Quartz City

Today’s required reading: Thom Hartmann’s essay, “When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History“.

Go read it right now. I’ll wait.

Megnut links to a cool app called IndyJunior which takes an XML file of latitudes and longitudes and creates a Flash map of one’s travels.

Chris Hellman links to an interesting article on the uphill struggle to market wine to Americans.

Chris’s rant on Calfornia wine is spot-on:

Don’t get me wrong, I like California wine. They have the prettiest vineyards, their wineries smell heavenly and the personal flair of California winemakers is unsurpassed. It’s just the taste of the wine that’s the problem. There are a few excellent wines, for example Carneros and Russian River Pinot Noirs, Napa Champaigne sparkling wines, Central Coast Petite Syrah’s and some unique Sonoma dessert wines. However for the most part, huge buckets of solventy, oak-chipped Chardonnay, truckloads of bland and boring Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and a non stop faucet drip of other hastily made grape juice flows out of the golden state.

And thanks to Chris for pointing out TiZWine.com - a terrific New Zealand wine news site.

The OC Weekly has a nice feature on Sandow Birk’s hilarious sham-documentary In Smog And Thunder which is being featured at the Newport Beach Film Festival next week.

File this under “you have got to be kidding”:

Two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, and the Rev. Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse said workers are near the Iraq border in Jordan and are ready to go in as soon as it is safe. The relief and missionary work is certain to be closely watched because both Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention have been at the heart of controversial evangelical denunciations of Islam, the world’s second largest religion.

The New York Freemasons are conducting a recruitment drive to increase their ever-dwindling membership. As part of the campaign, they’re offering a one-day class “compressing the rituals that could take a year to master.”

Today’s Word Spy is good enough to post in it’s entirety…

scam baiting

(SKAM bay.ting) pp. Teasing a scam artist - particularly someone running the Nigerian advance fee fraud scheme - by feigning interest in the scam and forcing the scammer to perform silly or time-wasting tasks.

Example Citation:
Scam-baiting has become the main attraction at a number of Web pages devoted to scams. Two Columbus, Ohio-area friends started the Scam Joke Page last year at www.geocities.com/scamjokepage and write under the pseudonym David Lee Roth, stringing along the scam artists who contact them and insulting them in the process. In one exchange, they suggest two fictional banks - with the acronyms GRIFT and MORON - that they’d like to use to send the scammer money. The scammer dutifully checks and responds that those banks don’t have branches in his country, and that Western Union would be preferable.

The British authors of another scam-baiting page, www.geocities.com/a_kerenx/ call their hobby “the new Internet blood sport.” The pair, who often write under the name Alexander Kerensky, have tricked scam artists into waiting in front of a public webcam in Amsterdam, then posted their images on the Internet. In one exchange, they pretend to be a retired general who is naively cooperating with the scam - until they invent a scheming girlfriend who threatens to expose the scam artist if she doesn’t receive a cut of the money.

Texan state rep. Wayne Christian, has introduced a bill that would triple the state’s taxes on French wine and triple the 14 percent liquor tax that the restaurants pay for the wine.

So if they’re so outraged about European non-support, then why aren’t they doing the same for German beer then? Morons.

Via BBC. You may begin freaking out at T-minus 10… 9… 8… 7…

The World Health Organization expert who first identified the mystery pneumonia that has claimed dozens of lives has himself died of the disease, the UN agency has announced.

Dr Carlo Urbani, a 46-year-old Italian and an expert on communicable diseases, had identified Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in an American businessman admitted to hospital in Vietnam in February.

The WHO said Dr Urbani’s early detection of SARS had led to increased global surveillance, enabling the identification and the subsequent isolation of those with the disease to slow its spread.

At least 54 people are known to have died of the disease, and more than 1,400 people to be suffering from it.

Note that 1000 (that’s one thousand!) people are being quarantined.

Folks, I’m having massive DNS and DNS propagation problems right now. Expect basically nothing to work until… well until it starts working again.