Halloween fun!

Life is tougher for kids today than it was back in my day. Nowadays, cartoons aren't as funny, penny candy costs a nickel (or a dime!), and the Earth's gravity is a lot stronger than it used to be. But one thing has gotten a lot better: Halloween candy. Sure, there are still problems — like candy corn (In The Onion, Brach's CEO tells us that Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS[*]).

Although some perils remain, Halloween candy has improved dramatically. When I was a kid, there wasn't anything a tenth as cool as "Dr. Scab's Monster Lab".

You get chocolate versions of five different external organs: crunchy fingers, toes, and ears; peanut butter–filled lips; and fudge-filled eyeballs. Note the attention to detail on the foil wrappers: the eyeballs have several iris colors, and some of the ears have hair sticking out. And the price is pretty good, too (The link is kinda expensive, but at Jewel, Dr. Scab's confections are cheaper than Hershey or Nestle.). Even better, there is tons of other body-part snackage for young Donner Party animals.

More Halloween treats:

• Excessive cuteness.


• Halloween safety tips from America's finest news source


• Something truly scary: Google has 163,000 results for [dick cheney hentai]. Fortunately, almost all of it is just comment spam. Almost all.


• The year's best jack-o-lantern?

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[*] That's really an old problem, though — all brands of candy corn cause disease. That's why flu season begins right after after the period of peak candy corn consumption.

Some good news for a change

Joy in Mudville

Sox win! Sox win! Sox Win!

Bill Veeck smiles down.

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Oy in Dudville

Harriett Miers withdrew her nomination. You can express your sympathies at her blog. John at AMERICAblog has a good post on what happens next.

2,000

I'm sure you've seen it elsewhere: 2,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq.

It looks like this.

Rosa Parks, R.I.P.

Rosa Parks, who wouldn't stand for discrimination, died. Steve Gilliard has a nice post. Billmon has her mug shot.

ANWR map conveniently "lost"

The official USGS map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was lost, just in time to expand the area to be drilled. Today's NY Times tells the story:

Arctic Map Vanishes, and Oil Area Expands

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Maps matter. They chronicle the struggles of empires and zoning boards. They chart political compromise. So it was natural for Republican Congressional aides, doing due diligence for what may be the last battle in the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to ask for the legally binding 1978 map of the refuge and its coastal plain.

It was gone. No map, no copies, no digitized version.

The wall-size 1:250,000-scale map delineated the tundra in the biggest national land-use controversy of the last quarter-century, an area that environmentalists call America's Serengeti and that oil enthusiasts see as America's Oman.

The map had been stored behind a filing cabinet in a locked room in Arlington, Va. Late in 2002, it was there. In early 2003, it disappeared. There are just a few reflection-flecked photographs to remember it by.

All this may have real consequences. The United States Geological Survey drew up a new map. On Wednesday, the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee passed a measure based on the new map that opened to drilling 1.5 million acres of coastal plain in the refuge.

The missing map did not seem to include in the coastal plain tens of thousands of acres of Native Alaskans' lands. On the new map, those lands were included, arguably making it easier to open them to energy development.

How conveeeenient for the Bush administration.

"People have asked me several times, 'Do you think someone took this intentionally?' " said Doug Vandegraft, the cartographer for the Fish and Wildlife Service who was the last known person to see the old map. "I hope to God not. So few people knew about it. I'm able to sleep at night because I don't think it was maliciously taken. I do think it was thrown out."

I can understand why he thinks that. People who archive information are appalled by the idea of destroying it. It's the same as book-burning to them — and they're right. But the Bushites have censored ANWR information before. They have even censored ANWR maps before.

In 2001 a USGS cartographer, Ian Thomas, posted maps showing how ANWR drilling would affect caribou. He followed the same procedures he had followed for 20,000 other maps. This time, though, he was fired. And Thomas's caribou maps, and thousands of others, disappeared from the web.

We know they've done it before. Why should we believe they didn't do it again?

