Spam: This is funny — via IP, ANNOUNCING: The amphibious transport dock and spam relay:
Justin's Linklog Posts
Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:
Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.
KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.
SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?
KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.
SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.
KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)
SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)
KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.
SLJ: Ok good.
KT: As are you.
SLJ: Yeah all right.
KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?
SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.
KT: So you checked him out?
SLJ: Yeah.
[….]
The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?
Yours sincerely,
Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com
Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’
Fun: 
C just got her xmas present; a digital camera,
the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)
Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the ‘spam now illegal’ club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before ’email marketing’ can be sent.
Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘
Software: There’s a certain frisson to be had when you find out that your software is running somewhere really cool; I got this when I found out that PLP was being used in McMurdo Base, Antarctica and SpamAssassin as The Well‘s spam filtering system (SpamAssassin‘s now even more widely deployed, which is amazing — but this was the first ‘woo!’ moment).
Here’s a hot UL that’s floating around the irish web right now —
In a British program about Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell’s lastest movie SWAT presented by British presenter, Kate Thornton, the following exchange occured:
Thornton: What was it like working with Colin (Farrell), cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now?
Jackson: He’s pretty hot in the U.S. too.
Thornton: Yeah, but he is one of our own.
Jackson: Isn’t he from Ireland?
Thornton: Yeah, but we can claim him cos Ireland is beside us.
Jackson: You see that’s your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don’t belong to you. We had that problem here in America too, it was called slavery.
… yeah, right. ;)
(Update: Actually, believe it or not, that’s more or less how it really went. Here’s the transcript.)
Some commentary at
TheReggaeBoyz.com (quote: ‘I NEARLY DEAD TO RASS!!!!’) and
Kuro5hin.
It looks like the TV programme does exist; no scripts online, unfortunately, so we’ll never figure out if this one really happened, I think.
IMO, it’s made up for sure. That last line is just a little too harsh for a primetime schmooze-a-gram, at the very least. Plus, it’s the kind of thing only an Irishman would give a shit about — the perpetual adoption of Irish celebs and worthies by the UK media is a continual source of irritation for the Irish — as Dervala puts it:
‘No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.’
Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:
Irish: Sarah Carey‘s back — good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or ‘shopping centres’ as they’re quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.
Politics: WorldChanging.org
on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that
several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing,
they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the
world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.
Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W’liberalise’ its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?
Spam: Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
- Exchange 5.0 is unsecureable (yikes!)
- Exchange 2000, installed as part of MS IIS/5, is open by default
E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an ‘electronic election’ in Belgium on May 18th 2003.
Books: Smartypants, the book! I’m there.
Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.
Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:
Japan: This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:
This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:
- ‘(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, ‘let me get you a copy’ and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher’s room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?’–Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
- I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn’t lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don’t have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.–Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.
Another good one — it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.
Net: ouch. That’s 5,093.54 New Zealand dollars — I guess $2,500 or so.
Health: Canadian Pharmacy FUD debunked: ”After nearly a year of sharp warnings about the dangers of prescription drugs from Canada,’ the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, ‘U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials cannot produce a single U.S. consumer who was killed or injured by inferior medications from Canada.’ Neither can its Canadian counterpart.’
xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.
Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an ‘erect penis’ when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:
$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis erect penis flaccid penis
Quickies: I like Thanksgiving! A holiday based around a roast fowl and some booze; can’t go too far wrong with that. Thumbs up.
Health: via Forteana, BBC: Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It seems the Beeb is producing a new TV series about parasites, and the PR blitz starts here (and also in The Sun).
This is a supposedly true story I received from an associate. I have no additional evidence as to its veracity but it makes a good tale. — Editor’.
No better way to announce an urban legend!
So is the Beeb printing a UL? Or did an author called Broughton Coburn really pick up a nose-leech in Nepal shortly after arriving with the Peace Corps, and before becoming a successful travel writer? It could be, I suppose…
This Hong Kong Medical Journal report on the removal of a large leech from a woman’s nose:
The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.
And this NY Times interview with a leech researcher, who notes:
“There are all sorts of things out there like Dinobdella ferox, which means the terrifying and ferocious leech,” Dr. Siddall said. “It lives in eastern Bengal, and it will literally crawl up your nose and lodge in the back of your throat.”
Back to the Broughton Coburn account. An Amazon reviewer comment notes that this story appeared in Travelers’ Tales Nepal, a book by Rajenda S. Khadka. In addition, Broughton Coburn has a website nowadays, so someone could always ask! Finally, this copy of the full account has some more research.
While on the subject of Nepal, <a href="http://www.jetcityjimbo.com/awful_wonderful_ii/as1_run.html"> here’s an incredible cautionary tale — don’t do the non-tourist treks in Nepal without a guide, if you value your life:
A wall of furiously churning brown water was racing toward us. Behind it the lodge by the river where we had lunch an hour earlier was disintegrating. The water level had increased another ten feet and was annihilating everything in its path.
yikes. Lots more great travel stories, including almost swimming in shit, diarrhoea in a west African minefield, and strangling muggers in Peru on that site, BTW. And he can write!
Ireland: Knick Knack Paddy Hack — ‘Paul Clerkin and Mick Cunningham explain how their crazy-ass website p45.net suckered the (Irish) media.’
Environment: Long-time taint.org readers (yeah, right) may recall last year’s encounter with the pla beuk, the Mekong giant catfish. (hey, it made for a good story in the end!)
E-Voting: Do not miss this fantastic round-up on the e-voting situation in the US. It contains these amazing quotes from the leaked Diebold memos:
Politics: Living With Caucasians – a journal (in English) from Tbilisi, Georgia, which is living in interesting times right now.
Living With Caucasians – a journal (in English) from Tbilisi, Georgia, which is living in interesting times right now.
Spam: Since the CAN-SPAM act passed Congress, there’s been quite a few comments raised against it — unsurprising, as it does still have quite a few shortcomings.
Spam: Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):
Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):
This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That’s good. On the other hand, it still doesn’t go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.
Still, one must be pragmatic – it doesn’t really matter if it’s better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.
‘the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys’
Humour: This year’s bad sex prizewinners. I think Rod Liddle deserved it, myself, purely for his comment: