Testing some markup features

This post has no real content of interest.

Ideally, this part should show up normally, though I've put it in its own <div> block.

If this is the second paragraph, then it didn't work.

Creating a Private Blog on a Free Blogging Service

There are a few problems with Facebook (and similar services):

1. It's a walled garden
2. You have no control over your data (even though you think you do)
3. You're not the customer, you're the product

Free blogging sites get around problem 1, but not the other two. Generally, you have even less control over your data, since the whole point is to publish so that everyone in the world can potentially read it. To get around all of these problems, you'd need to host your own site, which can be a pain and costs more than it's worth to most people.

So, what can we do with a free blogging site? We can post encrypted articles, and only distribute the keys to the people we want reading them. Not only have we removed problem 1, since anyone with the appropriate crypto can read the articles, but we've also partially removed problem 2. Why partially? I'll get to that in a bit. We still have problem 3, but that's an economic reality for any free service. You can, however, shop around for a service that treats you as a product with dignity, at least, and you can potentially find a paid blogging service that doesn't support encryption (or whose encryption you don't want to use), at which point you become the customer, and just a little more human in the eyes of the service.

Why might you not want to use a perfectly functional encryption service provided by a blog host? It's a question of who has the keys. It's almost certain that the host would have your encryption keys, and would provide the encryption and decryption on the fly. While convenient, it's still a loss of control, and they can hand your decrypted data to anyone they choose (though you may have some contract protections in this regard). It's also likely that they'll use password-based authentication. We're going to use public-key authentication, and we're going to do it in a way that's fairly easy and robust againt forgotten passwords.

Let's consider the following scheme. You write a new article for your semi-private blog. The bulk of this article (or maybe just a small part of it) is a well-delimited block of ciphertext. Maybe it looks like the following:

BEGIN CRYPTOBLOG
Key: http://some.location/key_identifier
66fa53d9b7b04210a54853e406d7b119...
END CRYPTOBLOG

We use special tags to denote the beginning and end of the special contents. This is easy for a person to pick out visually, and is also easy for a program to parse. The first line points to a URL with keying information for this article. We'd expect many articles to use the same key, since there's no reason not to. Keys should be changed occasionally, to prevent certain attacks that come from large amounts of available ciphertext, and when you want to deny someone who previously had access to your articles access to any new ones. We'll use a nice strong symmetric key encryption algorithm, such as AES-256.

We now have our encrypted article, how do we distribute the keys? The simplest way to do this is through another blog post. We have one key, but we want to make it available to a potentially large number of people. Let's say each of them has an RSA public key. A simple way to propagate the key is with a list of the following form:

Alice   E(Alice,key)
Bob     E(Bob,key)
Charlie E(Charlie,key)

Here the first column is the person's name, and the second is the key encrypted with that person's public key. This isn't great, from a privacy standpoint, because you've just transmitted the names of all your friends. Slightly better is

Pubkey(Alice)   E(Alice,key)
Pubkey(Bob)     E(Bob,key)
Pubkey(Charlie) E(Charlie,key)

Now we haven't revealed anyone's name, but we've revealed their public keys. This allows someone to correlate public keys between subsequent AES keys, revealing the degree of churn in your list of friends. Also, by publishing pairs of public keys and ciphertexts, you're potentially giving an adversary a leg up in cracking the corresponding private keys. Since just a smidge more paranoia costs us very little, let's instead go with the following:

H(Pubkey(Alice)|E(Alice,key))     E(Alice,key)
H(Pubkey(Bob)|E(Bob,key))         E(Bob,key)
H(Pubkey(Charlie)|E(Charlie,key)) E(Charlie,key)

The first column is now a hash of the person's public key and the ciphertext in the second column. Note that previously, your friend could immediately recognize the appropriate line of keying material to decrypt in order to retrieve the AES key. Now he or she has to perform a simple hash based on each line until one of them matches. The hash function doesn't have to be particularly great for this, so we can use something simple like MD5 without worrying about security or privacy being appreciably compromised.

What are our security and privacy properties now? Well, your semi-private articles should be well protected by encryption, and your friends should be able to recover the symmetric key. The identities of your friends are protected, for the most part. What data does this system leak, though?

1. The hosting service knows who's retrieving your posts, though not who's successfully decrypting them.
2. The world in general knows how often you are posting.
3. The world in general knows how long your posts are.
4. The world in general knows how many people are able to read your posts.

