This went by on jwz's dnalounge blog the other day, but my feed processor doesn't import embedded videos from the wild, so you might have missed it.

Lucky you...

Sorry folks for the problems connecting this morning. Had our very first million hit day, and the servers in La Brea weren't ready for it - and neither was I....

It was a combination of several things converging at once. Shamita Shetty  apparently was exposed on the Style Ikon channel, and even with an overlaid star to protect the family jewels it seems that a bunch of folks from the UK couldn't get enough of it. Wonder what this incident did to the transatlantic backbones...

But what really killed the servers was that as this was going on - Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves and a couple of other search engines all converged on 10-12 of my sites at the same time to do their normally periodic crawls. Normally I'll get one or two crawlers doing one or two sites a day. 

This belongs to MichaelAnn. Reproduced here because I love it. I would normally just import the feed except this one is setup with teaser (short) feeds where all the articles are chopped off in mid [...]

You've reached support, how may I help you?

The waiter seating us at Chilis looked at me quizzically.

'Hey, what happened to the (music) store?'

Sonica? Closed it. Went broke. (Nice to be recognized though. I still run into former customers occasionally).

'When did that happen?'

It was almost exactly a year ago.

'I went there to buy some ESP strings last week and it was gone. Now it's a Chinese store selling crafts and furniture and stuff. Had to go to Guitar Center.'

Sigh... That's Castro Street. I was perhaps the wrong ethnicity to survive there.

So I know you change your strings less than once a year and don't buy anything else at music stores. That's one of the reasons why the store didn't make it. But really - you went twenty miles to buy a $5 set of strings(?). Probably spent $5 on gas. Starving Musician is right there(!) - about 500 yards from where we are standing, and I'm pretty sure that they've got ESP's. Haight-Ashbury (the largest Sunnyvale music store) is about a mile that direction and they've also got ESP's.

Oh well. Whatever. It's long gone now, the memories starting to fade. Can't look back. 

It's sometimes amazing the kinds of things that the brain works on after the lights go out ...although I'm certain that the alcohol had some non-trivial effect. This dream lasted the entire night. My sub-conscious was diligently working out how to play all the intricate harmonies to the Beach Boys' "'Til Her Daddy Takes The T-Bird Away" --- on a grand piano.

By the time daylight struck, it was really rockin'. 

I've been playing a bit with creating a 3d tic-tac-toe game for the website. Turns out that it wasn't horrendously difficult to program, but I forgot how easy it is to win. There are a variety of popular handicaps. A popular one is to remove/disable the center square on the second level. This makes it marginally more difficult to win easily. Another popular tweak is to turn it into four-square (4X4X4) which also removes the center spot advantage. I haven't yet decided which tweak to go with, or figure out if I can balance the odds even further. 

You can try it out at here, but be advised that I've still got a lot of work to do, and it still has some bugs.  

Mommy look at that man over there - trying to ice skate. Gimme' your camera. This is too funny. There. Did you see how he was waving his arms before he fell this time? Look! There he goes again, right into the wall. Splat! Oooh, that must've hurt.

Sigh...

Hillary Clinton announced that she's in the running. Wow! That's like so totally unexpected!

Unfortunately, that pretty much wraps the race. The only thing that stands in the way of a Clinton victory is if a) she self destructs, or b) a real leader is found that is willing to run against her. I wouldn't put money on either of those probabilities.

By the way 'SecksCells.com' is available. 

Anyway I boot up my status log and once again find that somebody has trained a firehose of viewers at one of my websites. This time it's an article about the new Jenna Jameson flick. Everybody wants to get a look at the chosen actress...

Which I find quite interesting - especially since I've been starting to de-commission my adult sites for lack of use. People (I'm talking the majority here) don't really want porn. They don't really want erotica literature. They don't want to see a thousand college girls who get $50 to pose naked or get banged in front of a webcam. Yawn.  

But show Britt's labias or provide an article on Scarlett Johansson doing Jenna and they can't get enough.  'Sex' is still the runaway leader in Google search terms.

So saying that 'sex sells' doesn't tell the whole story. Not all of it does. But it is still the number one product of our culture. It is consistently the top thing on the collective consciousness. Celebrity sex sells big time. But here's the rub - it has to be presented in the mainstream. Then it's socially acceptable to look at. Sex outside the mainstream is considered sleaze.  Lia19's labias might be a vast improvement over Brittney's, but she's not in the mainstream. Jenna was a cult porn star for years, but that still was nothing compared to Hollywood. Now she's a mainstream star and selling big time - and she doesn't even have to take her clothes off anymore.  Nobody has seen Ricky and Kim's sex video. But millions have watched Pamela and Tommy. 

