A young blonde was on vacation and driving through the Everglades wanted to take home a pair of genuine alligator shoes, but was very reluctant to pay the high prices the local vendors were asking. After becoming very frustrated with the “no haggle on prices” attitude of one of the shopkeepers, the blonde shouted, “Well then, maybe I’ll just go out and catch my own alligator, so I can get a pair of shoes for free!”

The shopkeeper said with a sly, knowing smile, “Little lady, just go and give it a try!” SoThe blonde headed out toward the swamps, determined to catch an alligator.

Later in the day, as the shopkeeper is driving home, he pulls over to the side of the levee where he spots the same young woman standing waist deep in the murky bayou water, shotgun in hand. Just then, he spots a huge 9-foot gator swimming rapidly toward her. With lightning speed, she takes aim, kills the creature and hauls it onto the slimy bank of the swamp.

Lying nearby were 7 more of the dead creatures, all lying on their backs.

The shopkeeper stood on the bank, watching in silent amazement. The blonde struggled and flipped the gator onto its back. Rolling her eyes heavenward and screaming in great frustration, she shouts out.. “SHIT… THIS ONE’S BAREFOOT, TOO!”

More…

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It turns out that the beast, in caterpillar form, is called the “hickory horned devil” – more images here. And yeah, it’s typically 5″ long. They say it’s not harmful to humans. They say.

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You expect better than this from one of our nations founding fathers. No wonder John Adams hated him.

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.

–Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788.

And he calls himself a Virginian. He wouldn’t be fit to run for dog catcher there, these days. Heck, he’d be too busy pulling deer heads out of his mailbox to even do that. Sen. Allen would see to it, given Jefferson’s close relationship with Sally Hemings.

If that bastard were around today, I’d do the patriotic thing and courageously send him an anonymous letter filled with suspicious white powder. That’d shut him up.

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If you think only US citizens don’t know much, think again:

“Big problems for California U.S. Senate candidate Dick Mountjoy. He says he was on the Battleship Missouri in the Korean War. Turns out he wasn’t. No one on the ship can remember him being there. And believe me, when your name is Dick Mountjoy, people are gonna remember you being there.”

–Jay Leno

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“So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?�? Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. . . . Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority . . . .�?

Kelly saw the linkage of text to text, book to book, as the answer to the information gaps that have made the progress of knowledge such a hard climb. “If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject,�? Kelly wrote, “then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.�?

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But something has gone terribly wrong. In recent years, large multinational media companies have captured the global copyright system and twisted it toward their own short-term interests. The people who are supposed to benefit most from a system that makes ideas available — readers, students, and citizens — have been excluded. No one in Congress wants to hear from college students or librarians.

More than ever, the law restricts what individuals can do with elements of their own culture. Generally the exercise of copyright protection is so extreme these days that even the most innocent use of images or song lyrics in scholarly work can generate a legal threat. Last year one of the brightest students in my department got an article accepted in the leading journal in the field. It was about advertising in the 1930s. The journal’s lawyers and editors refused to let her use images from the ads in question without permission, even though it is impossible to find out who owns the ads or if they were ever covered by copyright in the first place. The chilling effect trumped any claim of scholarly “fair use�? or even common sense.

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We are losing much of the history of the twentieth century because the copyright industries are more litigious than ever.

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Richard has made good progress over the weekend following his jet car accident on Wednesday.

He remains in a stable condition and was moved to a general medical ward over the weekend, where he spent time with his wife and daughters.

Doctors at Leeds General Infirmary have said they are ‘reasonably optimistic’ that he will make a good recovery – and Jeremy said that Richard has already managed his first few steps after the accident.

Richard’s wife Mindy and their daughters Willow and Isabella have been ‘overwhelmed’ by support from fans and well wishers.

We alone have received well over 15,000 emails since the accident from Top Gear readers wishing Richard well – and the inbox is still growing.

A website set up by fans has also managed to raise more than £150,000 for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, which airlifted Richard to hospital on Wednesday. The Air Ambulance service has announced that these donations will help to ‘bring forward’ plans to operate a second helicopter.

Mindy has asked that well wishers make a donation to the Air Ambulance instead of sending flowers.

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President Clinton urged Congress Tuesday to act swiftly in developing anti-terrorism legislation before its August recess.

“We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue,” Clinton said during a White House news conference.

But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures.

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Hatch called Clinton’s proposed study of taggants — chemical markers in explosives that could help track terrorists — “a phony issue.”

“If they want to, they can study the thing” already, Hatch asserted. He also said he had some problems with the president’s proposals to expand wiretapping.

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A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

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Inside the inspector general’s office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual.

Tom Melius, with the Fish and Wildlife Service, left, Lisa Pajot, second left, and Gary Bullock, second from right, with the Bird and Treatment and Learning Center, and Pat Lampi, with the Alaska Zoo release a bald eagle in Anchorage Alaska Saturday Sept. 25, 2006. The eagle was cared for by the Bird and Treatment and Learning Center after it lost its tail feathers and was released after the feathers grew back. (AP Photo/John Gomes)

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NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity has arrived at the rim of a crater approximately five times wider than a previous stadium-sized one it studied for half a year.

Initial images from the rover’s first overlook after a 21-month journey to “Victoria Crater” show rugged walls with layers of exposed rock and a floor blanketed with dunes. The far wall is approximately 800 meters (one-half mile) from the rover.

“This is a geologist’s dream come true,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for NASA’s twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. “Those layers of rock, if we can get to them, will tell us new stories about the environmental conditions long ago. We especially want to learn whether the wet era that we found recorded in the rocks closer to the landing site extended farther back in time. The way to find that out is to go deeper, and Victoria may let us do that.”

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since January 2004, more than 10 times longer than its original prime mission of three months. It has driven more than 9.2 kilometers (5.7 miles). Most of that was to get from “Endurance” crater to Victoria, across a flat plain pocked with smaller craters and strewn with sand ripples. Frequent stops to examine intriguing rocks interrupted the journey, and one large sand ripple kept the rover trapped for more than five weeks.

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Intel says it will start shipping chips that exchange data at a terabyte a second – approximately 1000 gigabytes or one trillion (short scale) bytes – within five years.

A prototype of the 80-core chip was revealed this week at the Intel Developer Forum, the company’s twice-yearly conference used to educate developers on its short and long-term plans.

And they’re going to call it the 80×86.

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Efforts to win U.S. congressional passage of a bill to ban most forms of Internet gambling by tacking it onto a must-pass bill hit a roadblock on Tuesday, but aides said Republican backers were exploring other ways to make it law.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, raised a “strong objection” to attaching any unrelated legislation to a pending defense bill, which has been viewed by supporters of the Internet gambling bill as a prime vehicle for it.

“I have firmly opposed putting any (unrelated) bills in the conference report,” Warner wrote in a letter dated September 25 to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Warner did not cite the Internet gambling bill specifically, but he said other senators have sought to tack at least nine unrelated items to the defense bill.

I hear there were at least two “Dump Nuclear Waste in Lake Michigan” riders to a bill titled “People Shouldn’t Molest Babies.”

The system is broken. I suggest Americans reboot their government.