We could do better if we were self-hosted, but this is about the limits of using a free service like Blogger. If you think you have a way to reduce the amount of data leaked, please let me know.

That's the scheme, but how to implement it is another matter. We'd like to have some way for someone to navigate to an article, and be presented with a decrypted page. The easiest way to do this is probably to create a Firefox extension. Note that this must be written in javascript and CSS. The state of cryptography in javascript isn't great, from what I've found poking around online. If a person's public and private keys are loaded into the browser, then the extension should be able to use them to decrypt first the symmetric key and then the article. The extension should probably cache the ciphertext (not the plaintext!) of the symmetric key, since it'll likely be used multiple times. The URL identifies the keys sufficiently at that point.

For most people, the public key is likely to be the most intimidating part. Someone running Linux can easily create an RSA key using OpenSSL. There's no need for a signed certificate. I don't know what would need to be done on Windows. If the blogger is reasonably crypto-savvy, then a BER- or DER-formatted RSA public key, an X.509 certificate, or a PGP/GPG certificate should be equally effective mechanisms for relaying public keys. Generating the list of ciphertexts for a new symmetric key will probably be done on the command line. We'll worry about friendlier interfaces later.

A really nice feature of a scheme like this is that if one of your friends forgets his private key password, he can just send you a new public key and you can either email him the key ciphertexts or edit the old postings to add the new public key's cipher.

Schwoops!

I'm drinking a bottle of tonic water, and I just noticed the following warning:

CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE. CAP MAY BLOW OFF CAUSING EYE OR OTHER SERIOUS INJURY. POINT AWAY FROM FACE AND PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WHILE OPENING.

This leads me to believe that someone, somewhere, had this happen to them. Someone was twisting the cap off a bottle of tonic water, when the cap, straining like a bronco that had been drinking from an espresso-laced stream, exploded forth as a tiny missile of blindness-inducing plastic. Or perhaps the victim wasn't the person opening the bottle. Image the tragic scene. A young mother, a thirsty child. "Sure, you can have some tonic water." Then, tragedy. Now little Johnny will never play baseball again.

Maybe I'm wrong. The truth is, we may never know what prompted this warning, nor how much gin was involved.

This is Just Ridiculous

We've had about 45" of snow since Friday, with another 10-20" predicted for today and tomorrow. Buffalo has had about 60" this season. Buffalo. We might get more snow than Buffalo.

I haven't lost power yet, but my parents were out for over 30 hours, and Pepco still reports over 12,000 customers who haven't yet had their power restored (down from over 100,000). The roads are plowed, though many not to their full width. The snowplow crews have worked incredibly long shifts, with little or no time for sleep. They've got nowhere to plow the snow, so they've had to haul it away.

At the rate roads have been getting cleared, it's going to take at least all day Thursday before they'll be passable again. That's assuming the road crews can pull the sorts of hours they have been. Oh, and the local governments have already pretty much exhausted their snow-removal budgets for the year.

The next front looks like it'll pass to our south, dumping rain (and some wintery mix) on the South/Southeast from Texas to Florida. There's another one up in the Northwest, though. I have no idea what direction that one's going to go.

What is Wrong with Electronics Manufacturers?

I currently have a clock radio and an answering machine that are driving me crazy. We've just started thunderstorm season, so I've had a few opportunities to lose power for extended periods of time. Neither of these gadgets performs what I'd consider well during these events.

The worse is the clock radio. It doesn't have a battery backup, just a capacitor. When I lose power for more than, say, thirty seconds, I lose the time, the alarm settings, and all of the station presets. I have another clock radio that does have a battery backup, but it has an analog tuner and no presets, and the clock tends to run fast on the battery.

The answering machine has battery backup, which lasts for a few hours. If the outage is too long, however, it too loses the time, but it also loses the outgoing and incoming messages. Yes, any messages that were stored on the machine are now gone.

Now, I've had both of these for awhile. The answering machine is from the mid-90s, and the clock is from 2001 or 2002. So I've been considering replacing them.

The thing that I find maddening is that, in 2009, clock radios still don't use non-volatile solid state memory to record their settings. The closest I've been able to find, in a form factor appropriate for my nightstand, is an Oregon Scientific weather radio. It uses non-volatile storage for settings, and even gets the time signal from the atomic clock in Colorado. It doesn't have a normal AM/FM tuner, though, only the weather stations.

