] Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew
] about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by
] Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances
] with Iraq's neighbors.
]
] The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan
] appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S.
] government and the United Nations for years.
]
] The unclassified State Department documents sent to
] congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign
] policy divulge that the United States deemed such sales
] to be in the "national interest," even though they
] generated billions of dollars in unmonitored revenue for
] Saddam's regime.

[ Wow. Super. -k]

CNN.com - Documents: U.S. condoned Iraq oil smuggling - Feb 2, 2005

] Michelin has developed a new non-pneumatic car wheel that
] has been adopted for various robotics uses. It reminds me
] of the "Smartwheels" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash...

[ Awesome. -k]

Boing Boing: Snow Crash-like wheels from Michelin

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer...

[...]

He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

[ Stranger than fiction.... -k]

Man peed way out of avalanche

] Jan. 21: Conservative Christian groups are upset about a
] video that included SpongeBob SquarePants, saying the
] cartoon character is promoting a homosexual agenda.
] NBC’s Don Teague reports.

GOD Damn Faggot Sponge!

[ Does it ever seem like the best thing the ultra CC folks can do is continue this sort of attack? The best thing for everyone else, I mean. By all means, continue to marginalize yourselves by having a good solid freak out any time gays aren't being vilified. -k]

MSNBC - Christian groups go after ‘SpongeBob’

] First, a big thanks to everyone who donated during
] December, it was much appreciated. And it's never too
] late to give to these groups, they are really doing
] amazing and crucial work.
]
]
] So after having committed to send coal, we had to figure
] out how to get coal...

[ The story in pictures of Downhill Battle sending coal to RIAA and MPAA for being bad last year. Nice. -k]

Downhill Battle - Send Coal to the RIAA and MPAA!

] This is an ad for the Macintosh around 1989.

[ Kind of a neat blast from the past. Sometimes we forget that there was a time when "Copy" and "Paste" were brand new concepts. And, dude, Hypercard! -k]

Matt Groening Apple Ad

] As with most miracles, the functional elimination of
] distance became invisible to us almost as soon as it
] happened. The planet shrank by several orders of
] magnitude and most of us adapted at once. But I had an
] experience - or rather, two experiences - the night I
] arrived from London which made it seem that the earth had
] shrunk to a point of global intimacy. Indeed, they felt
] like that first mystical moment the Internet provided me
] many years ago, when I realized that I could type
] "telnet" at a terminal prompt and cause any number of
] hard disks to spin all over the world.

BarlowFriendz: The Intimate Planet

] With its music downloads selling at a rate of more than a
] million per day, Apple Computer Inc. said Monday
] customers have purchased more than 250 million songs from
] its online iTunes Music Store.

Talk about volume. Apple was excited to sell its first million... now it is about 1.25m/day.

[ That's really excellent. The questions I see now are, how much money does that represent for Apple, how much for the labels, and at the greatest level, how much for the artists?

If the store ends up driving iPod sales, then Apple wins, i'd say, which is why, of course, they don't want to let you play those tracks on your Rio. They sold 807,000 iPods last quarter - about a quarter billion dollars worth of revenue. (According to Forbes Apple's sold 10 million iPods for about 2.8 billion dollars in the past 2.5 years.) The math's not hard there. -k]

Forbes.com: Update 1: Apple ITunes Sells 250 Million Songs

] A 63-year-old man who hasn't slept for more than two
] decades has been told there is nothing wrong with him by
] doctors.
]
]
] Ukrainian Fyodor Nesterchuk from the town of
] Kamen-Kashirsky said the last time he managed to doze off
] was more than 20 years ago.

[ As long as i wasn't tired all the time, I think i'd be ok with never having to sleep... -k]

Ananova - Ukrainian hasn't slept in 20 years

] LONDON - Volkswagen and DDB London are distancing themselves
] from a hoax viral commercial for the VW Polo . . .

I'm not even sure what to say about this one. Just look at it, you'll probably be speechless too.

[ Yeah, wow. -k]

Small But Tough