame president clinton for the whole mess. now, i would agree that perhaps, the sec should have done a better job earlier...except for the now belabored point that the former head was actually doing his job while in office, fighting against the industries he was regulating. the current head has actually tried to roll back several regulations, and if not for enron et al. might have let even more craziness take place. somehow, though, i fail to see the connection between monica lewinsky and tight accounting procedures. the same folks who blame clinton's moral excesses for enron and worldcom are also the ones who offer up illogical arguments in an attempt to rewrite history to fit their preconceived notions. at some point, someone has to say: this doesn't make any sense. just like chewey on endor, the pledge was modified to please religious conservatives, and the current sec was modifed to please big business. you must acquit!

first off, check out this review of nine queens, courtesy brad. i didn't get a chance to watch it, but based on the review i now wish to do so...i did, however, read this amusing article about the metro's current woes. the best line comes midway through the article when, during an interview, someone becomes stuck in an elevator. classic. almost as predictable as this gem about the southern baptist convention displaying to the district of columbia that criticism will not be tolerated. i guess if you don't play strictly by the rules, you stand to lose money...unless, of course, you're a private school in which case, your indifference to the public school system enables you to take money from it. never have i understood why letting the few parents who care enough to send their kids to private school take money from the public school system makes sense. why not simply create two groups of public schools, one for parents who care, and the other for parents who don't? we wouldn't even need to have 'parents-who-don't-care' high schools, we could make attendance voluntary by them. on the other hand, 'parents-who-care' high schools could give way to 'parents-who-care' colleges, all for free. a think it's merely a modest proposal.

yesterday i caught an episode of hamtaro, a strange anime show about a bunch of hamsters...they talk (of course!) and have adventures, and hang-out. it's creepy but also strangely interesting. the group of hamsters are called ham-hams, and their leader, boss is actually quite amusing. in a similar vein, check out this piece about arafat calling for new elections here at home. classic. finally, i managed to find a cool website detailing the adventures of two people, a robot and the metro system. it's great stuff...check it out!

as quickly as my mood rose, this article dropped it back to reality. oh, yes, we need to be scared of the al-qaeda script kiddies who could take control of our dams, or power substations, through the internet. for a good response that mirrors my own incredulity that any reporter could be so easily duped, check out this slashdot thread. this is far far worse than the dirty bomb scare, because in that experts were quick to point out that there was no evidence that anyone was creating a dirty bomb. in this case though, unsubstantiated claims are preceded by lines like 'They surmise, with limited evidence'. Limited evidence? limited evidence? how can we be expected to even finish the rest of the article if the scare-mongering is being delivered so deadpan? these are, after all, the people who flew planes into buildings. ignoring the fact that no critical systems are hooked up to the internet, the complexity of using a dam floodgate system to kill people is absurd. hell, california had an energy crisis of epic proportions last year, but it wasn't due to terrorists, it was due to greedy corporations. go figure...

thomas jefferson would have been proud: today, the ninth circuit court decided to outlaw the pledge of allegiance on the basis of the line: 'one nation, under god'. this strikes me as interesting for a couple of reasons. first, the lines were added in 1954. before then, apparantly, there was no reference to us being a nation under god...the rationale then was that we wished to distinguish our country from the atheism over in Russia. this alone, apart from any legal precedent, seems to clearly mean that the pledge is an endorsement of mono-theism. it also seems to be easily fixed: why not simply restore the original pledge? much like south carolina's flag spat, which began in 1962 when someone decided the anniversary of the civil war was a good occasion to hoist the confederate flag over the capitol. (could well-meaning germans throw up nazi banners in 2038...claiming that the movement was really misunderstood?) One can only wonder why these ideas seemed good at the time. Yet even if the phrase is not struck down, some people's defense of it seems laughable, others quite clear. In the post article, it notes that the late justice William Brennan coined a phrase, "ceremonial deism" that refered to notions of god so frequently invoked that they lost all religious meaning. This seems to me to be the strongest argument against leaving it in the pledge, yet at the same time, isn't taking the Lord's name in vain a sin? Absurdly, any religious person should dismiss this argument because to trivialize god is worse than to simply omit the words: all good people of mono-theistic faiths should support the use of god in the pledge precisely because they feel the pledge should be rooted in mono-theism. For this reason, it should be stricken. The far less compelling argument, equally illogical given the current state of the nation is that the use of the word god doesn't promote religion. Yes, and Anderson's auditing was completely separate from their consulting work, too. If you believe that the use of religion in schools doesn't encourage students to support a faith, then you have been hoodwinked by those same people who believe that human nature is somehow divorced from peer and societal pressures. At least at Anderson, naked greed can be the cause of the willingness to wink, whereas in school, kids might only gain the knowledge that they are like their peers. The chinese wall between church and state should not be broken down for the mere convenience of so called moralists, the same way that auditors broke down their wall between client and consultant, or newsrooms between editorial and business. TJ, and by extension, the founders, were quite clear that America was not to be a nation, like England, with an offical state religion. If they had intended otherwise, then the nation would be filled with Episcopalians, like me.