Answering machines are no better. There's one model from AT&T that seems to have non-volatile settings. If you have caller ID an incoming call will even reset the time after an outage.

How much memory do you need to store settings and messages? Settings take almost nothing, the cheapest thumb drive would serve adequately. For a clock, it's 3 bytes per alarm setting, 4 if you want to specify on which days of the week the alarm should be active. A radio station is 1 byte. Voice recording takes substantially more, but still not ridiculous amounts. Yes, there are devices out there that have non-volatile storage, but seriously, one of each type?

One thing I've noticed, looking at clock radios online, is that they're either bare-bones pieces of garbage, or they can dock an iPod and produce concert-hall-like sound. Really? For an alarm clock? An alarm clock has a pretty simple function: to keep track of the time, wake you up when you've told it to, and do all of this with as small a footprint as possible. You would never know it from what's on the market today.

Answering machines almost seem to have been written off completely by their manufacturers. I don't get it. Voice mail is under someone else's control. (No, the irony of posting this on a blog controlled by Google isn't lost on me.) Voice mail can't tell you if your power's still out. Most answering machines these days are remotely controllable, and you don't have to remember a special number to call. You can walk through your door, look right at your answering machine, and know immediately if you have any messages. (Well, unless your power went out and your machine dumped all of them.) Mine has a number: "Hey, here's how many messages are waiting for you!" though I know some just have a little blinking light.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is, can anyone recommend a good clock radio or answering machine with non-volatile storage?

Quite Possibly the Funniest Spam I've Received

From: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller <kelvin.williams@info.net>
Reply-to: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients
Date: Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 4:41 PM
Subject: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller

Attn: Beneficiary,

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal Transaction with Impostors claiming to be Prof. Charles C. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, Mr Frank Nweke, none officials of Oceanic Bank, Zenith Banks, kelvin Young of HSBC,Ben of Fedex,Ibrahim Sule,Larry Christopher, Puppy Scammers are impostors claiming to be the Federal Bureau Of Investigation. During our Investigation, we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment.

Therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry Of Finance on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by cordinating your payment in total USD$11,000.000.00 in an ATM CARD which you can use to withdraw money from any ATM MACHINE CENTER anywhere in the world with a maximum of $4000 to $5000 United States Dollars daily. You now have the lawful right to claim your fund in an ATM CARD.

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in this transaction, you have to be rest assured for this is 100% risk free it is our duty to protect the American Citizens. All I want you to do is to contact the ATM CARD CENTER via email for their requirements to proceed and procure your Approval Slip on your behalf which will cost you $110.00 only and note that your Approval Slip which contains details of the agent who will process your transaction.

CONTACT INFORMATION
NAME: Kelvin Williams
EMAIL: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com

Do contact Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE with your details:

FULL NAME:
HOME ADDRESS:
TELL:
CELL:
CURRENT OCCUPATION:
BANK NAME:

So your files would be updated after which he will send the payment informations which you'll use in making payment of $110.00 via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Transfer for the procurement of your Approval Slip after which the delivery of your ATM CARD will be effected to your designated home address without any further delay.

We order you get back to this office after you have contacted the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER and we do await your response so we can move on with our Investigation and make sure your ATM SWIFT CARD gets to you.

Thanks and hope to read from you soon.

FBI Director Robert S.Mueller III.

Note: Do disregard any email you get from any impostors or offices claiming to be in possesion of your ATM CARD, you are hereby adviced only to be in contact with Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE who is the rightful person to deal with in regards to your ATM CARD PAYMENT and forward any emails you get from impostors to this office so we could act upon and commence investigation.

So Close...

British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham wants to apply movie-style ratings to websites. His plan is to have major ISPs provide child-friendly services based on these ratings. He's getting close to a good idea, but he's not quite there.

He also begins with a false premise:

“It worries me - like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do."

Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you should do. You shouldn't leave your child for two hours to watch television unsupervised, either.

Here's the problem. You're going to try to separate out websites that are child-friendly, or age-range friendly, from other sites. Trying to do this via government regulation is doomed to failure. What if the content of a site changes? What about sites where comments are allowed? Take a site like Bad Astronomy, run by Dr. Phil Plait. Phil generally keeps it PG, if not G, but very occassionally he'll slip in some saltier language. The commenters do, too, but are generally good. What rating do you give this site? Who is going to validate the ratings that sites are given?

