Can you give me and my gun a ride to Washington, DC?
A brilliant taxi driver knew the answer, which WTF? No! So the taxi driver drops him off at the train station and calls police instead.
I can just hear the 911 call now:
911: “What is the nature of your emergency?”
Taxi driver: “Some dude with a gun asked me to drive him to Washington, DC.”
911: “Did the passenger fail to pay you?”
Taxi driver: “Excuse me!  He had a gun.  A big gun.”
911: “Ah, I see.  What kind of gun do you have sir?”
Taxi driver: “I don’t have a gun.  I kicked my passenger’s ass out of my car and his gun.”
911: “Where did you lose your gun, sir?”
Taxi driver: “click…”

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This poster on MarketWatch asks how Crox can be losing money by making a shoe for $0.03 and selling it for $30.  That is like asking why bottled watch frequently costs more than soda (or beer).

[Updated 11/13/2008 from another news article]

Sometimes the pictures make the news by themselves.  Alcohol-related just jumps to mind before we even know any other details.
There is not much to do in Idaho sometimes.  Brutsche-Ely (the name speaks volumes too) evidently had about a dozen too many drinks.  She tried to hit a security guard.  Finding that she wasn’t doing much damage that way, she rolled the dice and pulled out her special damage multiplier.  She went to the next level by taking off her clothes.  I guess stripping was the most damaging, hurtful thing she could think of. Continue Reading

Few and far between are the dumbasses that just leave me floored.  This one is a real head-fake.

First, the background.  van Tassel, former US Army Iraq veteran, dons a ski mask, grabs a nearby American flag, and a handgun.  His plan?!  To protest something from a bridge in Santa Barbara, CA.  He obviously has his plan well thought out, since he leaves the bullets at home, presuming he had any.

Police in Santa Barbara are obviously smarter than in most places.  van Tassel is up on the bridge, stopping traffic since he’s waving a gun and the flag.  What do police do?  These brilliant police trade him an Obama campaign poster for his gun.  Something along the lines of “If you drop your gun, which is the only real reason you’re still here, we’ll give you a poster about hope.”  van Tassel, using the rapid decision making skills he learned in the Army, agrees.

van Tassel eventually gets tired of the Obama sign, or realizes that it won’t shoot anything, and gives up.  Police charge him with investigation of possession of a concealed firearm, possession of an
illegal weapon, conspiracy, resisting arrest, brandishing a weapon,
disturbing the peace, wearing a mask for the purpose of committing a
crime and allowing an unlicensed driver to drive.  I know that last one is the real clincher.  I wonder why they didn’t charge him with bad politics too?  Oh, right–this is California.

This Naugatuck man is a dumbass of the day wannabe.  This Yahoo article tells us of a man who fired a shotgun at a gas pump while people were standing around.  Fortunately, it didn’t explode.  Frustrated as his dismal failure, he drove off and promptly struck two cars.  2 cars!

Too bad that Darwin didn’t prevail.  The man lived.  Ironically, there are 2 police officers stationed at his room to keep him alive until he goes to a PITA prison.

ZDNet had an interesting article questioning how the Internet would hold up to the Olympic streaming demands. Since all of the video will be using unicast technologies, it is a real question.

The Dallas News tells us that police had to free 26 cheer leaders from an elevator at the University of Texas Jester Hall. Wow.

I have to assume that this was a cheer leader camp or such, and that the girls (where were the guys?) must have been really bored. Still, 26 is a pretty impressive number. I don’t think I’ve seen 26 clowns in a funny car before–maybe 15. So hey, that’s an idea. Next time switch and put 15, the recommended max for the elevator, clowns in the elevator and 26 cheer leaders in the funny car.

The end of the article is almost as funny as the rest of it. A Ms. Weldon, the director of communications for the UT Police Department, said that the sign says that there should be no more than 15 passengers or 3,000 pounds. I highly doubt that even 26 14-17 year old girls managed to tip the scales over 3,000 pounds. I rather think that the doors didn’t open because they detected too much pressure and stayed closed for safety reasons. I was in a situation like that once. In high school I was doing some volunteer work. One of the guys with me thought it would be funny to pull on the elevator doors as we descended. The elevator stopped in between floors and locked up.

The moral of the story–don’t be a dumbass, especially in an elevator.

I remember Julie Wainwright from the old days, the pre-dot-com bubble days. The sock puppet was pure marketing genius at the time. Then it flopped.

She’s back with her website called SmartNow. She has a fascinating blog entry about some of the mistakes she made at/after the time and what she’s learned.

People always say–well at least successful people frequently say–to learn from failures, and that success generally is the last step after a string of failures. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame says that the more spectacular the failure, the more attention you get, which can be good in its own right. Julie didn’t get that benefit. People laughed at her and she had to fight depression.

I’m not going to take anything away from Julie’s post. Go read it.

In my continuing research on the semantic web, I make it a priority to catch everything going by that affects the monetization of the web.  Harris Interactive performed a poll asking people about their attitude towards targeted advertising on the web.  After a few questions, the interviewer told the user about new FCC privacy regulations.  The results were somewhat surprising.

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Everyone seems to be talking about the semantic web these days.  Not wanting to appear a fool, I’ve been listening to it for some time without talking about it yet.  The time to talk is about here.

Like many, I have too many feeds, too many things to watch.  My aggregater needs aggregating.  I can’t find what I want, I’ve read behind others who want one too, so I’ve begun to build it.   In the next week or two, I’ll be introducing my attempt to make the web more manageable.  Stay tuned.