…shit that makes my bloodpressure soar.

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity….It is the federal government’s latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens’ privacy…Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). ..ADVISE involves data-mining – or “dataveillance,” as some call it…

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advise, government surveillance, data mining

titillating tidbits for the end of the week…

ladies: since valentine’s day is basically all about us, here’s an occasion to show your man just how much he means to you! 14th march is steak and blowjob day! (thanks for the link, s!) then again, do you really need a reason for steak and blowjobs? hell, it could be “jellied eel and blowjobs day”… it would still be every man’s number one favourite holiday.

free robot sex is always appreciated.

finally, this is thekind of quality journalism exemplified by “the sun”: lesbian lovers licking in loo. because that’s news.

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sex, march 14th, steak and bj day

If you listen to podcasts (or even if you don’t), this week’s “newsweek on air” has some excellent insight into the Hamas election, the iranian nuclear situation, and more. A worthwhile listen.

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the best article I’ve read so far on the context of the muslim cartoon controversy:

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3] That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

this to my mind explains why so much of the reaction seems to be a lashing out in fear. Fear of losing control in the face of an information age. Fear of losing ground. Fear of the erosion of faith through widespread exposure to the secular world. Fear of social constructs collapsing.

These seem to me to be the desperate measures of desperate people trying to stop the march of the inevitable.

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muslim cartoon controversy

things i will miss whilst we’re away…

• the red sox’s entire 2006 world series season (i can *feel* it!!)
• piper’s first birthday (and i know Kate will forgive me for putting this second!)
• summer in london
• vanessa’s new baby
• the world cup
• "friends"
• friends
• daily internet access

Things I will *not* miss whilst we’re away…

• the tube
• the tube during summer (!!)
• working for the council
• summer fashions in london
• the world cup insanity
• the tube
• thrice daily "friends"
• "big brother"
• daily internet access

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fun new (to me) things i’m enjoying:

the onion’s podcast – hilarity straight to your ipod

photojunkie – aspirational photography inspiration

Londonist – by, for, and about london

salon’s audiofile – quality music for free

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salon, photojunkie, londonist, the onion

in trying to use up leftover pastry dough, i have quickly discovered just how versatile the humble pie is. nearly anything can go in. sad potato, a few stray mushrooms and some quorn pieces? add some bisto and a splash of wine, and you have a pie. mince and peas and onion? that’s a pie. fish and leeks and cheese sauce? pie.

all bow down before me – i am the pie queen. yum.

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Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

In short, Santa has left the building

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scared of santa photo gallery

johnny damon’s scary new robot look

it’s the pope! no the grinch! no the pope!

wait, that one is definitely scary…

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scared of santa, johnny damon, santa pope

i feel a whole lot better about turning 33, now that i’ve read pitchfork’s top 50 albums of 2005 and realise i actually know more than a few of these bands.

i may be old, but my taste in music isn’t.

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filching links from elsewhere…

google doodles – the collection of google holiday logos over the years.

time magazines photos of the year 2005. stunning visual depictions of the events of the year.

the national priorities project tallys the cost of the iraq war. compare it to world hunger, aids funding, and the cost to your local community. and the figures keep climbing.

finally, for when you’ve just spent too many hours in front of the computer…

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cost of iraq war, photos of the year, google

apparently, if you google “upside-down chrismas trees”, my site comes up at the top of the list. in spite of the fact that there is no misspelling in my post.

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upside-down xmas trees

lame: sony’s marketing attempt tries to cash in on the street cachet of old-skool grafitti

smashing peas: slate dissects “my humps”. (as a personal aside, i owned “bridging the gap” way back in the day… you know, when the peas were *good*)

and finally porn: is in the eye of the beholder. who knew a poached pear could look like that?

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try it, you’ll like it

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when will we stop killing people to prove that killing people is wrong?!?

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death penalty

is he cute or is he british?

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british

some good election news from yesterday:

ahhhh-nies political agenda goes down in flames

“intelligent design” doesn’t seem so intelligent

dems seem to be on an upswing

long may it continue…

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a cheery little ditty of a playlist…

MP3 playlist (M3U)

The podcast feed is here

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a little mid-weekend nugget: see the new playlist in the sidebar

(okay, in case you can’t actually find it waaaaay over there, here it is… )

MP3 playlist (M3U)

podcast feed here

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Can I just say, we made *sushi* for dinner tonight, and it was fan-tastic (even if we need a little more practice to make it pretty!) Aside from the rolling bit, it’s not even that hard…

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the top 40 u.s. magazine covers of the last 40 years

even if you never read the magazines, you remember seeing these.

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