| Will I get persecuted for being foreign? After all, terrorists in movies are always English. But it's alright, I don't have white hair. Note to self: Don't dye hair white until after the INS are done with. [00:03] [0 comments]
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Tuesday 11 September 2001
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| And the mockery carries through into the next day's blog... Mysterious Tom suggests a new culprit; "Bill Gates. Means, motive, etc. Flight Sim used for terrorist training. Very bad man. Case closed." [23:33] [0 comments]
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| Someone should have installed more pusher robots in the World Trade Center. Too late now. [22:47] [0 comments]
| Conspiracy-theory fodder, from a co-worker of my wife: "My cousin who works for the UN in Baghdad, Iraq, was asked along with other US officials to leave Iraq last Monday within 48 hours..." (asked by the US, not by Iraq, apparently) [22:40] [0 comments]
| Comedy from Tyrethali this morning, that I forgot to blog; "John Edwards special tonight." [22:27] [0 comments]
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| Grarh, churches being shown in relation to the explodey things, with a bunch of people praying the generic "we are mindless clones" prayer. "The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he basheth my brains with a big hammer, and cooketh me for dinner. He fleeceth me for jumpers." [18:51] [0 comments]
| Inspired by Teleute; "It's a protest against the second Lord of the Rings movie." [16:55] [0 comments]
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| Courtesy of my wife; "Maybe it was a bet. 'Bet you $20 I can throw the entire nation into terror and paranoia!' 'No way, dude! You're on!'" [16:00] [0 comments]
| Courtesy of Eperdu; "I remember when all this was towers." [15:26] [0 comments]
| Courtesy of zx64; "Somebody set U.S. up the plane." [13:56] [0 comments]
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| "Something like this would take seven years of planning". What? Find some violent suicidal people. Take fifteen minutes at expedia.com or some similar site, and you're done. Oh, and a couple of days with a basic flight simulator, I suppose, for each of your mad suicidal violent people. Seven days, perhaps, but not seven years. I suppose it makes more sense than saying "It's dead easy to do this, but don't, please." [13:43] [0 comments]
| Shooting down the planes - how is that supposed to help? As far as I know, interceptor jets aren't yet equipped with plasma guns or other vaporisation technology. So you shoot the plane down, and then it, er, crashes into a building. On the up-side, I suppose you can make it crash into occupied houses, shops and streets, rather than into evacuated big buildings. It's much cheaper to get new people than it is to rebuild monuments, of course. [10:28] [0 comments]
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Planes crashing into important buildings - film at 11. An FBI Terrorism Expert says that "Only the middle east are capable of something like this" and "It was a well-financed operation". What gives him that idea? I'd have thought a group of people with a suicide pact, and a budget of about $2000, could pull off something like this. Plane ticket, plastic replica gun, and a baseball bat for if anyone argues with the gun. Does it cost more than that to hijack a plane? Maybe another $40 for a flight simulator so you can get good enough at flying a plane to crash it into the right place. Surely not difficult - landing and take-off are the difficult thing.
There's also some discussion of the motivation; "Why would someone want to incur the wrath of the United States?". Their conclusion was "I don't know". Apparently Australian TV had a more reasonable idea - someone might want to incur the wrath of the US in order to misdirect it at someone else. Sounds like a good plan to me. "Hello, this is Pa... er... Iraq. We blew you up, ha ha ha." [10:24] [2 comments]
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Monday 10 September 2001
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| Crikey, three blogless days. That's the worst I've done without the server being to blame. Disgraceful. And I don't even have anything particularly cool to make up for it. I started writing the non-mnemonic version of Ravens and Snake, and am in the process of making what will hopefully be a monster chilli courtesy of dried crushed habanero peppers from Kent. [16:37] [0 comments]
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Thursday 6 September 2001
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| This server now logs stuff remotely by a custom-made mechanism, so if things *are* hax0rs, and they haven't yet got a completely invisible back-door in place, they'll not be able to cast confusion on matters next time. Hoorah. [22:31] [0 comments]
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Stage 1: "Please notify this office in writing or by fax (202 30? !\<u)"
Stage 2: Ten minutes of "Press one if you'd like to go round in circles. Press two if you'd like to end this call."
Stage 3: "I understand, sir. We don't have fax numbers here. You could write."
Sure. Write. Like we did with the change of address months ago. You know, the change of address that was ignored, which is why this fiasco is happening. Or like we did with all those things we submitted when we were doing the other sort of application, that we kept getting told we hadn't submitted. Sure, I'll trust your letter-receiving abilities.
I have a better idea. I'll fax every number in the 202 30(7/2) (1/4)5(3/2/8)(6/0/8) combinations. One of them must work. And then I'll write. And then I'll come round with a letter and put it in someone's hand. And then I'll shout it from a rooftop through a megaphone into the ear of a sleeping INS worker. One of these methods must meet with success. [12:31] [0 comments]
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Tuesday 4 September 2001
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| Now that you all have access to the TV-Guide for my area, I expect you to inform me whenever there's anything good on, of course. Ignore things in purple, they're not really on. And please note, I don't actually expect any such thing. Splendid. [13:49] [0 comments]
| Tsk. Konqueror's annoying inability to function properly outside of KDE caused me to delete my bookmarks, thus removing my ability to check my TV-Guide, because Konqueror won't do the forms that lead to the correct page. Never again, as the link is now here. Hoorah for Blogs as portable bookmarks. [13:48] [0 comments]
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Sunday 2 September 2001
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| American food-adverts have a propensity to advertise using one particular technique that I like to call the "You are a fat fuck. Stop eating that lardy crap you always eat, and eat our food instead, shitball" technique. I imagine childhood training renders them susceptible to advertisements of this sort. [14:34] [0 comments]
| The sci-fi channel is advertising their "four-day labor-day sofathon". Not only is that unusually long for any sort of day, even a labor-day, but a sofathon is a somewhat disturbing concept. That said, I'll put $5 on my sofa, on the nose. [13:51] [0 comments]
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Saturday 1 September 2001
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| While I'm doing such things, I'll take a moment to recommend Attrition's song A Girl Called Harmony. [18:24] [0 comments]
| Thanks to Juniper, Raina and Mrrowr for mentioning that my play a song links of yesterday were all explodey-like because mp3.com disallow direct links to their playlist files nowadays. My links are now fixed, because I use my own playlist files. You may still need to be registered with mp3.com before they'll work - I'm not sure if their annoying cookie-filled prohibitions extend to such realms. [18:19] [0 comments]
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