Black Friday: More Than I Bargained For

Once the doors opened just before 5 a.m., hundreds of people poured through, breaking down the police tape. Dozens of others cut the line and ran through the exit door before Wal-Mart employees were able to stop them.

Inside, Wal-Mart workers were throwing boxes with laptops and portable DVD players to the people who were pushing and shoving to get the merchandise. A lone sneaker lay on the floor, lost by an anxious shopper in the scrum.

My name is Rogers and I am a recovering doorbuster.

A few years ago during a Thanksgiving holiday in Dallas, my wife and her sisters got up before dawn Friday morning to go doorbusting, hitting the sales at Target and other retailers on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I thought this sounded nurse-a-shotgun dreadful, but when I saw some of the prices at computer stores, I became one of these sad, bargain-crazed freaks.

The aptly named Black Friday gets larger, longer and more dangerous each year. I heard a radio report from a Wal-Mart where 5,000 people lined up outside before it opened. Some stores have even begun opening on Thanksgiving Day, spoiling one of the last commerce-free holidays.

Another former doorbuster:

Black Friday is the most terrible day of the year. I can't believe what kind of human beings go out on this day and start fights and are that greedy and materialistic to get up this early and do these things. ... I'm sickened by what I was exposed to today. I don't even want to go into detail about the things I saw and the things that were uttered out of people's mouths.

I don't know what possessed me to get up at 4 a.m. for a knockoff MP3 player, six-format digital photo card reader and other computer peripherals, most of which remained unopened the next time Black Friday rolled around. The only thing I can recall needing -- from any of these sales -- was a 100-pack case of blank CDs ($0.01 after a $9.99 mail-in rebate).

Two years later, I still have 70 CDs left.

When I was doorbusting last year at CompUSA in Jacksonville, I decided that no amount of savings is worth standing in line for an hour within the armpit fallout cloud of computer aficionados, many of whom skipped a shower so they'd have the best possible chance to buy one of five $49 laser printers.

Update: Bill Lazar survived a Black Friday riot at a Mountain View, California, Wal-Mart: "People raced to the consumer electronics department as the store opened at 5 a.m., jumping over counters and pushing over a display case. Store managers, downplaying the scrum afterwards, needed help from Mountain View PD to restore order."

Jacksonville · 2005/11/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

CNN Dicks Cheney with Subliminal Messages

The Drudge Retort has obtained video footage that proves the superimposition of an X mark over Vice President Cheney during a televised speech Tuesday wasn't just an innocent technical glitch by CNN, as claimed by anchor Daryn Kagan-Limbaugh.

In a story impacting hard across the conservative blogosphere, Matt Drudge reported Tuesday on a "large black 'X' repeatedly flashed over the vice president's face!"

The X, which appeared for two frames displayed over one-fifteenth of a second, turns out to be a small part of a series of extremely hard-to-detect subliminal messages lasting more than 10 minutes during the speech.

If you watch the 11-minute, 8-second video closely, you'll see that Michelle Malkin and other seasoned observers of politics were right to suspect that someone at the Communist News Network was attempting to subconsciously sway the public against the vice president.

If this kind of thing is standard practice at the network founded by patchouli-smelling medicinal hemp advocate Ted Turner, it may explain the 19 percent approval rating that Cheney currently enjoys in the polls.

Television · Politics · Journalism · 2005/11/23 · 289 COMMENTS · Link

Fun with Comment Spam

A spammer pimping Tadalafil left the following comment on Workbench this morning:

I am delighted that you have chosen to respond at last to one of the people posting comments on your blog. While the subject of the sex/slave trade is indeed horrendous, I am sure I am not alone in wishing that you would engage and debate with those of us posing hard and difficult questions about the impending EU Constitutioncrisis that is likely to result from a rejection by French and Dutch voters. Surely this is a paramount subject for you - Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication - to be addressing. It wont go away, you know.tadalafil

After a reader of Margot Wallstrom's blog shared his concerns with the European Union commissioner in April, his comment was grabbed by a spammer's software and is being spread around the world to help men achieve 36-hour erections.

2005/11/23 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Murthquake Continues to Shake Washington

On Friday, Republicans in the House of Representatives pushed to the floor a bill they wrote but did not favor:

It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

To no surprise, the bill failed 403-3. The yes votes came from the Democrats Cynthia McKinney, Jose Serrano and Robert Wexler.

