I haven't done this in awhile, but this weekend Shack's been about as fun as an enema, so I figure "why not?"

When your co-worker is a critter that wants to kill you - Want a fall job in Florida?

Forget the Mace -- Manhattan block gets thumb-activated alarm system - Oh man, I can't wait until someone hacks the frequency and activates this thing 24/7

Pencil-Carrying Camel Convoy Blocked - You just know Saddam would use those pencils for no good...

Bah, I'm going outside...

update Jack - New poll!

Yeah that's right, the trees are dying, the birds are hiding - fall is upon us! And as such, it's finally time for a good old fashioned Buffy Night! Of course, since last season, the old Buffy Night crew has resettled with four still in Dallas and me and Steve trying to start chapters in Austin and Seattle.

Nonetheless, it's the beginning of a new season and probably a good time to get hooked on like the best TV show ever. Screw the Olympics, watch this.

Something to ponder this late Sunday evening. If you slob just the right knob, you can get your own TV show! Monica Lewinsky, reportedly will host six 10-minute episodes of a television show for Britain's Channel 5 network.

...which will be broadcast in November, Lewinsky interviews "Bridget Jones's Diary" author Helen Fielding, discusses her body image during a trip to a West Coast health spa and visits the set of American soap opera "Days Of Our Lives,"

No word on whether or not Monica would be performing any oral acrobatics on the show. Thanks my pov

In an attempt to recover from that news item below being from 1999, here's something completely different. The University of Wisconsin recently (heh) doctored a photo and inserted a black student into a crowd photo in an attempt to show 'racial diversity' among their students for a brochure. Thanks John Brooks.

"It's a symptom of a much larger problem,'' he said. "Diversity on this campus is really not being dealt with.

I have to admit something to you guys, I'm not as dead sexy as you might think. I doctored photos too. :(

Something to ponder this Monday morning. By now you've probably heard of the Microsoft .NET project looking for even more interenet integration for the MS OS's. (Also some wacky leasing of software, crazy stuff like that). Well in a recent talk Bill Gates announced just how much they are spending on the project. 80% of the entire R&D budget at Microsoft!

``I'd say about 80 percent of it is behind this .NET effort. We actually started our advanced research group about eight years ago, and it's through .NET that their research will actually get into the market place,''

Quite a bit late but wtf. The second winner of the fake New DOOM screenshot contest finally gets his prize. I've replaced the logo here on the page for the next 24hours or so. Someone remind me to add a link to the contest winners. Here are a couple of not quite mini thumbnails but not quite full size thumbnails just to confuse you.

click here for all the winners

If the logo isnt showing up any different for you, clear your cache or hit ctrl-f5.

We were going to save this one for Evening Reading but I thought this was something that would probably overshadow the rest of the stuff. Doug Wolcott pointed out this website which is working towards covering executions of prisoners online. Pretty morbid stuff. Here's the quick tagline:

Welcome to death.com. Coming soon - online coverage of executions.

This is the kind of thing  that really pushes the envelope on those 'rights' we have in America. Disgusting. I heard about this a couple of weeks ago and its more oriented towards the whole spectacle of death thing than just informing people.

Well, I went out dancing last night thinking I'd have some really cool and interesting story to tell about it... But well, I don't. No weirdos on the street or anything. Oh well. So I guess I have to show you stupid pictures of me roller skating on Tuesday instead. Here and here. Yeah, that's right, I'm trying to bring back the quad skates, inline skating's for wimps!!! I can't believe that they haven't made the skates look any newer since like the 1980's. Of course, what's also annoying is they play the same music as they did in the 1980's as well at these rinks. Occasionally they'll toss in some Vanilla Ice, but mostly we're stuck with Bon Jovi and Skid Row.

Also, happy birthday to my dad, also named Jack, who just turned the ripe old age of 45! Watch that hip, old guy!!

Its all over! Head for the bunkers! we're all gonna die! In fact we're gonna 'make ourselves extinct' according to some knob scientist. But they do have the medic from TFC in the logo at the top of the article so I tend to believe this one more than most. Thanks my pov.

They have used data from the fossil record to chart the evolution and extinction of all animals and plants that have died out during the course of the planet's history. [snip] "from the evidence that we have that there is reason to believe that we humans are interfering with the environment so much that we are making ourselves extinct."

In fact, looking back in the archives, We're all gonna die several times over.

Ok, this is just a little bit odd. Yahoo! Auctions is auctioning off the used jeans of celebrities! You can get Britney Spears' for a cool six grand, Love Hewitt's for $2500, or the Wolverine X-Men costume for [gulp] 20 grand. Or you can even look really cool back at school with Tom Arnold's jeans for $150 or Rick Dees' for just $125. Have at it, Shacksters!

update - Maarten wouldn't throw in for JLH's jeans, but said he would think about going for Chris Kattan's if there are any pee stains. Gross, Maarten!

update by Maarten: lies by Jack ! Anyway, the auctions are now closed and one of our readers, Rosewood was *this* close to the Britney Spears jeans when he got outbid in the last second by some bidding bot. Sucks.

Last night Retro's Friday Night Film Posse went out to see Way of the Gun, with James Caan, Juliette Lewis, Ryan Philippe, Taye Diggs, and some other people. All in all, it was a damn decent movie. The gunplay scenes were excellently done, with guns behaving somewhat like the real thing and the sound being pretty much spot on. The acting was also quite good and the underlying plot was quite good. The only real complaints about the movie I had were the music and the moving losing focus.

