Just what we need: a nuclear state in the grip of a power struggle.

I was going to go find out what kind of site the “cheating wives” spam would lead me to (dating? porn? escorts?), but the DNS is not answering for the domains included in the specimens I have available. Google turned up only some discussions of the spam, and of the blogs I checked, only a comment in one of them remarked that all we apparently care about with these women is height, weight, and bra size. And no one involved in that discussion noted that the proportions are freakish. The first housewife listed is 5’9″, 120 lbs, 36c. I mean, I suppose it could be done, maybe even without silicone, but I’m not sure I’d want to see her naked, for fear some protuding bone or boob would put my eye out. I like some curve with my housewife (or working wife, for that matter), thanks.
And yeah, this post is ever so likely to end up attracting search engine hits, but since the spam bots have already found the blog (so we’ve turned comments off everywhere), there’s no use steering now.

I hadn’t heard that the wise-cracking Jerry Orbach was battling cancer. Sadly, he didn’t make it.

The iTrip (as well, no doubt, as similar devices) is illegal in England. Around here, you have to amplify the signal to be greater than 10mW (ERP) before you’re a pirate.

Since we moved to a more serious web hosting solution, I’ve had better access to statistics, including which search queries people are using (on the up side, I don’t have to scan through the URLs in the log; on the down side, the log parser my hosting company uses doesn’t recognize queries from very many engines—I think I’ll mention that to them). One of the benefits of such easy access is the ability to tell when someone has reached our pages due to a misspelled query. Today was at least the second time I’ve been able to go correct the spelling of a word in a blog post because somebody misspelled it in their query and ignored Google’s "Do you mean…?"

The BBC hosts a web chat with Tony Head. Ripper may still happen, maybe as a one-shot instead of a series, but "the world needs Joss Whedon to do some movies and that’s what he’s doing." In other news, Tony hosts True Horror on Discovery UK. No idea whether or when it’ll hit our shores.

According to this BBC piece about brain characteristics common to hoarders, hoarding appears to be qualitatively different from other OCDs. Just another in our ongoing series on hoarding. No, we don’t have a compulsion to cover it, why do you ask?

Ursula LeGuin tells us "[h]ow the Sci-Fi Channel wrecked my books."

I can’t find any evidence the collective has run across John Scalzi before, but he seems to be pretty funny.

Predictions about wearable computing go mainstream.