News You Can Bruise for 2002 May 31

Must... write... something... retain readers... from O'Brien overflow...

I like cats!

If Batman were a hacker he'd use metasyntactic variables batFoo, batBar, etc. Instead of the bash shell, he'd use the Bat-Shell. Instead of cat, he'd use bat.

Okay, I'm done.

Addendum: But Pete's not; he dubs the system "Bruce Waynix" and says:

And somewhat obviously, "batman".

Kevin's on to the manufacturers of the branding iron for steaks previously referred to. They wink and say it's for "your" steaks, just like CD burners are for "your" music, but Kevin knows better. He plans to obtain one and use it as the basis for a brief but flamboyant career in steak rustling, sneaking into barbecues and branding all the steaks as his. An aging sheriff will be called to duty one last time to bring Kevin to justice.

Sketchy-Sounding Number Crunching Press Release Watch: Sales of Counterfeit Products to Rise to 18% of World Trade in Two Years. The solution: impose tariffs on counterfeit products! Tariffs always keep down that pesky trade.

(It's unfair to mock PRWeb press releases merely for being poorly written; the whole point of PRWeb is to enable people to put out a press release despite not having a PR department that can jazz things up for you. So I'll only be calling attention to press releases which are superlatively odd in some other way. Press releases written by professionals, on the other hand, are fair game for nitpicking.)

I find it relaxing to watch television in a language I don't know. My favorite is Chinese television (I guess it's Mandarin). As far as I can tell, there are four shows on Chinese television: the modern show, the medieval show, the news, and the commercials. The modern show has the awesome name of "Meteor Garden", but my favorite is the medieval show, since as far as I can tell it's just kung fu movies without any subtitles. Or subtleties, for that matter.

Peter Hodgson once told me that the best way to passively learn a language is to listen to the radio in that language every morning. The language I most wanted to learn at the time he told me that was Latin, and apart from Nuntii Latini there's no radio broadcast in Latin.

Spam: "Hi dan, A Tax Deduction even Mr. Jones doesnt know about!" Ha ha! At last, my chance to enlist the IRS in my proxy war against Mr. Jones!