October 2004 Archives

I just got back from a spectacular (to a nerd like me) public policy conference in ATL. The conference had some exciting panels (see above note re: nerdiness) at which I was genuinely hyped about the prospect of meeting and maybe even asking a question of, that's right, school finance expert Andrew Reschovsky! (Wooooooooooo! Professor! Over here! Professor! Will you sign my conference program?!) And I got to stay with my brother-in-law, his girlfriend, and their attention-whore of a cat, which was great fun.

There are many things that I was aware of missing about the city (Andrew, the Braves, Pasta da Pulcinella, Emory's beautiful campus). After all, we lived there for seven years. But nostalgia hit me at several surprising moments. Here are a few of them, in chronological order.

1. "You are now entering the transportation node." This made me say, out loud, on a crowded Hartsfield escalater while descending to the people mover, "Awww, HI airport voiceover lady!"

2. Friendly bus drivers. MARTA may not actually be sMARTA, and in fact it kind of sucks, but the bus drivers and all the other employees I encountered were both friendly and helpful. This is in marked contrast to the employees on D.C.'s Metro, who, even if you're lucky enough not to get chased with a broom for asking a question, will treat you with varying levels of hostility ranging from obvious disdain (at best) to virulent hatred (evidently not even at worst, given the whole broom thing).

3. Guess that street name! This one just makes me an idiot, because I actually hated it at the time, but for some reason (probably because I didn't have to drive anywhere) I found it charming that the street you're on changes names at least twice before you get to where you're going. Granted this is because white Atlantans were so racist that they didn't want to live on the same street as black people, but I managed to forget all this and be thrilled by the suspense of it all.

4. ATLANTA at Philips Arena. It's just looks cool.

5. The Ted. I know the Braves weren't playing there, but it made me smile just to drive past.

Alas, and also alack, georgewbush.com has changed the image on their front page to this:

The future is now.

Maybe it's the year 2594 right now, civilization has crumbled, and you, Earth's last human, perhaps using a miraculously-pristine computer in an old bombed-out library, have stumbled upon our site. In that case, the image on the front page of georgewbush.com has probably changed. In the past, when this post was written, the image looked like this:

That photo, minus the text and the big green bubble, is used in the Bush campaign's new internet ad. Ah, but look closer!

Well, go on. Look at it already.

I'm guessing we no longer have enough marines for a photo-op. Times are tough.

With just six days to go until I officially start filling out Canadian immigration forms, a Mr. M. Pinzur (397) is in the driver's seat of the Instapundit "Indeed" Challenge. But Liaps (424) still has a chance!

Right now the counter stands at 398. If Glenn only manages to reach 410 by midnight next Tuesday, Mr. Pinzur wins the fabulous mystery prize. However, if our favorite pundit ("Missing weapons? What missing weapons?") manages to squeeze out enough "Indeeds" to crank it up to 411 by then, Liaps is assured of victory.

(And, I may have to rethink the fabulous mystery prize, since one or both of them may be lactose intolerant. I'm not sure.) At any rate, I'm leading both of them in the football pool, which is all that matters.

Any good sixth part in a series should revisit the themes of its first and perhaps third installments. That being the case...let's go back to Jacksonville. (Oh, dear.) Be sure to read the following excerpts with your best British accent...

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Wow. Just...wow. Remember, this is the same county that disproportionately rejected new black voter registrations. Now it appears they intend to reject black voters as well.

When asked by Newsnight for an explanation of the list, Republican spokespersons claim the list merely records returned mail from either fundraising solicitations or returned letters sent to newly registered voters to verify their addresses for purposes of mailing campaign literature...

There was no explanation as to why such clerical matters would be sent to top officials of the Bush campaign in Florida and Washington.

I'm no expert on fundraising, but I'm sure it's a bad idea to focus your efforts on areas concentrated with people who are traditionally hostile to your beliefs and don't have any money.

Oh, and be sure to check out that bit on the end about the private investigator hired to film early (black) voters. I read about this a few days ago, and it reminds me of the intimidation tactics used on black voters back when they first got the vote. That's Jacksonville for ya -- steeped in tradition!

Hey, here's a funny story from work.

