Religious political extremists the American Family Association are running another poll, possibly just to find out how badly tainted their mailing list got from that gay marriage poll a while back. Based on the fact that Kerry had something like 93% of the votes in the poll, I’m guessing they are mailing to a lot of folks who don’t agree with much of their agenda.

Why read Shakespeare’s words when you can get a better idea of what’s happening in the play by reading updated language? If I even begin to enumerate the ways in which this misses the point, I’ll be here all day.

If you’re building your own threat-condition monitor, the folks in charge of making sure you don’t feel secure in your homeland have provided a couple of handy hooks: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition returns an XML element with an attribute describing the current level, and http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage provides an image for putting on your page, thus: <img src=”http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage”/> yields

The image defaults to large, but you can ask for it to be smaller, thus http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage?size=small:

In that blog-feedback loop that we all thrive on, Ursula’s post has caused me to find this on-line word checker. Sadly, since they make money on SMS interactions with the phone, they’re unlikely to WAP-enable the checker.

For less than $500, you might soon be able to acquire a peripheral that would allow your correspondents to release scents when you display their messages. Why you would want to pay so much to give others control over your environment (and why the device requires a broadband connection) is somewhat beyond me.

Just in time, the dollar’s at historic lows.

Trying to find out who wrote, or who else performed, that song? Try BMI‘s Repertoire search, or ASCAP‘s ACE search. The Cover Songs Database appears to have its heart in the right place, but is very sparsely populated right now. On the other hand, The Covers Project has a mystifying desire to create "cover chains" ("A cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song."), but the one spot check I did yielded better results than the Songs Databse, so it looks like a fine resource.

Halliburton jumps 30 slots in dollar volume of defense contracts. It’s now number 7. With a bullet.

They’re mean; they smell bad; we should all throw rocks at boys.

Take for example this lovely Saddomo Table (partial nudity, probably not work-safe). Might be funnier to someone who reads Russian.