This bill was must-see C-Span, but I've been struggling to figure out what Republicans hoped to gain with such a transparent stunt. It may please Sean Hannity and other tail-wagging right-wing housepets, but the GOP doesn't need to engineer fake victories to throw a bone to their supporters. They have the majority in Congress and can mop the floor with real Democrats every day of the week.

Liberal Democrats regularly serve up new bills that have absolutely no prayer of being enacted. If Hannity enjoys the taste of fictitious Democrat, wouldn't he love to gnaw a nice tasty leg of Dennis Kucinich?

There's a real withdrawal bill they could have opposed: Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha's call to redeploy U.S. troops outside of Iraq within a reasonable time as a "quick reaction force" with an "over-the-horizon presence of Marines."

The GOP took a huge risk with their fake bill, because they pushed the subject of withdrawal higher in the news. This became clear yesterday when 100 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders responded Monday by demanding the withdrawal of foreign troops "on a specified timetable."

I couldn't figure out the Republicans' logic until I read Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg this morning.

Republicans hope that this 400-vote victory squelches debate of Murtha's proposal, reducing the war in the eyes of the public to their heroic defeat of nobody's call for immediate withdrawal. Americans are as heartsick as Rep. Murtha about 160,000 U.S. soldiers serving as target practice for suicide bombs and IEDs while we're given no exit strategy more concrete than "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

They're clearly afraid of Murtha, a conservative hawk and decorated Vietnam veteran who visits weekly with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital and has strong ties inside the Pentagon. He legitimizes a perception that's growing among disenchanted supporters of the war -- the belief that our presence in Iraq hurts more than it helps:

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45 percent of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

If only cowards cut and run, as we recently learned from newly elected Rep. Jean Schmidt, why are war supporters running as fast as they can away from this debate?

Politics · 2005/11/22 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Closing a PHP Mail Form Vulnerability

I wrote a PHP script that accepts e-mail from web site visitors using a feedback form. The script works with different sites, routing mail to the right inbox with a hidden field on the form:

The who field doesn't specify an e-mail address, because that would be easy pickings for spammers. They crawl the web looking for e-mail scripts that can be configured to send e-mail to any recipient they specify.

Instead, my script was written to send mail only to accounts on my server:

$recipient = $_REQUEST['who'];

if ($recipient == "") {
$recipient = "rogers@ekzemplo.com";
} else {
$recipient = $recipient . "@ekzemplo.com";
}

Recently, a spammer found a way to make my script send e-mail to anyone on any server, generating hundreds of spams on my machine over a space of four days.

I'm curious to see if any programmers spot the giant honking vulnerability in the preceding code that I missed for months.

Programming · Php · Security · 2005/11/19 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Jerry Lewis vs. Jerry's Kids

At an appearance in Chicago Wednesday night, Jerry Lewis flew into a rage when heckled off the stage by disability activists in wheelchairs, telling security to eject one overweight protester by commanding "move that living waterbed out of here."

The hecklers were from Jerry's Orphans, a group begun in the early '90s by Mike Ervin, a former Muscular Dystrophy Association poster child. They're angry about their portrayal in the Labor Day Telethon, as described in a documentary The Kids Are All Right:

Millions of viewers tune in every year and come away with the idea that people with disabilities need pity and charity rather than accessible public transportation and housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that a democratic society should ensure for all its citizens.

In yearly telethons since 1966, Lewis has helped raise an estimated $2 billion in donations for "Jerry's Kids," a staggering figure that one might expect to shield him from criticism. But Ingrid Tischer, a woman with muscular dystrophy, describes how Lewis depicts people like her as wretched, helpless and hopeless, a portrayal that pulls in the money at the expense of their self-worth:

Minutes after I tuned in this year, a little girl was profiled in a video montage before she and her parents joined the host on stage. She sat listening quietly as her parents talked about how their little girl didn't have a future.

Unlike "normal" children, she was "confined" to a wheelchair and could be "struck down" at any moment. You couldn't see how these dramatic statements affected her because a "Call Now" graphic covered the lower portion of the screen -- right where her face was, and where the face of of any person who uses a wheelchair would be expected to be.

