Freyburg

…and that name is “Orion.” Nifty, but why go back to the moon? To Mars, where half-naked women and swashbuckling surely await!

And though predictably the musical stylings of the dim-witted heiress are less than stellar, the Guardian rips the album to shreds with some lovely verbiage.

While Bush’s campaign to win over the hearts and minds of the Arab world through prisoner abuse and shock and awe has been somewhat unsuccessful (supriise), Venezualan president Hugo Chavez is skyrocketing in popularity in the Middle East. Odd but true.

Newsweek has a state of the union piece about the United States ongoing fight about terrorism, five years after the World Trade Center came crashing down. It’s interesting in that apparently the U.S. and Britain have made some progress in infiltrating jihadist cells, which they had no success with previous to 9/11.

This ridiculous commercial is just what’s needed to get top-drawer (one could even say “slam dunk“) recruits into the CIA. Sign me up!

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of lefty mainstay The Huffington Post, but this roll-over extravangaza of what right wingers see when they read the New York Times is pretty damned funny.

Kottke has a couple of good links to articles detailing how people acted as human computers before we had machine to do the math, as well as musings from a web designer as to what his career would have been 100 years ago.

Well, actually, the fellows profiled in “The Wonga Coup” were anything but gentlemen, and someone apparently forgot to inform them that it isn’t the nineteenth century. But their attempt in 2004 to make a game out of a military coup in Equatorial Guinea, while enriching themselves with a pile of oil money, didn’t quite come off. Sounds like a really interesting read, and I’ll be adding it to my wishlist. Read the story in Salon. You’ll have to watch a short ad beforehand, but then you get unlimited access to the site.

Yes, I’ve finally broken down and created a podcast about (what else) Doctor Who. Myself and I Am Steven yandered on for a half hour over Skype about the show, I did some noodling in Garageband, and voila…we’re radio hosts. You can subscribe directly to the feed, or go to the simple webpage I set up for it. I registered with iTunes, but it hasn’t shown up there yet. Eventually there’ll be a section on the right hand side of the page notifying everyone of new podcasts, but this will do for now.

Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was kidnapped and held for 82 days by Iraqi insurgents earlier this year, before eventually being released. She remained silent about her ordeal, up until now. The CSM is running a multi-part series where she details the experience of being yanked off the streets and held for ransom.