Another problem is that you're pushing the enforcement (at least partially) onto the ISPs. If they have to provide different levels of service, that involves either redundant networking or filters that run on all traffic, based on the subscriber. The redundant networking might be the cheaper option, since it doesn't require a lookup over a possibly-sparse set of subscribers for every packet or session. Plus, at the ISP level, you're probably going to be stuck with a pared-down internet or no filtering. That means keeping your children "safe" locks you out of quite a number of useful sites, even if the kids aren't even in the house.

There's a market solution here, and it could be implemented fairly easily without any government regulation or intervention. I call it .ratedg, or for the more network-geeky of you out there, RATEDG-DOM. The idea is that a new top-level domain (TLD) is created, where the sites are vetted initially and periodically for standards of content. On end-user computers, optional filtering software would be installed that only allows connections to sites in the .ratedg TLD. Traffic to other TLDs, or to numeric IP addresses, would be blocked. This isn't completely trivial, since all connections have to be addressed numerically, but a local DNS cache could handle this.

The TLD would be maintained by a nonprofit organization, which is funded by the fees paid by sites wishing to be listed. Some accommodation would need to be made for sites of nonprofits, hobbyists, and other cash-short groups. The fees could, for instance, be determined site-by-site based on the website's circumstances. This adds complexity, of course, but is not insurmountable.

The filtering could be provided by free software (funded by governments, the nonprofits, or volunteers), and disabled by password so that adults can have less-fettered access. One drawback of this is that software-based filters are notoriously susceptible to circumvention by clever youngsters. Of course, you're not letting your kids surf unsupervised, are you? The filter provides you with a no-accidental-bad-stuff net. You see the "Rated G" certification immediately, and if you click on a .com, .edu, .org, or whatever link by mistake, the filter blocks it for you with a friendly warning.

Another option, perhaps better for parents who insist on letting their children use the internet unsupervised, is a hardware filter. This would be inserted into your computer either between the network interface card and the wire, or between the card and the rest of the system (the latter is probably better). Filtering is now physically enforced by a key, which the parents can carry along with them. The case would have to be locked, as well, to keep the filter card from being removed.

This system also has extensibility. A RATEDPG-DOM could be created as well, or TLDs corresponding to other countries' standards. A hierarchy of allowed TLDs would arise naturally: a filter set for PG websites would allow both .ratedpg and .ratedg.

Note also that this would not force sites out of other TLDs that are otherwise descriptive. We already have websites that are in both, say .com and .co.uk. Having disney.ratedg would not preclude the same site being available via disney.com, though Disney would probably maintain pieces of its website other-than the G-rated portion.

Enforcement places some burden, but again the registration fees help fund this. It isn't feasible to completely verify a site's content, certainly not with any great frequency, but a combination of random compliance checks and public problem reporting can have great impact. If, say, Goggle contributes some of its resources to compliance monitoring, a much more complete picture could be obtained.

There are potential problems with this solution, as there are with any solutions. Filtering based on TLD punishes sites that do not or cannot register, and students who need access to information on non-registered sites. The Smithsonian Institution comes to mind, since there's likely to be photos of art that some would consider inappropriate for children. As the popularity of .ratedg grows, non-registered but compliant sites would feel pressure to register. Other sites might re-structure their content into G-rated and non-G-rated components, on separate IP addresses (though not necessarily different hosts). Still, other volunteer-run educational but not specifically child-oriented would likely be excluded. I'm sure there are other potential problems as well.

So that's my suggestion. It's an opt-in filtering system, both on the user and content provider ends. ISPs don't need to add or modify infrastructure. Governments don't need to add regulation or oversight. At-home implementation could be done by either hardware or software. The system is extensible. Implementation can be phased in, and some of the technical design could precede full implementation (such as prototype software that filters on .org or .edu). Since it doesn't require a strong-arm approach or extensive new infrastructure, the whole system could probably be implemented and deployed in under a year.

Happy Newtonmas!

For someone who's 366, he's holding up pretty well. Sure, he doesn't do so well with very heavy objects and can't move too quickly, but he still puts in a fairly reliable showing.

The Natural

There's currently a lawsuit filed that claims President-Elect Barack Obama is not eligble to be President because his father being Kenyan means Obama isn't a natural born citizen, as required by the Constitution. The case (on appeal to the Supreme Court, which is not likely to be hear it) hinges on the fact that "natural born citizen" never seems to have been defined. It would, in a way, be nice for the Supreme Court to weigh in on this, for the sake of precedent.

