I know a company in the area where this would actually be taken seriously if it happened there... I guess it's true what they say about the best comedy having an element of truth to it.

I had a show on Physics and alternate universes on as background noise tonight, and one of the scientists was going on about different universes being out of phase, but in the same place as ours. Thus, he said, dinosaurs could be rampaging through your living room and you'd never know it.

And yet, these people call us crazy when we talk about a "spiritual world."

Movable Type used underscores in the past to represent spaces in file names. For example, hello_word.html instead of hello-world.html. If you create an Apache error handler in PHP, you can use the following code sample to redirect from the old style to the new style without any problems:

$str = $_SERVER{'REQUEST_URI'};
$matches = array();
if (preg_match("/\/[\d]+\/[\d]+\/([\w]+_)+[\w]+\.(html|php)/", $str, $matches))
{
    $filename = str_replace("_", "-", $matches[0]);

    if (file_exists("." . $filename))
    {
        header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
        header ('Location: '. "http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com" . $filename);
    }
}

That will convert a request for, say, http://www.domain.com/2008/11/hello_world.php into http://www.domain.com/2008/11/hello-world.php. I'm using that now in my HTTP error handler.

Proposition 8 was an unsung victory for defenders of individual liberty. Wait, I know what many people will say to this. How can a measure that prevents gay couples from getting a marriage license be beneficial to the defense of individual liberty? It's because that vote represented a line drawn in the sand, even if a thin one, preventing the government from furthering its control over the institution.

As it currently stands, there is nothing short of the problem of finding a pastor, priest or rabbi who is willing to perform the marriage rite that is stopping most gay couples from getting married. They may not necessarily be legally married, but there is nothing stopping them from having a marriage in every other respect, including the public sanctification of their relationship and vows. This issue is really about other legal topics such as power of attorney and employer benefits than marriage itself, at least on the legal front.

The fact is, proponents of state licensing of gay marriages are generally in favor of using the power of the state to force society to accept homosexuality and gay marriage. They know that in a society based on a more concrete notion of freedom of association, that their views will have a hard time competing for dominance, and so they seek a short cut through the state.

In this day and age, it's refreshing to see some small, if temporary, victory in preventing the further politicization of an aspect of our culture. American politics are increasingly totalitarian in the literal sense that totalitarianism was explained by its proponents in the early 20th century: everything is political; every issue is up for debate before the legislature. One of the best defenses of individual liberty is oppose every attempt to politicize aspects of our culture.

Liberal opposition to Proposition 8 is understandable, but libertarian opposition is not, considering that the one real libertarian position on marriage is that it should be a private institution, unregulated by the state between consenting adults. In that sense, Proposition 8 was also a libertarian victory, as it slowed down the state regulation of marriage and might give libertarians ammunition to use with social conservatives to utterly abolish state licensing of marriage should the courts take this out of the voters' hands.

It's certainly educational to observe how many homosexual activists responded to the vote on Proposition 8. For them to compare their situation with that of black Americans is not just offensive, but ludicrous. Black Americans not only faced a whole host of very serious limitations on their legal rights, but often faced the imminent threat of violence should they even peacefully assert their rights. The biggest threat most of them will ever face is the possibility that somewhere, someone won't approve of them.

If most people aren't seeing this as a major civil rights battle, it's because it really isn't. Unlike being black or female, sexual orientation is something that can be controlled, hidden and denied. For millennia, priests practiced celibacy successfully in defiance of strong male heterosexual sex drives. Others have suppressed and denied impulses that their cultures have deemed immoral or depraved for equally as long. The defining difference between "women's rights" and "minority rights" versus "gay rights" is that short of plastic surgery and medical therapy, one cannot control, hide or deny their gender or race.

None of this is to say that homosexuals are inferior human beings who deserve less liberty. However, it's time for homosexuals to realize that their cause is not as worthy as that of women or blacks because what separates them from everyone else is most likely, at the biological level, merely a minor genetic defect. Likewise, defenders of individual liberty need to realize that even the bigots did everyone a favor here by temporarily delaying the state's advance on its control over even the definition of marriage.

It's possible that some of us have been wrong in judging many of the gay rights activists as being vicious totalitarian thugs in the aftermath of Proposition 8. So then, the challenge to them is to prove us wrong. They can start by offering up a counter proposition to dismantle state licensing of marriage in California and to allow each religious institution to define for itself what marriage is between consenting adult parties, as it always should have been. Surely, if this is really just about getting married, they can find willing parties among the Church of Scientology or the Unitarians at the very least.

For my Flash class, I had to add audio and/or video to my first homework assignment. Read on to see my semi-snarky addition to my first assignment, the "thank you card" from the government for giving up your house, so that property taxes could be raised.

Rachel just got glasses, and looks very good in them. A lot of guys are apprehensive about this sort of thing, but not me because I had faith in her taste and it paid off when I saw what she had selected. You know you're a lucky man when your wife can do something that a lot of men are uneasy about and actually come out looking even better!

(This was submitted to Pajamas Media over the weekend, but unfortunately, they ran enough on this subject and thus couldn't consider it.)

If these numbers are right, then the UAW and the big three deserve bankruptcy in spades. The only way for the numbers to be skewed that I can think of would be if they include executive compensation, which is unlikely because the article specifically points it out as hourly pay. Factoring in the mainstream media bias in favor of organized labor, it's highly unlikely that they'd fudge the numbers to make them look better by factoring in the hourly rate of salaried employees when discussing compensation for hourly employees.

$70.00-$75.86 is extreme. The average union worker is not worth even half that. $75.86/hour is about $152,000/year in income. As a comparison, most people with engineering degrees from a good university might make that much money fifteen to twenty years out of college unless they live in a very expensive area.

If these numbers are right, the big three are screwed. The unions will never tolerate their wages getting slashed to something more realistic like $30-$45/hour ($62,000/year - $94,000/year).

An 11 year old hits his mom in the head with a saw, then offers her $5 to not call the cops on him. This is after a track record that includes trying to cut his pregnant sister's belly open with a fork to "give her a C-section" and using hairspray and a lighter to set the family's cat on fire.

Within 10 years, a jury will look back on this news report and probably conclude that, had someone *ahem* "done something," they wouldn't be deliberating over homicide charges with him as the defendant.

Love him or hate him, Rupert Murdoch actually understands why the mainstream media is steadily collapsing and what needs to be done to fix it:

"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception."

"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news-and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."

This election was really what did them in. To call them propagandists for the Obama campaign would be too euphemistic. On most counts, as a watchdog and "guardian of democracy," the mainstream media is a colossal failure. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times where I have read a report about the police doing something that should have arouse suspicion, such as breaking down the wrong door, or shooting a leashed dog in a residential neighborhood, and the media just obediently parrots whatever line is given them. The media also didn't do itself any favors this year by focusing so much on Palin will giving Joe "Gaffe Machine" Biden a free pass.

Nothing illustrates Murdoch's point about the haughtiness and arrogance of the editors than the treatment of John Edwards's affair. That reporters and official newspaper bloggers were blatantly told to "shut up and not go there" only added fuel to the fire. The first and strongest image that came to mind for me during that episode was of a dinosaur defiantly screeching and trying to savage its prey as it sunk deeper into a tarpit.