Isn't this a Hugh Grant movie? YouTube has announced YouPrez; make a platform for your own presidential campaign, film a PSA/commercial for it, and post it on YouTube. Tag it "Youprez" and votes will be cast. I dunno what you get if you win…maybe Puerto Rico? Could be worse; have you ever been to Guam?
To this tiny corner therof, anyway.
Sometimes it's quite a long and winding road to the raincoaster blog, and I thought, as I'm too lazy to think of something more original, that we might just map an idea as it makes its way to a raincoaster post. And, frankly, there's nothing you can do to stop me.
Is there?
So this is the way it happened: raincoaster, feeling somewhat guilty at having taken nearly 35 hours this week off blogging to try a day job (the experiment appears not to have been a success) and sincerely desperate at watching the stats crawl into a well and begin plummeting to Satan's Doorstep, began Standard Operating Procedure 101, trawling the blogroll, looking for ideas to steal which to refer.
BoingBoing…nada. Sometimes they get on their copyright rants and sometimes they get on their cool nerdware rants and sometimes they get on their "Disney's Haunted Mansion is the greatest work of the human imagination in the history of civilization" and this seems to be one of all three of those sometimes. NEXT!
Defamer. Hmmm, the links aren't working. Cannot find server? It's a fucking Gawker Media server, you stupid Internet Explorer window; if Denton ever finds out you don't know where to locate a GAWKER MEDIA SERVER you'll never crunch bits in this blogosphere again.
Gawker is totally down.
PerezHilton is up. Good for him, he's been taking a lot of shit lately from abusive Britney fans.
It's a Definite Maybe is up. So to speak. As am I. So I read Jonathan's blog, and lo if it don't tell me sumpin' about why Gawker Media is down: it's a Russian spammer who has been targeted by the US. In exchange for being penalized, he's basically sent a denial of service attack to all of the customers of the company that turned him in, including Gawker Media and – get this – LiveJournal. So all Typepad, Movable Type, and Livejournal blogs are at risk today. Swell.
There are only two inviolate laws of the intra-web, and none of them involve talking about fight club. These are sacrosanct, immutable and will remain unchanged so long as humans are classed as homo sapiens…
(1) The internet is for porn.
(2) The internet allows people to be assholes. (Alternatively, the internet turns people into assholes, the internet encourages people to be assholes, the internet gives people reasons to be assholes, the internet is operated, used and promulgated solely by assholes.)
File today’s post, sadly, in category two.
According to the Washington Post, a Russian-based botnet owner effectively ended Blue Security Inc.’s brave but ultimately futile bid to give a big middle finger to spammers everywhere…
Those “other Web sites” mentioned in the article include Six Apart and the millions (literally) of blogs and sites it runs through TypePad and LiveJournal. Another, lesser, axiom of the intra-web is “You know someone with an LJ account.” Plenty of the blogs featured in my own links section are powered by TypePad and Movable Type.
The Russian spammer, reportedly going by the name of PharmaMaster, conducted DDoS attacks against Blue Security, several hosting sites and Six Apart (this last one because Blue Security posted information using Six Apart’s services, causing the blog network to be down from six to eight hours) [Wired.com]. If you try to access Blue Security, by the way, you’ll notice it isn’t working. Botnets are scary sons of bitches.
And there you have how this got posted; the Blogicidal spammer is the story that made it to raincoaster.
But
The second of Jonathan's Internet Laws leads me to the next meaty post, which shall require much actual writing on my part and maybe even some thinking, so it could take some time!
I am going to explain to you, the world, and even Polly Toynbee, why the Internet is made up of assholes and why that's okay. And if you don't like it, you can just .
It's lucrative! From Small Town Misfit:
From the often-accidentally-reliable Sun. I shall have Yavanna save me a BFO in the freezer for when I come over. How handy if the fish turned out to be something yummy; according to Charles Fort, they're virtually always pilchards or whitefish, though.
BRITAIN is set for a summer downpour of FROGS and FISH, scientists said yesterday.
Recent changeable weather conditions such as storms, droughts and sudden downpours have vastly increased the chance of objects falling from the sky.
Experts say the most likely spot for a BFO — “bizarre falling object” — is the Norfolk resort of Great Yarmouth.
The phenomenon is highlighted in a British Weather Services report.
Past recorded BFOs include jellyfish, frogs, crabs, fish and coal.
BWS senior meteorologist Jim Dale said the phenomenon can be caused by heat and air pressure coupled with atmospheric instability.
He said: “Converging cold air off the North Sea and warm air off the land make for the necessary conditions.”
Other BFO hotspots include east Manchester and Ipswich.
