From Wired news, Afghanistan, on 50 Websites a Day.

It didn't take too long for Google to find the home page for The Apostrophe Protection Society. I always knew that misuse of apostrophes was something that irked me, but I never thought I would feel such delight in finding such a definitive and pedantic site. Be sure to look at the photo of the chairman shown with his biography. He looks like a fuddy-duddy Englishman.

Yea! It's October... that means that the new Ig Nobel Prize Winners have been announced. From the brief descriptions I've read, my favorite is the winner for Literature, "John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive." On the internet he has his work cut out for him.

Marney Update... She gained over 3 lbs. this month! At her 5 month check up last week she weighed 14 lbs. 10 oz.! New photos in the "Marney Sep 2001" gallery at our yahoo photo site.

Something that I'm saving for future reference: a list of the top twenty internet security vulnerabilities. Is it for my future use as a sysadmin or as a nefarious ne'er-do-well?

Ref takes pity on team losing 18-1, so he scores a goal for them.

Over at The Onion, they've somehow managed to write funny, yet not-too-offensive, stories about recent events. Snippets:

From American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie:

"I always thought terrorists blowing shit up would be cool," Martin continued. "Like, if the Pentagon was bombed, I figured they'd mobilize a special elite squadron of secret-agent ninjas, and half of them would be hot babes. How could I ever think that? This is actually happening, and it's just not cool at all."

From God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule

"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."

There are lots of sick hoaxes related to the WTC disaster out there. I just received email of a photo that purportedly shows a tourist on top of the WTC with the first airplane about to hit right behind him. It's a fake, dammit! See more at this page at snopes.com. For information about other WTC hoaxes, see pages at snopes.com or csicop.org.

From htmlhelp.com, an article about misuse of the alt attribute in img tags. Included are some egregious examples of what not to do.

15-yard Penalty for Unnecessary Use of PDF: There's a mailing list that a very dedicated member of my neighborhood sends out every week or so. It contains information about crime, recommendations for plumbers, electricians, etc., news about our schools and more. However, unlike most modern email mailing lists, the moderator is doing this completely by hand -- subscription management, distribution, and archiving. This is silly when free resources like Yahoo groups are freely available which do all that and searchable archives, too. But, now the most pointless "feature" of this list is that the archives are available in PDF format. Take a look at a recent edition. Does this gain anything from conversion to PDF?

I'll stop ranting now. The content still more than makes up for the list's technical quirkiness.

Everytime I see somebody wearing a red, white and blue ribbon, I can't help but think of Tony Orlando and Dawn. This has been driving me crazy. The way I remember the origin of the ribbons was the Yellow Ribbons during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81 and that was all from Tony Orlando and Dawn's song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon".

A little research turned up this article from therepublic.com about ribbons. It mentions the Tony Orlando theory but says that "news stories credit Penelope Laingen, wife of Iranian hostage L. Bruce Laingen, with starting the yellow ribbon-tying craze at her Maryland home." That doesn't seem to refute the theory since Ms. Laingen may have been inspired by the Mr. Orlando and the Misses Dawn. The article also cites a woman who did ribbon research: "Virtually every culture and society, Wolos said, has used ribbons in a show of allegiance or support, from black mourning bands and wreaths with bows used at funerals, to red, white and blue bunting in the French Revolution, to red ribbons worn in the 1970s to bring attention to POW-MIA issues."

Very interesting, but I'm still sticking to the Tony Orlando theory for the lapel ribbons.

Pure, unmitigated silliness