The San Francisco Chronicle finds someone who claims to have been an Adidam devotee with Joan Felt:
A domain geek weblog runs an interview with the guy who sold popebenedictxvi.com for $6,100:... they had spent some wild times as devotees of onetime Marin County spiritual sect leader Da Free John, a.k.a. Bubba Free John, a.k.a. Dau Loloma, a.k.a. Da Love-Ananda, a.k.a. Franklin Jones.
Hales remembered Joan Felt talking freely about her association with Da Free John, the son of a Long Island window salesman who claimed to be an "incarnation of God" and whose nine wives included a Playboy centerfold.
"We had both been students of that cult and had left it," Hales said.
The name was registered in February along with roughly 40 other possible pope names, the only variations that were missed were the names that Rogers Cadenhead registered, I'm still kicking myself for overlooking those variations.
The tone of the article makes "domaining," the term it uses to describe the practice of registering domains, sound like a quaint hobby akin to scrapbooking or quilting. But there aren't many hobbies that could net an $180,000 payday.
We've Got Kids in Harm's Way
I'd love to ask Frank Luntz, the diabolical image minder who crafts political language for Republicans, what he thinks of this quote yesterday from President Bush on the war in Iraq:I understand how dangerous it is there. I understand we've got kids in harm's way, and I worry about their families. And obviously, anytime there's a death, I grieve.
I can't think of a worse way for a president to restore flagging public support in a war than to describe our troops as children. The quote reminds me of Nineteen, the '80s pop song by Paul Hardcastle that declared the average age of combat troops in Vietnam was 19.
The average age of American casualties in Iraq is around 27, according to Drew Brown of Knight-Ridder.
Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket
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The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. |
The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site.
Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times:
They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its very nature, fail.
Look up any hot-button subject on Wikipedia, the most well-known and successful wiki, and you'll find a lot of contributors in the common ground, looking for a place to plant mines.
As an example, check out the entry on the mercury-based vaccine additive thimerosal and the ongoing nine-month flamewar among people removing each other's edits.
Any parent reading Wikipedia to learn about the suggested link between thimerosal and increased autism in children will be either reassured or alarmed, depending on who edited the page last. (Our highly recommended pediatrician in Jacksonville has signs declaring the practice "thimerosal-free.")
Here's how one of the warring thimerosal editors describes the work of another:
In New York, some adopted children are being sworn in as American citizens at an exceptionally American place: a mall.It falls into a pattern that is becoming all too familiar: he disputes everything he finds disagreeable as being false or biased; deletes whole sections if he disagrees with one word in it; asks for citations; disputes that the references provided are legitimate; deletes references if he feels there are too many; and then starts revert wars. On the thimerosal issue, I've repeatedly asked that if he's so confident that thimerosal is harmless that he wants to withhold information about the controversy, he should voluntarily inject himself with equivalent doses to what babies have gotten to prove his point.
They returned to their seats clutching their certificates of naturalization, government documents that declare in the poetry of bureaucracy one's bond to this land. Cherished pieces of paper, they say: I came from there, and now I am here.
The children were also clutching gift bags, courtesy of the mall. Along with those sacred certificates, they received a small teddy bear, a plastic cup, a noisemaker, free soap from one of the stores and two coupons. One coupon offered 20 percent off fashion accessories, and the other offered "hot" summer tank tops, two for $20, or four for $30.
President Clinton on Alan Colmes Tonight
I picked a good time to become new best friends with Alan Colmes.
He scored an interview with President Clinton that airs this evening on his syndicated radio show, which broadcasts live from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern.
I've borrowed Matt Drudge's siren, because I have some advance details about the interview.
From excerpts that I wheedled out of a Fox News publicist, they discuss Hillary Clinton's political ambitions, his lingering sentiments about impeachment, and whether he would accept the vice presidential nomination on a Clinton/Clinton ticket.
President Clinton tells Colmes that he hopes his wife focuses entirely on her senatorial re-election campaign in 2006. "One of my rules of politics is if you look past the next election, you may not get past the next election," he says. "I hope the voters in New York will ratify her service. I think they will. She's become justifiably very popular here because of the job she's done."
One confession he makes in the interview might be upsetting to Knopf, the publisher of his 2004 autobiography My Life -- he pulled some punches:
I rewrote a lot of the parts of the presidency, because I didn't want to be mean-spirited about it. I didn't want to, you know, say what I really thought about some of the way some of these issues were handled and covered and the obsession with things that were called scandals that turned out to be totally phony.
The publisher might be in a forgiving mood -- the former president's book broke the first-day sales record for non-fiction, selling 400,000 copies.
As for whether he'd be his wife's running mate, that will be revealed in the broadcast.
Live discussion of the Colmes radio show began Wednesday on the Drudge Retort, which the host was kind enough to plug on the air last night.
Site traffic is normally light during the time his show airs, but the on-air mention appeared to bring an extra 10,000 hits to the site that hour, tripling the usual traffic.
In response to a guest's claim that that homosexuality is a choice, Retort users responded by describing the moment they decided to be heterosexual:
At the dance after the rodeo in Pecos -- July 6, 1991.
We'll call them "Shandi" and "Tracie".
For me, it was during recess one afternoon in second grade. If Mary Beth Farkas is reading this, I would again like to apologize.
Microsoft has abandoned six million developers with its decision to end mainstream support for Visual Basic 6, Karl E. Peterson writes in the current Visual Studio:There are millions of existing VB6 and VBA applications; this alone constitutes a compelling reason to ensure support for these applications on existing platforms. Otherwise, the authors of these applications have no means to use new platform features and no reason to encourage their customers to adopt the new Microsoft platforms.
Robert Scoble and Dan Appleman covered this in March, opposing the petition drive to add VB.COM into Visual Studio.
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