Here's the thing: Little girls who hear they don't have futures become women who don't have jobs. And people will never care that women with disabilities are excluded from their work places if they think of us as faceless bodies with special needs instead of women with equal rights.

In 1990, Lewis imagined himself having muscular dystrophy in a cover story he wrote for Parade Magazine:

I know the courage it takes to get on the court with other cripples and play wheelchair basketball, but I'm not as fortunate as they are, and I bet I'm in the majority. I'd like to play basketball like normal, healthy, vital, and energetic people. I really don't want the substitute. I just can't half-do anything -- either it's all the way, or forget it. That's a rough way to think in my position. When I sit back and think a little more rationally, I realize my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being a half a person ... and get on with my life.

I may be a full human being in my heart and soul, yet I am still half a person, and I know I'll do well if I keep my priorities in order.

As an indicator of how volcanic the 79-year-old comedian became in Chicago, Lewis accused protesters of faking their condition, according to one person in attendance:

When he spotted these activists in the audience that were in the front row in their wheelchairs, he even went so far as to say 'These people are going to walk out of those chairs and drive home tonight. I bought those chairs for them.'

Update: Will Pfeifer has posted audio of the incident. Another attendee disagrees the characterization that he "flew into a rage."

Television · Politics · Movies · 2005/11/18 · 52 COMMENTS · Link

Strip Club Owner Gets Something Off His Chest

If you take the southbound State Road 207 exit on Interstate 95 near St. Augustine, Florida, you'll see Café Erotica, a decrepit rural strip club. The café, which reportedly shut down in September, has been engaged in a bitter fight with St. Johns County code enforcement supervisor James Acosta.

I know this not because I keep abreast of the club's activities, but because you can't miss the huge 10- by 40-foot sign it recently erected.

Whenever we drive past this sign, my kids laugh like Beavis and Butthead.

The county and Café Erotica have battled in court for years over signs that tell the world they "dare to bare." The club set up a web site, Dumb Butt Acosta, that describes the last sign they put up in his honor three years ago:

There is a political statement sign up saying "In our opinion, James Acosta is a fat ---Barney Fife type which has cost the county thousand of dollars in lawsuits for using selective enforcement." This sign was erected by Café Erotica. Apparently Barney Fife here has decided which operations are OK and which are not based solely on the name. ... Our original intention was simply a quick footnote on this jerk but we have decided that due to recent ranting from this gay acting, gun toting lunatic to be a little more generous in what we will release to the public about this -------.

The site reveals that the club's actual name is Café Erotica/We Dare to Bare/Adult Toys/Great Food/Exit 94, but it doesn't really dare to bare -- an extremely precise local ordinance requires opaque modesty:

Buttocks: The area at the rear of the human body (sometimes referred to as the glutaeus maximus) which lies between two imaginary straight lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top such line being 1/2 inch below the top of the vertical cleavage of the nates (i.e., the prominence formed by the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom such line being 1/2 inch above the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance (sometimes referred to as the gluteal fold), and between two imaginary straight lines, one on each side of the body (the "outside line"), which outside lines are perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and which perpendicular outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each nate meets the outer side of each leg. Notwithstanding the above, Buttocks shall not include the leg, the hamstring muscle below the gluteal fold, the tensor fasciae latae muscle or any of the above-described portion of the human body that is between either (i) the left inside perpendicular line and the left outside perpendicular line or (ii) the right inside perpendicular line and the right outside perpendicular line. For the purpose of the previous sentence the left inside perpendicular line shall be an imaginary straight line on the left side of the anus (i) that is perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and (ii) that is 1/3 of the distance from the anus to the left outside line, and the right inside perpendicular line shall be an imaginary straight line on the right side of the anus (i) that is perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and (ii) that is 1/3 of the distance from the anus to the right outside line.

The ordinance spends a lot less time defining breasts; someone in the county attorney's office must be an ass man.

I never visited the club. I'm too Catholic to enjoy it properly and even with "Great Food" in the name, I fear that sexually oriented businesses do not follow good hygienic practices in food preparation. A blogger visiting every Starbucks in the world made a stop in 2004 and was not impressed:

... the club was unremarkable, and not worth hanging out in, except to try out the weird-ass private dance room in which the customer reclined on a ... a recliner, I guess while the dancers straddled from above. Weird.

Jacksonville · Florida · 2005/11/16 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

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