One sounds about right to me.

Internet jukeboxes: A brave new world, or the end of an era? - Boston.com: "'I think you only need one Ohio State Marching Band,' McCarthy says with a laugh. 'I don't think too many people come in and say, 'You know what, I really need to hear a good marching band.''"

I don't mean to be obstructionist or anything but maybe this Internet jukebox idea is one song too far. Long after American food began all tasting the same everywhere along the road there was still the possibility of stumbling upon some jukebox-defined personality now and then. And there was that place on North Clark Street in Chicago, the place with all the Sinatra, you always knew was the place to go on a moody evening in July. Turning jukeboxes into big iPods is, well, not the same.

Of course if what you want to hear is the Michigan marcing band, well then.

Saturday.

Blogger was pretty much bluggered yesterday so some of the stuff I posted didn't appear, either that or they've installed some sort of bozo filter. We shall see. I will not desist. (A little something for the grammar Nazis there.)

Meanwhile here's something to contemplate. A bunch of geezers running around loose in Central Florida have managed to cause a local spike in STDs.

"Yeah, they are very shocked (to hear the diagnosis)," gynecologist Dr. Colleen McQuade said. "I had a patient in her 80s."

And I always thought they went there for the sun. Or the shuffleboard.

Local doctors count a plentitude of Viagra and a dearth of sex education among causes.

"All I can repeat are the things I have heard which are things like, 'Should I bring the little blue pills over tonight?'" community singles group president Richard Matwyshen said.

That's plenty, Richard. Thank you.

Come on. He had help, right?

Robertson says he leg-pressed 2,000 pounds - Yahoo! News: "VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he has leg-pressed 2,000 pounds. The feat is recounted on the Christian Broadcasting Network Web site, in a posting headlined, 'How Pat Robertson Leg Pressed 2,000 Pounds.'"

Always nice to catch a break.

'This was a combination of good police work and a stupid criminal,' said Sgt. Tom Connellan, a police spokesman."

Guy breaks into a convenience store, walks out with lottery tickets and a pocket full of snacks. Cops follow a trail of Little Debbie wrappers to the crook's front door. Case solved.

Is this a great country or what?

Homer Simpson Talking Pizza Cutter: "Hear Homer Simpson's wisdom celebrating the Joy of Pizza every time you cut a slice!"

No wonder it's out of stock. Everybody would want one of those. Or like that. I saw one at CVS this morning but it didn't have Homer Simpson, it had red sox. A lot of stuff around here has red sox. Some New England thing.

Of course if you're a small user, well then, Bunky...

WTOL-TV Toledo, OH: Leading Antivirus Software Exposes Customer Computers: "Maiffret published a note about the company's discovery on its Web site but pledged not to reveal details publicly that would help hackers attack Internet users until after Symantec repairs its antivirus software. eEye said it intends to describe the problem in detail privately for some of its largest customers. 'People shouldn't panic,' Maiffret said. 'There shouldn't be any exploits until a patch is produced.'"

...then it's the "maybe we'll get lucky" part that applies to you. Or you can buy even more Symantec software to protect you against what seems to be a security flaw in, um, Symantic software. Uh huh.

Be a people.

As in government by.

Join in the ACLU's complaint to the FCC about the NSA spooks.

Ah. Well then.

Dell Plans 2 Stores, but for Display Only - Los Angeles Times: "Sticking with its direct-sales approach, the stores will only carry display models. Consumers will still have to order online or over the phone and then wait for their purchase to arrive in the mail."

Dell's new retail stores won't actually, you know, like sell computers.

I see.

Oh yeah.

UNDERNEWS: FORGET TAYLOR HICKS; HERE'S SOMEONE TO REALLY IDOLIZE: "The pleasant farce known as 'American Idol' wouldn't be on the air if any of its contestants had to sing against 20-something Russian-born, Israeli-raised Canadian Sophie Milman. In music as in politics, the media often keeps the best well hidden. Go to her site and listen to I Can't Give You Anything But Love or Lonely in New York"

No matter what you think about American Idol (I watched it once and that was plenty for me) Sam Smith at Progressive Review knows a songbird when he hears one. Check out her site and procede directly to your favorite music store.

