This one's for you, Zargon

[Researchers] studied 40 volunteers who used a driving simulator four times--while undistracted, using a handheld cell phone, using a hands-free cell phone and while intoxicated to a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level--the average legal level of impairment in the United States--after drinking vodka and orange juice.

Three study participants rear-ended the simulated car in front of them. All were talking on cell phones and none was drunk, the researchers said.

Motorists who talked on either handheld or hands-free cell phones drove slightly more slowly, were 9 percent slower to hit the brakes, and varied their speed more than undistracted drivers.

Discussion question: who drinks screwdrivers anymore?

Get Your Cameras and Dice Ready

Because this is obviously a no-brainer for us: The Dungeons & Dragons Fan Film Contest.

Breath As Fresh as a Spring Ham

Futurama Returns. For real this time. With actual confirmation from actual people in the position to confirm. Seriously.

Subtle Dig, Slowly Cracking

Clearly, the liberal media is straining under the pressure of trying to appear anything but for the last six years.

From CNN's website in a story about the overwhelming scientific consensus on Global Warming. Note the phraseology in the link to the associated video clip:

"The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs. (Watch as lawmakers argue saving the planet could ruin our economy-- 2:24)"

I don't know about you, but I hear sarcasm and spite splatter on the floor as they drip and ooze off that turn of phrase.

As one jerk to another

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s decision on whether to veto the General Assembly's BGE rate-deferral plan isn't due until midnight tonight, but he has given strong signals that he will reject the legislation and attempt to push a bill of his own.

The Democrats who run the legislature tried during last week's special session to bring an end to the issue that has dominated Maryland's political scene for months. But the governor indicated yesterday that he would like to keep the debate alive, and he said consumers are on his side.

It's like that one X-Files episode only real

WN: What sort of evidence?

McKinnon: A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.

My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. As this was happening, I had remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting. There was no reference to the size of the object and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files. At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I was disconnected.

I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else.

... well, the guy's actually up for extradition, anyway.

Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri.

If we know why, we aren't telling.

Arrrrre you rrrrrready to rrrrrrrumble?

Are you an in-shape male weighing between 64 and 86 kilograms and hate the films of controversial German director Uwe Boll? If so, he wants to fight you in Vancouver as part of one of his films...

"On the message boards, you have, like, tons of people, they want to punish me kill me, grill me, shoot me, everything. The Internet threats are so full of hate in a lot of times that I think it goes way over the top of normal reviews and normal talk about a director."

The top five critics who sign up to fight him will be flown to Vancouver and will be extras in Postal... Five, 10-round fights will be staged over the last two days of filming and scenes from the matches will become part of the film, Boll said... To be eligible, critics must have written at least two negative articles about Boll in 2005.

WWI In Color

A huge collection of WWI color photos from France.

I really thought we were the only ones who did this.

From an article on the D+D website about dice habits:

'The most extreme dice superstition I’ve seen was something called "prepping the dice". This ritual was preformed before making an important d20 roll, like against a save-or-die spell. It involved the individual taking as many d20 as they owned, 8 to 12 dice, and rolling them over and over, eliminating all the high rolling dice. The theory being that if you had a die that had just consistently rolled low, it was now due to roll high and could be used for the official roll. '

I'm honestly surprised that other people in the world are as nuts about this shit as we are. And by 'nuts' I mean 'fucking crazy'.

Optical illusions for morons

This takes so little effort to work and is endlessly amusing.

Now that apparently all of us have fallen under the sway of the dread Apple Computer, Inc., I thought I'd share some Nice Things:

• Uno. Holy cow, all of a sudden there's a consistent, non-garish interface!
  
• TextWrangler. Free and way more text editor than you dabblers will ever need.
• Like your junior prom date, Seashore's not great but it's good enough for basic fooling around. Also... free.
• HexPicker for color-pickin' on that there interweb.
  
• Camino. Unless you need a Firefox extension to make your life complete, it's better.
• Adium. Equip with pretty icons and emoticons.
• VLC plays every video ever.
  
• Senuti, Transmission, and Acqlite.
  

i fail to see the problem with this.

a tribute to precancellation.

Who Says What Now?

Is it a PI-can or a pee-KAHN? And seriously, who doesn't know the word "creek?"

We're Being Watched

Comics propose, Texas executes

A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.

The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.

This doesn't have a date attached to it, but I'm guessing 2001-2: