From BBC News… Florida Muslim arrests were mistake

Authorities in Florida have admitted they got it wrong when they detained three Muslim men for 17 hours for being suspected terrorists. <…> the authorities have admitted their conversation was not about terrorism and that CCTV footage has shown they did in fact stop and pay the toll.

I knew it!  What an unfortunate mistake, but at least nobody got physically hurt.  I still think the media SUCKS for broadcasting the whole thing.  If we’re going to be so careful in investigating every potential terrorist, we’ve got to shut up and let the cops do their job.  What I mean is… if the woman’s initial complaint was even a little bit believable, then the cops probably had no choice but to pull them over and at least question them.  But I betcha anything that the incident wouldn’t have gotten dragged out so long if it weren’t for the presence of all those cameras.

We had dinner tonight at the Brauhaus — I AM SO FULL!!  It was Rian’s girlfriend Lisa’s birthday dinner party thing.  It wasn’t a big party, just seven of us.  Her and me and Char on one side, and John and the Murphy brothers on the other, plus Dan K. on the end.  If you haven’t been to the Brauhaus, you totally should go!!  It’s a crazy German-themed restaurant with live music.  The waitresses wear Robin Hood caps and "traditional" dresses, with their boobs all pushed up and pouring out the top. Every time you go, they’ve got new games, new guest musicians, new ways to torture the audience.  It’s supposed to be a very audience-participation kind of thing.  Tonight there was a tuba player who walked through the dining room and let people throw coins into the horn.  There was an AWFUL yodeling contest, and several instances of party trains / bunny hops.  They even had the Achey Breaky dance going at one point.  I thought they were doing the Bus Stop!!!  Lisa had to correct me, isn’t that hilarious?

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I keep dutifully updating my copy of NetNewsWire Lite; it’s up to 1.0 now.  What a great tool, and it’s getting better all the time.  Pretty soon you’re going to be able to control your toaster with that thing!  Anyway, the reason I’m writing is because I was just idly checking the site-drawer in the new version… different websites all over the place are starting RSS feeds, so I like to find out what’s new.  So I look in the "Blogs" folder and open up "0-F", and what do I see?  My own name on the list, that’s what!  I’ve never even talked to this guy; how has he even heard of my site?  I’m really surprised, and pleased.  :-)

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I’ve been avoiding the computer today, gee I wonder why?  I didn’t get enough sleep last night with all the crap I had to deal with; I’ll probably go to bed early.  This is one of those days when there really isn’t anything to blog about!  I paid some bills, so my creditors are a little happier… hopefully that’ll shut ‘em up for awhile.  I still have a few more to pay tomorrow; I didn’t want to overload my poor debit card by charging everything at once.  If there’s any money left, I know what I want… I’m going to buy an Airport wireless router and an Airport card to go with it!  But I don’t know if I really can; we’ll see.  It’s a total luxury item that I don’t really need in any way, shape or form, but of course I want it anyway.  Maybe I can trick John into accidentally breaking my router somehow.  ;-)

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Ugh.  I’m writing on my PC now.  Apple put out a new OS update today (and by "today" I mean "yesterday" of course).  I installed it and some things got killed.  It wasn’t happy about the fact that I’d created subfolders inside my Applications folder.  It wants to find all the files in their default locations.  Story of my life, right?  Me and subfolders, we just don’t see eye-to-eye.  So anyway I’m reinstalling Jaguar now.  Ten minutes ago I was just coming in to check my mail to see if anybody had replied to my plea for help… but the answer confused me and I got mad at it, so I’m fucking reinstalling the system.  Real good Edith.  Real clever way to solve a problem…!

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…has just been posted.  Last week’s misery mystery song was "Rock Pretty Baby" by Ivy Shulman & the Bowties, from the 1951 soundtrack to Rock, Rock, Rock.

The SpamCop paid mail service has announced a "planned outage" all day this coming Sunday the 22nd, while they move their servers to a new location.  Althought I’m glad they’re getting a better connection for the future, it displeases me that they’re actually planning on all mail being lost on that day.  I may be misunderstanding the announcement but it seems there’ll be no backup server to catch the mail that flows in during the outage.  I guess maybe it wasn’t a good idea to start giving people that address as my primary contact addy!  I get the impression that most other paid users only use their SpamCop addys as a place to forward and filter their mail, not as a primary public address.  So… I know I do this all the time to my poor suffering contact-info-packrat friends, but… if you could change my addy back to the one at THIS domain (that is, my first name at my whole name dot com), that would be super.

