Slaughters.com

Interesting fact of the day. 86% of my mail for the month of May was spam. I've had the same email address for about 7 years. And I've made almost no effort to prevent it from appearing on public webpages, newsgroups and message boards, so I'm a bit of a spam magnet. But thanks to my elaborate home-cooked filtering system (consisting of fetchmail, procmail, and perl), only a couple dozen of these spams landed in my inbox.

France has not been significant or even interesting the the last 200 years. That's fine. They are an arrogant bunch with no morals or taste. OK. They are a squirelly looking lot that doesn't bathe - to each his own.

But the french have gone mad. They are out of control.

So what can a guy like myself do? I've heard that we are supposed to boycott French products, but France doesn't produce anything. About the only thing I can recall ever coming out of France was that LeCar thing a few years ago (the car that made the Pinto look like a luxury car).

Bin Laden Speaks of Iraq 'Partnership,' Powell Says

It seems odd that one day we hear that Bin Laden is certainly dead, based on the incredulity of recent video tapes; then the next day Powell uses Bin Laden audio tapes to support his position.

I wish our government would simply release some of the more damning evidence against Iraq. Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, saying there is a threat is simply not enough. They need to show hard core irrefutible evidence before they can expect more support.

Kurt
Cobain's diaries to be published

Though I'm not a big Nirvana fan, I do recognize the band's talent and importance. And I have an odd fascination with people like Kurt Cobain. (Another figure I've recently become interesed in is Lee Mavers of The La's.) Anyway, the sample entries from Cobain are revealing and sad. Reading this, I felt like I was inside some sort of fish tank with Kurt, talking with him as many people stared in at us from the other side of the glass. He is no different than many of the people I grew up with. His tone reminds me of people I went to high school with. Then one day, he got famous and his old world was gone. He didn't want to leave his old world. He was evicted and forced in to a world of phonies. I have to wonder if it's a healthy situation to be in, a world of fantasy. Sure, there's still the music, but eventually that too must necessarily become a product of the fantasy world that's been created. Real music comes from real people being honest and real. I don't see how you could become a rock star and still make music.

An Op-ed from kuro5hin.org addresses this question. Don't you love rhetorical questions?

The article can be summed up, IMHO, with the following quote:

If the word "knowledge" cannot in fact be applied to anything, it makes more sense to redefine the word so that it just means "overwhelmingly likely, given certain assumptions".

/me puts away pipe and turns off classical music and fires up Quake2.