The boys at Iraq the Model tune in to Saddam’s trial:There's still time for him to be shot while trying to escape.“Why do we have to listen to this bull****?” said one of my friends.
“I prefer the trial goes like this:
Q:Are you Saddam Hussein?
A:Yes.
Then take this bullet in the head.”
With hundreds of thousands forced from homes battered by Hurricane Katrina, the federal government cut red tape to rush $2,000 checks and debit cards to help victims pay for clothes, food, transportation and a place to live.Might be because the local chiselers discovered that fooling the Feds is profitable and not real tough:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency intended the aid for displaced Gulf Coast families and limited it to one payment per household.
But in three Louisiana parishes, FEMA issued more checks than there are households, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $70 million, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation has found.
And in 36 parishes and counties in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, FEMA awarded $102 million to at least 51,000 more applicants than local officials said were displaced by the storm.
In Mobile, Ala., residents coached each other on the right words to use when calling FEMA to get the $2,000. Many who received the money never had to leave their homes. Some had minor roof leaks. One said her furniture got wet because she kept opening her door to watch the storm.Maybe they ought to have a special award for the most bogus excuse? Hmmm, I think my rheumatism acted up when Katrina came ashore down there. Send me my bucks!
In Pike County, Miss., Katrina displaced 25 families, yet 2,494 collected nearly $5 million and "made a ton of money," said Civil Defense Director Richard Coghlan.Ya think?
"I'll tell you, it was Christmas," Coghlan said. "We're talking plasma TVs. We're talking stereos. We're talking bicycles."
In Louisiana's Iberville Parish, 70 miles from Katrina's landfall in New Orleans, the storm knocked down trees and power lines but caused no major damage, said emergency manager Laurie Doiron. Still, 819 parish residents received $1.6 million from the federal government.
"I can't possibly fathom 819 people needing $2,000 in immediate assistance," she said. "What do I attribute that to? FEMA being free with the money, too free with the money."
"Of course I'm not a real person," Skwarok said earlier this week. "I'm a big piece of poop."John Kerry fans can relax. He's still running in 2008.
Skwarok was not available for further comment.
Hollywood is breaking ground on the silver screen by putting movie fans in the seat of trigger-happy game players as it tries to cash in on gaming's popularity this Friday with a film adaptation of the classic title "Doom."You'll get the idea in the teaser trailer available at Yahoo! More on the sequence:
In a novel sequence lasting several minutes, the movie offers a taste of the first-person-shooter gaming style introduced in the original "Doom" title, but whether the gimmick will lure fans awaits weekend box office results.
"Doom," based on the blockbuster video game series considered to be the grandaddy of this generation, pits an elite team of Marines against chromosomally mutated monsters on Mars. When film's action peaks, the camera's perspective changes to that of Karl Urban's "Reaper," the movie's hero, as he blasts a series of gruesome aliens to bits.
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Wells said film makers worried about the length of the sequence because when the "Doom" game came out in December 1993, its first-person-shooter perspective sickened some gamers, including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who started playing in college and stars as "Sarge" in the film.
"There is always a risk that it becomes physically disorienting ... It's not a visual experience we are used to having" in a film, Wells said.
The subjective camera sequence was a matter of great concern to both the filmmakers and the id folks. It comes fairly late in the movie -- not too late to satisfy fans, hopefully, but at the right point when general audiences are ready for it.Odd effects don't make a movie, of course, but at least this isn't a typical Hollywood whineathon based on the evidence so far:
"We had long conversations about how long the audience would be able to stay comfortable with the subjective camera sequence," Wells reveals. "It hasn't been done very much. And it's different if it's happening in front of you on a 14-inch monitor or if you're surrounded by it in the theater.
"So it was a matter of how long you can stay in it before it becomes so disorienting that you, one, lose the narrative train of the picture, and two, just become physically disoriented," the producer continues. "One of the things we looked at were subjective amusement park simulator rides. They had done an extensive amount of research on how much time people could actually stay in them before, when they got off, they fell down on the pavement."
Ironically, id was more skeptical than the filmmakers.
"We were like, 'Maybe this is too much for video game fans and not enough for everybody else,' " Hollenshead says. "But it seems to be far enough along in the movie that people get it at that point. If you started the movie with something like that, I think it would've been confusing."
"We always assumed that this was going to be an R-rated picture," Wells adds. "And we felt very strongly that to do 'Doom' as a PG-13 would just, on its face, mean that it sucked."
Using a self-propagating worm that exploits a scripting vulnerability common to most dynamic Web sites, a Los Angeles teenager made himself the most popular member of community Web site MySpace.com earlier this month.But it's more fun to read the kid's own account:
A few months back, I decided to make a permanent myspace account so that I could easily view pictures of random, hot girls whenever I please without creating a new account each time.Much more by following the link.
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I began to examine the site some more, seeing how they restrict things, what they restrict, taking some breaks to look at profiles of really hot girls, trying to add them as friends and getting rejected, and getting back to making my profile cool so that they would add me as a friend later. Chicks dig cool profiles. After a little bit of messing around, I found that I could put in a longer headline than what they allowed. Hell, I could even get around their other restrictions and get HTML in there in order to add cool "effects" to my page that other people can't add. Yeah, that will get me chicks. Girls want guys who have computer hacking skills.
Let's see here...what would make my profile rock. Well, the most popular profiles on myspace pretty much consist of people with the IQ and English delivery skills of Kanye West so I don't want to mimic those, but popularity begets popularity. I need some more friends. I need people to love me. I delved into the bug and found that I could basically control the web browsing of anyone who hit my profile. In fact, I was able to develop something that caused anyone who viewed my profile to add my name to their profile's list of heroes. It's villainous. I was ecstatic.
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If I can become their friend...if I can become their hero...then why can't their friends become my friend...my hero. I can propagate the program to their profile, can't I.
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Some people would call this a worm. I call it popularity. Regardless, I don't care about popularity, but it can't hurt, right?
10/04, 12:34 pm: You have 73 friends.
I decided to release my little popularity program. I'm going to be famous...among my friends.
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10/05, 8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests.
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
10/05, 9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests.
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Sh*t.
10/05, 10:30 am: You have 518 friends and 561 friend requests.
Oh crap. I'm getting messages from people pissed off that I'm their friend when they didn't add me. I'm also getting emails saying "Hey, how the hell did you get onto my myspace....not that I mind, you're hot". From guys. But more girls than guys. This actually isn't so bad. The girls part.
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10/05, 6:20 pm: I timidly go to my profile to view the friend requests. 2,503 friends. 917,084 friend requests.
I refresh three seconds later. 918,268. I refresh three seconds later. 919,664 (screenshot below). A few minutes later, I refresh. 1,005,831.
It's official. I'm popular.
9. Play to the leftist audience by allowing Paul Krugman one column per week which is completely (rather than mostly) unedited and un-fact-checked; run promotional campaign featuring pitchline "Thursdays are Crazy-Days!!!"Maybe they ought to just have regular pledge drives?
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7. Put popular NYTimes Forum commenters behind the TimesSelect pay-per-view wall; people will eagerly shell out $25 to read the unhinged ramblings of "ProgressiveAvenger" and "DataNinja77"
6. Emulate the NY tabloids by running frequent contests and give-aways; readers who win the TimesBingo! contest will either receive a collection of books-on-tape by Susan Sonntag or Win a Dream Date With Frank Rich
Sex worker Camille Cabral, representing French prostitutes, poses next to a European Union flag after a press conference organised by the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), at the European Parliament in Brussels, October 17, 2005. The ICRSE wants to end the criminalization of the sex industry and give prostitutes the same social rights as other workers.Hey, why not? The EU already wants to regulate circuses.
Federal officials dealt a major setback to the chances of holding citywide elections in New Orleans on Feb. 4 by denying state officials records showing where hurricane-displaced voters are living, state election officials said Tuesday.Try, "If they aren't back by February, they've moved".
Secretary of State Al Ater said he has written officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency seeking a reversal of the denial, which was issued Friday.
A FEMA spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said the data Ater is seeking are protected by federal privacy laws and cannot be released to state officials.
Ater said that "by no fault of their own, more than 299,000 registered voters in Orleans Parish have been displaced." In his appeal letter -- also sent to members of the state's congressional delegation -- Ater said, "The absence of FEMA's assistance greatly hinders our attempt to conduct this election in February, and, in my opinion, leaves us with few options."