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Wow, I just got my very first trackback ping!  It’s linking to this article in a Norwegian music webzine, which talks about what I said in that last blog posting.  I just heard from the person who posted it too, and asked ‘em to translate it for me.  I get the impression they’re just saying they’re glad that maybe I’m playing in Norway.  I’m glad too… it better not fall through now that I’ve blabbed about it to the whole world!!  I’ve had lots of these disappointments before so I don’t know if it’s even right to mention it until the shows are confirmed.  So much can happen to derail a tour, but then… sometimes, miraculously, it does happen.  Let’s hope all the million pieces of the puzzle click together soon.

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Hi!  Happy B.B. King’s birthday!  Where is everything?  What have I done?  I moved everything around last night and can’t remember if I left anything broken or not.  It does look a hell of a lot better on the ass-end… all the files are now grouped into folders by year and month, so no one folder has more than a hundred or so files in it.  FTP is MUCH happier now, it works like it’s supposed to again.  I still have some messin’ around to do (especially with the archive index, and the category listings) but I’m hoping everything’s stable for the moment.  Are any links broken?  Post a comment if you notice anything screwy.

I’m getting a little panicky over a tour I’m supposed to do in Europe soon.  It’s supposed to start around the end of October but I still haven’t seen any list of dates, venues, or even cities.  I do know I’m supposed to start in Spain, then go to Italy and then Norway, and then come back home.  (Sorry, too bad for everywhere else!!)

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I’m doing some futzing with Movable Type again.  If you notice broken internal links, please wait until tomorrow and THEN comment about it if it’s still screwy.  :-) I kinda have to do this like now if I want to keep adding stuff.  That’s because I suddenly realized I’ve reached the point of having waaaay too many files in the archive folder.  All my entries and archive pages are currently being stored in a single folder called "blog".  There’s about five zillion files in there now; it’s extremely messy to look at, and it makes it hard or impossible to use FTP because there are too many filenames to display at once.  Fetch won’t even work on that folder; when I try to drag it to copy to my hard drive, it starts to read the list and chokes.  Dreamweaver does work (albeit verrrry slowly) when performing the same operation — that’s why they’re gettin’ the big bucks!  But it’s no good to let any one folder get out of control with files.  Causes a huge heaving strain on the system every time you want to do anything.

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I just paid off $175 worth of parking tickets.  Uggggghhhhhh.  I had to do it or they would’ve booted my van pretty soon.  It’s the street cleaning that gets me every time.  :-(

So, I just saw two bits of video relating to the Florida story I talked about in the last entry.  Saw the sister of one of the three guys who were pulled over.  She lives here in Chicago and spoke very eloquently and angrily about the ridiculousness of the whole pullover thing.  She sure sounded like an American to me.  Looked right at the camera, and… call me gullible if you like, but I believed what she said.  So THEN I see the three guys themselves in an interview on CNN Newsnight.  Those poor sumbitches!!  After hearing what they had to say, my instincts are telling me they’re innocent even more than before.

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Triskaidekaphobia is the Dictionary.com Word of the Day.  It means, a morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th.  Today at least, it works for me!

The interview with Chad was a total Three Stooges operation.  It wuddn’t his fault and it wuddn’t my fault, it was just one of those days where almost everything that could possibly go wrong, did.  Technically I mean.  First there was confusion over the lack of a difference between Chicago time and Louisiana time.  I know, it’s pretty far to the east, you’d think there’d be some difference… well, I’m pretty sure we both got that one wrong.

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… has been posted.  Last week’s mystery song was "Stinky Poodle" by Tangela Tricoli.  This week’s song is equally silly, and I hope that’s okay with you, considering what day it is and all.  I figure with all the stuff on TV there’s no way I’m going to add to the depression by posting something maudlin or "thought-provoking".

I can’t believe it’s only been one year.  It seems like maybe about 2-1/2 years ago.  9/11 and its aftermath just seems like one very extended bad dream in my memory; maybe that’s why I’m having trouble keeping track of time when I think about it.

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I feel quite crappy today.  Snotty and sneezy and achey and just miserable in general.  The only thing that really helps is a little ibuprofin, a lot of hot tea, and sleep sleep sleep.

There was some public confusion here about an interview I’m going to do — the secretarial stuff has all been cleared up, in case you were wondering.  It was my own fault for even answering the phone when I hadn’t had my coffee, LOL!!  Usually the interviews are scheduled very neatly by Lisa Turallo at Drag City… she does a terrific job of making sure everyone knows where they stand, who’s supposed to call who at what time, following up on getting print copies for the archives etc.  I’m supposed to forward all interview requests to her, for that simple reason, and if I don’t, I always end up wishing that I had.  Because I’m a confused person by nature.  When she deals with it, it’s like BAM.  She can complete the transaction in 3 e-mails.  Why can’t I be more like Lisa???  She’s so together.

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