Plame wars

Patrick Fitzgerald will wrap up his investigation of the Valerie Plame leak by October 28th, when his grand jury expires. Unlike Kenneth Starr, who leaked like a firehose, Fitzgerald and his crew have kept very quiet — he has said only that he won't issue a report. (For background on the scandal, see the excellent Wikipedia article; for info on why it's not just politics as usual, Steve Gilliard excerpts a Stratfor piece on why it's really, really bad to uncover secret agents.)

No report means one of two things. Either Fitzgerald will finish up next week and say nothing, or much more likely, he'll issue indictments. His near-silence has just fueled speculation. It looks like Fitzgerald is hunting some big game: Karl Rove, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, aka "Bush's Brain" (was there ever a more left-handed compliment?); and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.

The fun part is speculatin' on who else is a target. There will almost certainly be some henchpersons, whom I should care about. But I'm more interested in how high up it goes. My money is on Cheney, but ...

My hope is for Monkeyboy. Bush knew about the leak two years ago, and rebuked Rove — not for essentially committing treason (since Rove uncovered a spy in wartime), but for doing it sloppily. (If W were better edumacated, he might recall Talleyrand's quip "It's worse than a crime, it's a blunder." But I suspect the only Talleyrand quotation he knows is "Come Mr. Talleyrand, tally me banana.")

I can't help but feel sweet, sweet joy at the prospect of a little justice. But at the same time, my fear is: how will the Bushites react? They respond to ordinary political setbacks by crying wolf by issuing terror alerts. But this is a lot bigger. So what will they do?

• Jack Balkin says Bush could just pardon everybody. It kinda runs in the family — that's what Bush I did about Iran/Contra.
• At Wampum, MB Williams recalled out that yesterday was the anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon axed his attorney general — and kept chopping top Justice Department officials until he found a hack willing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox (BTW, Wampum is holding a pledge drive to pay for their sponsorship of the Koufax Awards. A worthy cause!). Ray McGovern says, "Fitzgerald is at least as vulnerable as Cox was."
• Devon at TPM cafe wonders "What's the worst case?" I suspect it's pretty bad, especially since ...
• As Brad DeLong is fond of pointing out, "The Bush administration is worse than we imagine — even after taking account of the fact that the Bush administration is worse than we imagine."

Tom Delay mugshot

"Dispense with all delay!" — Marcus Annaeus Lucan

Tom Delay was just booked on charges of conspiracy and money laundering (from The Smoking Gun via Talking Points Memo).

Which Republican criminal will be charged next?

• Frist?
• Rove?
• Rumsfeld?
• Cheney?
• Bush?

I can hardly wait to find out ...

... but I bet I won't have to wait too long.

If it wasn't for bad sex ...

... I wouldn't have no sex at all.

At Shatter, Doug Hoffman is running a Bad Sex contest. Rules are here. Read the entries (heh-heh, he said "entries") here.

I'm still searchin'

Search engines have been sending a lot of readers to this site lately. A few of the searches match my preoccupations, and on some of them, semiquark scores a little better than I would expect:

Google Images: Chicago maps (#173 of 12,400)

MSN Search: cow farts as source of pollution (#10 of 49).

Searches where this blog ranks high tend to be either typos:

MSN Search: gorge bush farts (#2 of 1514)

or obscure. I'm number one! on this search:

Google Images: bush cake new orleans

out of two results ...

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But there are some searches where this site does much better than one would expect.

Google: what happens when knocked unconscious

This site was #2 of 481,000! You can sort of explain that by the odd phrasing of the query. But Google must be fussing with its algorithms and indexes: on retrying the search this site wasn't even in the top 1,000.

But what really surprised me was the number of visitors who came here via Dobby image searches. Out of over 16,000 results for

Google Images: dobby

this occassionally humble blog comes in at number 24. Even more strange, for

Google Images: photo dobby

Google Images: image dobby

out of the same 16,000+ results, this site is first! Something is broken.