Date: Monday, November 11, 2002 2:47 AM
A couple of years ago I was sitting in my living room watching Law & Order or somesuch at 2am and I heard clip-clop, clip-clop, a sound which reminded me of racehorses and show jumpers, things you rarely encounter when sitting in your living room watching the telly. It for sure wasn't in the plot [Picture it: Mike gets drunk and drives, crashes, gets his license taken away and must pursue criminals from the back of an elderly cayuse, perhaps the very one from Cat Ballou! And Lenny has to ride shotgun, holding on for dear life].
But seriously, folks.
It wasn't part of the plot, which I think was the erotomania episode that I really like, not that I identify with any of the characters. Not even Claire! Well, maybe a little when Jack gets out the bike…NO! No rice burners for me, nor no slutty DA's neither. I still don't think Claire put out.
But meanwhile, back at the living room, the clip-clop continued. And for sure it wasn't coming from the tv. [Sidebar here, but a virtual sidebar because first of all this stuff you are reading is only photons on a screen, so it cannot really have a "side bar" because there is no physical side to attach it to, and no bar: it's just pictures. Second of all, I don't know how to do a sidebar in HTML, so there you go: nothing. Virtuoso virtuality, meta-metaphosphors. Don't you wish you'd gone to grad school now? Don't you wish I had, so I'd know what I was talking about? But the clip-clop wasn't coming from anything in the living room at all, that's what I wanted to use the sidebar to explain, at least I think that's what I wanted to use the sidebar to explain, but am not sure because I started this o-so-long-ago, somewhat like the Bush family must be feeling right now, but let's get at least one of these things finished, eh?] But if the sound wasn't coming from the tv [oh, wait! Now I remember what the sidebar was for. It was to say that you used to capitalise "TV" and now you don't. "tv." Does that signify a loss of stature on tv's part now that it is running shows like Blind Date or does it signify greater familiarity, to the extent of becoming a regular, rather than proper, noun? Methinks the latter (don't you just hate sentences like "Methinks the latter"? Don't you just want to bitch-slap them a little?) And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog]
So if the sound wasn't coming from my living room and it wasn't coming from my tv (which is in, though not really of my living room) where was it coming from? Not the rest of my house: although well-stocked with four-footed beasts, the place didn't harbour anything with shoes on, nor were any of my mice hefty enough to make such big, beefy clip-clops. There was this rat once…you could feel the floor shake when it gallumphed across the dining room…but he doesn't wear shoes…but anyway, it wasn't me, it wasn't them, it wasn't Jack or Claire or even beefy Mike, so it had to be something Outside.
I dashed to the blinds (I'll bet you thought I'd never get there). I peeked out between them. I saw…
You'll never guess what I saw!
At 2 in the morning!
On Pender Street!
A team of tired, plodding draft horses drawing a wagon, with an old man at the reins.
Apparition? A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago such a sight was common enough on this old pavement, but now? The only draft horses in the city of Vancouver pull wagonsful of tourists, but not around here and certainly not in the haunted hours. It's all way west and way earlier. All good Belgians should have been tucked up in bed long since, yet there was no denying that a couple of tons of horseflesh were wearily clipping and clopping down my street, only slightly after the turn of the millennium. Not that one, this one. Well, they might have been Percherons; it was real dark, okay?
After that I used to see them all the time, or rather only at 2 am, but all the time at 2am though not every time. The clip-clop would ring out through the soggy, foggy air and they would plod past, never looking up or even to one side, just nodding their heads in unison as they headed for their mysterious destination. Where they were going I never found out: it's all city for about thirty miles in the direction they were headed.
One cold, rainy night, long about 2am, I heard the now-familiar clip-clop, clip-clop trundling down the street from west to east, just as usual. Then I heard voices.
If you don't live in Vancouver and haven't spent a lot of rainy winter nights sitting up alone reading Victorian ghost stories it probably wouldn't be your first thought that the horses had learned to talk. I, however, live in Vancouver.
Maybe I wasn't surprised to hear my mid-night-mares talking, but I was surprised to hear them use such language. "Motherfucker" did it for me; I had to peek, if only to give them a sharp look. If they were a serious hallucination they would at least know that I paid them the respect of a proper reaction.
I dashed to the blinds…but we've been over this before. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pair of scrawny hookers, arguing about a drug deal.
But still the sounds continued.
Clip
Clop
Clip
Clop
Had my horsies become invisible? But no…wait…there was something about the hookers. They'd stopped. The horses stopped. The hookers moved on. The horses moved on.
Of course, hooker shoes!
raincoaster 