Salam Pax’s first column in The Guardian

I have discovered Love Hina / Dungeon Keeper II crossover fan fiction.

This can’t be happening.

Keitaro was relieved. His work was finally done. Well, for a while, anyway. Steel doors, secret doors and magic doors filled the entire Dungeon… well, the current, unexpanded Dungeon and he hadn’t gotten around to the orders for traps yet.

He decided to step out and get something to eat, plus maybe talk with Naru or one of the other girls. He didn’t know what Narusegawa did around the Dungeon, other than fight.

“Myu, myu!” came a strange call from behind Keitaro as he neared the hatchery. He turned to see a small turtle flying toward him. It’s legs were similar to those of a sea turtle rather than the land-based turtles.

The same guy has all sorts of other horrifying fan fiction.

Ha! Even Zhongwen.com can’t resist.

Nothing can be talked about but the Eternal Tao.
Nothing can be named but the Eternal Name.

Salam’s story. Turns out Salam is indeed his real name.

He will start publishing his thoughts in The Guardian’s G2 section next Wednesday. He is also still posting to his blog.

Erik Benson’s All Consuming is another neat application of all the raw data that webloggers are churning out each day. This one looks for mentions of books, and tracks and aggregates the mentions any number of ways. Well… not any number. Maybe like 5 ways.

Here’s how it works.

Starbucks Photos Dot Com

That’s Jenny, Yvonne, and Sally. Starbucks in Taiwan was nice, but the Starbucks “experience” in Japan was much better. I can still clearly remember the way they all would say “Ohayo gozaimasu!” in unison when we walked in in the morning, and the way the cashier would repeat my order to the drink maker in detail, who would then repeat it back for confirmation, and then say it again when I picked it up, and the super polite way they’d thank you over and over. “Arigato gozaimaaaaaasu…”

One morning we walked in, and the girl slipped up and started to say “konbanwa” (good evening) instead of “ohayo”. In quick succession, she realized she was saying the wrong thing, and began to correct herself, and then looked at me and realized I probably didn’t know the difference. There was a priceless moment of confusion, but she ultimately decided to err on the side of caution and say good morning, just to be sure.

North Korea’s military fired a laser in March at two U.S. Army helicopters patrolling the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in what U.S. officials call a provocative action, The Washington Times has learned.

They think it wasn’t just a targeting laser, but an actual laser weapon they bought from China. Yes, there really is something called the ZM-87 Portable Laser Disturber.

More on laser weapons.

Today’s word of the day features SARS Soda. Don’t miss it!

Our conclusion: It’s SARS-tastic!

I really like the color scheme of this site.

New family pictures at M.info.

The Office of Special Plans, AKA the Cabal, is now in charge of intelligence.

See, the problem with old-fashioned intelligence operations like the CIA is that they look at the evidence first, and draw conclusions later. This method is slow and produces unpredictable results. OSP has a new, streamlined process: Presuppose your conclusions! Then find evidence to back them up.

(found at This Modern World)

Where is Raed ?

This article about Science Applications International Corp. makes them sound spooky and very cool.

Adding to SAIC’s covert aura, Beyster has hired an unusual number of former spies, law enforcement chiefs, and secret warriors. Some 5,000 employees — roughly one-seventh of the workforce — have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest arrays of top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. “We are a stealth company,” says Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer. “We’re everywhere, but almost never seen.”

They get extra cool points in my book because their name makes me think of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.

I got my report card! A!

And we made an offer on a house. Today’s experiment…?

2300 now

There are more pictures of Alexis, featured in today’s Word of the Day, at Minutillo.info.

My first vacation with Jenny was to the White Mountains. We stayed in a tiny hotel in Littleton. We saw the Old Man of the Mountain then, and we’ve always liked him. Now the Old Man is gone.

2200 pulse-pounding mAh!

Click for an animation of the air traffic over the US on a typical day. There’s way way way more traffic than you think there is. (4500 planes in the air at the peak.) You can clearly see the east coast wake up and start flying at about 7 in the morning and then the west coast do the same 4 hours later.

I didn’t even know Denis Horgan had a weblog, and today I find it, and immediately find out that The Hartford Courant forced him to shut it down.

Booooooooo.

Just when we were getting used to the idea of Blogger + Google taking over the world, along comes this: Ben + Mena + Anil + Joi = TypePad (what is TypePad?)

Who is the third great power? Rael and Blosxom? The Winerverse of Radio and Frontier? LiveJournal?

Going by the data at Blogging Ecosystem, and by using link: searches at Google, and assuming that sites link to the home page of the blogging system they use, it seems like the popularity proportions break down this way:

MT 1 (MT gets a 1, the rest are relative numbers compared to MT)
Blogger 2/3
Radio 1/2
b2 1/10
Bloxsom 1/20

Interesting! I’m surprised that b2 is so high up. But that probably leaves out the scores of Frontier and LiveJournal based sites out there. LiveJournal says there are 471224 active users at livejournal.com alone, and that doesn’t count all the LiveJournal clone sites.

Dear LazyWeb: Is there a breakdown of the popularity of the various weblog tools out there? I’d like to see estimates for how many weblogs exist that run each one. Is NMAP for blogs required here?

I think I understand what they’re trying to do at Blogalization, and I think I like it.

I went to Amazon today and on the home page, right under my gleaming Gold Box (probably full of belt sanders and cordless vacuum cleaners) was this sticker:

Those jerks! I could feel my mouse pointer being pulled in, but I was able to resist. This time.

Jenny is only afraid of three things.

