Jon Carroll’s column today is awesome:

Terrorism is not a nation; terrorism is a tactic. The United States has used it or condoned its use. There is currently a very real Islamic fundamentalist terrorist movement. The United States has an equally real obligation to use its power to oppose this movement.

The movement is not controlled from Iraq; there is no evidence that the elimination of Saddam Hussein would do anything to hinder that movement. The Taliban still move freely along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; their power has been diminished but not eliminated. But we are asked to forget about that, even as we are asked to forget about the still-mysterious anthrax attacks that occurred less than two years ago.

Go read the rest of it. Right now.

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For all you Buffy fans out there: The First Evil’s Online Journal.

Have decided to move on from the death of my Ubervamp, heart-breaking as it still is. The memorial page has provided some sense of closure, since obviously funeral was not possible for the medium-sized pile of dust.

(Warning: contains some spoilers for Season 7.)

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I found a new blog devoted to movie reviews, The Flick Filosopher. She gets to see all the movies I don’t any more. I have no idea if I agree with her on all her reviews (having not, you know, seen the damn movies), but her Bias Meter is pretty funny.

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Matthew Tobey provides us with a short list of who’s not involved with terrorism:

Blue Man Group: I致e said it before and I値l say it again; Blue Man Group was nowhere near the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998. While their stage show is packed wall-to-wall with less-than-subtle anti-capitalist propaganda, and they contributed a song to the charity album Now That’s What I Call Death to the Infidels, the strange paint-faced musicians are all bark and no bite.

For Darin: Emma of Late Night Thoughts… appreciates Miles Vorkosigan. Since Darin is a big fan of Lois McMaster Bujold’s series about Miles and his family and their various exploits, I thought he would enjoy reading how much others seem to be enjoying it too.

(The reason I keep putting links here is that normally I’d mail them to Darin, but a)I know he reads this page and b)perhaps one or two of you out there would appreciate a pointer to something offbeat as well.)

I read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning:

StreamRipperX is, very simply, a tiny piece of software for the Mac that records live, continuous MP3 audio streams from Net radio stations, automatically breaks up the songs they play into individual, high-quality, discrete MP3 files, names them and then lets you listen, organize, burn custom CDs, whatever. All free.

This is all it does. It is very simple. But it is, quite simply, the greatest thing ever in this lifetime ever. Think about it.

Here’s an example of what you can do right now: Click on one of hundreds of DJ-free, 24-hour online music stations of a particular, favorite genre, leave StreamRipper running for a few hours (or all day) and come back later — and, boom, waiting for you is a couple gigs of fresh new music, hours and hours worth, all organized by song name and group, ready to burn right to CD. Amazing. So much for Napster.

I mean: Damn. I am so behind. And like I’ve said, I’m on the Internet 24/7.

Needless to say, guess who downloaded StreamRipperX and set to work minutes later?

It does work as advertised, by the way.