I'm working on this project that lives on its own dedicated Linux server. It's a state-of-the-art setup; essentially, eight different computers, or "nodes", are hooked together to create one big number-crunching behemoth. The server has a gigabit Ethernet connection, so it's very fast. Our project lives on the server and uses its processing power to calculate underwater microphone data, in order to localize noise sources on sumarines.

But in the past week, I'd been having some big connectivity problems; I would connect to the big machine from my desk, only to have the connection inexplicably dropped every 10-15 minutes when I would try to do something. After a few days of this I got fed up and went to the company's network administrator to let him know about the problem. He pulled up the firewall data and found the problem: the server had been transmitting data to the outside Internet(s). Lots of data. Continuously. In fact, about a gigabyte's worth in about a day. There was so much traffic that it was even choking off my office connection. Ruh-oh! There was no reason for that to be happening; none of our work was Internet(s)-intensive. What was going on?

All of a sudden I'm Nancy Drew, and there's trouble down by Mystery Lake!

After some detective work, my fears were confirmed: it had been hacked. Somebody out there on the Internets had been repeatedly trying to break in all month by trying different common usernames and passwords, and had hit on a successful combination. Then, using the account access, they apparently began using the big server to launch denial of service attacks against various unknown targets.

The thing is, this is not an uncommon security problem, nor is it one that's difficult to guard against. If you make sure that everyone has a difficult-to-crack password, and keep the operating system well updated with all the latest security fixes, attacks like these are easy to fend off. Otherwise, people can gain access to your machine, and use that access to gain access to the super-powerful "root" account, which basically gives them run of the entire system.

So, if you're like my company, and you set the super-powerful "root" account's password to... wait for it... "Password" (ugh), and then put that server out on the Internets, you're pretty much asking for trouble. And we were hax0red. Big time.

It's hard to tell where the attackers are from, since captured machines from around the world can be used to do their dirty work. For all we know it was a bunch of Latvians trying to pull a shake-down, or perhaps Matthew Broderick (although, thankfully, my "Global Thermonuclear War" project appeared untouched). At any rate, we had to unplug the big server and will have to re-install the operating system to remove the offending installed programs.

The moral of the story: don't set your password to "Password." That's moronic.

Only my brother and I will be interested in this Alex Ross Village Voice cover painting. So, check it out James.

Last night: Saturday Night Live.

Musical guest: Ashlee Simpson.

She pulls a: Milli Vanilli.

Simpson had performed her hit single "Pieces of Me" without incident earlier in the show. When she came back a second time, her band started playing and the first lines of her singing "Pieces of Me" could be heard again. She looked momentarily confused as the band plowed ahead with the song and the vocal was quickly silenced. Simpson made some exaggerated hopping dance moves, then walked off the stage 35 seconds into the performance. NBC quickly cut to a commercial.

Pretty embarrassing to be, you know, exposed as a fraud, and all. But then, she makes it worse at the end of the show by blaming her band!

"I feel so bad. My band started playing the wrong song. I didn't know what to do so I thought I'd do a hoe-down."

Blech! The band had tried to cover and make the best of it by playing along with the wrong song; Simpson merely sulked off the stage, presumably in shame. If she has any left.

It's got to hurt to be the lesser of the two Simpson sisters anyway. With any luck, this will be the final nail in the fame coffin for Ashlee Simpson.

Anyway, it is imperative that I counter-balance this lip sync awfulness with some pop music goodness. As you probably know, I collect old radio broadcasts of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. I trade CD-R copies of these shows with other collectors, and up until recently we had a trading post message board on the Internet(s) that allowed us to set up trades. That board went away recently, so I have decided to step up and fill the gap.

Presenting... (are you listening, Google?)... the official furdell.com American Top 40 Trading Post message board thingy.

Keep your feet on the ground, etc. etc. etc.

I liked this entry in an online Photoshop contest... what WarGames might have been like if they'd had Google.

A hell of a lot easier than dialing every possible phone number in the city with a 300 baud modem.

(I? Am a colossal geek.)

Evil crackpot lunatic Ann Coulter was recently hit by two delicious, creamy custard pies. Said Coulter after the assault: "Oh, a wiseguy eh? Nyahh nyahh -- woo woo woo woo woo woo! You knuckleheads."