Tourist season arrives early in Milford Township.

Michigan bakery sells Hoffa cupcakes - Boston.com: "Lu & Ruby's Bar & Grill offers a $12.95 Hoffa Steak Salad 'buried under field greens with mushrooms and edible flowers.'"

With FeeBees excavating a local farm in a search for former Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa's remains, a local business sells T-shirts reading "The FBI Digs Milford, Do You?"

Go, kids!

Boing Boing: Kids turn "teen repellent" sound into teacher-proof ringtone: "I had similar doubts -- which suggests that these kids have done something even more subversive than creating an adult-proof ringtone: they've convinced adults that there's an inaudible sound that they can all hear."

No matter how you cut it, if a teenager's No. 1 job is driving adults craZy these kids in England deserve a raise. The story follows one earlier (but I'm too lazy to find the link) about how UK merchants have adopted a "teen repellent" sound to kid-proof their stores. Now kids claim to have converted the sound to a ringtone only they can hear, allowing them to txt in school. Adults are, as is their wont, without a clue.

Walt Whitman describes a Democratic convention.,

UNDERNEWS: THE GORE QUANDARY CONT'D: "'The members who comprised it were seven-eighths of them, ...the meanest kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contracts, kept-editors, spaniels well train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyists, spongers, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.'"

See? Just calling them assholes is kind of lame.

Workin the line.

When I came back out an hour and a half or so later the front wheels had slipped off the track and three guys with a big machine of some kind were trying to put them back. And me without my camera. Left it in the lab. For shame.

I've been told these tracks, which run past the building I work in, are so bad they have to be inspected every day. They don't get much traffic, fortunately. Unfortunately, I've also been told these are the tracks they're most likely to use if they ever decide to haul waste from the nearest nuke plant out by rail. Which is not, the way I see it, a terrifically happy thought.

Now we're down to playing "Nyea, nyea, they're bigger crooks than we are."

The Raw Story | Republicans fire back at reports Santorum top lobbyist recipient: "Republicans have responded to widespread reports of Rick Santorum's (R-PA) lobbyist contributions by pointing out that 8 of the 11 U.S. Senators to benefit the most from lobby gifts are, in fact, Democrats, RAW STORY has learned."

Surveys say, it appears, most Americans think Congress is corrupt but their own Reps and Sens are pretty good. We'll never get anywhere that way, Bunky. So here's the deal. I'll vote against mine if you vote against yours. (Actually I'll vote against mine anyway, just on principle. Why not join in the fun?)

Throw the rascals out.

Headlong into the future, in Massachusetts.

There's a new four-way stop (well OK eight or ten years old but that'd be new hereabouts), a new four-way stop, I say, just up the street that seems to have people a little bit confused. They stop all four ways. So far so good. But nobody goes.

When I first noticed that and observed to a long-time New Englander friend people were being way too polite she explained it wasn't politeness causing the hangup, it was distrust. Let's not be the first to drive out there into the intersection, let's just wait till somebody else does it, see how it goes. Don't know, might be a trick or something, never can tell.

You'd think a decade or so would be time enough to figure it out but apparently not. I wound up being first into the intersection this afternoon. Seemed to work. Ayup.

Skippy says it.

skippy the bush kangaroo: we are just sick and tired of it all - a skippy rant: "we walked through life facing down a real enemy, an enemy which proclaimed its desire to infect the world with its own way of thinking, without ever once giving up any of the civil liberties our forefathers built into our way of government and which our fathers fought and bled on foreign shores to protect."

And a whole lot more.

California increases security to $11.99/hour.

