• Building Phoenix is a royal pain in the butt. But I think I've figured out the magic to create a new Xft-enabled build... if it works, it'll be up shortly.

• Patriot II (the Wrath of Ashcroft) is a monumentally stupid idea. Of course, so was Patriot I. (Having said that, I echo Tacitus' position; I consider myself under no obligation to blog about every topic under the sun. That's why there are lots of blogs out there; I talk about what particularly pisses me off, or pleases me, or whatever, and let other people talk about things they want to talk about. It's called agenda-setting; deal with it.)

• I'm debating what I'm going to hack into LSblog next; it'll probably be behind-the-scenes stuff so I don't have to (always) write raw HTML into the text area widget. Probably something on the order of UBBCode or its various ripoffs, or maybe something more sophisticated. I'll probably add a preview, too. Maybe also something to translate HTML entities on-the-fly too.

No dice on Phoenix; it built, but then it segfaulted when I ran it. On the other hand, I did put together a a page of information about Interstate 555. While I realize these aren't perfect substitutes for each other, something's better than nothing, no? (Today's other big project will be the position statement I promised below...)

Well, the Toshiba's given up the ghost again. At this rate, Best Buy may be taking it back as a lemon before Toshiba gives me a refund for its half-of-advertised performance. Grr.

It's someone's blog anniversary!

Eugene Volokh has a great post in response to some linkage he didn't find very appealing:

NO, THANK YOU: Visitors from StormFront, which linked to this site as a sample of what Web logs are -- please go away. There's nothing technical I can do to stop you reading my page, but since you want to spread your "pro-white and anti-Jew message," would my being a Jew help persuade you to just close the window? That's right, Jew. In fact, of the nonanonymous bloggers on this site, the great majority are Jews, and the others -- well, they're only worse, because they're Aryans who seem to like Jews, no?

Look, if you're still reading, don't you get it? We call ourselves The Volokh Conspiracy. That's obviously an allusion to the International Jewish Conspiracy, no? One of the creators of the Internet was Leonard Kleinrock -- coincidence? I think not! We control the banks; we control the media; we're sleeping with your daughters; now we're controlling cyberspace. What's the point of resisting, really?

See, this is why I run my own server; a little bit of hacking in index.cgi will send unwanted visitors elsewhere on the web. Say, somewhere like the Lieberman 2004 Yarmalke Store. But then again, why let the denizens of StormFront miss out on a post like Eugene's?

And there's probably some JavaScript that would do this as well, but I don't speak JavaScript.

I'm serious. He's like my evil twin or something. Take his comments on Avril Lavigne for example:

I hate saying it, but she has the best pop record of the year. I like every single one of these songs. Everyone who I’ve pushed to listen to this disc grudgingly agrees this is a great album, even if “Complicated” generates a nervous tic in their eyes (it’s recently replaced “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd for the “Livin’ La Vida Loca Overplayed Song of the Year” Award). Great record, great hooks, non-wince inducing lyrics...it ain't gonna change the world but as disposable musicianship this ranks pretty high.

So, if you want to know what I'd write in my blog if I watched Buffy and was fixated on Jennifer Garner (as David Letterman would say, she's easy on the eyes), read Wading in The Velvet Sea.

This post brought to you by the Department of Having Nothing Worthwhile to Post.

You know, until today a regionless player wasn't a big priority for me. Then I discovered Inspector Morse - The Complete Series (33 Disc Box Set). Ah well, maybe a Region One set will come out eventually; a crapload of the individual episodes are listed at the U.S. Amazon site, and I'm not going to order them all individually.

The annoying thing about seeing Morse in the U.S. is that it seems like A&E and BBC America have the rights to one season each, and they just rerun the same ten over and over again... (a few episodes — again, always the same ones — also show up on PBS during pledge drives). It'd be like only seeing the NYPD Blue episodes with John Kelly and Danny Sorensen in reruns.

Seen at Ben Hammersley's blog.

