Everyone who has email gets Spam, there's just no way around it. Like most, I don't even bother to read them, I just hit the delete button. But there is one guy out there who does more than just read the spam, he replies to it.

Luckily for us, he archives his replies at The Spam Letters because some of them are pretty darn funny. One of my favorites is one in which he replies to an advertisement for an herbal rememdy to a certain male dysfuntion.

Not that I know any, but this article titled Caring for Your Intorvert could come in handy some day. Hmmmm, who do I know to whom I can apply this new-found knowledge?

Reminiscent of the movies they showed in elementary school, kids ducking under their desks to survive a nuclear--or is that nucular?-- bomb, the government has brought forth its newest propoganda tool: ready.gov. Yes, it's slick, it's colorful, it's been created by advertising experts, and it's just about absolutely useless. Thank you Mr Ridge.

The best part is that somebody has already lampooned the site. On the site, there is an entire section about what to do if various attacks occur. Somebody took that section and made some slight modifications.

With citizens such as these supporting our the cause, how can we lose? Take that you French swine.... we fart in your general direction.

For those who insist upon owning cats, just one of the downsides is the smell created by the fact that the cat "takes care of business" in the house. Yes, disgusting I know, but some people do put up with such behavior. Thankfully though, there is now a website that will teach you how to train your cat to use the toliet.

I wonder if you can train them to barf up their hairballs into the toliet too?

It is President's Day. And what's a holiday without someone to tell you that everything you know about a holiday is wrong? Well, it's not an American holiday, that's for sure.

Everybody knows that when you talk, air is being passed out of the lungs and through the voicebox. Yesterday I made an interesting observation, the voicebox works in both directions; you can talk while inhaling too. At first when I tried this (and I still don't know why I even bothered to try), I had a hard time. I'd get one or two words out and I'd find my self exhaling again. But with a little concentration I found that I could rattle off a short sentence all while inhaling.

Of course, this may be a well known fact and I am just too lame to have known it already. Last year I "discovered" that when editing a document, if you double click on a word, it selects the entire word. I thought this was great. When I told others of this great discovery they looked at me as if I had just discovered that the earth is round. Congratulations were not forthcoming.

Several weeks ago, it was revealed that Microsoft has been intentionally serving bad pages to visitors of MSN who use the Opera browser. They reconfigured the tables on the page so that the formatting looks terrible. The thinking being, if users see bad pages, they'll assume that Opera has problems and they'll switch to Microsoft's broswer.

It appears that two can play at that game. Opera has released a new version of their browser called Bork. It appears to be a normal version of Opera; all the pages show up normally. But if you visit the MSN site, all of the text is translated into the language of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. This is my kind of payback.

There clearly is no end to the lengths people will go in an effort to find bias where there is none. The latest example is the case of two sisters who are suing Southwest Airlines for racism. After reading the article, this is clearly the most ludicrous case to hit the courts in a long time. For the lazy, here's a synopsis.

The flight crew to leave the gate but people are still looking for seats (Southwest has no assigned seating). To let people know that they want them to sit down, a stewardess gets on the PA and says, "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe; pick a seat, we gotta go." Pretty clever, huh? I would have certainly thought so.

But two sister looking for seats were black. And they take this to be a racist taunt of some sort. It appers that this really did used to be a racist jingle. But give the stewardess a break, she's 22 years old. So far as she (and myself too until I read this) is concerned, it's just a play on a childrens rhyme.

The fact that they feel the need to sue of something so trivial makes me glad that they are not my neighbors.

Like Colorado, Pennsylvania has, or should I say had, Blue Laws that mandated no selling of liquor on Sundays. Now that we're out of the 19th century, Pennsylvania has finally started dismantling some of these antiquated measures. Not so for Colorado. Yes, the home of Puritanism is no ahead of our own fair state.

I don't remember where, but a year or so ago, I read an article concerning the status of these laws in Colorado. You'd think that the force behind the keeping of these laws would be religious conservatives. You'd be wrong. The reason that laws have not been overturned is due to powerful lobbying by representatives of the liquor strore owners. That's right, they don't want to be open on Sunday.

The thinking is... We're going to sell the same amount of product no matter how long we're open. Currently, if someone knows they need to buy liquor on Sunday, they buy it on Saturday instead. If we have to be open seven days a week, we'll take in no more income, but we'll incur more costs.

Does this sound like a good reason to have such a law on the books? Of course not. Yet, our legislators bow to their requests, all in the name of money. I can't think of any industry that wouldn't like to be afforded the same sort of protection.

People have created a lot of very interesting media presentations using Flash. This is not one of them. But it is funny nonetheless.

It's bad enough that there are morons out there who believe crazy stuff like this. But the fact that the moron in question is a congressman (I know, I repeat myself), is scary. The fact that he heads a homeland security subcommitte; well, that makes it downright frightening.

The good news is that the groundhog saw his shadow today. Since we haven't really had much of a winter, maybe that means we'll get one yet. Now that he's done being useful, here a site with some additional uses for Punxsutawney Phil.

Hey, in case you haven't noticed, I've made some design changes to the site. Don't worry, you can still count on the same stale content, only the looks have changed.

The redesign was taken for several reasons...

1) I was getting a little tired of looking at the dark brown color. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I thought I'd lighten things up a little bit.

2) For some reason, I followed the same format as most other blogging sites: a central blogging area with a section on the side that has assorted links and info. Yes, I am a drone. Like all of the other sites I've seen with this layout, the area underneath the links section is lost as dead space. This really bugged me. So I redesigned the site so that this space is no longer lost; now when the blogging messages get below this area, they wrap over to fill the space. To do this I had to use some tricks that mean people with older browser will not be able to see the site; at least not with the intended layout. Sucks to be them.

3) Search engines often link to the comments page and it often happens that people end up there as their first page on the site. Since this page was intended to be a pop-up, hitting the link for the home page resulted in the window being closed. For some reason, people take exception to this sort of behavior. The reason--aside from the fact that this is the default behavior of Moveable Type and, as mentioned before, I am a drone--is that I wanted people to be able to see the entry as they read/entered comments. The solution, which is now so obvious, is to get rid of the pop-up and put the text of the entry on the comment page. Aside from links to other sites, YABERS is now pop-up free. I feel so clean.