Induction

Kieran at CT points to a new reason for optimism: in every election year in the seventy-one year history of the Washington Redskins, they've won their last game before election day when and only when the Presidential incumbant has gone on to lose the election. The Packers beat the 'Skins today -- if the winning of football games and of Presidential elections are natural kinds, and thus able to enter into law-like generalizations, this bodes well.

If there is a force for justice in the universe...

...it will work towards the Ravens' defeat of the Eagles, and especially of Terrell Owens, today.

Key Endorsement

John Kerry seems to have won the hamster vote. Hat tip: Shari.

Fake Barn CountryWe

Continuing TISTAT's access-denied theme, Fake Barn Country is having some issues. SPAM was up last week by more than a little, and since yesterday, we've been unable to log in to delete SPAM or write new entries. I've put in a request to Brown Web Publishing to see if they can figure out what's going on. In the meantime, advice is appreciated. When we try to log in, which we do by going to this site

http://cgi-user.brown.edu/cgi-user/opp/mt.cgi

instead of being prompted for a password and username, we get this error message:

Forbidden You don't have permission to access /cgi-user/opp/mt.cgi on this server. Apache/1.3.27 Server at webpub.brown.edu Port 80

Did some setting get assigned wrong? Has a clever SPAMmer/hacker managed to lock us out of our own site? I know next to nothing about such things... help much appreciated. I'll be updating FBC news here if there's more to report before we're able to post there. UPDATE, already (6:15 p.m.): I went to post a comment at FBC, pointing to this post, but it turns down that my ability to comment there, too, is now gone. UPDATE (Nov. 1, 5:00 p.m.): We don't seem much closer to a solution, although we have a hypothesis as to a cause. The URL we've been using references "opp", which was Brian Weatherson's paper's blog before he left Brown. His two blogs and FBC were all set up using the same stuff, it seems -- the working theory is that somebody deleted his old things, failing to realize that they were still being used by us. I'm still waiting to hear back from Brown Web Publishing for insight. UPDATE (Nov. 2): FBC is back online, finally. At the moment, it's even free of grossly offensive spam.

We must protect our youth. From ME!!!!!

Elsie teaches in a New York City public high school. She told me today that she tried to access my blog from a school computer, and got this message:

Access Denied The requested document, http://ichikawa.blogspot.com/, will not be shown. Reason: Found in Denied List (SexEd/Advanced). Entry causing block is ichikawa.blogspot.com.

Does anyone understand how things like this work? Does that last line mean that someone specifically entered my blog as objectionable? Or is some automatic filter picking up bad keywords? It's weird, because I don't really ever talk about vulvae or fellatio or waiting for marriage. I don't think my ideas are very dangerous...

Now that's some crazy shit

Exactly one of the following two columns represents intentionally incomprehensible, apparently-pointless rambling. Can you guess which? Is it Column A? Excerpt:

"It should be!" says [identifying name omitted]. "The signs mean things - great an terrible things! Omens an miracles an dogs marrying cats an goats born with two heads, stars an moons an green clovers! Dark things to come! There's a wolf at the door! There's a bear in the woods!" "Maybe the bear will eat the wolf," says me. "Then we can all settle down an get a pizza with the bear!" "Your commie bear cannot save you now!" says [identifying name omitted]. "Wolves are the pirahna of the forest. They can skeletonize a cow in under thirty seconds!" "And the bear is the cow of the forest," says me. "Which is why forest-farmers milk bears for honey - or as it is technically known, hunny."

Or is it Column B? Excerpt:

It is only now that the dinner party lion emerges to stake his claim to greatness. While others quiver with pre-election anxiety, their mood rising and collapsing with the merest flicker of the polls, he alone radiates certainty. He alone can read the internals, cross-tabs and trends, can parse Gallup and Zogby and emerge with clear answers. He alone can captivate a gathering, while men hang eagerly on his words and women undress him with their eyes. He begins his dinner party performance with a combination of impressive name-dropping and crushing banality: "I was talking to Karl the other day - Karl Rove - and he mentioned that winning the most electoral votes is the key to winning the election. And when I bumped into Tim - Tim Russert - at Colin and Alma's place, he agreed." By this point soup will be cooling in the bowls. His dinner companions will be waiting for him to validate their highest hopes or underline their fears. The lion must be careful not to utter a final prediction too quickly.

Farenheit 9/11 is Downloadable

I didn't see this film, even though I wanted to. Now it is available for internet download here. The site in question claims to have Michael Moore's permission to distribute the movie for free, and that therefore this is legal -- I haven't followed up to see whether that first claim true, and I also don't know if the argument is valid -- that his permission is sufficient to make this legal, given studio rights, etc., but I'm taking the web site author at his word unless I have reason to do otherwise. The high-resolution WMV version is about a fifteen minute download on my high-speed connetion. I'm about halfway done with downloading it.