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Friday, February 13, 2004
Words, words, words Someone should invent a crayon-stain remover and call it "Cray-Off." (Somebody probably already has.) If someone invented a mayonnaise-based sexual lubricant—and I really hope they don't, but if they did—they could call it "Mayonn-Ease." If a group of eschatological Christians started playing Caribbean music, they could call it "Apocalypso." (My brain just comes up with this stuff sometimes.) [ at 11:21 AM • by Abby • permalink • ] Tuesday, February 10, 2004 Election update (no, not our election) Well, this isn't bad: the "missing" Russian presidential candidate has surfaced in Ukraine, alive and apparently well, surprised by all the fuss his unscheduled absence had caused: The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted the head of his campaign staff, Kseniya Ponomareva, as saying that Rybkin "called me, saying that he had had pleasantly spent four days in Kiev and did not understand what all this hysteria was about."Why exactly he took off to Kiev for four days without telling his wife or anyone on his staff is his own business, of course; perhaps, rather than sleeping with the fishes, he was only drinking like one... So: He's alive. Good. The three other politicians I mentioned in yesterday's post are still dead. Not good. ("One of these politicians you've been accused of liquidating is not like the others, three of these politicians are kind of the same...") [ at 3:51 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] The end of an era? Is the age of flagrantly-misleading domain names coming to an end? It's reported that pornographer Daniel Parisi is selling the leading misleading Web address "whitehouse.com", the slogan of which isn't, but ought to be, "Confusing children, scandalizing parents, and surprising the heck out of people who don't understand TLDs since 1997." (The actual White House Web site is, of course, "whitehouse.gov." The presidency isn't officially a commercial enterprise...not quite yet, anyway...) (Actually, that's probably why "whitehouse.com" is still around; if you bought, say, "windows95.com" and routed it to a porn site, you'd be slapped with a lawsuit before Internet Solutions charged your credit card; but the federal government can't sue for trademark infringement.) (Can it?) [ at 12:16 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] Spam subject line of the day Once again, not a very inventive spam name, but I love the subject line: "Anita Alford," "Re: helm inviolable." Doesn't that sound like the beginning of an epic-fantasy quest? "Thou shalt cross the Misty Mountains and the Burning Barrens and bring back the Sword Invincible and the Helm Inviolable, and therewith slay the Dragon of Dark Delving, and when thou returnest with his heart on an adamantine spike, we shall all go out for mead and fresh unicorn sandwiches." [ at 9:20 AM • by Abby • permalink • ] Monday, February 09, 2004 Elections elsewhere Well, this isn't good: a Russian presidential candidate, a "harsh critic" of Vladimir Putin, has been reported missing; he hasn't contacted his family or his campaign staff since Thursday. One of his campaign members said "As he is a registered presidential candidate, we hope this will take priority." Yeah, right after the March 14 elections, probably. (The missing man's name, Rybkin, is related to the Russian word for "fish," which, I fear, is who he's sleeping with...) (If your browser handles Unicode, his name is Рыбкин, and "fish" is рыба.) More, 11:50 a.m.: This article in Aftenposten reports that a Norwegian official has accused Putin of "systematic liquidation of the political opposition in Russia," with Rybkin's disappearance the most recent in a string of suspicious, um, ends-of-lives, including presidential candidate Aleksandr Lebed going down in a helicopter crash in 2002, liberal politician Sergej Jusjenkov being shot in the street the day he registered his new "Liberal Russia" party in April 2003, and liberal politician and journalist Jurij Sjekotsjihin being poisoned three months after that. Jeez, "Russian presidential candidate" is turning out to be an even shorter-lived political career than "Kennedy family member." I think one thing the U.S. may have failed to consider in "making the world safe for democracy" is that democracy is not always safe for the world... [ at 11:22 AM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
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