“[Bush] has always done well for the affluent … anyone that does well for the affluent should be named for the effluent.”
— a plumber signing a petition to get a San Francisco sewage treatment plant named after George W. Bush
Two news items side by side on CNN Money:
Fugato.net wishes its tireless, deluged readers a happy new year with thanks for everything, online and off, in the years gone by.
Vífill Atlason (16) made the news last weekend for prank-calling a supposedly top-secret number at the White House, pretending to be the Icelandic president, and booking a phone appointment with President Bush.
Ha ha, but the US news outlets missed the good part: the followup. Two TV stations ran interviews with Vífill. He showed up for one, and had a very-different-looking friend do the other, pretending to be him.
The duped station made it funnier still by threatening to sue both Vífill and the other TV station (which seems also to have been pranked, in that Vífill had promised to appear only on that station that day. Technically, of course, he kept his promise.) The reporter tendered his resignation, which his boss did not accept.
The same station has a show called Tekinn (“Taken” or “Duped”), running pranks on people with hidden cameras.
Vífill may in all seriousness be denied entrance to the US in the future for this (and possibly shackled and denied food and drink for 14 hours), the Dept. of Homeland Security being the celebrated Orwellian juggernaut of common sense and discretion that it is.
But he’ll have no trouble getting into Icelandic showbiz. (Except perhaps on Stöð 2.)
My office address is in 101 Reykjavík, Iceland. We just received a letter from Reuters, addressed thus:
Laekjargata 4
200 Kopavogur
Norway
Pretty good work by the postal system! And as for Reuters, the dependable, accurate information source, well …
I’m often asked the question, “Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments — there are a lot of places out there, and use the word billions, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I’m asked, “Yeah, but what do you really think?” I say, “I just told you what I really think.” “Yeah, but what’s your gut feeling?” But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
— Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, in The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 1987
Sales blurb for the HTC P3600 mobile phone:
„Process applications faster and store more data with 256MB internal ROM …“
Note to self: do not buy scientific instruments from websites that smack of the previous millennium.