Not that this will work, but...
The ACC is going to have a conference call tomorrow about expansion, Wyclef Jean, and the ridiculous amount of rain Tampa has been getting and how it will affect Sunday's championship football game. I want to listen. $500 (thanks, IUPUI, this makes up for going one-and-done in the tourney) to the man, woman or entity that gets the codes and gets me on it. But you have to take the money Al Dawg style.
Shout out to M@ in the strip club wasting his bling-bling.

Senator Orrin Hatch proposed that stealing intellectual property (a la Napster) should be punishable via remote/automatic destruction of the offender's computer. In an O'Henry-esque twist, it turns out Senator Hatch is a mangy cur of a software pirate himself.

Along with being one of the world's greatest bands, The Shins are also devout followers of the teachings of Ronald.

There are a lot of {unhappy, enlightened, contrarian}? antisocial people on the Google.

Did the US actually invade OPEC?

Writing three months before the start of the war in Iraq under the title "Oil is the First Casualty after the American Invasion of Iraq," a number of Saudi experts speculated about the effects of the war on the oil situation. The article denounced American intentions "for naked interference in the freedom of the oil market and the militarization of this strategic item in order to lower prices by divorcing them from the market's instruments of supply and demand." [my emphasis]

The author is refering to the prospect of the US's "encouraging" the nascent free-Iraq to part company with OPEC and flout their production quotas. Please note, OPEC is not a cartel bent reducing the amount of oil on the market to drive prices up:


I am sure you know that OPEC's main aim is price stability, and that means not only cutting output when prices are on a downward path, but also increasing production should prices threaten to spiral out of control. We work for the benefit of both producers and consumers, and we encourage non-OPEC nations to join with us in this.

For this reason, some people call OPEC a cartel. It is a word that is instantly recognizable in any language. In fact, I believe that even the Hungarian word for cartel is "kartell." However, this is not a description that we believe is appropriate for what we do. If you really want to give a name to what OPEC does, I would call it proactive management of the oil market. And we do this not just for the benefit of our Member Countries, but for the benefit of everybody in the oil market, including consumers.


Remind this consumer to thank the Secretary General for his consideration next time I pay $1.49/gal at the 'Roo.

This is how people talk.





This is the classic graphic by "Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French engineer, which shows the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and time-series, drawn in 1861, portrays the devastating losses suffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Nieman River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army. Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.
"It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn."

This is so dang cool! Visual Thesaurus.

(Informal) Very Good
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