Quartz City

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.”

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.

Zany North Korean dictator Kim Jong Ill II has a weblog…

Today I was so depressed I wrote an opera. I want it to come out in the summer which means we have to start casting in the spring, which means I have to order the kidnappings like next week. I am so busy.

Dear diary. Bush still doesn?t ?get it.? I tried making my feelings clear but he?s too busy ignoring me, he is such a jerk. Everything in his life is just Saddam, Saddam, Saddam and I am sick of it.

On the plus side, I think my hair looked pretty good today. Also I went frolicking at Paektu Mountain and the rainbow came out again. After dinner some of my subjects sang me a song because I invented Outer Space

Choice quote from today’s news.

The US army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, General William Wallace, warned that long supply lines and Iraqi guerrilla-style tactics had reduced the chances of a swift military victory.

“The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” he told The Washington Post, in comments reported to have caused some unease in the Pentagon.

So do they still have the receipt for that war game? It’s obvious they need to take it back.

Er, what the hell?

The House passed a resolution Thursday calling for a national day of humility, prayer and fasting in a time of war and terrorism.

The resolution, passed 346-49, says Americans should use the day of prayer “to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities, and to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our nation.”

OK, if the government goes ahead with this, it’s time to eat, drink, and party on that day.

Today’s Word Spy seems rather appropriate….

-dog watching TV
idiom. A person who is viewing or working with something without understanding what it is or what it does.

Example citation:
“This was my first job in this command and I felt like the dog watching television,” he said. “I knew there was a lot going on around me. I just didn’t know what it was.”

Mac OS X Hints posts a fantastic shortcut for emailing Safari URLs via Mail.app.

Drag the following “url” (actually a javascript) to your bookmark bar:
javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)

Call it whatever (say ‘e’). Since this is a bookmark (and not a folder), a hotkey is assigned to it (command-1 to command-9) by Safari.

Now whenever you need to send the page title and URL to someone, just press the hot key, and that’s it!! A mail message is created with the title of the page as the subject, the URL as the body, and the cursor active on the “To:” field.

OK, I’m going to see how far I can get today without blogging anything about The Current Situation…

This kinda got lost in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, but it’s some prime doublespeak.

But there are depths even Mr. Bush shouldn’t be allowed to plumb without rebuttal. This week, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reached these limits. Pouring contempt on the UN’s record of inaction, Mr. Fleischer said on Monday that, “from the moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . the UN Security Council will have failed to act once again.” In a literal sense, he is dead right; the Security Council did fail miserably in 1994. But his insinuation distorts what happened. With the ninth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide only weeks away, certain truths mustn’t become casualties of U.S. spin doctors.

To begin, Mr. Fleischer should review an interview between ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Mr. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. When Mr. Donaldson asked him what he would do if “God forbid, another Rwanda should take place,” Mr. Bush replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interests. . . . I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda.”

Second, as Mr. Fleischer must surely know, the Security Council failed to intervene in Rwanda because Washington opposed any such intervention. This was the stance pushed by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright on behalf of the Clinton administration, and the position of Republicans in Congress. A rare moment of U.S. political consensus allowed a clique of Rwandan extremists to orchestrate one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, annihilating some 800,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus.

To highlight today’s moral irony, America’s efforts to prevent the Security Council from intervening in Rwanda was fervently seconded by none other than Britain, then led by John Major.”