Fascinating... 

Now here's a cool mashup... Follow Jack Bauer on google...

http://www.wayfaring.com/maps/show/4698

The order was ready at the fast food counter. The girl leaned into the microphone. 

Number 9!

(no perception of activity in the nearby region...).

Number 9?

Number 9!!!!

Number 9.

Number 9!?!

By this point I was howling in laughter.  She was probably not more than sixteen years old. Gave me a quizzical look as if to say 'I don't get it. What's so funny?'. Which is precisely why I was rolling on the floor. ...Because she didn't get it. Didn't have a clue.  

I'm probably going to be asked to explain this but I won't. Those of you who understand will likewise find it amusing. Those that are clueless will have to remain that way. 

Something isn't adding up. Bush is expected tonight to request an additional 20-30 thousand soldiers for Iraq. And to meet this goal there are going to be more callups of the reserves and extensions of current duty tours - which also seem to be made up in large part by reserve troops.

But if you check the reference sources, the US military is supposed to have about 1.4 million active duty personnel - today. If these competent and trained soldiers aren't available to be put to work on the largest military task at hand, where are they? What are they doing?

I for one question the logic of adding an arbitrary number of troops to a situation that is tenuous at best. But a larger question emerges. If we're adding 20-30 thousand weekend warriors to a staff comprised largely of weekend warriors, why not just put a half million active duty folks over there tomorrow and act like we mean business? That would still leave us close to a million folks to handle any other world crises which might demand attention. Surely we don't have any immediate crises requiring close to a million active duty personnel.

It makes me wonder if we really have 1.4 million active duty soldiers. Maybe we don't.... Which brings up the question - how many do we really have? Given the gyrations the military is going through to keep 150,000 or so in Iraq (our most demanding campaign at the moment), it leads me to believe that the total active force must in fact be somewhat less than 300,000 (50% on standby for immediate national defense); and nobody is talking about this because it might point out how badly the volunteer army has failed and how vulnerable we really are.  

All of this noise over DRM and copy protection. It should be called what it really is - profit protection. The good news is that eventually it's all gonna' die. The bad news is that a dying business behemoth can still do a lot of damage.

Why am I so sure it's gonna' die? Numbers my friend. Sheer numbers. I loaded up my MP3 player last night with about two months of music. You've probably never heard any of these songs before - yet they all have good qualities. There are thousands more where they came from. I would be so bold as to state that it is now entirely possible to listen to a different musical work every single waking minute of your life, and never hear the same song twice. This certainly isn't good for the music business - which is all about making you play stuff over and over until you wanna' puke.

With YouTube (oops I meant Google Video) we're about to see the same explosion in video media. Maybe this has happened already. Then it will be entirely possible to sit in front of a TV set forever and never see the same thing twice.

The interesting part is that you can do this today without ever touching any of the sacred media which the labels are fighting so hard to protect. Do they have the best content? Who cares? It no longer matters. New content is coming online much faster than you can digest the old content. It's essentially an infinite content stream. All the labels can do is increase this to infinity + n; where n is some absurdly large number. There isn't enough time in your life to take it all in.  

It's a strange and peculiar media tyranny we live under. We've got hours to discuss the lame presidency of Gerald Ford - spread over a week or two. OK, the Vietnam War did end under his watch, 30 some odd years ago. So I won't dis the guy completely. And then we spend countless hours contemplating the demise of one James Brown, who wrote a few hit songs 30+ some odd years ago. Yawn.

But the man of the hour, the butcher of Baghdad - whom we've spent trillions of dollars to hunt down and capture, and whose country is even now sapping the lives of thousands of our youngest and brightest; gets less than 30 seconds on the evening news when his life passes in an execution filled with the same sectarian politics that is causing our soldiers untold grief.

Some will say that he doesn't deserve as much respect as Gerald Ford. I'm not going to argue that point, though I'm not convinced. I would argue that his life has more direct impact on the average American than James Brown, and the circumstances surrounding his death warrant more than a 30 second sound bite.

The world is now safe for the new Iraq. By this I do not mean democracy and a world free from terrorism. We didn't kill Saddam. Al-Sadr killed Saddam. We facilitated it.

Meet the new boss.