Astroturfing

We were gonna take today off (in the blogging sense) since we (a) got an incredibly late start today due to an incredibly sleepless night and (b) just coz everyone needs a day off every so often. But I just can't resist this... click for larger:

Of course, this all has to do with Madame Pelosi's comment about the insurance industry "astroturfing" all the health care town-halls and the like where real people happen to turn up with real questions. Astroturfing, my ass.

But then again... as many folks have noted in many other spaces on these here intertubes... it's a standard liberal ploy to accuse your opposition of doing just what you yourself are doing. Or have done... see the "my ass" link above. And thanks to commenter ManlyDad at Lex's place (August 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm) for the image link.

Found...

... while checking out a link to a link in comments on that water-slide vid at Lex's place. More fake stunts, but this one is way-cool:



Now just imagine being a passenger on that train were this REAL.

Apropos of Nothing

I mentioned in comments SN1 is in town, bedding the family down before he heads out to Kandahar. We fixed the world for quite a while last evening whilst sitting on the verandah knocking back more than a few barley pops and assorted other adult beverages. Some of last night's remnants:

I'll spare you a view of the empties, Gentle Reader. And yes, I feel fine today.

A Lil Light Reading for a Friday Afternoon...

That's a screen shot from memeorandum, date/time as noted in the upper right-hand corner (click for larger). The reddish links are things I've read, the blue yet-to-be-read... but I probably won't read even half of this stuff. I'm just killing a lil bit o' time waiting for SN1 & Co. to arrive so we can begin Happy Hour... which has been seriously delayed. I'll have to counsel the boy about punctuality once he arrives. But we digress.

You'll note from the headlines in the image that it is getting VERY ugly out there. Assaults. Intimidation from union goons and thugs... and that's from our friends on the Left. Wasn't it supposed to be the conservatives who were/are the mob at these town-hall meetings? I won't be at all surprised if I read about riots in the coming days and weeks...

Ugly.

Another Stolen Bit...

Via Lex, who posted the link with the pithy post title "Math," followed with an oh-so-accurate summation: "It really is important." And that was it... all, end of report.

Heh. But that IS way-cool, no?

Further...

Remember The Smoking Hot Cigar Chick I posted the other day? Well... here's a counterpoint:



Kim is... ummm... much more like it, no? And by "it" I mean "down to earth." That's my Bud Tim on the right (I use the term "Bud" loosely, but he takes great care of me). As a matter of fact, I got off the phone with him about five minutes ago... after ordering a box of these:

They should be here on Monday, accompanied by another five of those Nica Libres. My cigar consumption rate has gone through the roof now that summer is here. Well... that's not entirely true. It's only doubled... from one to two. Sometimes three. What the Hell... life is short, and getting shorter.

Twitter Still Down?

It looks like it... at this writing... coz what you see on the right is what I see in my G-Mail box.

This was a BIG DoS attack... from a Russian hacker. From CNet News:

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.
The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

[...]

Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and it suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

[...]

In the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the sites, computers that have been compromised by viruses or other malware are instructed by the attacker's computer to visit the specific Web sites all at the same time and repeatedly. The barrage of connection requests overwhelms the target sites, making it so that legitimate Web traffic can't get through.
Such coordinated attacks require the efforts of tens of thousands or more of hijacked computers, which together form a botnet. Spammers send e-mails with malicious attachments or URLs to millions of people to create botnets. Criminals also can lease existing botnets for specific campaigns for as little as 5 cents to 10 cents per bot.

Facebook and YouTube were hit, too. I dunno about Facebook (I deactivated my account a couple of months ago) but I had no trouble with YouTube yesterday. I still can't log in to Twitter, though.

MUCH more at Techmeme, including how Google was impacted by the DoS attacks. There must be 50 different articles on this subject. And you thought Twitter was just a toy, didn't you? (/snark)

Update, 15 minutes later: I reloaded G-Mail and TwitterGadget came alive. Twitter was probably up all along... it's me that's the twit. Heh.