Sunflowers are too big, she thinks. “No flower should be bigger than your head.” She’s somewhat worried that Raggedy Ann might come to life. And Gumby is just all around spooky, to her.

I’m afraid of the dark. What are you afraid of that doesn’t make sense?

Local favorite Jeremy Hedley, of Antipixel, is interviewed by waffle.

I broke down and decided to go to Flushing with Jenny, Susan, and their mom. I want to mention two places we ate at that are absolutely “THE BEST” and everybody should try… and I mean everybody. These are both in my top 8 restaurants on Earth:

THE ABSOLUTE BEST HOT DOG PLACE

First, on the way there, we stopped at Super Duper Weenie in Fairfield. This is the best hot dog place ever. How good is it? I don’t even like hot dogs. I actually HATE hot dogs. But I love Super Duper Weenie. Get the Chicagoan, or the California dog. Their hot dogs are all loaded to 110% capacity with chili or relish or pickles or whatever, all made fresh. They’re messy and great.

THE ABSOLUTE BEST KOREAN RESTAURANT

Then in Flushing we went to KumGangSan (금강산). Now, careful, don’t be tricked: They have two branches, one in Manhattan in “Korea Town”, and one in Flushing. The Manhattan one has fancier decor, but the Flushing one is way better. Better food, better service, and on a nice day you can sit outside by the waterfall. Somehow they’re open 24 hours a day. And, just about every time we go we randomly get some sort of bonus food. “Here, this is special Korean mumble-mumble.” Who knows what we’ve been eating, but it’s always good. And that’s besides the normal eight million little dishes of appetizery stuff they bring you before the main meal.

Nothing else too interesting today. I saw the dangerous water yo-yos on sale, but didn’t buy one. Jenny searched for a book by 魯迅 - Lu Xun but it was sold out. And Susan forgot to bring her fancy new phone with the built-in camera, so no moblogging for us.

IMPOSSIBLE THING THE FIRST:

CIA creates parody version of Gangsta Paradise, broadcasts to Iraq. Among the lyrics: “If you don’t like me, I kill you. I am Saddam. Saddam in the house. Everybody in the house say I hate you. (we hate you!)”

I give you, via MeFi, the MP3.

IMPOSSIBLE THING THE SECOND:

That apparently wasn’t enough, so they went on to create a deck of cards, featuring the 55 most wanted members of Saddam’s regime. Saddam is the ace of spades.

I give you, via www.defenselink.mil, the cards.

There’s something really spooky about the way these new robots the Japanese have been working on move. Instead of being all jerky and wobbly and akward and, well, machinelike, like sci-fi always imagined robots would be, their movements are very human, smooth and perfectly balanced.

Slightly relatedly, lots of people have been using the Internet to welcome all sorts of new overlords.

This has to be a joke, right?

I was about to post about this company, Stavatti, working on a totally sweet nuclear powered laser gun, which I found out about at Slashdot:

But then I got to reading the rest of their site. They also claim to be working on a Robotech looking fighter they call the F26, and a hypersonic nuclear heavy bomber!

And they have a division called Stavatti Special Access. On a single web page, both of these staements are made:

1: “Stavatti’s Special Access Division is responsible for the design and production of Top Secret/Special Access Required/Compartmentalized and COSMIC aerospace weapon systems and special products for the U.S. DoD and government user agencies.”

2: “Stavatti can neither confirm or deny that from 1997 to the present Stavatti SA has continued to perform special access contract work for U.S. government user agencies as either the prime contractor or industry team member.”

Well which is it then? It gets better. They’re also working on tactical space fighters, and interplanetay space craft. It just gets crazier and crazier the more you read the site. Oh, and drums, they sell drums somehow.

It has to be fake. But it is a very detailed fake! Reams and reams of PDFs of specifications, cost estimates, and production schedules for all these fantastic (with emphasis on the FANTASY) weapon systems.

The guys at rec.aviation.military agree that it’s bogus. But who are they trying to fool? And why?

One last thing, check the clear thinking in the chairman’s statement on the war in Iraq:

I think we as American’s know the reality. Our economy collapsed a long time ago. There have been numerous frauds organized by the powers-that-be to keep the gears turning, be it trickle-down economics, the Dot Com Stockmarket or now, the Invasion of Iraq. This invasion may well preserve the US status quo for at least another two to ten years, but then what? There are real threats to national security. There have always been. MacAurthor was fired for insubordination when he desired to deal with the roots of the problem. If America truly is the greatest nation on earth, we should act as police officer for the world, secure Babylon and eliminate Saddam. We should then preemptively strike all other threat nations which possess weapons of mass destruction and harbor no respect for human life. Those include North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and the People’s Republic of China. I am certain the CIA has a far more comprehensive list which could add a extra threat or two. Before we do that, however, we should actually rebuild our military, provide every soldier with a good pair of boots and a nice warm blanket, and start openly deploying some of the toys ‘we don’t have’ .

Doesn’t sound real, does it. They have it in Flushing, NY! It turns out it’s mochi stuffed with some sort of sweet sesame paste. I was hoping for something spicy, but it was still good. I guess you usually eat them around new year, but I didn’t care, once I saw it, I had to have it.

We had it at the Flushing Food Court, along with all sorts of other 小吃. The Chinatown in Flushing is the absolute best. It’s the secret Chinatown in New York that is 8000 times better than the one in Manhattan.

Also 三喵 got herself a new cell phone with a built in camera. I offered to help her set up a moblog. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Optimus Prime has a weblog.

I was shocked on a visit today to find out that one of my readers didn’t know about The Agonist. So there it is.