American Madness

Just a quick little post about my favorite topic: Green. Well, kind of, at least everything in this post can be tied together under the Green heading.

First up, a website for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was hacked and loaded up with spammer links to sell Viagra, Xanax and the like.

It looks like only the pages associated with the blog were attacked and linked to other hacked pages from Westmont College (that or the Christian College is running a side business pushing drugs).

Looks like the hackers exploited a flaw in WordPress (a popular piece of publishing software) security. Might be time for us to up our own security here.

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Lord help me, but before I went down to Miami in May I considered getting my back waxed. I’m not a bear, but I figured I should look my best. NY Magazine had one waxer on a previous “Best of” list and I wrote him to get an estimate. It was way WAY more money than I wanted to spend, so I forgot about him.

Then, a few months after I’d returned from the trip, I got a really interesting email inviting me to a party where they sell lube at the door, etc. It took me a while, but I finally realized that the email was from the wax guy and that he volunteers as a gay party planner. Well, I’ve now gotten another email. I love the implication he must have in his head: that because I considered getting my back waxed I MUST be gay!

While being gay might help eliminate my women troubles (and I mean COMPLETELY eliminate them), I’m afraid I’m just not wired that way.

However, I think the email is just fascinating. WARNING: Not child safe after the jump.

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Watch this. The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reveal that 30 years of FBI science in “bullet lead analysis” was junk all along. And that when the FBI found out, the bureau did nothing to let convicted felons know that they might have cause for appeal. Because of the story, now they will. One man has already been freed from an unjust imprisonment.

This is journalism at its best.

WeFeelFine is a project I learned about at the Beautiful/Decay: Vis/Ed event last week.

To learn more about Jonathan Harris, the mind behind WeFeelFine you can watch a video of him talking about this project and his new project, Universe on CoolHunting. Anyway…

WeFeelFine is a project that… Well, actually, they have a really good description of what they are doing, so let’s let them say it in their own words:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

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While Josh has kept himself busy posting up and down on the site I have had a more leisurely past few days, relaxing and enjoying the break from everything afforded by Thanksgiving. But now I am back and ready to get posting again.

First up today we have a little something for all of you creative gadget type folks out there. The Discovery channel is working on a show based on Rube Goldberg type inventions, setting up a team of artists, scientists, engineers, architects, designers and other like-minded folks to create Rube Goldberg-like contraptions to do “impossible challenges.” They are looking for folks between 25 and 3.

If you are interested in more information check out the casting call posted on the Make magazine forums.

My brother, god bless him, wants to be a police officer. He’s the kind of person friends always called on to be the designated driver, to carry the inebriated from the bar, to pick someone up at the airport.

He’s really what we members of the tribe call a mensch. So, this line of work does make a lot of sense for him in some respects. It also comes with great benefits (early pension) and offers a lots of stimulation (as compared to sitting in an office all day long).

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Someone at HBO is suffering from George Lucas disease. I was watching a really old episode of Sex and the City tonight and noticed that the show had replaced a critical reference to John F. Kennedy, Jr. with a reference to Leonardo DiCaprio. Not only is this bizarre, but demonstrates why the original reference was valid while the new one is not.

In the episode, Four Women and a Funeral, Samantha is ostracized from high society after she’s caught canoodling with a social bigshot’s husband. Her salvation and return to the party circuit occurs when she is befriended by JFK Junior. Now, since his death, there are probably few men in whom this kind of power would reside. The very notion of being returned to society seems quaint now, a mere eight years later. With Brooke Astor gone and most of the old guard leaving us, even Tom Wolfe (who isn’t sentimental for sentiment’s sake) has taken to deriding the current crop of socialistas as brash and low class.

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I’m hoping to work myself onto some Fox Business slots in the future, but can’t help posting this. From Robert Greenwald, he of Outfoxed. Hysterical. Some “conservative” focus!

According to The Blog Readability Test, American Madness is at the college (undergrad) level!

I really thought we’d been much more puerile than that, so I’m a bit surprised, but we’ll take what we can get.

Whoo hoo!

Many corporate lawyers live in a state of denial and rationalization. First, they tend to think they are clever. I don’t know why they think it’s clever to spend an entire career working 80 hour weeks doing work that very few people would choose to do.

Secondly, while acknowledging that they’ve chosen a risk-averse career path in order to earn a stable and high income stream, they tend to overvalue that risk/reward ratio. I don’t think it’s any huge mystery that many lawyers excel at logic and cynicism but don’t rank very high in terms of native math skills or they’d realize it’s far more profitable, per unit of safety, to work as investment bankers (for instance).

I exempt from this analysis lawyers who help people (as opposed to those who help corporations). There’s a bit more interest in that line.

Unsurprisingly, these corporate cogs are so victimized by their own narrow-mindedness, they think that getting a milkshake or a random gift every now and then equates to quality of life, as this New York Times piece, For Lawyers, Perks to Fit a Lifestyle, demonstrates:

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