Happy New Year!
In case you spent all year surfing for breaking news and in-depth reporting, you might have missed some of the crazier stories of the year. Fortunately for all of us, The Washington Times fills in the gaps with a long list of zany, but real stories of the year.
A few of my favorites:
BERLIN -- A swingers club in Berlin was forced to shut because a court ruled that members' moans and shrieks of pleasure violated noise regulations.TEHRAN -- Iranian police were on the lookout for an alleged sorcerer who conned a man into believing he was invisible and could rob banks.
LAKE CITY, Fla. -- A Lake City woman was hospitalized after her 9mm handgun fell into the commode and discharged, hitting her in the left buttock.
LONDON -- A Welsh police team dubbed "the Frying Squad" was formed to sniff out motorists who fuel their cars with cooking oil from fish and chip shops in a bid to avoid paying high government fuel taxes.
OXNARD, Calif. -- An Oxnard man was charged with animal cruelty and being under the influence of amphetamines after allegedly torturing and dissecting his daughter's pet guinea pig because he thought it was a camera-equipped robot placed in his home by government agents.
Merry Christmas. Your tax dollars at work: NORAD Tracks Santa.
Is there really a Santa Claus? Of course, he exists only in your head.
Science to the rescue to answer that age-old question.
My favorite part: "The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second."
Survivor Thailand has wrapped up and Brian Heidik, billed on the show as a used car salesman, won the $1 million grand prize. No surprise that Brian won, he was the strongest member left in the final weeks.
A larger surprise is Brian's recent "acting" history. Turns out he's appeared in a few soft-core porn movies that can be seen on Playboy or Cinemax. The Smoking Gun website has all the details.
Not only that, but his wife has also appeared in a few soft-core porn movies. She made a brief appearance on the show as a surprise guest. Their recent marital troubles are now behind them, according to another Smoking Gun entry.
I've made some significant changes to my blog tonight.
First, I'm now on a new domain (dondrake.com) instead of on my company site (www.drakeconsult.com). I wanted to move it off so this can have a life of its own, and not be directly tied to the biz. Also, I've owned dondrake.com for 5 years, I might as well do something with it.
In moving to the new domain, I'm also using a new content management system: Movable Type. Previously, I was using GreyMatter, both are excellent tools to manage a blog. I wanted to give MovableType a try, since I've been doing this for a while now and a few sites I visit regularly have also made the transition. It was the other blogware (is that a word?) that I seriously looked into when I started this experiment.
In making the migration to MovableType, I also imported previous entries. This was easier said than done. I ran into a few problems along the way. First, was the export from GreyMatter can only be done in descending order. MovableType's import can only be done in ascending order, so my entry ID's were reversed. I needed them to stay the same so I can write my redirect script on drakeconsult.com to the new domain. So I had to write a small amount of perl to reverse the exported file so the import would work. Also, if you close an entry in GreyMatter, it won't be exported, this caused the ID in the import to go off by one. It took about 5 export/reloads for it to go smooth, thank goodness for the mt-load.cgi script, that was handy.
I'll be fiddling with the look and feel of the new site to get it looking better. I wanted to launch everything at once, but the appearance of the site will get better over time.
BTW, here's the perl code to reverse the GreyMatter export:
Get your war on has some hysterical cartoons regarding the war on terrorism and other hot topics. Worth a visit, be prepared to laugh out loud.
'Fightin' Whites' spoof raises $100,000
What started out as an attempt to shame a local high school into dropping a mascot name viewed as racist has raised at least $100,000 for scholarships for Indian college students.The effort began last winter when a group of Indian students at the University of Northern Colorado asked officials at nearby Eaton High School to change the school's mascot from "Fighting Reds" because the name was offensive.When the school refused, members of the UNC intramural basketball team, made up of Indians and whites, decided to get even.They named themselves the "Fightin' Whites" and began wearing T-shirts bearing the name. After getting national media attention they began selling the shirts, which also bear the slogan "Everythang's going to be all white," from their Web site.More than 15,000 shirts and hats have been sold, raising at least $100,000.Buy your loved one a "Fightin' Whites" t-shirt, hat, bag, boxers, mouse pad, or mug.