My top ten fave search phrases that landed people here, month of May:

1. computer monitoring all telephone calls conspiracy (1/1,500,000!)
2. morality of bombing civilians (1/1,222,000!)
3. osamabinladen@hotmail.com (1/8)
4. ubergeek mac (3/63,400 — man, do I want to pull number one on this search)
5. CFP2006 (3/890! — the first link that’s not actually the CFP website)
6. leahy wiretapping site jeffporten.com (3/6 — Brian still kicks my ass)
7. hershey conspiracy accident (5/42,700)
8. monitor glasses borg (10/56,900)
9. cute Jewish guy (15/2,560,000 — how the hell did I do that?)
10. sleep is for the weak (18/16,100,000)
11. bryan greenberg icons (26,258,000 — Brian, apparently you’re now a Russian demigod)

I’m starting to realize that by naming my blog “Conspiracy” I’m probably getting an even greater share of nutbar eyeballs than my politics would predict. Incidentally, the real Hershey conspiracy accident appears to be a speech by Helen Caldicott, founder of an organization I speak highly of.

“Jeff is an idiot” tracker: now 7 out 6,110,000. It appears that what’s put my rating back up in the top ten are these posts talking about my Google ranking. Bizarre. Perhaps asking Google to rank your own idiocy is a sign of greater idiocy?

Apparently, the archive of your tax records, if you live in the USA, is being outsourced. Which sounds like a fine idea to me, because nothing could possibly go wrong with that.

The office pool is open — how many weird stories will we be reading in tomorrow’s newspapers about 6/6/6?

Neil Gaiman co-writes an essay for Wired on the myth of Superman. I disagree with Gaiman on several of his thoughts, the biggest one being about Clark Kent being the “disguise” for Superman. To my thinking, it’s the other way around — it’s because Superman is Clark Kent, and has the classic American upbringing and mores, that makes him a hero and not a tyrant internally to the storylines, and externally a part of the American mythology. It wasn’t his powers that made him part of our culture — those keep changing. It was his Kansas.

Still on the topic of superheroes, check out this gallery of Photoshopped art from which I’ve illustrated this post. You want proof that modern standards of female beauty are very different than they used to be? Ask yourself if you can imagine seeing any of the women dressed up as Wonder Woman in a modern comic.

Some people have far too much free time in both the real world and a virtual one. (I wasn’t aware that watermelon was a popular fruit during the Middle Ages.)

I am officially too old to have any idea what this sounds like.

Speaking of too old, I thank God Almighty I can’t remember what I was eating in 1971.

I think this is the best $200 you can possibly spend. Bloodsucking bastards.

Don’t even think about going to this mindbending Flash site while drunk or stoned. It’s hard enough to deal with sober. I’m now wondering if I’m living in an atom in my own eyelash.

1. Someone younger than you compliments you on your iTunes playlist.

2. A reverse IP lookup says that someone really interesting is reading your web site.

3. A tourist asks for directions, and you know the Secret Local Method of getting there.

4. Making an exceptionally brilliant call or an exceptionally astute laydown.

5. Finishing the IKEA furniture without any extra grommets, flimflams or whatchamadoodles lying around.

6. The shareware you downloaded yesterday for “someday” testing purposes turns out to be perfect for today’s 3:30 PM crisis.

7. Figuring out a great method of transmogrifying your EyeTV movies onto your new Palm, which provides both portable entertainment and excuse to buy a faster transmogrifier.

8. It’s 4 AM, a mile to the 7-11, and a serious nicotine craving is setting in, and you find one more cig in the “empty” pack of smokes you left lying around yesterday.

I’ve written before about the absolutely wonderful Project Gutenberg, which provides free electronic copies of 18,000 books that are out of copyright. So, for example, if you have a desire to read the complete Sherlock Holmes in the original, with illustrations, it’s all right here for you to enjoy.

The technologically savvy among you might wonder how these century-old (in some cases, millennia-old) works came to be available in electronic format; the answer is, through the magic of optical character recognition and lots of proofreading by dedicated volunteers.

Turns out, there’s a great system for people who want to dabble in such volunteerism. It’s called Distributed Proofreaders, and you can be one of the worker bees. There are a number of ways to get involved, but at its simplest: find a book you’re interested in, ask for a page, edit the OCR text against the scanned image (both of which appear in a convenient web page), and submit your edits. Simple and easy.

In terms of bang for the buck, this is about the best activism around; spend 15 minutes proofing a page, and after you’re done you’ll have played a part in making this book available forever. Tens of thousands of people might someday benefit from your work, which you can do in your bathrobe. Hard to beat that math.

Just by way of example, here are the books I worked on today:

1. A Depression-era oral history of former slaves in Texas
2. A turn-of-the-century history of the US Navy
3. An 1860 work compiling pro-slavery arguments
4. Transcripts of the hearings of the Warren Commission
5. An anthology of great literature (I got a page from Don Quixote)
6. Two encyclopedias

Check out one of the footnotes I found today; this is from a British encylopedia discussing World War I at a time when no one thought it would ever need a number:

[1] The use of gas, as already pointed out, had been forced on the British by its adoption by the Germans. Ultimately the methods invented by British chemists and physicists outgassed the Germans.

I just love this phrasing: of course the only reason the British used poison gas was because the bad guys were just so darned evil about how they used theirs. But when they set their minds to it, of course they were better at it. I’m sure I’ll find similarly interesting quotes if I stick with the pro-slavery book.

Postscript: in case you’re wondering why you might find this interesting yourself (assuming we share the same interest in historical trivia), I have since edited a passage referring to “Bagdad” as a modern Turkish province; a history of Copenhagen; an entry for Copernicus; and I’m currently reviewing the life of Henry Coppée, Penn history and literature professor from 1855-1866, and the first president of Lehigh University. Maybe I’m weird, but I think this is damn cool.