If you, like me, have ever played Quake, the original 3D first person shooter, and Infocom text-only advernture games like Zork or Hitchhiker's, you probably never even considered to combine them. These guys did! And BoingBoing told me about it.
This is a game where you actually type attack grunt with shotgun instead of mousing and hitting control keys like crazy to accomplish the same effect.
The German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop is impressed with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, but maybe for different reasons than the rest of us: he thinks Karzai is the most elegantly dressed world leader.
"President Karzai is a shining example of how a man can maintain the role of a gentleman even while wearing the dress of his ancestors" Joop wrote in an article for Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel newspaper on Thursday.
I bet nobody said anything good about the sense of dress in the Taliban. And the less said about their women's fashion, the better.
President Bush, pictured with the sharply dressed Karzai above, has already ordered one of those hats for his first presidential debate against John Kerry.
Alas, this is not an April fool's joke: Opec is cutting its oil production by 1 million barrels a day, at least officially. True, Opec is not very disciplined so what they decide and what happens is rarely the same thing, but there is little doubt the cartel intends for the prices to stay high through the summer.
The oil prices are record high, and have been so for months. That is brilliant news for net oil exporter Norway, but it no doubt hurts the economy in Europe, North America and Asia. Especially in the US, where consumers are very sensitive to fuel prices, the rising cost of gas has been an issue in the presidential campaign already. The economic recovery has been very sluggish, and high oil prices are part of the explanation.
And is this the main reason Opec pushes up the oil prices? Do they hope that by hurting the US economy and increase gas prices they contribute to prevent Bush from being reelected?
Of course, you don't need anything but an economic motive to explain Opec's move. They are somewhat hurt by a declining dollar exchange rate, and are trying to take it back through price hikes (even at the cost of production). Still, I can't help wondering if that is the only motive, especially considering that the last annoucement will mostly have a psychological impact. I doubt any Opec countries apart from Saudi Arabia and Iran will.actually cut the production. And the regimes in these countries are the ones who have the most to lose from Bush's ambitious plans to democratise the Middle East.
Wired seems to take it seriously. The New York Times seems to report it as actual news. Heck, the entire world seems to report this in a very serious way.
User Complaint About Existing Services Leads Google to Create Search-Based Webmail
Search is Number Two Online Activity – Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders
What really gives the joke away is the generousity:
Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer.
Would be nice. Very nice even. But I don't believe in free giga disk space more than I believe in free lunches.
Update: On the other hand, if it was really a joke, I guess they should have let us in on it by now? These guys asked if it was a joke, and the Google spokesman insisted this was real. Who on earth came up with the idea of sending out a flippant press release on April 1st about an improbable service?
Update 2: This Google wanted ad is definately an April Fool's joke for this year. I suspect gmail is real, but that they wrote the press release like a joke to get the publicity for it twice.
Steven Den Beste ponders why Europeans loved Clinton but hates Bush. There is actually very little difference between the foreign policies of democrats and republicans.
But they also discount the fact that, as the IHT article points out, the Democrats don't have any higher regard for European opinion than the Republicans do, and are no more enchanted by the Europeans as any kind of role model. The main difference between the parties when it comes to foreign policy is that the Democrats are willing to smile and nod at the Europeans before ignoring them, whereas the Republicans are more straightforward in expressing their disdain.
A different way to put that is that the Democrats are more willing to lie; the Republicans are more likely to tell the truth. There's less real difference between them in practice than the Europeans think.
Actually, he's more right than most Europeans are willing to admit. In European politics, rhetoric is often more important than substance.
European politicians will be deeply disappointed if they believe that an election victory to Kerry will change much in what the US does. But maybe they will be happy if he just pretends to care what they think.
I earlier wrote about a Norwegian newspaper article where the clueless journalist was shocked to find that John Kerry, too, was pro-Israel. Well, d'oh!
A rather bizarre flash movie, somewhat resembling the badger badger mushroom thingy posted some months ago: Kenya believe it. And, yeah, it mentions Norway.
