from the desk of stinkpot

i was chatting with a friend today about the things that make firefox really useful (for me at least). in fact, if not for the following two tools, i’d have long ago ditched firefox for something that uses much less memory + cpu cycles, like safari.

1) sage – an rss feed reader. it takes rss feeds (compressed versions of news / articles / postings) from sites you bookmark and displays them in a simple, uncluttered interface. i think i can honestly say this piece of software has changed how i use the internet; using it makes me feel like i’m directly consuming information, instead of being distracted by all the blinky lights of the web.

2) adblock – this extension enables you to block not only popups, but the banners and ads displayed on webpages. it even understands regular expressions. besides reducing the “blinkiness” of the internet, adblock makes pages load slightly faster, since your browser doesn’t have to download all those pictures.

by the way, it’s interesting to think about the implications of adblock. some webfolk think that if adblock goes mainstream, the internet as we know it will collapse. the idea is that if you block flashy ads, advertisers will stop funding websites and all that free content on the web will disappear. of course, this kind of commentary seems to conveniently forget that the most popular site on the ‘net relies only on simple text-based ads for virtually all of their revenue.

the incompetance of the people running the show in iraq is stunning.

i wonder if anyone in the bush administration will own up to this one. doubtful, sadly … i bet it’ll be either ignored or worse yet, the bushies will attack the auditors for being unpatriotic.

i’ve had a little time on my hands during IAP, so i decided to take apart my itrip and make it suck less. here’re the results.

for those of you who like photoshop and zombies, here’s a fun tutorial on how to go from this:

to this in photoshop:

[via digg]

this story out of italy is great:

[Luigi] Cascioli says that for 2,000 years the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people by furthering the fable that Christ existed, and says the church has been gaining financially by “impersonating” as Christ someone by the name of John of Gamala, the son of Judas from Gamala.

He also asserts that the Gospels — the most frequently cited testimony of Jesus’ existence — are inconsistent, full of errors and biased, and that other written evidence from the time is scant and doesn’t hold up to scholarly analysis.

Cascioli has even gotten litigious:

Cascioli, a lifelong atheist, claims that Righi violated two Italian laws by making the assertion: so-called “abuse of popular belief” in which someone fraudulently deceives people; and “impersonation” in which someone gains by attributing a false name to someone.

As the article points out, there really is no hope for Cascioli winning the case. Nonetheless, I still find it amusing that Christians will find themselves in a court, forced to defend an ideology
seen as obvious by many, but lacking in definitive proof. Ok, ok that’s a terrible analogy – forget about it with some soma: the Chuck Norris video in my previous post.

holy crap, there really is hope for SNL.

go see this new “snl digital short” a tribute to the young chuck norris. christina thinks chris parnell plays the 80′s hair band lead singer, which if indeed true, makes parnell ginormously talented.

andy samberg again seems to be in on the action; if you’ve been living under a rock in a cave while in a coma for the past several weeks, andy samberg is the kid paired with chris parnell in the “chronic of narnia” rap. that video is also hysterical.

finally, now that your appetite for all things chuck norris has been whetted, here’re some little known chuck norris facts.

this nytimes article is stunning. the author recounts:

One morning when he was 15, Takeshi shut the door to his bedroom, and for the next four years he did not come out. He didn’t go to school. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have friends. Month after month, he spent 23 hours a day in a room no bigger than a king-size mattress, where he ate dumplings, rice and other leftovers that his mother had cooked, watched TV game shows and listened to Radiohead and Nirvana. “Anything,” he said, “that was dark and sounded desperate.”

for some reason (i haven’t finished the article yet), japanese adolescent males are turning themselves into extreme recluses. looks to be a fascinating read.

i took a bike ride into boston commons earlier this week, to go and pick up tickets for the belle & sebastian + new pornographers concert at avalon on feb. 27th. i brought along the new camera, to try and gain a little more experience with taking pictures.

here’re the results. unfortunately, most of them feel like they were taken by some cheap private eye stalking a deadbeat dad. (that zoom lens is just too much fun.) i’d like to think some of the pictures were keepers though, like the ones below:

i learned a new word today: malapropism. it means

the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect

an example would be saying something isn’t your fort, when you really meant to say, forte (if someone knows how to insert an accented e, i’d love to know how).

i came across the word while trying to finally figure out if the phrase is “for all intents and purposes” or “for all intensive purposes.” both sounded rightish to me, but it turns out there’s only one winner.

if that page stirs your porridge, you might enjoy “the eggcorn database’s” whole list of commonly misspoken phrases.

wow, this is hard to believe; i’d think it a prank if it didn’t come from CBS. apparently:

The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying “intelligent design” is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion.

go see for yourself here. hopefully, the majority of americans who buy into ID will hear about this. then again, i suspect that that group of people probably doesn’t buy into what the pope has to say anyway.