Taxi fares to rise in NYC
Taxi fares to rise in NYC. Fine with me, I almost never take cabs.
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Entries for March 2004
The American People, what politicians are saying in our name
The American People, what politicians are saying in our name.
Core77 roundtable on design with some top-notch participants
Core77 roundtable on design with some top-notch participants.
Those naughty Girl Scouts
Excerpts from a story about a cookie boycott involving the Girl Scouts, sex education, and the great state of Texas, with my comments interspersed throughout:
Some families are boycotting Thin Mints and Do-Si-Dos and other Girl Scout cookies. Troop 7527 is down to just two members after the other girls were withdrawn by their parents. And Brownie Troop 7087 is no more.
Why are folks in this conservative Texas town where President Bush has his ranch so mad at the Girl Scout organization?
Because they’re uptight? Or perhaps they’re upset with the war in Iraq or the rising national debt and are mistakenly taking that out on the Girl Scouts.
Planned Parenthood and sex education.
The furor was started a few weeks ago by the leader of the anti-abortion group Pro-Life Waco…
Pro-Life Wacko? This commentary almost writes itself.
…who sent out e-mails and ran ads on a Christian radio station urging people to boycott Girl Scout cookies because of the “cozy relationship” between the Girl Scouts and Planned Parenthood.
“Cozy relationship” between two women’s groups? That sounds naughty! Christian radio is no place for such puerile double entendre.
Parents were upset to learn that the local Girl Scout organization had given a “woman of distinction award” last year to a Planned Parenthood executive. And they were disturbed to find out that the Girl Scout organization has been giving its endorsement for years to a Planned Parenthood sex-ed program in which girls and boys are given literature on homosexuality, masturbation and condoms.
I don’t like the sound of this “literature”. Sounds more dangerous than TV, video games, or movies. Let’s attack this problem at its root and ban the printing press.
“It’s not that we’re a bunch of activists. We’re just a bunch of moms who care about their kids,” said Lisa Aguilar, who took her 10-year-old daughter out of her eight-member Girl Scout troop. “For us, it’s the morality. Where is Girl Scouts going?”
The Girl Scouts are going where the rest of America is going, toward more tolerance, acceptance of diversity, education, and making sure young women are prepared for the future, not sheltered from it.
The two troops in Crawford, population 700, decided not to deliver the cookie orders that they had already taken.
They just took that money and ran. Thou shalt steal if Planned Parenthood is involved.
But cookie sales have skyrocketed this year as many people bought cases just to show their support for the Girl Scouts, said Becky Parker, a troop leader who is the cookie distributor for Waco-area troops.
More cookie sales mean more profits that can be funneled into a secret effort by the Girl Scouts to distribute vibrators and heroin to kindergarteners. They must be stopped.
While the cookie boycott may have backfired, the furor prompted the parent leaders of the two Crawford troops to quit.
“You’re telling these girls to raise their fingers up to pledge to honor God and country, and yet you’re handing out materials saying homosexuality is OK,” said Brownie leader Donna Coody, who disbanded her five-member troop.
Yeah! Disband the Brownies! Those girls are up to no good! I salute your courage, Ms. Coody.
Some 400 to 700 fifth- through ninth-graders attend the half-day Nobody’s Fool conference in Waco each July. The program never mentions abortion, according to Planned Parenthood. The youngsters receive a book with chapters on homosexuality and masturbation, as well as illustrations of couples having sex, people examining their naked bodies and a boy putting on a condom.
Some Girl Scout mothers called it soft-core porn.
“It embarrassed me to look at it with my husband,” said parent Shannon Donaldson.
Something tells me Shannon showers, dresses, and does the “you know what” with her husband in the dark. Shannon’s mommy told her that babies are delivered from the stork and don’t you try and tell her any different.
Pro-Life Waco director John Pisciotta, an economics professor at Baylor, the world’s largest Baptist university, said his call for a cookie boycott “was a way to bring attention to the issue and wasn’t really about cookies.”
Not about the cookies? Wake up, people, those cookies are all about sex! Thin Mints? Animal Treasures? Caramel Delites? Do-Si-Dos? Those are some of the most sexually suggestive and — in the case of Caramel Delites — racially charged dessert names I’ve ever heard.
The Girl Scouts national organization, which is based in New York and has 2.9 million girl members and 986,000 adult members, takes no position on sex education or abortion and has no national relationship with Planned Parenthood, according to the Bluebonnet Council.
The Crawford mothers are forming their own girls organization and will use a Christian-based curriculum.
Sweet! Instead of cookies, they could sell shrimp cocktail, lobster rolls, or crab cakes. God couldn’t possibly have a problem with that.
Some parents decided to explain abortion to their girls.
I hope they showed them pictures of aborted fetuses. Nothing more wholesome than pictures of aborted fetuses to keep them from having sex until they’re old enough to start drinking heavily and have unprotected sex in the backs of their boyfriends’ cars.
Others gave only a vague explanation about the uproar.
“Oh honey, it’s them damn homosexuals. They make Mommy so angry that she wants to take a shotgun to all those sinners. And they’re actually marrying the gays out there in New Sodom, California.” … “Yes, baby, that’s why Mommy took away your Lion King soundtrack. Turns out that nice Elton John is a fag! What’s the world coming to?”
“Our girls have been through a lot these past three weeks,” said Jennifer Smith, who quit as leader of Girl Scout Troop 7527 and removed her daughter. “After I told my 10-year-old daughter that they are supporting some things that are not morally right, she understood.”
Thank God. That’s so much better than treating your daughter like an adult and letting her make up her own mind about what’s morally right.
Ted Jesus Christ GOD
I just got the best piece of spam ever! Ted Jesus Christ GOD (TJCG for short) thinks he’s the Second Coming of Christ *and* that His Word shall pass through the world’s email servers unhindered:
TJCG is also insisting that nobody now and into the future has the right to block port 25 that is an SMTP port or port 80 that is an HTTP port and that it is HIS RIGHT to have these ports unblocked and unfiltered and COMPLETELY OPEN that HE can send email and run servers and this unrestricted by any ISP or Email Provider or Web Hosting Provider and send Unsolicited Bulk Email or UBE or Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE per the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
TJCG reserves the right to sue for damages if you block His email:
If you are a corporation or company or partnership or soul proprietorship in the United States of America and mess with Ted Jesus Christ GOD in the slightest or stop HIM from sending future emails to ALL of your employees and ALL of your customers and ALL at your domains and ALL on your mail servers and ALL on your computers it is that TJCG can sue you minimum and also any that did not receive their emails and you need to ask yourself how deep are the pockets of the corporation and board members and top executives and executives and managers and employees or partnership or soul proprietorship and their managers and employees. There could be and will be put a dollar value on each email blocked or filtered out or bounced like $7,000.00 each and then you sued for that amount minimum. Why this much money? Because TJCG is TRULY the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to World Earth and can and does prove this enough to step out in faith and follow HIM and like Jesus when on World Earth it is that any that do not Closely Follow TJCG by their death will be getting ETERNAL DEATH and will be LOST unless an exception is made to this. Therefore the emails of TJCG and HE will ARGUE are a matter of life and death are ENORMOUSLY IMPORTANT BEYOND ANY WRITTEN OR SPOKEN WORDS. How much value can you put on an email that if not received causes a person to get ETERNAL DEATH and be LOST? This is actually much more than $7,000.00 per email if and when put like this this is more like PRICELESS.
“Soul proprietorship!” The Lord Ted GOD Jesus H. Christ is such a poet. And it goes on for several more pages. Read the entire thing if you feel the need to be saved. Praise Ted, amen.
Plan Jason’s lunch
Today is one of those days when I don’t feel like eating. All my favorite foods from my favorite lunch spots seem boring and unappealing to me. If I had access to an IV, I’d skip lunch, hook myself up, and get my midday sustenance that way. But as that’s not an option, what should I have to eat today for lunch? Options around Grand Central appreciated.
Update: I’m back from lunch. Thanks for all the recommendations.
Subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale
Subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.
RSS update
I’ve updated the kottke.org RSS feed to include my movie and book posts. An RSS feed for the remaindered links is available separately. There are three other RSS feeds currently published on kottke.org (in RSS 1.0 format), but they will not be “upgraded” (i.e. won’t show the movie and book posts) and will eventually go away, an occurance which I hope will be nearly seamless for those of you reading this with an RSS reader. RSS auto-discovery is now in effect. Atom support will be added at my leisure, when/if the advantages of switching to a new format are made clear to me.
Could a John Kerry/Bill Clinton ticket work?
Could a John Kerry/Bill Clinton ticket work?. Legally? Yes. Politically? Maybe. Hillary? And ruin her chance for a run in 2008? Not likely.
Radio Vox Populi takes weblog content and
Radio Vox Populi takes weblog content and plays it over the radio. Reminds me of Press Nothing to Continue, a blog-to-phone project I did for 0sil8 a few years ago.
Avi Rubin is a prominent critic of
Avi Rubin is a prominent critic of Diebold’s e-voting machines; this is his experience as an election judge. His precinct used Diebold machines exclusively.
Wow, McDonald’s is phasing out their Supersize menu items
Wow, McDonald’s is phasing out their Supersize menu items.
Kidz Bop 5 features children singing Outkast and Beyonce songs
Kidz Bop 5 features children singing Outkast and Beyonce songs. I’m afraid to listen to this.
Bryan Boyer’s simple yet elegant entry won
Bryan Boyer’s simple yet elegant entry won I.D. Magazine’s “global identity card” competition. What does an ID card mean for those without enough money to buy a car or have a credit card?
Mars rover Opportunity finds strong evidence that
Mars rover Opportunity finds strong evidence that part of Mars was “soaking wet in the past”.
Real world coin tosses aren’t strictly random
Real world coin tosses aren’t strictly random. Not 50/50, more like 51/49 in favor of the coin face it started on.
Pete Rojas leaves Gizmodo for the greener (?)
Pete Rojas leaves Gizmodo for the greener (?) pastures of Weblogs, Inc..
Swirling, swirling, swirling on the Magic Roundabout,
Swirling, swirling, swirling on the Magic Roundabout, a kooky traffic circle in the UK.
Larry Lessig recounts the missteps in the
Larry Lessig recounts the missteps in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case.
Toy Story
After I finished the movie, I watched a couple of the DVD extras. During the making of, they mentioned that the movie was made in 1995. Nine years ago! Hard to believe that digital animation of such high caliber has been around that long. Toy Story’s a little rough around the edges compared to Boundin’, but it still looks pretty good.
The evolving design of the Economist
The evolving design of the Economist. With pictures of designs new and old.
Hexadecimal Color Codes in HTML That Look
Hexadecimal Color Codes in HTML That Look or Sound Dirty, But Are in Fact Merely Colorful. CC00CC, F0CCED, EFF0FF, etc.
Loads of great headlines on The Morning News today
Loads of great headlines on The Morning News today.
Delightfully absurd take on gay marriage by
Delightfully absurd take on gay marriage by George Saunders in the New Yorker.
The Leica Digilux 2 is the most beautiful
The Leica Digilux 2 is the most beautiful digital camera I’ve ever seen.
Sparklines
Sparklines are “intense word-sized graphics”. From Tufte’s upcoming book, Beautiful Evidence
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