Gaspar Torriero writes from Italy in response to my saying "showing people what I'd written but not revised made me feel as good as getting a rectal exam in a Macy's store window." (Nov. 15). (Count on Rageboy to have picked up on this particular image of mine. Sigh.) Gaspar writes:

You may will not believe this, but on Swiss television this Friday, during the evening live medicine show, a guy from the public had a colonoscopy in front of the cameras. He seemed to enjoy the attention, being interviewed and all. Very nice live video of his rectum and colon.

How many Harry Potter reviews are we going to read that are based on some pun about "Wild about Harry"? And how many reviews of "Legally Blonde" twisted "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in one way or another? I have nothing against writers (including headline writers) taking the easy way out. In fact, I'm all in favor of it. But - and here's the point - no one has heard the songs these puns are based on in fifty years or more. The songs live on now only in punning headlines.

Whoix.com, the Thinking Person's Alternative to Whois, responds to malformed queries with the following error message:

Bitte geben Sie den Domain-Namen ohne "www." an

Ach, ist jetzt die Sprache vom der Internet Deutsch ? Ausgezeichnet!

Besides, if Whoix is smart enough to see that the name I entered begins with "www." why isn't it smart enough to remove the "www." and do the lookup I requested? "To dial the number you requested you must first dial 1." If you know what I did wrong, why don't you dial the one, you a-hole!

General category of this picked nit: The Petty Revenge of Resentful Robots.

Or so it seems. The BBC video report features a quick glimpse of the document that supports the claim that Al Qaeda is building nuclear weapons. The few words visible do indeed seem to come from the parody document. It also seems that CNN has been taken in.

Hey, Osama, time to start rehearsing for your IG Noble Prize acceptance speech next year!

According to The Daily Rotten, the instructions for building nuclear weapons found in the deserted Taliban headquarters actually are a parody from The Annals of Improbable Research. The parody has been circulating on the Web since the 1980s and was written in 1979.

The alarmist report was filed by Anthony Loyd of The Times of London. In it he reads from the paper he found:

The device basically works when the detonated TNT compresses the Plutonium into a critical mass. The critical mass then produces a nuclear chain recation similar to the domino chain reaction (discussed in this column, "Dominos on the March", March, 1968). The chain reaction then promptly produces a big thermonuclear reaction. And there you have it, a 10 megaton explosion!

Says The Daily Rotten:

To find these joke atomic bomb plans, do a web search for "The device basically works" and look for mentions of "Let's Build an Atomic Bomb!". It gives us pause and joy to know the Taliban are wasting their time downloading what amounts to joke mail and spending time trying to discern the facts therein.

Personal Web Publishing Communities. Four very key words. Let's go through them one by one...

So says Dave. No argument here. Dave nails it.

Of course, there's more to say about weblogs; that's why they're hard to reduce to a definition, even with the expansion Dave provides for each of the terms. Weblogs are a rich phenomenon.

For example: Weblog communities are different than communities formed around discussion boards or mailing lists. The nature of the conversational bonds is different. Even weblog time is different - the fact that blogs have a daily feel isn't incidental to what they are and what they're becoming.

And, they hit a middle ground in terms of their publicness. For some of us - me - that's been an inhibitor, since in the 2x2 matrix (I've gotta stop writing Powerpoints) of publicness and formality, emails are in the lower left (small, intimate group and highly informal), zines are in the top right (large group, formal/reviewed/drafted writing) and blogs are in the upper left (potentially a lot of readers, but generally pretty informal because they're so timely). Some of us, because of our own neuroses, find the upper left an uncomfortable place.

Our blog has only been up for 8 hours and it's already won it's first award!

Well, we haven't quite won it yet. We've been nominated, but that itself is the real award, isn't it? Yes, we are proud to announce that our site has been nominated for the prestigious Deco-Website Awards!

The exciting news arrived be email just minutes ago. At first we thought it might be spam, but at the bottom it said explicitly:

THIS EMAIL IS NOT SPAM YOUR SITE WAS SELECTED BY
HAND TO TAKE PART IN OUR 2001-2002 AWARDS, WE NEVER SEND SPAM. IT IS BAD.

And it was all in caps! They couldn't do that if it weren't true!

The fact that we received the message twice and it doesn't quite mention which of our web sites has been nominated also made us a bit suspicious, as did the fact that the mail was addressed to "[email protected]." While I own the domain name evident.com, I don't actually have a site up. So, I'm sure they mean the award to go to this blog. After all, although I'm normally quite humble, it's clear that I deserve it. Well, not me alone, but the team of people who labored over the past 2 hours to build this site. I dedicate this award to the little people.

Paranoid me, I still thought it might be a scam or maybe some of my "friends" (you know who you are) pulling my leg. But the Deco Website Awards site tells you just who the Evaluators are. These three folks are Web heavys ("heavies" just reads too funny)!:

David Collinson
David is working as a freelance web designer in Japan and has an extensive experience in web design, HTML and Java programming As of his education, he is the post graduate in computers/ graphic design of a Tokyo collage and he is the Webmaster of this web site and the Award program.

John Roberts
John is an office worker as a Senior Programmer Analyst, but his important interest is the internet and web site design. He has excellent skill in HTML, Java, He has a very good experience by working in several countries like England, Holland, Japan, and right now living in Paris, France
He is a graduate in computer graphics and has more than 8 years of experience in Web Design and Programming.

Mary Richards
Is a graphics designer. The Deco Website Awards is a part time job for her, And in the new year planing to go to japan to study more.

(Keep it up, Mary. You're going to make it after all!)

Another couple of signs that these guys are the real deal: First, look at their URL: http://www.deco-websiteawards.co-inc.com. You can't get much more legally incorporated than to be both a Co. and an Inc. ... these guys must be rock solid! Also, when you go to the site, not one but three popup ads appear, each a vote of confidence.

Best of all, if I win, they're going to allow me to buy a trophy! Do you think I should put it on top of my monitor, or is that too ostentatious? Maybe I should just put it on a bookshelf and half hide it behind some old paperbacks so that when people notice it, I can be all humble like.

I'm probably overdue to update this weblog since the last update was, let's see, November 20, 1999!

Yeah, I tried this weblogging thing two years ago. But it's not how I like to write. I like to let things sit before I show them to people. Yes, I recently finished writing a book in public, posting each day's draft at a public web site (www.smallpieces.com). But I was very uncomfortable doing it. The feedback made it worthwhile, but showing people what I'd written but not revised made me feel as good as getting a rectal exam in a Macy's store window. So, we'll see how this second attempt at blogging goes.

Let's try this. Here's the beginning of a column that should be showing up tomorrow in Darwin Online.