Little known Furdell fact: once, my then-roommate bought a cocunut cream pie and then slammed me in the face with it in the parking lot. Just getting hit with a pie wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't put so much force behind the damned thing.

Okay, that title doesn't really apply to what I'm going to write about, but it's hard to find good fifth-in-a-series titles. It was between this and Assignment: Miami Beach.

Right, anyway. Somewhere in Ohio...

The caller interrupting a North Side couple?s dinner earlier this week said he was from the Franklin County Board of Elections.

He told the elderly woman that her voting site had changed and that on Nov. 2 she and her husband should cast their ballots at a South Side precinct.

Not bad, not bad. A good, subtle cheat.

At no time, Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said, does the board call voters...His office has received about a dozen calls since last week from voters checking on similar calls.

Damschroder said there are two scams: The caller tells voters their precincts have changed or the caller offers to pick up an absentee-ballot application, deliver the ballot to the voter and return the completed ballot to the elections office.

Well, this leaves me with some questions. How do the callers know which voters to call? Or is the person behind the calls just some vote-hating bastard who wants everyone to be equally disenfranchised? That would be hilarious. According to Talking Points Memo, the "recipients of the calls seem to be disproportionately elderly." Does that mean anything? I just...don't...know. In any case, the whole scam reminds me of something...

Lest I be accused of missing any stories from my home town that involve turning away black voters, here's a Cheat the Vote! bonus. Free!

In a remarkable display of bad judgment, I read the sexual harrassment complaint against Bill O'Reilly in its entirety. My first thought was, "Ew!" (OK, my second through hundredth thoughts were also "ew!" because no one needs to have that mental picture.) But after successfully repressing my gag reflex, I had to ask: Why did she go back to work for him?

I quickly supressed this question, thinking it made me a Bad Bad Person. I'm not into blaming the victim, and if O'Reilly did what the suit claims he did than there is no excuse for his actions. But the whole thing still troubles me. She managed to escape the hostile work environment and go work somewhere else (CNN), where she was better paid and didn't have to deal with O'Reilly, who I imagine is not fun to deal with even if he's not constantly begging you for phone sex. Richard Cohen's column in today's Washington Post brilliantly expresses the problem I have with the whole thing, so I won't rehash his every argument, but here it is in a nutshell: Women are not powerless. She had the power to exit from the situation, and she exercised that power. Good for her. But then she chose to reenter it, and to allow herself to be a victim again.

Let me reiterate that I'm not saying there's any excuse for what O'Reilly is said to have done (can you tell I'm well-versed in libel law?). And personally, I get no small amount of joy in seeing O'Reilly exposed as the worst kind of hypocrite. I'm just saying that the victim contributed to her own disempowerment by not doing something about the situation sooner and by ignoring basic common sense.

OK, dismounting from high horse now.

Way back in the third presidential debate, I thought "President" Bush made a big mistake when he said...

My call to our fellow Americans is if you're healthy, if you're younger, don't get a flu shot this year...I haven't gotten a flu shot, and I don't intend to because I want to make sure those who are most vulnerable get treated.

That statement reminded me of an article from almost a year ago about flu vaccinations and why even healthy young people should get them.

"I'm young and healthy," you might say, "why do I need the shot?"

Whoa, this article is more apt than I remembered.

Even if spending a week violently sick and bedridden doesn't worry you, by immunizing yourself you vastly lessen the chances you will spread the virus to some child or older person (family member, friend, or stranger) who might die from it.

In medicine, this concept is called "herd immunity"?that is, if enough members of a group of animals (including humans) are immunized against a disease, the entire group is more likely to escape infection.

Watching the debate, it occured to me that people running for elected office shake a lot of old peoples' hands and kiss a lot of babies. Isn't Bush putting others at risk by not immunizing himself?

I didn't bring it up at the time because, well, it's a quibble. But now I have context!

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), a heart surgeon, sent letters urging his 99 colleagues to get the shots because they mingle and shake hands with so many people, his spokeswoman, Amy Call, said.

In conclusion, don't let George W. Bush kiss your baby.

