Tomorrow I start a new contract gig...gone are the days of sleeping 'till noon and wandering around New York eating pretzels and hot dogs 'till I'm sick...I am, however, excited to get back to work.

We just recently took a road trip from Minneapolis to New York. When the pints of truck stop coffee and the 25 packs of chocolate munchkins weren't enough to get us through, we turned to the truckers prayer (found by Mike on a postcard in a truck stop in Ohio)

Amen indeed...

photos from the Manhattan Bridge

and some fun with the new wide angle lens...

coney island...

A friend wanted to go see the Empire State Building the other day. I haven’t been up there since I was a wee lad. Strange to realize it is once again the largest building in New York.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting much lately…follows is a list of reasonable, yet most likely fabricated, excuses for not posting: out of town, friends in town, sick, tired, sick and tired, war, didn’t feel like it, just couldn’t pull myself out of bed, hard to see keyboard through glue sniffing induced stupor.

Human rights groups hail the International Criminal Court (ICC) as world justice's biggest step since an international military tribunal in Nuremberg tried Nazi leaders after World War II.

"The current leadership in the United States seems to have forgotten the lessons we tried to teach the rest of the world,"

After some forty million people had been killed in World War II, the victorious powers, led by the United States, agreed upon new rules "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The use of armed force was specifically outlawed, except in self-defense against an armed attack, or when mandated by the Security Council. These Charter provisions became, and remain, international law binding on all nations. We owe it to the memory of the dead to honor these commitments to peace. -- Benjamin B. Ferencz

The songs of 5-time Grammy Award winner Billy Joel and the direction and choreography of 2-time Emmy Award winner Twyla Tharp come together in MOVIN' OUT

I'll be busting out my Members Only jacket for this bad boy...maybe I can rent a 1987 iroc (with t-tops, of course).

This is very cool: ENIGMA Cypher machine army model for sale on ebay (via kottke.org), but isn't having only one enigma machine analogous to owning one walkie talkie?

If only the allies had this: Enigma applet

whitehouse.org (via shawn).

"Listen - when I put my hands on the Bible during my inauguration into office, I told the Lord Jesus that if I ever got a wild hair up my ass about killing folks, I would just go with it and that any dumb peacenik voters out there could just choke on it..."

I have thought a few times about adding the ability to allow people to comment on posts here, but I always decide not to. There are two main reasons for this:

1) I realize on a subconscious level that nobody reads this site besides me and my mom (at least she says so as not to hurt my feelings), but do I really want conscious proof of my mediocrity?

2) I like being able to spew forth my uneducated biased opinions, and the last thing I want is to give people the ability to refute them.

and so we have titles (for the RSS feed more than anything else). I never felt the need for a title on posts, so we'll see how it goes. Carry on, nothing else to see here...

Restaurant serves 'freedom fries'

Because of Cubbie's support for our troops, we no longer serve french fries. We now serve freedom fries,

Uh, can I get a patriot patty with that as well...maybe a war mongering, short sighted, miss-informed, fear laden side salad too...

"In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful that OUR leader isn't the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen."

--Huey Freedman, The Boondocks

Emergency Appeal to the U.N.

President Bush is pushing hard for a second Security Council resolution that would authorize war against Iraq. But millions of us believe that a war on Iraq would be wrong...

...The U.N. Security Council should back tough inspections, not war. The list of signers and comments from this petition will be compiled and delivered to the 15 Security Council member states on Thursday, March 6th...

Some more minor changes to the site. Another hard reload may be in order to reload some css and javascript. I added an RSS feed, and some other small changes. You'd think I'd have switched to Movable Type or some other nifty web logging tool by now, but I'm just too damned stubborn. And how better to write reams of unreadable code...he he, I said ream...

Best search term I have seen in a while for bitterpill.org: "getting stoned with friend's girlfriend"

The thing I can't figure is why would you ever need to do such a search? Are you worried your girlfriend is getting stoned with your friend, and thought maybe google could help you find out? Are you worried your best friend might know your getting his girlfriend stoned, and thought you'd check the internet for sure?

Maybe Tam is getting stoned with my old Long Island friends? Stupid sexy potheads...

John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. (via kottke.org)

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government...