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7. oktober 2003
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Do call: turning the tables
It's not a very original joke to give out telemarketers' phone numbers to the public for retaliation. It is, however, one we'd like to repeat endlessly.
Miami Herald's Dave Barry has his own twist, too, and surely got a hilarious response from the deeply offended American Teleservices Association.
It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article:
''The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him,'' Searcy said. ``. . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.''
Our hearts so bleeds for telemarketers these days.
7:28:24 PM 
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Angle-Grinder Man: the driver's superhero
 Secular Blasphemy managed to scoop the New York Times by almost three weeks in writing about London's Angle-Grinder Man, a guy dressed up in a colourful superhero costume to liberate illegally parked cars that are trapped with a "boot," but it is definately worth reading this funny interview with the anonymous superhero himself.
The NYT even have pictures of the not-so-secretive superhero. The large circular saw hides his gold lamé underpants, which may be just as well.
First question: what does his parents think?
"I got kind of a lukewarm response," said the masked Englishman who calls himself Angle-Grinder Man and who has been trawling London for four months dressed in a homemade superhero outfit, complete with gold lamé underpants and cape, removing the security boots from people's illegally parked cars.
"Any parent who gets a phone call from his son saying, `Oh, you might see me in the newspaper; I'm a superhero wheel clamp vigilante' — it might take them a little while to formulate their views," he said in an interview.
Apparently, Angle-Grinder Man is unemployed in real life (not having the resources of his collegue Bruce Wayne), but from his activities I think he could make a great career in comedy. Seriously. In fact, I suspect his stunt owes more to Monty Python's Bicycle Repairman character than it does to Batman.
5:56:32 PM
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Syria refuses journalists access to strike site
Syria has insisted the Israeli airstrikes hit "a civilian area," but when BBC's journalist went to investigate, the area was off limits. It is otherwise customary, even in despotic countries, to allow access to western journalists if there are injured or dead civilians, or even ruined civilian buildings, to show off.
Locals seemed to confirm that this was a training camp for foreign militants, but whether it was operative is a bit more unclear.
4:08:54 PM
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Execution by injection may be cruel and unusual
The most common way of executing people in the US, lethal injection, may not be as painless and humane as it appears. One of the chemical used, pancuronium bromide, actually paralyses the inmate completely, giving spectators the impression he or she dies peacefully, while the reality may be slow suffocation or even intense pain from the deadly chemicals used.
In 2001, it became a crime for veterinarians in Tennessee to use one of the chemicals in that standard method to euthanize pets. [...]
The state's legal papers also argued that the ban on pancuronium bromide in pet euthanasia does not apply to Mr. Abdur'Rahman because he is not a "nonlivestock animal," which the law says includes pets, captured wildlife, exotic and domesticated animals, rabbits, chicks, ducks and potbellied pigs.
Death row inmates thus have less protection against cruel executions than domestic animals.
2:22:28 PM
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Phelps to set up Shepard hate monument
Casper in Wyoming has a monument to the Ten Commandments in the City Park. After a prolonged legal battle over a similar monument, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this is acceptable only if the city also allows monuments espousing all sorts of different political and religious views.
This can easily open a very nasty can of worms. Imagine the KKK setting up a monument to racist ideas, or al-Qaeda sympathisers setting up a monument to their glorious victory on 9/11.
Something equally disgusting is actually about to happen in Casper now. The infamous gay-hating preacher Fred Phelps is now taking action to put up a monument to Matthew Shepard, the gay student from Casper who was murdered five years ago. The monument is, as you should expect from the bigot Phelps, no memorial to a tragically murdered young man, but one carrying this inscription: "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22."
The laws being what they are, there may be nothing the city can do to prevent this testimony to vile hatred being set up on public property.
9:23:02 AM
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The vast open blogsphere
Perseus Development has done a large survey of blogs, and to nobody's surprise found that two thirds of them are already abandoned. 2.72 million blogs have not been updated for the last two months, of which 1.09M blogs were abandoned after only one day.
Girls are more likely to start blogs than guys (56%) and also more likely to keep blogging once they start it
Blogs are famed for their linkages, and while 80.8% of active blogs linked to at least one external site from a post on their home page, these links were rarely to traditional news sources. Only 9.9% of active blogs had a current post that linked to one of 2,875 traditional news sites. So blogging in practice is not just about linking to news articles.
However, this supports the impression that there are essentially two types of blogs. One is people who write about themselves and their life, and those are likely (but not certain) to have a very limited audience, and are presumably satisfied with blogging as a sort of public diary for friends. And, to nobody's surprise, the typical author of a small personal log is a female teenager.
Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.
Maybe the typical blog, in sheer numbers, but probably not the typical blog that you are likely to read. What is great about blogs is that anyone who is on the Net can become an instant writer. But whether you actually keep going, and get an audience, depends on having something to say. In this, blogging is not radically different from any other form of authorship.
5:27:56 AM
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Don't want girls
For some reason, parents seem to universally prefer boys to girls. And when they have a girl, the chance of divorce increases.
In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys. In Mexico and Colombia the gap is wider; in Kenya it's wider still. In Vietnam, it's huge: Parents of a girl are 25 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy.
I am surprised that this even applies to modern industrialised countries. Lots of theories, but nobody really knows why.
3:34:03 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.11.2003; 03:18:41.
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This is my blogchalk:
Norway, Bergen, Norwegian, English, Jan, Male, 31-35.
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