The music at times became extremely overbearing and really detracted from the movie. There were also a couple scenes where the type of music being played was extremely inappropriate. The loss of focus was another annoying thing as the movie started out very quick and clever, focusing on the theives and their pursuers. Then, the movie picked up stories from almost all of its ancilliary characters which played out to really not matter most of the time. Luckily at the end of the movie, things picked back up again, but not quite enough to forgive all the underused plotlines.

Nonetheless, I would recommend this movie as it's still much better than most of the drivel coming out of Hollywood lately for non-comedies and even with its faults stands up as a very enjoyable movie.

Normally I don't do this, but well, who cares? Did you guys see the MTV Video Music Awards last night. While most of the show was a steaming pile of ass, there were two moments that stood out (one good, one bad). The good was Britney Spears, who, well, was dressed like she wasn't. It was really a sight to behold. In fact, here's some RealVideo from MTV that doesn't really do it justice. The other, errr, memorable moment was a "comedy" skit in which Lars Ulrich came out to do a rant on Napster. He harasses a college kid for downloading music and for some reason starts putting Napster bumper stickers everywhere. That and he acted like a complete ass. If anything, it was more of an advertisement for Napster and really shows how silly he is.

update - Go here now.

Ok this story is being sent in by way too many people not to post. The MPAA and a few others are working on getting a new standard pushed into VCRs and other recording devices (TiVo anyone?) that would prevent people from recording particular broadcasted shows. There is of course quite a bit of objection, the HRRC is leading the charge.

copyright holders want the FCC to require that circuitry be built into nearly every digital TV device - receivers, VCRs and set-top boxes - that will prevent recording programs carrying copy protection information set by the program's owner.

Damn it, and I just figured out how to program my VCR to record those 3am Skinemax flicks.

A little late, but at least you didnt knock her up. here's some of that midnight reading stuff for those oh so exciting holiday weekends. Be careful though, you never know about those news items you see late at night on the weekends. You might wanna double bag it:

- ZDNet is carrying a story about the future of the internet, specifically the year 2004 which I'm pretty sure isnt all that far away.
- Seems the post office is still pretty upset about that whole 'going postal' slang. They even did a comprehensive study (heh) to prove that post office workers are normal.
- Hey look, even more Pentium4 benchmarks. Intel seems pretty upset about these things getting leaked but they are popping up in more places now it seems.

The big ECTS show is about to kick off in London so things might get a bit more interesting around here tomorrow. There may be a few surprises (I havent gotten anything confirmed)

Ok, not that big Anti-Trust case but its something. After the success that Microsoft has been having in the courts, its time for a change-up. Microsoft has just been ordered to pay $1million (yeah, at least its something) to a 'tiny rival' for engaging in ``wanton, reckless'' and deceptive business practices.

...ruling came just over a year after a federal jury awarded privately held Bristol nominal damages of only $1 following a six-week civil trial. Bristol had alleged that Microsoft violated U.S. antitrust law by refusing to negotiate a new contract for Windows source code.

So what else is new? I've got this feeling that when the dust settles, Microsoft will end up paying a few token penalties and have to say 'Ok we will play nice' and nothing will change.

In case you thought those asteroids hitting the Earth movies things werent realistic, just last week a half-mile wide asteroid wizzed by the Earth just missing us (about 12times the distance from us than our moon). Of course if it were coming any closer, we would have sent up a oil drill team and blew that sucker up! (Thanks my pov)

Asteroid 2000 QW7 falls into a category of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) called Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or PHAs. [snip] Gravitational nudges by Earth, Mars or Jupiter can potentially set such asteroids on a collision course with our planet, says Yeomans.

Even more signs computers really won't need us in the future, as scientists have created a system where robots can design and construct other robots. Right now several robots are creating tiny plastic prototype robots and they are described as ``nearly a self-replicating artificial life system.''. About the only thing they can't do yet is snapping in the motors.

However, automatically-produced robots would still be designed for specific tasks and would not be the all-purpose humanoids of science fiction.

Well yeah we can only hope for robots that don't realize they can do without us...

Really don't have friends online? According a CNN story AOL's Instant Messenger may just be your thing as someone has created a replyscript using Perlwhere you just get some kind of psychoanalytic-styled questions back. Of course we already know AOL is the place to meet friends and pick up the chicks but now they don't even have to be real. An example from the CNN story

five: just asking if richard can tell me about some good lobster diving spots thats it if this is a problem then forget iot i dont know whats going on here

AOLiza: that is interesting. please continue.

Haven't seen one of these for a bit (both Steve and I have been busy for the past couple weekends), so let's resurrect it here with The Cell. The movie was quite entertaining, but not too much beneath the surface. If you look under all of the special effects and strange dreams, you actually see a pretty formulaic Hollywood treatment of psycho killer people. The script itself just wasn't very clever at all. But the wacekd out stuff when in the minds of others made the movie watchable. Basically, the movie's a two hour music video sans music. But make no mistake, it is fun to watch. The acting and such were done well enough, with my main complaint being how underused Vince Vaughn was.

Didn't vote for the Stupid Shack Contest yet? Then you still have time as we will be announcing the winners on Monday. Go here for "normal" fakes and here for more jeffk-ish entries. You have one vote for both. We're up to 2894 votes right now. Winner gets to replace the Shack logo for a day so be sure and vote wisely or something ;)