Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

I’ve been neglecting my friends and my blog-readers. And for that I apologize. Stupid work.

So here’s not one, not two, but three week’s worth of selected (by me) news snippets courtesy of Harper’s.

The Labor Department reported that the economy created a mere 96,000 jobs last month, thus failing to keep pace with the expansion of the nation’s work force and confirming that George W. Bush has the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. The White House reacted to the bad news by declaring that the poor job numbers prove that the president’s tax cuts have been working.

double ewe tee eff?

The Iraq Survey Group issued its final report and concluded that Saddam Hussein dismantled his nuclear weapons program in 1991 and did not attempt to revive it. The inspectors said that there was no evidence that Iraq continued to possess chemical or biological weapons, and they concluded that Hussein refused to admit he had disarmed because he wanted to maintain a deterrent against Iran. [New York Times] President Bush said that the report proved that Iraq was “a gathering threat.” [New York Times]

double double ewe tee eff.

A Washington, D.C., policeman arrested, cuffed, and jailed a woman for eating a candy bar in the subway. [Associated Press]

Republicans in Michigan were calling on authorities to prosecute Michael Moore for offering to give clean underwear to college students if they would promise to vote. [Associated Press]

Cheney claimed that he had never before met Senator Edwards; newspapers then published a photograph of the two men smiling and speaking together at a prayer breakfast. [New York Times]

Chicago experienced its first murder-free night in five years,

Britain suspended the license of the factory in Liverpool that was supposed to manufacture almost half the American supply of this year’s flu vaccine. [New York Times] Public health experts have long warned that it is insane for the United States to depend on two companies for the country’s flu vaccine. [New York Times]

Mexico declined to stop the construction of a Wal-Mart next to the ancient ruins of Teotihuacán, and paleontologists [Reuters] in China discovered 130-million-year-old fossils of Dilong paradoxus, an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, with impressions of feathers all over its body. [New York Times]

Korean and Italian researchers developed a tiny robot with multiple legs designed to crawl through a patient’s guts. [New Scientist]

Scientists with NIZO Food Research developed an artificial throat that breathes, salivates, and swallows. [New Scientist]

A nineteen-year-old Singapore man set a world record for the number of hamburgers he could stuff in his mouth. “I’m on top of the world right now,” he said,” because everyone’s going to know that I can shove more than three burgers in my mouth.” [Associated Press]

United States military personnel who worked at Camp Delta, the largest prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, revealed that many prisoners there were tortured by being forced to endure strobe lights and cold temperatures and extremely loud recordings of Limp Bizkit. [New York Times]

I wonder if they got royalties.

A senate candidate in Oklahoma warned of “rampant” lesbianism in the schools. [Associated Press]

People in Detroit were debating the wisdom of creating an “Africa Town” district, where the city would give special loans to black businessmen. [New York Times]

A quadriplegic man succeeded in checking email and playing computer games via a microchip embedded in his brain. [Nature.com]

The federal government reached its $7.4 trillion debt ceiling and was forced to delay contributions to pension plans. [Washington Post]

Police in Burlington, Ontario, were searching for someone who glued shards of glass to playground equipment. [CBC News]

The Global Amphibian Assessment announced that 1,856 of the 5,743 known amphibian species are at risk of extinction

Absentee ballots missing the names of John Kerry and John Edwards were mailed to Ohio voters. [Cincinnati Post]

Two Polish doctors and two ambulance workers were charged with murder for killing patients in exchange for kickbacks from funeral homes. [Associated Press]

Boston police killed a woman with a non-lethal pepper spray projectile after the Red Sox defeated the New York Yankees to win the American League Championship Series. [Associated Press]

Six Buddhist monks from Ratchaburi, Thailand, were arrested and defrocked for holding wild drug and alcohol parties. [New York Times]

The British Armed Forces officially recognized its first Satanist, a sailor on the HMS Cumberland who will now be permitted to perform Satanic rituals on board. [BBC]

Have I mentioned this already?

A little while ago I deleted my friendster account. I never liked friendster, really. Sometimes I hated it. It was novel at first. One thing that especially irked me was the people who have over 100 people on their ‘friends’ list. I guess different people use it for different things. I chose to take the ‘friends’ in frienster literally. I had a policy where if I didn’t actually see you regularly, or if you weren’t in Vancouver - basically if you weren’t actually my friend - I wouldn’t approve your ‘friendship’ request. To me friendster is mostly a thinly veiled dating service. Why would it be used for anything else, when any decent email program has an address book that you can just make a ‘friends’ entry for your bulk emails? When I did occasionally visit the friendster website, which was primarily when I got an email saying that I had a message (it would be too easy for friendster just to forward the actual message to me), sometimes I would check the ‘gallery’ to see if any of my friends had friends of friends who were single. Nothing ever came of it - I never emailed someone to say “hey - you don’t know me, but you do know John who knows Sally who knows me, so hey…how about a date, huh?”

We played D&D last night and it was fun. The gang is on board a galleon. They’ve had to be hired on as workers, which required a lot of shenanigans, since none of them (except the NPCs) have any sailor skills. The ship is under command of their enemies, so they have to constantly be careful not to expose themselves. This is particularly difficult because Paul’s wizard character used a magical ‘hat of disguise’ to get on board the ship (wizards are not allowed) and they are now travelling through a zone that negates magic. This zone surrounds an island called The Flame of Mesir-Ramok. The island is all that remains of the domain of an ancient dragon god-king, who was so nasty that all the other gods got together centuries ago to destroy him and his continent.

Anyway, Marlo’s spindly elf character (Marwen) couldn’t pass as a sailor, so she was trained to be the cook. So far, even though she took 6 ranks in the Profession: cooking skill, she’s rolled a 1 for both consecutive meals she’s prepared for the crew, and the officers are demanding that something be done about her. The salty sea-dog captain, who has a thing for elves and orchestrated the whole arrangement for Marwen to be cook in the first place, told the crew he’d see to it “personally” and demanded sexual favours from her, otherwise who knows what will happen.

Meanwhile the wizard spent the last 24 hours hiding in the spare rigging or throwing up from seasickness, or both. It’s pretty entertaining as a DM.