I have been reluctant to hope on board the iPod train, but now I just may have to go out and get one. According to this article over at News.com, even the Pope has one. I guess soon we will all be saying “En Nomini Patre, Et fili, Nano Sancti”.

Now that I have a new phone that can handle MP3 ring tones, I found this article over at Wired to be of great interest. However, seeing as I do not yet have a laptop or computer that is Bluetooth enabled, I will have to settle for paying roughly 25 cents for my ring tones by using Mobile17’s service.

So I wonder if something like this would ever catch on over here. I know the cultures are vastly different, but the gaming subculture is roughly the same. If only I knew how to go about acquiring venture capital, I think this might take off in cities with a large young gaming community. Perhaps somewhere in California…?

Once again CNN has another great article. This one basically talks about our nation and how much we have actually declined.

By standards of national cohesion, economic and social justice, international respect, and fiscal vitality, the United States has lost much ground since 9-11, and we’re not winning this war.

Now I don’t consider myself to be very political but this article echos the feelings of many people I know, myself included. I personally did not vote for Bush, and this article points out many of the reasons why:

Oh, and one other thing…

The nation’s fiscal health has deteriorated. When Bush took office, the debt ceiling for all federal borrowing was under $6 trillion and had not been raised since 1997. Last year, Bush signed into law another $800 billion increase in the debt ceiling to $8.2 trillion. In the first 224 years of the nation, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a total of $1.01 trillion from all foreign sources. In just over one term in office, George W. Bush has out-borrowed all 42 of his predecessors.

Now seriously ask yourself “Are we better off now than we were in 2001?”

This goes to show that animal cruelity is wrong, no matter what the animal is, even a mouse. According to this article over on CNN “Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner said he caught the mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it.” Ok, I can understand that, but then he goes on to say “I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire….” That is just wrong! No animal deserves that, there are proper ways to remove mice and other varmits from your house, burning them alive is NOT one of them! The only upside to this is that “the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house…to just beneath a window, and the flames spread up from there and throughout the house.” Luckily no one in the house was injured, but I do think this is a kind of poetic justice. Be kind to animals people, or they will burn your house down.

[Update: 01/11/2006 04:12]

According to this article, this story may have just been rumor. The man in question now states that the mouse was already dead and not responsible for the fire.

No joke! Now you have the ability to buy someone else’s phone records. According to this article that appeared today in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

I am not in law enforcement or a privacy expert; I know I have a problem with this. My phone calls are my own business, and they should not be available to others! At this point everyone is focusing on the possible threat to undercover law enforcement agents and how criminals could use this information to expose them in a potentially life threatening manner, and I understand that concern.

However, this also affects normal everyday people as well. With this information “employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist — or a competing company.” How long before it becomes a normal part of the hiring process? This could lead to an entirely new form of discrimination in the hiring process, with employers not hiring people because they have made contact with a competing company, or perhaps because they don’t like the trend of the person ordering to much take out food or something else.

“According to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use… this problem is all too common [and], federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime.”

This is one piece of legislation that I hope gets approved [depending on the wording and the full extent of what it covers].

Hold on, it’s not what you think. Evidently a new calendar has been released in Germany depicting scenes from the Bible, but not the kind you would expect…they are erotic scenes!

“A German Protestant youth group” has put together a 2006 calendar that “feature a bare-breasted Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and a nude Eve offering an apple.”

Nuremberg pastor Bernd Grasser said: “It’s just wonderful when teenagers commit themselves with their hair and their skin to the bible.”

“There’s a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,” said Stefan Wiest, 32, who took the racy photographs.

Anne Rohmer, 21, wearing garters and stockings, posed on a doorstep as the prostitute Rahab.

“We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people,” she told news agency Reuters.

Apparently the calendar is only available in Germany…that’s too bad as I still need a calendar for 2006. 😉

A few days ago Joe had a post over on his site that dealt with police training pest control agency employees to become, esentually, undercover police. In this post Joe brought up the fact that we, then general public, are slowly losing our rights due to things like the Patriot Act.

A “lawsuit was filed against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut by an unnamed library and the American Civil Liberties Union” on August 9 2005. What many people don’t realize is “that legal changes made under the Patriot Act ‘remove any requirement of individualized suspicion, (and) the FBI may now … demand sensitive information about innocent people.'”

Enacted after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Patriot Act lets U.S. authorities seek approval from a special court to search personal records of terror suspects from bookstores, businesses, hospitals and libraries, in a provision known as the library clause.

The FBI letter requesting the information, called a National Security Letter, is effectively a gag order because it tells the recipient that the request must be kept secret.

What this means is that the “authoriteis” have the right to demand information about a person ranging from their book reading habits to their finicial standing for pretty much any reason they choose. Nothing more than simply stating that they think a given person is a terror suspect is needed for them to be allowed to dive into their personal records.

I am glad that someone has finally taken action to stand up to the Patriot Act, something that the ACLU calls “unconstitutional on its face.” The results of this trial will have a very large effect on just how our constitutional rights are protected or not.

Well, the banner speaks for itself. Evidently Christopher Walken is going to run for President in 2008! I have yet to find any evidence that this is a joke, so I guess we will just have to wait and see. I can personally think of more than one person who will vote for him simply for the fact that he is who he is. You can read the press release in which he declares his intent to run, along with other information about him on the site.

More than 2000 years ago Plato wrote of a land “depicted a land of fabulous wealth, advanced civilisation and natural beauty” that was wiped from the face of the Earth in a single night, this was the fabled land of Atlantis. Since its destruction people have seemed to be more than a little interested in discovering the lost city.

There have been many speculations about where this lost city might be located, and based off of Plato’s writing scholars “have placed it off the coast of Spain, Cuba and the south west of England, as well as under the South China Sea.” Now it seems that some of the most convincing evidence of the lost city’s location has been found.

American researchers claim to have found convincing evidence that locates the site of the lost kingdom of Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus.

The team spent six days scanning the Mediterranean sea bed between Cyprus and Syria using sonar technology.

They believe they found evidence of massive, manmade structures beneath the ocean floor, including two straight, 2-km (1.25 mile) long walls on a hill.

They say their discoveries match accounts of the city written by Plato.

Robert Sarmast, in describing a section that is shapped like a flat-topped hill said,

“The hill, as a whole, basically looks like a walled, hillside territory and this hillside territory matches Plato’s description of the Acropolis hill with perfect precision,”

“Even the dimensions are exactly perfect, so if all these things are coincidental, I mean, we have the world’s greatest coincidence going on.”

With any luck, this does not turn out to be that coincidence, and we are able to learn more of this long lost civilization.