I guess we can retire Champaign Socialist in favor of Cocaine Socialist.

If I had a million dollars,
I'd buy me some blow.
If I had a million dollars,
And some fangirls to ... (etc)

As I understand it, Obama and I have a lot in common: we both spent twenty years of our lives sleeping through church.

American's knowledge of religion shallow?

Stephen Prothero, author of the recently published Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't, agrees that the Good Samaritan story is germane to the immigration debate because it is all about how Jesus said we should treat strangers.

"First of all, how many Americans actually know the Good Samaritan story? I'm not sure many do," said Prof. Prothero, chairman of Boston University's religion department. "Second, should we be basing policy on biblical passages? If we're going to, how can we have any reasonable conversation if we don't know the story?"

An awesome little project, via Danny:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics programme of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

Heh: "...Lessing’s words should be taken somewhat in context: the ditherings of an ignorant old women..."

Wow, I'll let others worry more about the "one laptop per terrorist supporter" issues and say, WTF? They city's spending almost $11,000,000 / year to give computers and high-speed Internet to 3000 families? That's about $3500 / family! Who are they buying these things from, Dash Domi? Why not just give half to the schools and half to the local libraries to put computers for everyone?

Now, this sounds more like a "social justice" program -- i.e. Bucks for Buzz and his Boys -- than it does a meaningful attempt to help anyone, but I've got a better deal for the city and the disadvantaged: outsource it to me and I'll save the city lots of money and double the number of disadvantaged kids getting computers.

• For $22.95 / month I can get Rogers Ultralight Internet.
• For $450 I can get Dell Inspiron 531 with plenty of everything and a 17" LCD Monitor

The logistics are fairly simple. Dell will ship directly to their apartment and I'll handle the Rogers billing from here. I'll assume I can get Rogers and Dell to eat GST & PST given the size of the order we're making, plus the potential for a tax write off for everyone. Rogers and Dell will also handle tech support directly, which is a reasonable part of becoming computer literate. The city will provide the names and addresses who to ship to. I'll need 5 people at say $50,000 / each to handle paperwork and logistics. One person will be dedicated to Googling names to weed out friends-of-terrorists. Let's also posit that I'll maintain another 6000 Internet accounts for people who have already got their computers.

So here's the budget:

• Internet connection: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
• Legacy internet: $1.65 million (6000 @ 22.95/month * 12 months)
• Computers: $2.7 million (6000 @ $450 / each)
• Employees: $250,000 (5 @ $50,000)
• Offices: $150,000
  
• Subtotal: $6.4 million
• Management fee: 1.28 million (20%)
  
• Grand total: $7.68 million
• Savings to City of Toronto: $3.08 million

That'll buy Dave Miller a lot of food carts. I'm available on my cell during normal working hours.

Nerve (via Kottke):

The Lands' End fall catalog is porn for the heartsick man. Who thought sixty pages of stylish-yet-practical clothing would employ models who are disturbing approximations of the lovely thirty-something woman who doesn't want to put up with your shit anymore?

...

For a second, studying the supposedly idealized images of men in the catalog — the ideal man for these uber-women? Your replacement? — the old anger flashes: These guys are dorks! They're wearing clothes chosen by their women - turtlenecks and non-Levi's jeans, monogrammed, $50 button-down shirts with matching ties. . . khakis.

...

Each page of Lands' End fantasy is a perfect scene in the wonder of her new life without you.

CBC radio just had a story about the Hollywood writer's strike. During the story the announcer mentioned "they've have stopped writing lines and started walking the line". Funnyish, but not bad delivery. Too bad there wasn't a producer's strike though -- then CBC could tell us that the producers are walking the line after, of course, stopping doing lines.

(Snowy Owl Habitat, repurposed for amusement purposes only, courtesy of Trinity-Anne)

Well, all good things must come to an end: Fake Steve Jobs has been outed by New York Times' report Brad Stone as Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. Kudos all round, especially to Lyons who has kept the blogosphere well amused (by his writing, and by the identity hunt) for the last year.

Fake Steve:

So I'm getting loads of mail in response to my post about Al Gore. People are telling me I've got the facts all wrong: the world temperature hasn't gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius in six months, it's .05 degrees Fahrenheit in sixty years; it's not true that a piece of ice the size of Greenland broke off from Iceland, and it couldn't possibly be true, since Greenland is roughly 100 times the size of Iceland. So fair enough. Maybe it was a piece of ice the size of Iceland that broke off from Greenland. Whatever. Listen. You can quibble all you want over tiny mistakes. You can keep calling for more studies, and you can sit around with your thumbs up your butts while the planet keeps getting hotter. Or you can put aside the details and keep your eyes on the big picture. Don't you see what the skeptics are doing? The tiny details are what the oil companies and Republicans want people to focus on. They'll just keep throwing these nitpicky things at us, trying to wear us out. Like Al told everyone this weekend at Barbra's house, these guys are just going to keep looking for tiny mistakes and then trying to extrapolate from those tiny mistakes that the whole theory is wrong. But it's not wrong. It's right. Everyone with half a brain knows that it's right. Anyway. To those of you who wrote in, I appreciate your criticism. But you're wrong and Al is right.

Peter Piper tells a few jokes in his distinct, unique and hilarious style.

(C) 2005 Vegas Buzz Radio Network