Lost in OK

Johnny Carson, the “Tonight Show” TV host who served America a smooth nightcap of celebrity banter, droll comedy and heartland charm for 30 years, has died. He was 79. “Mr. Carson passed away peacefully early Sunday morning,” his nephew, Jeff Sotzing, told The Associated Press. “He was surrounded by his family, whose loss will be immeasurable. There will be no memorial service.”

Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider

[Via: CNN.com]

This is kinda amusing to me because my buddy Peter and I were just talking this morning about how it was inevitable that Google would have to weigh in on the comment spam plague. Today they announced on their blog that they will be implementing an “nofollow” tag that will allow you to block links on your site from being used for ranking purposes on Google. The same rule applies to MSN and Yahoo searches. From the blog post:

He’s pulling our legs again . . . Tom Waits hasn’t had fun in years:

Moody TOM WAITS admits the last time he had “fun” was 40 years ago - at a JAMES BROWN concert.

The gravel-voiced American singer prefers to occupy his life with educational activities rather than indulging in childish behaviour - but he did allow his standards to slip on one occasion.

Waits says, “I don’t have fun. Actually, I had fun once. In 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 powder-blue Lincoln Continental to a James Brown concert with some Mexican friends of mine. I haven’t had fun since. It’s not a word I like.

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I should preface this post by saying I am not, in any real way, an open source developer. I feel no compulsion to distribute the source of my work for others to modify and distribute on their own without proper monetary compensation. In fact I am revolted by anyone who suggests that I have a moral obligation to do so. This is the talk of looters who wish to steal the works of others for their own purposes without the producers consent. However, my feelings on the politics of GNU style open source are well known and not the purpose of this post.

I just love to see the stories about Oklahoma that hit the international news wires:

Oklahoma highway users wishing to call the state about electronic payment passes were mistakenly directed to a sex hotline.

Via: Yahoo! News - Oklahoma turnpike number exits at sex hotline

Following up on my little rant of yesterday, I had started to write my original piece about the eagerly offended agnostic. However, what do I find, but that the ever eloquent Mr. William F. Buckley has once again stolen my thunder (though while talking about a completely different subject):

The opposition to nativity scenes at Christmastime, or to the singing of songs that focus on the manger and the stilled star that hung over it, embraces a wide group of people. Among them are secularists who have drunk deep of ACLU doctrines over the years and have convinced themselves that any theological exercise in public circumstances is both a deprivation of their rights to seamless agnosticism and a personal affront to believers in competing doctrines. In such language you can’t say a Christian prayer without offending the Jew or the Muslim.

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With all of the hype about the security improvements in Firefox there is one thing that they overlooked which is being pointed out by Peter Torr over at ASP.Net:

I personally don’t care if people choose to run Firefox or Linux or any other software on their computers – it’s their computer, after all – but we’ll never get past the spyware / adware problem if people continue to think that installing unsigned code from random web sites is A Good Idea.

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Some people will forever be chasing the chimera of better government. This shields them from the idea that the only option is less government - Peter Gordon.

[Via Samizdata.net]

[Listening to: Bad Businessman - Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hot (03:48)]