Random: October 2004 Archives

Spotted on the Ave...

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while, but now I have an excuse! A friend of mine from Leicester is visiting the Bay Area for the first time with her husband, and they're trying to plan their week. So here are my suggestions, starting with San Francisco itself...

I get two!

One was from "Ned Beatty" with no subject mentioned. I've gotten a few messages from the Democratic Party or John Kerry which were written by a celebrity, so I was fooled. But nobody really knows who he is these days, or remembers his comic turn in Silver Streak, do they?

The other bore the intriguing subject line, "storming column of men".

Both messages were about low interest rates.

Michael is calling Kerry supporters in Florida to ask them to volunteer for the campaign — trying to get them to join a door-to-door canvassing effort there. He just came in and said,

"This guy told me he can't do it — because next weekend he's going to Orlando to show Fahrenheit 911 to a bunch of people there, and the following weekend, he's showing it in Tampa!"

I said: "Man. People will just say ANYTHING to get out of volunteering!"

The Chronicle is running a series of articles about the impacts of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which happened on this date in 1989, on Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

This date is of particular interest to me because I was a student living in Santa Cruz at the time. More about that later...

If this is true, Bill O'Reilly is a very, very, very,

veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery
veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery
veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery
veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery
veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery
veryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery

(times 1000 jillion)

sick boy, indeed.

Getting this out of my system so I don't send it to the person I shouldn't send it to. Because I don't want this to happen.

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I don't love taxes either. But we all want working roads, police, fire, and ambulance services, plus we now have security and wartime expenses. And our governor got elected partly because he kept talking about lower taxes, but also because he cares about education. Alas, schools cost money! It's all a shell game. If our city and state get less money from the federal government, they have to get more money from somewhere. So now I'm paying more to ride BART, parking ticket fees have doubled, and I think my property taxes just went up. It's just the way it is. I'd just rather than the fire station near my house didn't sometimes have a sign up saying "This station is closed today", especially during fire season! But I'm getting off topic. Anyway, on to the second point...

The debate last night wasn't as exciting as the one last week. Cheney and Edwards are both very good speakers, though one of them is a tad deficient on the charm and health side of the ledger (guess which one I'm talking about) and Edwards blinked way too much.

If you couldn't hear anything they were saying, you'd think that Edwards was very nervous and Cheney was very angry, perhaps some kind of fire-breathing preacher of an apocalyptic Church of the Brimstone-Laden Intestines.

My favorite part was when Cheney got all defensive about Halliburton and told his audience to check out Factcheck.com, which would clear things up nicely about his record. The problems with that were that 1) I knew what page he was talking about and it only addresses the issue of his deferred compensation from Halliburton, not their investments in Iran or the investigations for bribery and 2) that page is not at Factcheck.com, it's at Factcheck.ORG.

Interestingly enough, until yesterday, Factcheck.com was nothing but a link farm — set up to entrap careless typers and drum up hits for advertisers. But somebody managed to redirect it to George Soros' web page! How'd they do that so fast? (Update: it seems that the domain owners did the redirect themselves, and the Soros team had nothing to do with it.)

Perhaps Cheney misspoke on purpose (as he did on so many other things), because the REAL FactCheck is pretty harsh on him today.

Another update:

From CNN:

The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.

"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.

They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.

Web site operators typically pay fees to the companies that host their sites. The more hits a site receives, the more its operator pays.

Soros was not advised of the switch and did not know it had taken place until Wednesday, said a spokesman, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

"We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events but certainly encourage voters to visit both of these valuable sites," Michael Vachon, a senior aide to Soros, said in a statement.

An unprecedented number of visitors to FactCheck.org caused the site to crash several times Wednesday, said Brooks Jackson, the site's director.

Considering that the site is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, presumably for tax reasons, I'm pleasantly surprised at their politics.

Behold the delightful diatom, illustrated by my friend Leila.