Page 63 – scaredpoet.com

Indecision goes global

9/20/2005scaredpoet

So, waht the hell is up with voters these days? In 2000, the US couldn’t figure what the hell it wanted. Now, in 2005, it’s Germany:

BERLIN — “Chancellor War!” screamed the headline in Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid newspaper, on Monday. “Who will govern Germany now?”

The answer is still days, if not weeks, away. Incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his opponent, Angela Merkel, both claimed victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Their competing claims put Germany in a political deadlock and could stall efforts to revive the torpid economy.

“An unstable government and a perpetual election campaign with an uncertain outcome is the last thing our country needs,” said Hermann Franzen, the head of HDE, a retail trade association.

Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, won 35.2% of the vote in Sunday’s elections, compared with 34.3% for Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party.

Each of the candidates in question could barely muster a third of the vote? That’s pathetic!!

Enough Already!!!

9/19/2005scaredpoet

tropical storm rita

Not another one!

Mounting evidence is that this heavy hurricane season could be linked to global warming. Remember when ol’ Dubyah said global warming is probably a myth? Never forget that you picked him, America!

$4.00 a gallon, here we come! Shall we dance?

The Brain Freeze Turns 40

9/17/2005scaredpoet

The Slurpee^TM is now 40 years old. And with THAT piece of news, I must ask: what’s scarier?

a. The fact that anyone kept track of how old the Slurpee is.

b. The fact that anyone cared to report on the issue, much less write a 1,149 word piece on it. Seriously, that’s how long the Slate article is.

c. The fact that I haven’t had a Slurpee in over 10 years.

I think it’s a tie between a and b.

Read this and tell me something isn’t up…

9/16/2005scaredpoet

So yeah, this is a li’l scary…

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A university student from Egypt was ordered held without bond after prosecutors said they found a pilot’s uniform, chart of Memphis International Airport and a DVD titled “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act” in his apartment.

The FBI is investigating whether Mahmoud Maawad, 29, had any connection to terrorists. He is awaiting trial on charges of wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number.

Maawad, who is in the United States illegally, told the judge during a hearing Thursday that he is studying science and economics at the University of Memphis.

“My school is everything. I stay in this country for seven years; I stay for the school,” he said.

And on his spare time he impersonates pilots, Allah willing?

Your blog has been googled.

9/14/2005scaredpoet

So finally, Google has launched a search engine that focuses on RSS feeds, and actually threads blogs correctly. Took them long enough!

At any rate, the new blog search engine bases its crawling on RSS and Atom feeds, which nearly all decent blogs (and even quite a few non-blogs) provide as a standard feature.

From what I can tell, it works quite well.

Personally, I’d like to see this kind of crawling integrated as an option into the standard Google interface, the one that millions of users go to blindly when they want to search something. Only the really savvy bother to specifiy if they want to search images, newsgroups or blogs; the rest just type a phrase into the search bar and expect to see results.

For what it’s worth, Google isn’t ahead of the curve on this one. Quite a few search engines specifically catering to blogs have been around for quite some time prior to this launch.