Aug. 10th, 2006
Hey, look, a loony from Ohio!
Aug. 10th, 2006 12:57 pmConservative political activist June Griffin has been arrested for the theft of a Mexican flag from a Dayton business.
The 67-year-old Ms. Griffin, who ran for Congress in the recent election, is facing misdemeanor charges of theft, vandalism and harassment and felony charges of civil rights violations. She said on July 18 she had noticed a small Mexican flag at an Hispanic grocery in the former Rogers Drug Store.
She stated, "I went in and there was nothing English in the store. There was one man who could not speak a word of English." She said she was outraged about the Mexican flag, saying it was an "act of war" and it "insulted my citizenship."
Ms. Griffin said as the Hispanic man watched, she tore off the flag from where it was suctioned to the building and left with it. She had been to local governments trying without success to get them to ban all but American flags.
The 67-year-old Ms. Griffin, who ran for Congress in the recent election, is facing misdemeanor charges of theft, vandalism and harassment and felony charges of civil rights violations. She said on July 18 she had noticed a small Mexican flag at an Hispanic grocery in the former Rogers Drug Store.
She stated, "I went in and there was nothing English in the store. There was one man who could not speak a word of English." She said she was outraged about the Mexican flag, saying it was an "act of war" and it "insulted my citizenship."
Ms. Griffin said as the Hispanic man watched, she tore off the flag from where it was suctioned to the building and left with it. She had been to local governments trying without success to get them to ban all but American flags.
(no subject)
Aug. 10th, 2006 03:18 pm
After 40 years' burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop
From the outside, the house that stands at 121 Mortimer Road in Hackney, east London, looks no different to the thousands of other decrepit old buildings scattered across the country. The roof has caved in. Three of the windows are boarded up and cracked paint peels from the wrinkled walls.
But this is no ordinary house. Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.
Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property.
No one in the community, even those who remember when Mr Lyttle first purchased the house in the 1960s, can answer the question on everyone's lips: why does he do it? In all his years of digging, though, Mr Lyttle has never offered a straight answer.
"I don't mind the title of inventor," he said. "Inventing things that don't work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking you what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn't one."
Things I hate today.
Aug. 10th, 2006 06:43 pm#1: Pedestrians in la belle province
#2: Being a pedestrian in la belle province
#3: Windows XP issues that stump Microsoft[1]
#4: Laptops. All laptops, but specifically fucking Sony fucking Vaio fucking laptops with bad video chips, which is a perfectly clear known issue, that choose WHEN THEY ARE IN THE ONLY STORE IN THE FUCKING CITY THAT CARRIES OLD VAIO PARTS to work PERFECTLY, in such a way that we can't make it fail, and that it hasn't worked before IN A BLOODY MONTH.
#5: Laptop stores that, upon seeing that the thing is POSTing, flat-out refuse to give me a quote on replacement parts. "It's working, you don't need one." "I WILL need one shortly. Price?" "But it's working now!" "It wasn't working ten minutes ago, and it won't be working ten minutes from now. HOW MUCH DOES A NEW FUCKING MOTHERBOARD AND CHIP COST?"
#6: Laptops, redux, as I leave the store, the store closes, and the laptop STOPS WORKING AGAIN.
#7: Toyotas that break down literally an hour from anything that even looks like civilisation, with no warning, showing no signs in the regular maintenance checkups, after working perfectly for most of the previous decade.
#8: Toyota dealerships in the middle of nowhere who replace your transmission, badly[2], and aren't open at a civilised hour OR located in a civilised location so you can get them to fix the very expensive job that they did wrong the first time.
I'm going to go kill something and eat it raw.
[1]: XP pro machine in a workgroup. No domain. It cannot browse other machines through Network Neighbourhood, nor can it connect to them by name. By IP, everything works absolutely perfectly and it can see and connect to those machines without a problem. Other machines in the workgroup cannot see this machine by name, but by IP they work perfectly. Every other machine can see every other machine without a problem. The machines are a mix of XP pro, XP home, Debian running Samba, and Ubuntu. When attempting to browse the workgroup, the error message is that the workgroup is not available, you don't have permission, the server list is not available.
NetBIOS is enabled (both through DHCP and through TCP/IP at different times), and it's even been tried disabled.