For the poor souls who got this site while searching for “Jennifer Garner lingerie,” presumably due to my Super Bowl commentary, I feel obligated to provide the following links, courtesy of Moxie and Ryan McGee: “Lifestyles of the Rich and Bloggerly” and “Jennifer Garner is not a drag queen.”

I'm providing these links solely as a public service and without further comment.

How Appealing looks at a district court decision overturning the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 on the basis that it violates the establishment clause. A Roanoke Times article describes it as an "unprecedented challenge" to religious freedom.

It seems to me that it's very precedented: specifically, the so-called "Peyote Case" (Employment Division v. Smith, 494 US 872, 1990) and the subsquent case overturning the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which attempted to elevate religious freedom above other constitutional rights contra Smith (City of Boerne v. Flores, 117 S.Ct. 2157, 1998), both had similar findings, and both rejected the "compelling interest" standard that RLUIPA seems to have articulated.

Rand Simberg looks back at the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster, which claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee, and draws a parallel to the grounding of the Shuttle fleet after the Challenger disaster in 1996:

A key difference between this accident and the Challenger catastrophe was that in Apollo, we had a goal and a schedule. Accordingly, we dusted ourselves off, analyzed the problem, addressed it, and kept to the schedule.

With the Shuttle, the political reality was that there was no particular reason to fly Shuttles--no national commitment would be violated, no vital experiments wouldn't be performed, no objects would fall from the sky on our heads, and no elections would be lost, if the Shuttle didn't fly.

So, two and a half years after the Apollo I fire, we landed men on the Moon. Two and a half years after STS 51-L, the fleet was still grounded. It didn't fly again until two years, nine months later.

What a difference a couple decades make.

Seen at InstaPundit...

By the way, the Penn and Teller Super Bowl prediction trick came off without a hitch (that didn't stop me from figuring out how they did it though). The drawback to working with a live, unmanaged camera is that it's fairly clear how the trick was done, if you don't pay too much attention to Penn blabbering on and Teller waving around the sledgehammer.

Of course, it didn't help that one of the bystanders was pointing at the "confederate" the entire time she was switching the original paper they stored inside the test tube inside the pipe inside the giant pickle jar with the one prepared after the game was over. Nor was it helpful that she fiddled with it for a good 15-30 seconds in plain view of the camera.

Still, it was a cool trick, and I'm sure millions of people around the world think they did it with holograms or magic paper or an advanced flexible LCD display or camera tricks or something.

Virginia Postrel writes about her Lasik surgery experience today. It's something I've thought about vaguely (but never seriously considered; same with the fun and excitement of liposuction), but ultimately I've concluded that wearing glasses just suits me better than being "two-eyed." Now if they just figured out a way to keep the damn things clean...

As always, other good stuff there too...

Michele @ A Small Victory has compiled her 2002 Required Reading list. Needless to say, you're required to read it, and not just because she picked one of my entries (“Mississippians, persecution complexes, and Trent Lott”).

Today was pretty much a blah day; nothing much to comment on, really. I did go shopping at Wal-Mart (mostly diet soda, milk, and juice, along with the tax program and a couple of sweaters that were on sale; no SimCity 4 yet, natch). I thought about going to see Narc, for which the previews looked moderately interesting. Otherwise, I killed time by riling up some I-69 idiotarians at HoosierTalk, and watched the new Stargate SG-1 episode, “Unnatural Selection” (not really what I expected at all, but it was good nonetheless).

Tomorrow's project will be to try to get the business back on the rails again. I can hardly wait...

I won! My winning entry:

If women should be admitted as members of Augusta National Golf Club, why shouldn't men be admitted to [preppy New England womens' college]?

However, I can't condone the alcohol consumption associated with the judging. Binge drinking should be reserved for special occasions, like political science conferences and summers in Ann Arbor.