Here's what I'd consider a reasonable set of criteria to be eligible for the Presidency:

• Either:
  1. at least one parent was a U.S. citizen at time of birth; or
  2. the person was born in the United States of America (yes, I'm excluding territories, but not embassies).
• The person does not currently hold citizenship for any country other than the United States of America.
• If the person has the right to citizenship of any other country by birth or circumstance, that right must be alienated.

What I find particularly interesting is that all of these criteria could be established by a Supreme Court ruling in regards to President-Elect Obama's eligibility.

Feel free to weigh in. Abusive comments will be deleted. Links to informative sites are welcome, but comments linking to propaganda (on whatever side) will be deleted. Yes, I get to decide where the line is between "informative" and "propaganda", but then it's my blog. Blogger hands them out for free, so go ahead and start your own if you disagree. I'll keep deleted comments available for re-posting if you want to try to convince me that something shouldn't have been deleted.

A Metaphor for Our Times

I've been watching Mayor Booker (of "luxuriating in our deliciousness" fame) (and Newark) on the Colbert Report. Oh, and drinking homebrew. OK, the "Newark" part isn't fame so much as, well, that's where he's Mayor.

That's not my point, though. He was comparing America to a somehow-delicious symphony, among other things. It struck me that this isn't the "deliciousness" metaphor. Nor is the currently popular "tossed salad" metaphor of modern America. Face it, when is the last time you luxuriated in the deliciousness of a tossed salad? And how many of you chuckled when you read "tossed salad"?

No, my fellow Americans, I have a new metaphor for America. And it's one that we can all agree practically epitomizes deliciousness.

America is a banana split.

We've got chocolate and vanilla ice cream. We already understand that part of it. We've got bananas, which are yellow, or at least yellow-ish. Close enough, say I. Maraschino cherries are red (Hey, I didn't come up with the label. I'm a uniter, here.), as is strawberry ice cream, if that's your thing.

Now, I know what you're saying. "All that's left are whipped cream (whiter than vanilla) and hot fudge (which is more chocolate). Isn't that rather glaringly omissive?"

To that I reply, caramel sauce is just as delicious. Just make the chocolate ice cream double-chocolate or chocolate fudge, and you'll never miss the hot fudge. Trust me. Butterscotch is pretty delicious on a banana split, too.

Where am I going with this? I could really go for a banana split, and I'd wager manyboth of you could, too. And when you're eating that banana split, luxuriating in its deliciousness, give a thought to the deliciousness that is our National Banana Split.

On a final note, which is eerily synchronicitous, Thomas Friedman is currently on the Report re-broadcast, and he kind-of looks like a dollop of whipped cream.

The Policy Here is to Aim the Cointreau at the Peach

This popped into my head for no good reason today, and I thought I'd share.

Very Poor Housekeeping

I think my house spiders are developing an attitude. And, if I'm not mistaken, a taste for human blood.

Ballot Questions in Montgomery County, MD

This year there are two statewide ballot questions and two county ballot questions. Of these, Ballot Question A is the least clear, so here's some background information.

The following excerpts of the County Charter with editorial remarks are © 2008 American Legal Publishing Corporation:

Sec. 311A. Limitations on Expenditures for Landfills in Residential Zones.

No expenditure of County funds shall be made or authorized for the operation of a landfill system of refuse disposal on land zoned for residential use. (Election of 11-7-78.)

Editor's note—See East v. Gilchrist, 296 Md. 368, A.2d 285 (1983); holding section 311A cannot be given effect under circumstances involving an order of the secretary of health and mental hygiene and requirement of local funding under public general law.

Sec. 311B. Limitations on Expenditures, Contracts, and Permits for Burying or Trenching Sewage Sludge in Residential Zones.

No expenditure of County funds shall be made or authorized for the construction or operation of a system for burying or trenching sewage sludge on land zoned for residential use, nor may the County purchase or contract for the service of burying or trenching sewage sludge on land zoned for residential use. Also, the County may not seek federal or state permits for the burying or trenching of sewage sludge in residential zones. (Election of 11-4-80.)

Sec. 313A. Purchasing, Contracting for Goods, Services with C&P Telephone Company.