What I won't miss, part two: attack of the spambots

Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

I was perversely flattered when this blog began to receive comment spam. At first, I thought it was a sign that I had arrived. Then I realized that it was just another example of Moore's Law in action. Equipment and bandwidth keep getting cheaper, so the marginal cost of a new spam attack keeps getting smaller.

And the latest comment spam here were very marginal indeed:

• a small fraction (who clicks on traditional mortgage-enlargement spam?);
• reduced even smaller (even fewer care about mesothelioma-casino links);
• of a tiny number (this site's readers are a select group, but a small one).

The amount of spam was still small, so it was easy to delete. Unfortunately, the spambots weren't consistent enough for me to set up something like the amusing honeypot for spammers at chez Driftglass. So if you enter a comment (and you should), you'll have to prove your existence with a little Turing test, a captcha, where you'll see a distorted word and type its letters into a box (Blogger calls it
"word verification").

There are problems with captchas. They are really, really bad from an accessibility standpoint: computers can't read the distorted images, but neither can visually-impaired humans. And captchas may not work for long. The obvious tool, optical character recognition, is good enough to decode weak captchas; in the future, OCR will break strong ones, too. And right now, spammers can crack captchas with free porn. So captchas are a flawed and temporary solution.

But they are the best we have for now.

What I won't miss, part one: a key attack

As I was cleaning out the old apartment, somebody took a key to my car's paint job. It was clearly no accident because the scratch goes all the way around the vehicle. What really irks me is that I know who did it, but I can't prove it. And without proof — or a confession from the miserable, skulking bastard — I have no recourse. It's almost enough to make me long for simpler times ...

In an earlier, simpler time, I would have slapped him twice across the face with my gloves (preferably the chain-mail ones), and said, "Sirrah, I find thee a knave, a coward, and a big ol' poopyhead. Make whole your mischief or meet me on the field of honor at dawn." And, craven that he is, he would have forked over the repair cost.

Realistically, though, in an earlier, simpler time, I would have been a peasant(*) — a miserable peasant growing membranes between my toes from living in the bogs. In such a state of webbed serfdom, I would have had scant property and less recourse. So I'm better off now.

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(*) Of course, as an Irish-American, I am a descendant of kings — it's difficult to avoid such a blot on one's pedigree. But where my ancestors lived, a man was reckoned a king if he was rich enough to own two pigs, so it hardly signifies.

Timing the market

The bubbly housing market(*) has been getting a lot of attention. Writers more perspicacious than I have discussed it often, and in depth.

But my understanding of markets is so complete that I can pinpoint the exact moment when the housing market reached its peak. It wasn't when USA Today published a story about a million-dollar mobile home (although that's a good guess). It was at noon CDT on September 14th.

That's when we closed on our new place.

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(*) One could argue that housing markets are local, so there must be more than one. Some say that about 300 markets matter, out of more than 3,000 housing markets in the U.S. (if you take this to its logical extreme, there are 80 million housing markets, 'cause every home is unique). Since demand for houses depends heavily on the availability of mortgage money, and since the mortgage market has become increasingly national (contributing factors include the savings and loan crisis of the eighties, the consolidation of evarthang, the rise of Fannie Mae, and the internets), I think it's fair to call it all one market. (Yay! This footnote is longer than the rest of the post.)

Location3

The new place is in Zion, Illinois. We had to meet some special criteria. That's why we're about halfway between a regional airport and a shuttered nuclear power plant.

The airport is small enough to be free of O'Hare's congestion, but big enough for a Learjet. The nuke plant is right next to a state beach, where the fishing is reputed to be most excellent.

I'm not dead yet.

He says he's not dead.

Tetricus asked, "Is this blog dead?"

No, but after 3½ weeks, it's beginning to smell that way. There have been a few distractions in my personal life.

After our offer on a house was accepted in mid-August, we experienced a stuttering escrow, a slow move, and a long time unwired. Fortunately, I didn't miss much in the wider world. It's not if the past month has seen any hurricanes, pennant races, or political news.

Coming soon: an auspicious location, timing the market, someone I won't miss, a broken mnemonic, and the secret origin of glube — plus the usual kvetching.