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Friday, May 03, 2002
Truly excellent Fortune Cookie Fortunes. One time I read an article about a man who wrote fortune cookie fortunes for a living. I would love to have that job. I tried to find the article to post on sadmind, but alas, it had disappeared.
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
I know Jeremy and Devin have prolly seen this before, but here's the amazing Internet ESP Experiment, in its billionth iteration, for those of you who haven't seen it and are interested in having your minds blown. It's like 3 card bunco for the web.
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
I'll bet those pirates were Iranians attempting to defect. Why would they try to surrender when the Diehl opened fire? Why not just turn around and speed off?
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
Today: Crime Blog
Recent major heists
20 million Euros stolen
6 million Euros stolen
Half a million Euros stolen
100,000 Euros stolen
260,000 Euros stolen, as well as 100,000 lire (a kind of Italian currency similar in value to pop tops from soda cans)
1 million British pounds worth of computer equipment stolen or damaged.
McDonald's Monopoly was a fraud, but you already knew that. I cried for two days when I found out those contests were rigged. To think of all the value meals I supersized for the extra Monopoly pieces.
$8 million in diamonds stolen in Amsterdam.
Lots of fancy jewelry stolen. "It's a matter of American competence," says some snooty Italian bitch. Maybe, but we're not the ones who decided to ship 26 pieces of high dollar jewelry without sending someone to watch over it.
Russia has a huge problem with stolen art. If you can imagine.
9 Expressionist paintings stolen in Berlin. Museum curators make the very good point that stolen art is difficult to unload. Unless you're paid by a private collector to grab specific pieces for his/her collection...from what I hear, at least.
Hey, did you hear about this? 4 pounds of Uranium stolen. Why didn't this make CNN? Shouldn't we be alarmed?
Dutch paintings stolen, estimated worth is 2 million British pounds, which comes out to some amount of American dollars. The police make two points--it is very hard to sell well-known artworks, and the thieves seemed to know exactly what they were after. If they knew exactly what they were after, doesn't that suggest that they already have a plan for cashing in on the art?
6.5 million British pounds stolen at Heathrow. I posted this on the site when it happened.
Evidently I make more than the President of Zambia, but not much.
4 million British pounds worth of watches were stolen from an airport warehouse.
This takes balls.
A statue worth 3 million dollars was restolen. Those Nigerians can't catch a break, either.
This is what I'm talking about-- the successful art theft takes doesn't steal random paintings with hopes to unload them on the black market. He finds a buyer who wants a painting, and then he goes and gets that painting.
Holy crap, there's a lot of stolen artwork out there. Seems like you shouldn't be able to walk down the street without kicking a hole in a priceless Impressionist masterpiece. I'm going to stop posting stolen art links.
1 million dollars stolen in Poland
If I could get work in the Russian government, I could retire by the time I'm 30, assuming the Russian Mafia didn't kill me first.
Seems like grave robbing would also be a good job
More stolen computer parts.
Ok, I'm tired now, and I'm sure you are too. Enough crime links.
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
The Navy is attacked by pirates in the Persian Gulf.
Talk about the highlight of some enlisted sailor's career. He signs up, gets some crappy assignment to an oiler ship, and figures that the most exciting thing that could possibly happen is shore leave in Bangkok. Then these pirates show up like gifts from heaven.
.: posted by Jeremy 5/3/2002
In every man's life there comes a time when he must turn to crime to make ends meet.
It seems like I can't catch a break. I think my dept. will be insulated from any job cuts, since our money comes from billing students instead of the state, and I think Beth's dept. will be ok, as well. But you know it's always the people who feel the most secure who go first. I sure am tired of working for shaky organizations like drkoop.com and the State of North Carolina.
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
Hey, at least the IDF soldiers wear uniforms. I believe that was one of the keystone issues of the geneva convention. I think all those palestinian martyr squads would increase their moral currency by wearing uniforms. I bet a lot less palestinian civilians get would killed that way. And isreali civilians, too, now that I think about it.
.: posted by Jeremy 5/3/2002
Quite possibly the most important artistic work of the 21st Century.
.: posted by andy 5/3/2002
Thursday, May 02, 2002
I hope that all you wwff readers hate the Israeli government as much as I do. That said, we should remember that the individual IDF soldiers are not evil baby-eating sociopaths--they're just a bunch of regular guys following orders. It's not their fault if they happen to violate the Geneva Convention in the process. To show your support of the average IDF soldier, and to let them know you don't think they're a bunch of hate-mongering assassins, why not send them a pizza?
.: posted by andy 5/2/2002
Student suspended for drawing stick figures of her teachers with arrows through their heads. Apparently this constitutes a terrorist threat. If that's the case, then I'm the Ossama bin Laden of stick figure artists.
.: posted by andy 5/2/2002
Workers of the world, unite!
