What in tarnation was that?

The cats just caught some kind of large beetle in the kitchen that looked sort of like an elongated scarab, about two inches long but no more than about three eighths of an inch wide, and rounded in section almost like a grasshopper rather than flat like cockroaches are.  They let it get away, though, and it escaped underneath the refrigerator.  I have not the vaguest idea what it was, and had no success attempting to fish it out for a better look.

oh yeah.

cymrullewes got this fortune this morning:

There were in this country two very large monopolies.  The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.  The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape^[1], magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.  Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?

[1]  Actually, I thought Grundig invented magnetic tape.  But still....

FTC: "No no-spam list." Chuckie: "Oh yeah?"

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports,

FTC Chairman Timothy Muris announced yesterday that the agency would not develop a do-not-spam list similar to the highly popular do-not-call list; Muris said the list would be ineffective because spammers would simply choose to ignore it.  Worse still, he said such a registry could be exploited by spammers to increase their mass sending of junk email.

Well, DUH.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a supporter in Congress for a no-spam registry, said the FTC's decision was disappointing.

"The registry is not the perfect solution but it is the best solution we have," Schumer said.

And with Chuckie weighing in in support of the do-not-spam list, you KNOW it was a bad idea.  (Not like you didn't know that before now, right?)  Naturally, having been told that the do-not-spam registry won't work, Chuckie is now investigating legislative options to force the FTC to create it (or so says the Washington Post).  The FTC wisely pointed out that the very first thing spammers would do is mine the registry for email addresses, and that lacking any form of email authentication, there would be no way to know who was honoring the registry and who was just using it as a compilation of verified email addresses to spam.  Needless to say, the logic of this argument is completely lost on Chuckie.