I was going to do a "Who's Show Will Get Cancelled First?" contest between Michael Biehn (Hawaii) and D.B. Sweeney (Life As We Know It). Alas, the fantasy matchup of Terminator slayer Kyle Reese vs. hockey playing figure skater Doug Dorsey will have to be placed on hold, as the much inferior Hawaii has already been put on "indefinite hiatus." (The network can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... until you are cancelled.)

The Michael Biehn Fan Club (really!) was unavailable for comment at press time. But Biehn, who also played Corporal Hicks in Aliens, can still take heart in the fact that he helped play a part in the funniest newsgroup posting ever:

From: PD Carter (u3j98@cc.keele.ac.uk)
Subject: Re: Your Favorite Movie Lines...Ever
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Date: 1995-02-07 12:47:35 PST

YiKuong Chen (gt2868a@prism.gatech.edu) wrote:
: "Why don't you put her in charge?" (or any other Hicks line from ALIENS)

Its Hudson sir, he's Hicks

Well played, PD Carter. Ten years ago.

Why oh why will nobody bid on the Rocky DVD set that I shouldn't have purchased? Do they know my horrible secret? Savvy bastards!

Recent epiphany: I am no longer a comic book collector. I mean, I still have thousands of comic books meticulously stored and ordered. But I don't think about it nearly as much as my rapidly-growing DVD collection, which is much less shame-inducing. If comics were still exactly like they were in the mid-to-late '80s, I think I'd still be all about them. Or maybe if they went back to calling Captain America a commie smasher.

Time's running out for Karl Rove, and Kerry seems to be pulling ahead in the polls. It's time to kick this fraud up a notch!

In Palm Beach, where nobody ever learns their lesson, Theresa LePore -- who you might remember for designing "butterfly ballots" that confuse old Jews into voting for anti-Semites -- has announced that electronic voting machines there have not yet been tested. Because of a server crash. Yeah, that's not ominous.

This should not be a partisan issue, but for some reason it is. Computer voting machines are illegal under Florida's state constitution, which stipulates that a manual recount must be done in certain circumstances. (Manual recounts can be done when these machines are used, ya see.) Even though the machines are clearly faulty, illegal, and very easily manipulated, Florida's Republican officials have practically insisted on it. Look for all of this to blow up in everyone's face on Wonder Tuesday*.

Ah, but that's not all! Somehow, a pile of Xeroxed fliers found their way into the trashcan of a Tennessee Democrat whose office shares space with the Kerry/Edwards campaign. From there, they mysteriously found their way into the hands of Republicans, who are clearly totally innocent in this whole thing.

The fliers, by the way, are not only crass, but totally unoriginal -- someone just took that image that says "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics," changed the first part to "Voting for President Bush," and pasted Bush's head onto the retarded kid. I mean, come on. That image has been around for at least three years now. You'd think we could come up with something a little more original.

Beyond the point. It turns out Karl Rove is actually reusing an old trick that worked pretty well for him the last time. Step one: put out a flier that maligns your candidate in an unfair or disgusting way. Step two: ? Step three: profit. After all, who's going to think you actually tried to start a smear campaign against your own candidate?

Yep, there's a lot of evil in the world. With less than three weeks of vote cheating left, expect the dial to be turned up to "11" shortly.

* Originally, this text incorrectly used the term Super Tuesday.

Dateline: my mom!

?Local politicians talk with even more platitudes and generalizations than the national ones,? said Elizabeth Furdell of Jacksonville, Fla. ?I assume most running for office will tout themselves as pro-family, anti-crime, pro-education. I want to know more about how candidates stand on development, traffic, schools, sewers, etc. I don?t care if they?re religious or not, only that they have some clue about these real concerns ordinary people face.?

Ahh, mom. Always so refreshingly eloquent. What's she doing in the Spokane (Wa.) Spokesman-Review? No idea.

They built a Wal-Mart on top of an ancient Hawaiian gravesite. And they moved the headstones... but they DIDN'T MOVE THE BODIES!

Who is Nathan Sproul?

He's the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and the Arizona Christian Coalition. His GOP-funded organization appears to have masterminded a multi-state anti-Democrat voter registration fraud conspiracy.

But has anyone seen his face?

Furdell.com is asking anyone who knows where Mr. Sproul hangs out or something to take a picture of him with your camera phone. Or something. Because we really want to know what the hell he looks like.