THE BRAD BLOG: "Internet Ad Seeks Temp Workers to Privately Shuttle Hackable Voting Machines for California's Upcoming Primary Elections": "A classified ad seeking the workers is currently posted on the Internet at Monster.com by Kelly Services. (A screenshot of the complete ad is posted at the end of this article.) The salary offered to temp workers hired for the job -- who will have private unsupervised access to the state's voting machines before and after election day -- is $11.99/hour according to the posting."

Last time I knew anything about elections handling a box of marked ballots was like handling a shipment of gold, with observers from both parties present at every step. Now, apparently - in California, at least - some guy from Kelly shows up and hauls away a machine. After multiple studies describing how easily these things can be hacked (see Black Box Voting), this does not seem like a terribly good idea.

If we want our elections to be anything more than symbolic acts of superstition we really ought to care.

"iPod ready" Nikes! Alright!

BetaNews | Nike to Offer 'iPod Ready' Shoes: "The two companies have announced specially designed footwear that would allow the wearer to use their iPod nano to monitor time, calories burned and pace. Additionally, the shoes could give real time audible feedback when used with headphones."

I'm not sure I really want to know about the "additional audible feedback." From my feet? Nawww. They're kidding, right?

American landscape.

Here's some good news.

I don't know what was going on yesterday but the whole sky turned this funky blue color and there were shadows everywhere, all over everything, talk about strange. I thought it was some kind of global warming thing maybe. But everything's back to normal today - no shadows, and the sky is gray. So I guess whatever that blue stuff was blew away.

There are always more questions than answers. Have you noticed that?

So I'm browsing around the Library of Congress looking at posters and find this one from WWII. And I'm wondering, how many people loaned binoculars to the Navy.

And how many got them back.

Well that's OK then!

"It's highly probable that they do not know what they have," Nicholson said of the unidentified burglars.

"What they have" turns out to be personal data on some 26.5 million US vets "and some spouses," stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee. (Watch me run to check my DD-214.)

What a bunch of doofuses, huh? Or is that doofii? Well, whatever. If you want YA reason why you don't want the gummint (or anybody else, for that matter) slurping up your data, well there it is.

Meanwhile Reuters, which pretty much negates its "don't know what they have" story by printing it, twists the screw still further with its obligatory scary Internet graph:

"Identity theft, or obtaining the personal or financial information of another person in order to assume that person's name to make transactions, has mushroomed in recent years with the growth of the Internet and electronic business."

Oh no no, Bunky. This has nothing to do with the scary Internet. Or, for that matter, with "electronic business," whatever that may be. Nothing whatsoever. This has to do with plain old-fashioned dunderheadedness, is what it does.

And you thought Katrina was the only thing they could screw up?

Difficult to imagine, isn't it?

A computer glitch.

Mix-up brands innocent citizens as criminals - Yahoo! News: "It said the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which carries out checks on people who have applied for jobs working with children or vulnerable adults, had confused the innocent people with convicted criminals because they had similar or identical names."

(Not to mention it sounds like Florida.)
British government winds up labeling 1,500 innocent people criminals. But not to worry, it's for the children, say officials. (Sound familiar?) And the old people. And anyway it's only a 0.03 percent rate.

Which might not be much consolation to the 0.03 percent.

And I'm a little suspicious of that new T-shirt too.

BBC NEWS | Americas | US government restricts China PCs: "It was 'no secret that the US is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services', he said, adding: 'No American government agency should want to purchase from them'."

US State department buys 16,000 computers from Chinese firm, now doesn't want to use them because they might be spies. The computers were manufactured in Mexico and (oh, the horror) North Carolina. The State Department could use a clue but they're manufactured in China.

Feeling a little insecure, Bunky? Buy a fort.

Civil War-Era Fort Up for Sale on EBay - Yahoo! News: "The limestone fort sits on a Lake Champlain island in northern New York and is connected to the mainland by a 700-foot causeway. The full package offered on the auction Web site includes 6,900 feet of lake frontage and 279 acres on the adjacent mainland."