Computer Browser service has been stopped, started, run, told it's the master, told there is no master, and told that it cannot be the master but should look for one, to no avail.
No firewall or blocking software except Windows Firewall, and that's been disabled to test, too. No effect.
I've done everything but stick a damn lmhosts file in. I COULD put in an lmhosts file, but only about *half* of the machines that this one needs to connect to are on static IPs, and so the file would be counterproductive after a very short time AND it wouldn't detect new machines.
I'm stumped.
MSKB is stumped.
The owner of the machine resists "Here's your XP CD, key's in the sticker on the case, enjoy your reinstall" as an option, or good reason.
Any suggestions?
[2]: While it's a great, great improvement over "bang crunch shimmy screech to a stop ha ha your car is fucked", which was the state BEFORE the transmission replacement, currently the engine races way, way too far in 2nd and 3rd gear before shifting up and the entire car jerks when those gears shift. Shifting down appears to work perfectly normally. No, this doesn't depend on how hard I'm pressing the pedal, although putting the pedal down will make it happen faster. Have I mentioned how much I hate automatic transmissions? No? Let's put that as #9, then. #9: Automatic transmissions.
#2: Being a pedestrian in la belle province
#3: Windows XP issues that stump Microsoft[1]
#4: Laptops. All laptops, but specifically fucking Sony fucking Vaio fucking laptops with bad video chips, which is a perfectly clear known issue, that choose WHEN THEY ARE IN THE ONLY STORE IN THE FUCKING CITY THAT CARRIES OLD VAIO PARTS to work PERFECTLY, in such a way that we can't make it fail, and that it hasn't worked before IN A BLOODY MONTH.
#5: Laptop stores that, upon seeing that the thing is POSTing, flat-out refuse to give me a quote on replacement parts. "It's working, you don't need one." "I WILL need one shortly. Price?" "But it's working now!" "It wasn't working ten minutes ago, and it won't be working ten minutes from now. HOW MUCH DOES A NEW FUCKING MOTHERBOARD AND CHIP COST?"
#6: Laptops, redux, as I leave the store, the store closes, and the laptop STOPS WORKING AGAIN.
#7: Toyotas that break down literally an hour from anything that even looks like civilisation, with no warning, showing no signs in the regular maintenance checkups, after working perfectly for most of the previous decade.
#8: Toyota dealerships in the middle of nowhere who replace your transmission, badly[2], and aren't open at a civilised hour OR located in a civilised location so you can get them to fix the very expensive job that they did wrong the first time.
I'm going to go kill something and eat it raw.
[1]: XP pro machine in a workgroup. No domain. It cannot browse other machines through Network Neighbourhood, nor can it connect to them by name. By IP, everything works absolutely perfectly and it can see and connect to those machines without a problem. Other machines in the workgroup cannot see this machine by name, but by IP they work perfectly. Every other machine can see every other machine without a problem. The machines are a mix of XP pro, XP home, Debian running Samba, and Ubuntu. When attempting to browse the workgroup, the error message is that the workgroup is not available, you don't have permission, the server list is not available.
NetBIOS is enabled (both through DHCP and through TCP/IP at different times), and it's even been tried disabled.
Computer Browser service has been stopped, started, run, told it's the master, told there is no master, and told that it cannot be the master but should look for one, to no avail.
No firewall or blocking software except Windows Firewall, and that's been disabled to test, too. No effect.
I've done everything but stick a damn lmhosts file in. I COULD put in an lmhosts file, but only about *half* of the machines that this one needs to connect to are on static IPs, and so the file would be counterproductive after a very short time AND it wouldn't detect new machines.
I'm stumped.
MSKB is stumped.
The owner of the machine resists "Here's your XP CD, key's in the sticker on the case, enjoy your reinstall" as an option, or good reason.
Any suggestions?
[2]: While it's a great, great improvement over "bang crunch shimmy screech to a stop ha ha your car is fucked", which was the state BEFORE the transmission replacement, currently the engine races way, way too far in 2nd and 3rd gear before shifting up and the entire car jerks when those gears shift. Shifting down appears to work perfectly normally. No, this doesn't depend on how hard I'm pressing the pedal, although putting the pedal down will make it happen faster. Have I mentioned how much I hate automatic transmissions? No? Let's put that as #9, then. #9: Automatic transmissions.