Below is an artist's rendition of what Mr. Sproul would probably look like in shadows from the side while symbolically looming over his conglomoration of would-be tyrannical world conquerors.

for how angry this makes me, so I'll just ask you all to read it yourselves, and cultivate your very own righteous anger.

Since my attempt at non-politics blogging was by varying accounts whiny and boring, it's back to The Usual, and it's time for the long overdue 3rd segment of Cheat the Vote!^tm

Remember how, in Episode One, we visited James & Andrew's home town of Jacksonville, Florida? Let's check back in on the old boys and see if things have improved down there.

In Duval County, 31,155 black voters had been added to the rolls by the end of last week. [...] But hundreds more could show up at the polls only to find they cannot vote. The office has flagged 1,448 registrations as incomplete, and as of last week had yet to process 11,500 more.

A Washington Post analysis found nearly three times the number of flagged Democratic registrations as Republican. Broken down by race, no group had more flagged registrations than blacks.

This, in a heavily GOP county where records show that the number of blacks added to the rolls since 2000 approximately equals the number of non-Hispanic whites.

Sweet Christmas! How could such a thing happen? Who could possibly be to blame? I think the culprit is pretty obvious. It's the Democrats.

[The Jeb Bush-appointed Republican Secretary of State's office] said the real blame belongs with the Democratic-leaning groups that targeted minority voters and then turned in sloppy and incomplete registrations. The disproportionate number of black Democratic registrations flagged...is a function of "who those groups are targeting."

According to the article, a lot of the registrations are being flagged because of a new directive -- ignored by many counties, but diligently enforced in Duval -- that new voters must both sign an oath and check a box attesting to their citizenship. Failure to do either one is like crossing your fingers behind your back. Thanks, Duval County, for so diligently protecting our rights!

Oh, but the fun doesn't stop there! Let's take a plane to the city named "City We Most Often Fly To" by furdell.com three years running! That's right, it's...Las Vega$!!!

If the stuff in Jacksonville irked you, you're gonna love this...

[An out-of-state firm called Voters Outreach of America, aka America Votes] has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assistant to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Employees "allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands" of registrations got trashed.

As Talking Points Memo has discovered, Voters Outreach of America is "Paid for by the Republican National Committee."

Why does it not surprise me that, when faced with a clear choice between Good and Evil, half of America chooses evil? Don't get me wrong, I think only about 5% of that group realizes what it's doing. But I'm pretty sure Darth Vader could get half the popular vote. And that's even if he was running for reelection after having just exploded a peaceful planet.

***UPDATE!***
That GOP-funded group that was shredding Dem. registrations in Nevada? Yeah, they did it in Oregon too. Oh, and stay tuned -- other states couldn't be far behind.

Back in late April, the Sinclair Broadcast Group ordered its seven ABC stations not to broadcast an episode of Nightline that honored America's then-under-600 killed troops in Iraq.

In a statement online, the Sinclair group said the "Nightline" program "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

So, showing pictures and saying the names of dead soldiers is a political statement. Fair enough.

Fast forward to nowish. The Sinclair Broadcast Group is ordering its network affiliates -- including "all six of the major broadcast networks in the swing states of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania" -- to pre-empt primetime broadcasting in favor of an anti-Kerry documentary, Stolen Honor. They will be running the documentary commercial-free and categorizing it as a news item (and not, for example, free political advertising).

Sounds like an in-kind contribution to the Bush campaign. This one's going to be hard to defend -- or is it?

Sinclair Group's Vice President for Corporate Relations on CNN:

However, the accusations coming from Terry McAuliffe and others, is it because they are some elements of this that may reflect poorly on John Kerry? That it's somehow an in-kind contribution of George Bush?

If you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be an in-kind contribution to John Kerry[...]And that's just nonsense.

This is news. I can't change the fact that these people decided to come forward today.

So it seems that reporting on dead people in Iraq either is, or isn't, an in-kind contribution to the Kerry campaign, depending on what action the Sinclair Group is defending that month.

It's October 2004, and every blog has now officially become a political blog. Well, we can't have that. I'll take a break from my usual routine of repeating everything you already read on all the other political blogs, and regail you with a story of my Thursday poker-playing adventure.

