East of the Sun, West of the Moon

You may have heard about this ridiculous bill that the movie industry is trying to push through in the USA. Well, the people that buy into the movie industry are trying, anyway.

The proposed legislation would make fast-forwarding through those ads illegal — not only in theaters, but also at home, …

They can’t possibly be serious. They can’t. This is an early April Fools joke, right? I mean, let me get this straight, are they going to:

• fine people for showing up late at a movie theatre?
• stop them from walking out the theatre to go to the bathroom or get some extra snacks, during the ads?
• tie me to my chair so I can’t walk into the kitchen?
• disable the mute button too?
• …

And that’s of course just the beginning. Next they plan to:

• Prevent you from changing to a different channel when there’s an ad break in progress.
• Stop you from skipping past the ad-pages in your favourite magazine.
• Make it impossible to toss the snail-mail spam you get, it’ll jump right out of the trash when you try, onto the table so you can read it.
• … fill in more ridiculous thoughts here…

Whatever these people are smoking, I’d love to have some of it, because it must be pretty damn strong!

The first actual paper on voting machine irregularities, with an article in Wired implying the vote could be off by as much as 260,000 votes that should’ve gone to Kerry. Not enough to make a difference on the known outcome, but what else has been going on and how does this reflect on other states? Meanwhile Mr Bush grabs some more money that the next few generations will have to pay back, somehow.

I sincerely hope that the return of the original Mr. Wendy means that we’ve seen the last of the unofficial Mr. Wendy because he’s way past the point of getting on my nerves. Thank $deity for videorecorders and fast-forwarding and don’t you dare take the right away from me to do so!

I guess it had to happen. After a busy start with more entries than days in the month in October, I’m now showing more empty days than otherwise in November. The novelty has worn off and now I need to figure out what I’m really going to do with this blog. I expect I’ll continue to list odd or otherwise read-worthy sites & links I run across and occasionally share my thoughts on what’s going on in the world.

Speaking of that… some sites have been created to express the feelings of people that voted for the other guy and now feel like the world thinks they didn’t even bother. I had great fun browsing some of them and some stronger worded protest websites, you also have to wonder what these people think of those in other countries. Surely the non-Americans must realize even without these sites that if around 55 million voted against the guy who ended up winning that it was not a giveaway by any means? While some are no doubt still making sure that the elections are kept honest, the rest of us should now move on and make damn sure that the president does something useful with his 4 more years, in any way we can.

Hmm… just read on Electoral Vote that there is an effort in progress to raise money to request a recount in Ohio. Ouch, I had no idea that something like that, which seems like a fairly fundamental request, would cost that much money. Good luck to them, if they succeed I’m sure we’ll hear about it one way or another in the big media…