Okay, so what's the politically correct term for "chick peas"?

"Woah, check out those garbonzos!"

"And a set of legumes that seemed to go on forever...."

Well, the porn spam in my Inbox seems to have abated/spent itself, but now, in its place, there's this:

As a writer, quite frankly, I'm more offended by the way they're deliberately (?) mangling the English language to get this past spam filters, than I was by any of the offers for "pink and ripe inside" hot watermelon teens, etc. It's obscene!

Women's beach volleyball. The "spectator sport."

Can you believe they used to do this naked in ancient Greece? (They had volleyballs back then, right?) How did they ever get any philosophy or sculpting done? "I think, therefore I ... Oh my God! Check her out!!"

[Stanley] Milgram was fairly new to Harvard, but his reputation as a crafty researcher had preceded him—you never knew when he was going to pull an experiment on you. So when in the early afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, he burst into Emerson Hall in the midst of a lecture by Talcott Parsons about the nature of social systems, and rushed to the podium, yelling, "I have horrible news. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas," he was met with outrage and skepticism. Barry Wellman, now a sociologist at the University of Toronto, remembers blurting out: "You're just doing another experiment on us."

—Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World

The wide public exposure [Milgram] received via the television appearances and book review made him something of a minor celebrity. As a result, people from all walks of life wrote him letters, which ranged from the silly to the sublime.... [R]ock musician Peter Gabriel ... after reading Obedience to Authority, was planning to use obedience as the theme for a new piece of music. He asked permission to use the soundtrack from Milgram's film Obedience to punctuate the instrumental theme as well as photographs from the obedience experiment, which would appear on the album's inner sleeve. Although he told Milgram that he had no intention of criticizing the experiments and that he was not "a punk rock singer about to set upon your work with razor blades," Milgram turned him down, explaining that he only gave permission for scientific use and not for entertainment purposes. A dirge-like song, "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)," did end up as a track on Gabriel's album So, which came out in 1986, but without the embellishments the musician had hoped for.

So I was in at the oral surgeon's office today, getting an evaluation about whether my lower wisdom teeth (#38, #48) need to come out.

And on his waiting room table is an issue of Reader's Digest, with the partial headline, "How They Caught M," with the rest of the article's title being covered by the mailing label.

"M." "Mono"?

Turned out that the full line was "How They Caught Saddam." But before I saw that came the happiest moment of my day, in having the following imaginary conversation pop into my head:

"Have you ever had mono?"

"Yeah, back in high school, once I was actually fighting two different strains of it at the same time, so it was more like ... stereo."

Rest of the afternoon, I haven't been able to stop giggling.

Plus, the patient before me was a really cute girl, and the big dentists' chair in the surgeon's office was still warm from her lying back on it when I got into it, so that's got me kind of in a good mood, too.

Oh, just wait 'til Hollywood gets ahold of this:

One of megalomaniac "god-man" Adi Da's nine (9) "wives": Whitney Kaine, a.k.a. Julie Anderson.

Of course, that "snap, snap, grin, grin" pic was taken a few years ago. Hopefully she's aging better than the butt-ugly, Realized Nutcase Da (hero to the too-often-clueless Ken Wilber) himself.

Jennifer Johnston Hoggle
John M. Huelskoetter
Ruth W. Kastenmayer
Sara Bliss Kiser
Debbie L. Kornegay
Libby Tete Looney
Charles Curtis Meisenheimer
Frankie L. Oglesby

"Alright, you got this far in the hiring process, but what's your real name?"

Alice Cooper, Ph.D.

Our Professor of the Day:

Dr. Cosmas Uche Nwokeafor

Pronunciation: Just like it's spelled....

Found this neat, free toy on the Web yesterday: A PDF print driver which allows you to create PDF documents from any application that you can print from.

Update (September 5/04): There's also PDFCreator, which will do the same thing, without having to pay the $9.95 to get rid of those annoying pop-up ads.

Well, I guess I shouldn't have insulted Yahoo! yesterday: Woke up this morning, checked my Yahoo! email account, and found that they've deleted all of my emails that were more than a month old.

If that's part of the small print to keep clients from using too much of their "free 100 MB," I'd rather have my old 6 MB limit back. I mostly use the Yahoo! account for off-site archiving of stuff I can't afford to lose should my hard drive self-destruct (happened with the previous Dell machine) or my building go up in smoke, etc. But still, you don't expect your backups to mysteriously vanish like this.

Yahoo! email has always been unreliable for me: I've had emails sent from the "Contact" form on this site completely vanish—although that could be a problem with the relevant web host. And I've had numerous emails sent from my Hotmail account to my Yahoo! one take up to a full week to show up in the latter.

Once had a letter take nine months to get from southern California to Canada. And one with insufficient postage take a week to go back upstream from the mailbox at Dundas and Yonge to my then-apartment at Dundas and Sherbourne. It's a ten-minute walk.

"Snail mail," indeed. But at least it doesn't mysteriously vanish into the ether (e-ther).

On the front page of Yahoo! today:

Slow news day, huh?

If the terror alerts don't scare you, Cruise's long-term, committed involvement in Scientology sure as hell will.

But hey, if he's "ready for love" again, it's all okay.

Well, it's that "time of the month" again: Microsoft security patch time.

Another gaping hole in IE.

"As Microsoft describes them, the three holes are a navigation method cross-domain vulnerability, a malformed BMP file buffer overrun vulnerability, and a malformed GIF file double free vulnerability. "

I used to program computers for a living. And I was damned good at it. I built all three tiers of an OLAP cube reporting system from scratch in six months, without having seen a cube, built a dll, or coded an ASP prior to that, with nothing more in requirements than the instruction to "build me a cube reporting application, and web-ify it."

They don't document the interleaved structure of the multidimensional (ADOMX) recordsets, you know. You have to hack it out on your own. So I did. Had no documentation to help me; left none for the people who've had to maintain the system since I got laid off. Programming, like it's meant to be done.

And yet, I haven't the slightest idea what a "malformed GIF file double free vulnerability" could be. It sounds like something gone terribly awry halfway between genetic engineering and a tennis match. For all I know, they could just be making it up.

Well, I'm downloading the patch just to be on the safe side anyway. But if this turns out to be one of Bill Gates' "jokes," I'm not laughing.