Yeah, yeah, I know -- if it's not politics, it's gambling. Well, leave me alone. Thursday's game keeps replaying in my head, largely because I did absolutely everything totally wrong. So read on and laugh at my lack of skillz.

The last issue I got of The New Yorker had a story about Creflo A. Dollar, Jr., an Atlanta preacher who espouses "prosperity theology." The Rev. Dollar believes wealth and religion go hand-in-hand. His church, which he runs like a corporation, has thousands of members, and he is on TV every Sunday, not just in Atlanta but pretty much everywhere.

There are several things that strike me about this guy and his church. One is that his name is Dollar. I first heard of him when we lived in Atlanta, and I just assumed that he had chosen that name, because, come on. The second thing is that this guy is filthy rich. Mansion, Bentley, private jet, the whole nine yards. He stresses the importance of tithing and giving as commanded in the Bible, even though I'm sure many of his followers can scarce afford to donate 10 percent of their pre-tax income to help fuel up his jet. He seems to have skipped over that whole part about how rich people can't get into heaven because their camels are too fat. It seems like the ultimate hypocrisy to me. Maybe he thinks that if he takes 10 percent of his "corporation's" profits and, I don't know, FedExes it directly to heaven, he gets to keep the other 90 percent?

In my (I think) very first entry on this blog, I threw a small hissyfit because Adam LaRoche had the audacity to be new. I take it all back, and offer up to you, Adam, my undying and unconditional love for yesterday's game-tying, hope-restoring homer. Bobble-head Smoltz thanks you too.

That was the best line in last night's debate. According to Kerry, Bush's claim that Kerry's tax plan would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses was a distortion, because that claim loosely defines "small business owner" -- so loosely that, for claiming $84 income from a timber company he co-owns on his 2001 tax form, even Bush himself counts as a small business owner. Bush's response:

BUSH: I own a timber company?

(LAUGHTER)

That's news to me.

(LAUGHTER)

Need some wood?

(LAUGHTER)

I gotta say, it was pretty funny. Unfortunately, the Dems won't be able to get much mileage out of this one. What Kerry said was fundamentally correct: by the standards of the Bush claim, Bush himself counts as a small business owner for claiming $84 from a business he co-owns.

Unfortunately, Kerry's likely (and ironic) source, factcheck.whatever, made a mistake when it described the company, Lone Star Trust, as a timber-growing enterprise. It is in fact an oil-and-gas concern. So, the Dems can't use the "Need some wood?" soundbite, alas.

In the grand tradition of youforgotpoland.com, a website has sprung up in the aftermath of the Vice Presidential debate. According to Slate...

In response to a series of attacks from John Edwards on Cheney's tenure as CEO of Halliburton, the vice president said that Kerry and Edwards "know the charges are false. They know that if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton." One problem with Cheney's rebuttal: He misspoke. He meant to say "factcheck.org.," rather than ".com." George Soros capitalized on Cheney's error, snatched up the URL, and now if you type "factcheck.com" into your browser, you get redirected to a page titled, "Why we must not re-elect President Bush: a personal message from George Soros."

Dear friend,

As I promised you, I will not reveal your name to people who would otherwise have your head on a pike, because I am the soul of charity. However, I didn't say anything about posting open letters on the internet. So that's just what I'm going to do.

I was shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that you are undecided. As you know, I'm a Florida voter too. In the interest of making my vote count twice, I shall endeavor to help you make up your mind in a way that totally agrees with me. Join me, won't you?

This weekend, while laundering my laundry at the laundromat, I achieved a personal high score of 150,210 in Ms. Pac-Man. I usually consider it a good game if I get to see Act III ("Junior," in which a stork delivers a teensy Pac-Person to the Pacs), but over the course of this game I saw Act III three times.

Interesting Pac-fact that I did not know (and that cost me a life): when you get to a certain stage, which I think was level 19, power pellets have no effect. Eat one of the four giant dots on the screen, and the ghosts don't change even for an instant. Ouch. So look out for that, when you get to level 19 of Ms. Pac-Man.

There's a new Internet cliche in town, taken from last night's debate. And it's...

"You forgot Poland."

There's already a website.

I've got a fever. And the only cure... is MORE POLAND!