I’ve set my desktop background to cosmic spectrum green.
Scientists: Green is dominant color of stars
By Paul Recer, 1/10/02 (AP)Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University said that averaging all the colors from the light of 200,000 galaxies shows that the current color of the universe is a sprightly green.
We haven’t been to a paint shop yet to see if there is a fancy name for it,” said [Dr. Ivan] Baldry, [Johns Hopkins]. He calls the color “cosmic spectrum green.”
I was taken aback this morning by some standard legal boilerplate published on an Apple news site about a contest that Apple is running:
ELIGIBILITY: All entrants must be at least 18 years old and must be legal residents of the United States, including the District of Columbia. [emphasis added]
Typically, these sorts of legal clauses are only added when there’s been some sort of legal protest or confusion in the past, which implies that someone, somewhere, managed to think that people living in D.C. aren’t even legal residents of the United States, let alone citizens. That’s gotta take the cake.
Which is more worrisome: that our defenses aren’t as good as we think they are, or that the government is willing to lie to us about it?
From the initial Washington Post story about the Tampa plane crash, 1/6/02:
Capt. Kirstin Reimann of the North American Aerospace Defense Command said two F-15s were scrambled from Homestead Air Reserve Base as a precaution, but he declined to say whether they reached the scene before the crash.
From a follow-up story, 1/8/02:
The military command that sends fighter jets to respond to acts of terrorism did not learn of Saturday’s flight of a private plane into a Tampa office building until after the plane had crashed, officials said yesterday.
Turns out that the FAA decided that it wasn’t necessary to contact NORAD, since local authorities were on the case; therefore, it’s not the fault of the military that they didn’t get there. But I’m very concerned that every report prior to this one strongly implied that the jets were on the way.
If we have to take homeland news with this much salt, how bad is the Afghanistan news for our blood pressure?
Has anyone else noticed that W has been a bit… morbid in his recent comments?
First came the unveiling of his Texas gubernatorial portrait, where he commented to the great amusement of his audience, “I’d like to welcome everyone to my hanging.”
Then, he vowed that taxes would be raised “over my dead body.” (Actually, he vowed the exact opposite, but who needs diction from a manly President?)
These would be curiosities, excepting one other article in the Washington Post 1/8/02 edition, where he’s quoted as saying, “All in all, [2001 has] been a fabulous year for Laura and me.”
Great year, huh? I’m surprised that Bush is so willing to admit that his political fortunes were improved last year, as they obviously were. But I’m bothered worse by something else.
The post-September 11th world is one in which there are a lot of things we can’t say without getting official attention from the authorities, and joking about the death of the President is definitely one of them. Likewise, anyone saying how wonderful 2001 was would be, at the very least, deserving of avoidance at parties. Yet the President can still say anything he damn well pleases.
Perhaps he considers that a perk of high approval ratings. But I would love to see what the “red states” who voted for him would say if there were wider distribution of his comments. Of course, criticizing the President is still unpatriotic, and is not one of the things polite people say.
And in case you’re wondering where we’ve been, remember this moral: it’s not a good idea to use an email address in your own domain as the MAIL-FROM authenticator address.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky.
Long story short, I had been hosting this site on a server at an old client site, and had accidently set things up so it would be very difficult to put things back together when that server went away.
Interesting side note to this story: my domain is hosted at Network Solutions. After a few months of getting conflicting information about what I’d need to fax to them to prove that I actually own this place, I was able to do this over the phone—with no identification whatsoever—when I called up to pay my $35 for the year. Reset my password, gave out my account ID, and basically gave me complete control.
Needless to say, if I weren’t me, I could be doing big mischief on a site in my name right now. Moral of this story: if you own a domain, keep it renewed well in advance.