Bill Moyers on Democracy Now:

I almost didn’t come back to PBS; I really wanted to be a correspondent on The Daily Show, but I wasn’t funny enough.

I’m looking forward to tonight’s broadcast of Moyers’ first Journal on PBS: Buying the War.

For some reason, the top two searches that get people here are “4×4” and “tuning”, with “4×4 tuning” not far afterwards. Apparently I’m now a light truck expert. Variations on rigged PowerBall are a close second.

Two lists today: searches that amuse me, and searches that amaze me (by giving me such a high Google rank).

Amusing:

1. allowed nude home open windows? (1/435,000)
2. porten park (1/186,000)—hey, does this really exist somewhere?
3. guy holding starbucks tray (4/58,800)—can’t imagine what this guy was looking for
4. best way to win on keno mathematically (8/16,500)—just like War Games, the only way to win is not to play
5. diseases frequently bought by flight attendants (9/341,000)
6. how to measure for drapes (11/479,000)
7. animated cochroach (12/152,000)
8. naked window dorm penn (15/215,000)
9. vast Jeff wang (not in top 100)
10. sleestak (not in top 100)

Amazing:

1. jews at microsoft (1/1,220,000)
2. blue apple conspiracy (1/1,150,000)
3. arrogant bastard telecom (2/16,400)
4. best new yorker cartoon ever (3/573,000)
5. jewish redheads (3/181,000)
6. groh vs. ramirez (4/10,100)
7. roosevelt conspiracy (5/1,010,000)
8. l’enfant loews plaza website (7/16,800)—I love that my “Loews is really pissing me off” post comes up so high.

This cartoon might be a great reason to start waking up on Saturday mornings again.

I wrote about Quinn Norton after I met her at CFP2006 last year—specifically, after I met her while she was taking telephoto pictures of NSA headquarters through a chainlink fence. I just found a video of a fantastic speech she gave on functional body modification at Chaos Congress in Berlin, but I’ll warn you that it’s a 184 meg M4V download before I link to it.

Hey, did you know that the FBI has lost 75% of the documents that were requested under FOIA in 2006? No wonder Alberto has so much trouble remembering things; he has so little to read.

Tomorrow is the deadline to register a complaint with the FDA over their plan to redefine chocolate to include all sorts of crap. Yes, there is a difference between what can be called chocolate, chocolate-flavored, or chocolatey. If you think this matters, then let your government know. Reminds me of my favorite George Carlin quote: “You know what ‘real chocolatey goodness’ means? No fucking chocolate.”

I’m a fan of creative displays of quantitative data, but this one takes the cake: this graph of home values since 1890, adjusted for inflation—as a roller coaster.

Hey, did you know that approximately 100,000 people (Jeff estimate) can look up what prescriptions you’re taking, pretty much whenever they feel like it? It’s all to make sure you’re not getting stoned with your meds, which is amusing, since it looks like marijuana is a great way to slow cancer, and you can’t have any.

Aside from showing how to peel an egg in eight seconds, this has gotta be the greatest kitchen hack I’ve ever seen. Plus, you can also peel a raw egg.

Daylight Saving Time erroneously puts a kid in jail for two weeks.

Curious to know whether your headache and nausea is a hangover or bird flu? Go ahead and track your symptoms to see if this is self-inflicted or epidemiological.

It’s official, I have one more reason to hate people who drive cars.

I just ran several of my blog entries through Gender Genie, and the results were 4 out of 4: I am a girly blogger. Even my TidBits article is eligible for Lifetime Channel broadcast. The only entry that came up male (and that was borderline) was my post here that was a copy of a comment I left on I Should Be Sleeping.

I guess arguing raises my testosterone just enough.

The New York Times with a graphical accounting of deaths by gun, on a daily basis.

Somehow I managed to miss this until I heard about it from Bill Maher:

Take Monica Goodling, who, before she resigned last week, because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s 33 years old. And though she never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 93 U.S. Attorneys.

How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College. You know, Messiah, home of the Fighting Christ-ies? And then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said that the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, has a law school.

Announcing my latest cockamamie idea: EOTD, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In blog format. One entry a day. With snarky commentary. Suitable for RSS feeding.

As of this writing, you too can become a postbellum whore in New Orleans (it’s surprisingly easy), engage in sleazy stock transactions, read about a town in Germany named “town” (I think), and read about three random 19th-century Europeans.

Why am I doing this? I wrote about that, too.

Hat tip to MacDevCenter: check out the driving directions to get, for example, from one major world capital to another.

I don’t keep kosher for Passover, but tonight as I was shopping for my usual bagels, pasta, and popcorn, I suddenly had a hankering for matzoh. Unfortunately, this being the first night of Passover and an hour or so after most seders have concluded, every Jew in the tri-state area with an ounce of sense had already purchased their Pesach supply and my supermarket was sold out.

In the Passover aisle, that is. A few aisles over in Ethnic, they had the regular matzoh, the stuff that’s available year-round, that’s marked on the side NOT FOR PASSOVER USE.

And I stood there for something like ten minutes, looking back and forth from my bagels to my ersatz matzoh, thinking that there was Just Something Wrong with buying it. Knowing for a fact that I was being very silly. I’m still not entirely sure why I’m silly, but I’m definitely sure about it.

It’s simply cruel that this is a hoax. I’d probably buy it with this clock to save shipping.

The BBC wants to know if you can smell cheese?

Windows insecurities exploited that can truly invade your privacy.

If you need a new ISP, I’m hearing good things about this one.

A small error imperils an upcoming poker tournament.

Threat Alert Jesus. I’d buy this, and I’m Jewish.

Giles Turnbull on the great new productivity app coming its way to Macs.

Google finally goes analog, and it’s about damn time.

A good history of April 1st hijinks, dating back centuries. There’s even a meta-prank courtesy of Boston University. Turns out that some pranks have been superceded by actual events.

And I’ve gotta say, I’ve been to Providence. If they closed for the day, who would notice? Although I did make the mistake once of going to Belgium on the day it closed.

It’s on my perennial list of things to do to get a daily feed of The Daily Show and Colbert Report into my regular media schedule. In the meantime, I rely on web clips like this one.

What Jon didn’t mention is that the McCain website wasn’t “hacked” — instead, McCain’s campaign pulled something sleazy. They had a response button on their page that was completely lifted from someone else’s code; the license for the code said it was kosher to do this, provided they kept his authorship intact. The campaign instead stripped his authorship, and pulled the code each time from the author’s site, whacking him with the bandwidth fees.

So the author, Mike Davidson, swapped in the image with the new McCain platform. No hack at all, as the campaign itself had said, “go get that image from the other guy’s site.” I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the actions of the campaign reflect poorly on McCain himself.