The County Government may not purchase and contract for goods and services with the C&P Telephone Company (C&P) unless C&P includes telephone subscribers in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Montgomery Village in the Washington Metropolitan Area Telephone Exchange (MET) at local rates no higher than local rates charged MET subscribers in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Kensington and Rockville telephone exchange areas. (Election of 11-2-82.)

Editor's note—In Rowe, et al. v. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland, et al., 65 Md. App. 527, 501 A.2d (1985), it was held that Charter section 313A could not be given effect because it conflicted with a state Public Service Commission Order.

The League of Women Voters has a discussion of all four ballot questions, including (in part) the following on Question A:

Present Practice – The County Charter provides a framework for the governance of the county. Three provisions in the County Charter: 311A, 311B, and 313A currently have no legal force and do not affect how county government operates. The Maryland courts blocked implementation of 311A and 313A because each directly conflicted with some aspect of state law. More fundamentally, neither of these provisions are proper “Charter Material” because they do not address a fundamental aspect of the form and basic structure of county government. In addition, they attempt to legislate through a charter amendment, which the Maryland Constitution prohibits. Although the Maryland courts have not blocked the operation of 311B, a consistent line of Court of Appeal opinions makes clear that this provision, like the ones above, is in conflict with the Maryland Constitution’s prohibition on legislating through a charter amendment.

Quite Possibly the Funniest Spam Message I've Ever Received

From: root@s119.evanzo-server.de (Cron Daemon)
To: root@s119.evanzo-server.de
Subject: Cron <root@s119> /etc/webmin/sysstats/sysstats.pl
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/root>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=root>

WARNING (eval)(disk.pl 176)  : ERROR while updating i3.rrd: opening 'i3.rrd': No such file or directory

Be Young And Beautiful Forever, Or At Least For Twenty Years!

Defy ageing the natural way! Take up to 20 years^† off your appearance with the age-defying secret of flaxseed! But realistically no more than that! Ageing is as inescapable as the shifting sands of the Sahara, where the Riffian people of the Atlas Mountains have been defying the ravages of age for millennia by harnessing the cosmetic power of flaxseed!

For over two centuries, travelling salesmen have been selling age-defying cosmetics made from flaxseed and flaxseed by-products to passengers on the trains criss-crossing North Africa! And now this practically age-obliterating (up to about 20 years^†) miracle has crossed the ocean! And it's available now! For you! To purchase!

Cosmetological Scientists agree that nothing defies ageing like LinumOleum™'s FlaxTastic™ line of cosmetics! The Omega-3 fatty acids restore your skin's natural shine, while the hydrogen cyanide gives Father Time the middle finger! It's like a facelift in a bottle! And over 20 years^† it will cost you less than the Blue Book value of a 1963 bison!

So order now! At LinumOleum™, we guarantee that you'll love our FlaxTastic™ line of age-bludgeoning flaxseed, flaxseed by-product, and flaxseed-adjacent cosmetic products, or some of your money back! Look 20 years^† younger today!

^† LinumOleum™ makes no claims of medical or cosmetological efficacy for its FlaxTastic™ line of products. LinumOleum™ is not responsible for injuries or cyanide poisoning resulting from use of its FlaxTastic™ line of products. Continued use of FlaxTastic™ products for longer than 20 years is likely to result in your face falling off.

The Past 32 Hours

Yesterday morning, I was mowing my lawn. This was quite the endeavor, since it had been a couple of weeks, the weather was good for growth, and I have a push-reel mower. This meant that instead of my usual mowing each row twice (up and back), I had to mow each four times, the first pass being substantial effort.

I'd finished the front, which is the worst part of my yard, mower-wise, and started mowing the side. The side is a bit of a pain, since it's on a slope, but it's small, so it's not generally that bad. As I'm pushing the mower up and back, I glance at one of my basement windows. And see a squirrel looking out at me.

Of course, I immediately cease mowing, and go inside. After pounding on the basement door a few times, I open it, turn on the stairway light, and close the door behind me. The squirrel is still sitting in the window, trying in vain to get out. I open another window, and it immediately runs over to it, but neglects to jump up to flee to safety. I figure that the window's too high for the squirrel to reach (a fact belied by the signs of gnawing I later notice), and stack a couple of boxes by the window. The squirrel won't go back, though.