So here I sit on International Workers Day, or May Day; which incidentally started amoung Polish populations in Chicago, with no modem. There was a lightning storm Monday and it fried my modem. I have seven extra network cards, three video cards, two scsi cards, and even an old IDE controller, but no spare modem. I've been reduced to trading sexual favors for internet access, and I've been trying to figure out why I didn't think of this earlier.
As for those rats, I've been reading a scifi novel called The Alliance which talks about a post-apocalyptic world where some crazy surgeon runs a society where everyone has a brain implant that gives them pain when they do something bad. The positive feedback system seems like it would work better, but then there wouldn't be this evil empire of do-gooder automatons for the hero to fight.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 5/2/2002
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Remotely controlled rats, sort of like in the movie The One.
.: posted by andy 5/1/2002
This judge is putting terrorists back on the streets. Hopefully John Ashcroft will be able to stop him on appeal.
.: posted by andy 5/1/2002
Starbucks hold-up with some creative improvisation.
.: posted by Jeremy 5/1/2002
Become a Ninja in Six Easy Steps. This changed my life.
.: posted by andy 5/1/2002
Jeremy, I think you're as spunky as I am driven.
Get ready to whistle in amazement.
Here's more information about the Saudi ad campaign I mentioned earlier.
I wasn't wrong when I said we should eat the vegetarians. I wasn't aware that Vegans don't breastfeed. Idiots.
Cooter, from the Dukes of Hazzard. owns a cabaret.
.: posted by andy 5/1/2002
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
What? You don't think I'm spunky?
.: posted by Jeremy 4/30/2002
.: posted by George 4/30/2002
Sprint/ASC Telecom are scamming people. Truly, the meek shall inherit nothing.
"Jeremy, the spunky 23-year-old upstart." Ha. I'm Andy, the calculating 24-year-old go-getter.
.: posted by andy 4/30/2002
Monday, April 29, 2002
For all I know I emailed them the address to the site so they'd check it out. I guess the worst that could happen would be that I'd have to eat lunch alone again, since I never see them outside of work. Not that I care, but I think my stock went down with my fellow engineers previous to this anyway. I think one day I seemed less like a spunky upstart 23 year old engineer with a whole lot of energy and skill, but no real understanding of the world, and started seeming more like what I really am.
oh, and my department's supervisor "left the company" today, so that doesn't matter so much. And my immediate supervisor and I have an understanding: "You don't like me, and I don't like you. I'm an asshole, and you think you know it all. We still need to communicate about our work, though." his words paraphrased, of course.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/29/2002
Jeremy, do you ever wonder that someone might google you? I only ask because that happened to me at Healant, where the CEO happened to google me one day, and found sadmind. Actually, I think he Googled Healant, which I had mentioned on my site. In any case, a whole new world of Andy Thomas opened up before his eyes. I don't think it hurt his opinion of me very much, but I guess we'll never know, will we?
.: posted by andy 4/29/2002
Last week the President had a pow-wow with the Saudi Crown Prince. Soon thereafter, the White House asked Congress to postpone a resolution supporting Israel. Then, all of a sudden, we had a big breakthrough in the negotiations in Ramallah. Yesterday, while we were watching Cops' 500th episode, Beth saw an ad paid for by the Saudi Embassy (hell if I can find the ad itself, though). Seems like Bush and Prince Abdullah must have had a fruitful meeting. Do you think we'd ever switch our Middle Eastern alliances? It would certainly make a whole lot of sense for us to be buddy-buddy with Saudi Arabia, neighbor to Iraq, cradle of Islam, and one of the most influential nations in the region.
.: posted by andy 4/29/2002
The people I work with are so PC it makes me sick. You know the kind of people that are so PC that they're afraid of labeling someone a Mexican, so they call them Spanish. Because in their mind there is something wrong with being mexican, so they unconsciously think "mexican" is some kind of slur. So really by being afraid of identifying a mexican as mexican, they are admitting their bias against mexicans. I know that this kind of thinking will just confuse them, though, so I just point out to them that they aren't english and hope they figure it out for themselves. And yet when I point it out to them that they aren't english, they say something like, "well, I have some english in me." jesus...
.: posted by Jeremy 4/29/2002
Sunday, April 28, 2002
I vote for Iran and Saudi Arabia. And while we're moving east and south, Israel can cover our western flank by invading Jordan and Syria. We'll have an Axis of Zion and we'll repopulate the middle east with people whose skin isn't very suited for the climate.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/28/2002
What's after Iraq, Korea or Cuba?
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/28/2002
Yeah, they can't accuse us of fighting dirty, coz our normal tactics of staging a coup, or fighting a 'proxy battle', wouldn't work, so now we're going "to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions", then invade. I'm glad they've got this whole war thing down to a checklist.
Notice how our current regime seems to be really open about all of these military things, like invasion plans, where we have our nukes pointed, under what conditions we would consider preemptive attacks on NK and China. Is this sort of a 'too many secrets' feeling, or do they just have more important things to keep secret than our last few regimes?
I guess now would be a good time to start stockpiling gasoline? And once we occupy Iraq, that means we get oil real cheap, right?
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/28/2002
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