Thousands of e-mail death threats directed at a professional mah-jongg player flooded one of Japan's most traveled Internet sites just hours after she won a defamation case against the site's operator, the Mainichi has learned.

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 07:33 PM | TrackBack 0

...it emerged that the supermarket was automatically taking photographs of shoppers when they picked the blades off the shelf and when they left the shop with any tagged product.

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 07:31 PM | TrackBack 0

I have to admit to a feeling of resentment at the extent of the security searches every time I travel by air. The armed guards, the x-ray machines, the metal detectors, the pat downs, the search of luggage and personal effects, the removal of shoes, and for some, I suppose, the explanation of prosthetics, pacemakers, and appurtenances, constitutes a massive invasion of privacy. We have just come to accept this as a natural state of things because, like Gilmore, we’re all suspected terrorists. I find myself having to explain to people why I, as a Presidential candidate, am repeatedly shuttled off to that special line of selectees identified by the SSSS stamped on my ticket. The transportation security agents inform me that a computer has made this decision. I want to know who programs the computer. Is it John Ashcroft?

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 05:16 PM | TrackBack 0

Stephen King’s success in adult fiction is singular. Except for J.K. Rowling, no other writer, not even those who can guarantee their latest book will open at number one, are even caddies in his club. When Hillary and Norgay reached the summit of Everest, they didn’t start rolling boulders down the sides of the mountain. It’s hard to understand why King, at this stage in his career, would seek out such a forum and use it as base camp for attacking other writers. I don’t give two hoots about ballet, but I’d be disappointed if Baryshnikov had a column in Demi-Plié Weekly in which he trashed modern dancers. Or if Spielberg, rather than championing the films he loved, elbowed onstage with Ebert and Roeper every week to crap all over the oeuvre of Dennis Dugan. Literature is the only art form where artists routinely get paid to trash each other’s work in public and I don’t think most writers view this as a problem. Which is the problem.

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 05:10 PM | TrackBack 0

"Even the patients with dementia seemed unsurprised by (the robot's) presence," Sandy Ratliff, assistant vice president of clinical operations at Ohio's Otterbein Retirement Living Communities, told the Dayton Daily News. "They just acted as though they were talking to a television."

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 05:09 PM | TrackBack 0

Think of your twelve closest friends, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write. If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million. Have any of your twelve closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, or Brown? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against your having four or more friends from those schools would be more than a billion to one.

Posted by GeeTee at August 15, 2003 04:45 PM | TrackBack 0