At this point, the squirrel is, so I think, behind my TV and stereo setup, so I start looking around the basement to survey the damage (which at the moment seems minimal). That's when I see something that doesn't look right. There's a hole in the wall, through which I can see daylight. It's clearly a hole that was created by a human being. Not yet sure what the hole's for, I notice the dryer exhaust hose lying partially coiled behind the dryer.

I continued my survey of the basement, and find no sign of the squirrel. Now, I'm hoping that it found a way out while my back was turned. I close the window and go outside to take a look at the hole. It's behind a big plastic mini-shed that holds my garbage cans to keep the raccoons out. I see the remains of the vent hood, but no sign of the pieces of plastic that were formerly part of it. Given its placement behind the shed, I'm not sure how long it was like that. It could easily have been in that condition when I had the house inspected prior to purchase, though I'd hope the home inspector was more diligent than that.

The rest of the day was squirrel-dominated. After finishing the lawn, I went to Home Depot to pick up a new vent cover. While getting advice from the retired plumber working in that section, another customer (who was waiting to ask a question) ventured her own opinion. She claimed the plastic vent covers were useless, and that squirrels would just chew through them again. Of course, the store had nothing better. She finally asked her question, and was on her merry way, so I asked the plumber, "What would you use?" He didn't put much stock in the woman's claims, which are really probably more relevant if the squirrels have nested in the house, so I made my purchase and left.

Of course, with the current temperatures, it's not the best time to try getting caulk to set, but needs must win out, so my new cover is slowing sealing itself to the outside wall. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. After home depot I went over to Marco's to keg our latest batch of Winky Dink Marzen. Then I came home to replace the vent cover, which remains un-gnawed.

The day's manual labor done, I went over to my parents' house to borrow a squirrel trap. I didn't think the squirrel was still inside, but better safe than sorry. After baiting it with peanut butter, I called it an evening.

This moring, after getting ready for work, I went down to the basement again to check on the trap. I didn't get that far, though, because I could see the squirrel sitting at what it must have come to regard as its window. I opened a window, but it wouldn't budge. Figuring noise would stir it, I turned on the stereo and played NPR's pledge drive at high volume. That got it moving. Not to the open window, though. It was away from its window, however, so I opened that one as well.

There's a particular state of mind, helped along by wanting to get to work, that causes you to try to reason with a squirrel. It, however, was being thoroughly unreasonable. Fed up, I moved the trap into the finished part of the basement, close off the doors to keep it from going back to the laundry or furnace rooms, and left for work.

Knowing there's a squirrel in your house, trapped with your 42" flat-panel TV among other electronics, can make it difficult to focus on your work. I soldiered on, though, and put in a good innings. By the end of the day, however, the stress had my stomach a bit twisted.

Once home, I put on some old clothes (what I used yesterday to mow the lawn), a denim jacket, and a pair of reasonably thick gloves. Then I ventured into the basement. Sitting patiently in the trap was the squirrel. It didn't object when I approached, and only slightly when I lifted the trap and carried it up the stairs and outside. Outside—that was something it recognized, and became considerably more animated. I set the trap on the ground, with the door facing the large tree in my back yard, and carefully openened the trap. Squirrels can be, well, squirrelly, so I was prepared for it to view me as its foe rather than its liberator. No such occurrence, though, as it flew from the trap and up the tree.

I am now relaxing in an ostensibly squirrel-free house, enjoying some homebrew (Whitey's Gone Fishin' Pale Ale). And, of course, recording this for your entertainment. The clean-up will wait for another day.

The World Collectively Held Its Breath

It's Olympics time, and this year in Beijing the world is collectively holding its breath.

This has nothing to do with the suspense of the games.

Maryland Driver's Licenses

You'll find the following in the Maryland Code, under Transportation, §16-106:

(a)   Each application for a driver’s license shall be made
      on the form that the Administration requires.

(b)   The application shall state:
      (1)   The full name, Maryland residence address,
            employer, race, sex, height, weight,
            general physical condition, and date of birth
            of the applicant; [emphasis added]

Evidently, the Maryland General Assembly believes that the MVA needs to know for whom you work in order to determine whether you are a legal resident of Maryland capable of safely operating a motor vehicle.

This repulsive change to the law, which was passed in April 2003 and took effect in October 2003, was House Bill 838. The bill page lists the sponsors, and has links to how Delegates and Senators voted.

Hilarity Ensues

I give you, Garfield minus Garfield.

From The Comics Curmudgeon.

w00t!

That is all.