For a change, this year's Grammy nominations are moderately interesting; certainly there are a few choices to disagree with (for one, I don't see the appeal of Vanessa Carlton), but there's some good stuff nominated this year — 3 Doors Down, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne, Pink, Bruce Springsteen, and Tonic all received multiple nominations (see the full list). And (perhaps) disturbingly, Eminem is starting to grow on me in small doses.

Rather than writing several paragraphs to summarize my reaction (which was basically to pump my fist in the air and shout YES!), let me just link you to Radley Balko's take on the Indianapolis Colts, his plug of Penn Jillette's recent airport experience in Las Vegas, and his comments on the ADA's potential impact on the Super Bowl (also mentioned at Hit & Run, or as Radley calls it, “ReasonBlog”).

The pseudonymous Bitter has a challenge for the blogosphere: help her rile up fellow students at her womens' college in New England. The deadline is Monday, so put your mind to work and give the girl a hand.

A few miscellaneous thoughts for today, since I don't have anything in particular to say:

• I'm going to take a real course (ECON 610: Public Choice) this semester, at 8:00 a.m. no less; we'll see how long that lasts.

• Only 11 days until SimCity 4!

• Go check out Kos' Political State Report, particularly if you like “inside baseball” coverage of politics.

• David Adesnik @ OxBlog has some more interesting North Korea stuff.

The pseuononymous Bitter contributes a female perspective (in multiple parts) to Radley Balko's dating advice in response to some other dating advice that meandered toward him on the Blogosphere (this isn't the Bible, I'm not going to give a geneology of the meme). Then again, I'm not sure if I want dating advice from someone who plans on having a Season Pass to “Joe Millionaire.”

I really have nothing to contribute to either debate, except to say (a) “The Bachelor” is only watchable among other people so you can make fun of the participants, as Justin and Michelle can attest, and (b) spending much of an entire evening ranting half-drunk on Killian's Irish Red about a former colleague of mutual acquaintance to a table full of women doesn't seem to work all that well.

Much of Saturday's blogospheric comments have revolved around relatively goofy topics (the impending end of 2002 and the pre-war doldrums have created a bloggage vacuum, it seems). Among them: the wacky thimerosal smoking gun search, postmarks on Christmas cards, Pencilgate, and the messages on Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge ATM.

However, John Rosenberg does have some interesting posts, including his part in a blogospheric discussion on affirmative action, and some of Glenn Reynolds' blogging intrigued me enough to find his discussion of U.S. v. Lopez, probably the most important Supreme Court decision in the past decade. (Lopez overturned the bizarre “anything that might be construed as having some vague connection to interstate commerce can be regulated by Congress” interpretation of the Commerce Clause [Art. 1, Sect. 8, Para. 3] that had slowly been constructed since the 1930s.)

Title sorta-cribbed from here.

Just got back from seeing The Twin Towers with friends. Jacob T. Levy has a comparison between the novel and the film, and Glenn Reynolds comments as well. I enjoyed the film for the most part, especially since my recollection of the book is so dim that it's entirely possible I never read it. It's a bit like Shakespeare though; you already know the ending (even without having read the book), so ultimately the execution is key. Now I have to dig out my Fellowship of the Ring DVD.

If I were my cousin, I'd be singing myself happy birthday. That's something she really enjoys doing, pretty much any day of the year.

(Technically, my birthday was yesterday... hence the lack of blogging.)

So says The Commercial Appeal, at least. I don't know that he can make money at this, but I guess it's better than just sitting empty like Mud Island and the rest of Memphis' boondoggles.

XM's 90s on 9 is starting to grow on me, even though I could live without the rap that's about 10% of the playlist. Then again, that's why there's 100 other channels to choose from. :)

Incidentally, they're doing a bit of housecleaning. Now if they can just replace KIIS with something a bit edgier than MIX but without the rap from 90s on 9, I'll be in music heaven.

One of the great mysteries of the universe: why didn't the Sacajawea dollar coin take off? I've always found them eminently useful and preferable to digging around in my wallet for small purchases.