The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of about 76,000 Troy-Bilt and Craftsman chain saws.

It included this priceless line:

Hazard: The chain saw’s plastic front handle can break during operation. If this occurs, the saw would be difficult to control and poses a risk for lacerations.

(Emphasis mine.)

Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko pans the Microsoft Zune, competitor to the iPod.

His bio reads simply, “Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times.”

What it fails to mention is that Ihnatko is a columnist for the Mac Observer and for MacUser, and author of The Mac OSX Tiger Book, iPod Fully Loaded, The iPhoto 4 Book, and Dr. Macintosh’s Guide to the On-Line Universe, among others.

A Mac guy hating a Microsoft product — a product that is getting at least decent reviews other places. I am shocked. Shocked.

Note (11/28): This is a troll for page views.

There’s a counter in the newsroom that serves as a giveaway shelf — people put things there for others to take, whether it was something sent to them or some kind of food they want to share. I grabbed a small book the other day about composting.

I’ve wanted to do composting for a while; the idea of throwing away all the leaves from my lawn drives me nuts (we live under a huge maple tree). But that’s what we do so the grass doesn’t die — all that wonderful plant food raked to the street.

When we lived in Cincinnati I tried a commercial composting box, but that was a miserable failure. Forgetting the fact that the wind kept knocking it down, I had neglected to actually read how to compost, and thus filled the thing with grass clippings. (Grass clippings make great compost food, but not compost. You want to mix ‘em in with the stuff that’s actually gonna break down.)

But with this little book in hand, I now knew what I had done wrong.

My wife, bless her heart, had already moved most of the fallen leaves to the street, where they had been swept up. But there was plenty left, and darn it, I was gonna use it. I considered another commercial composter, but decided to stick with something simple.

We had this expandable pet gate thing called the Pet Yard with sides that could be snapped together — you could have a square, pentagon, etc. We had 12 “sides,” so I took four and made a square. The thing is sturdy and has holes the size of chicken wire, so plenty of air can get in. I put it by the side of the house where it would get some sun.

Then I raked up some big piles of leaves onto the lawn and took the lawnmower — with the bag attached — and mowed the leaves. In a few minutes, I had a bag full of shreds with some grass mixed in. (That was another mistake of mine. If you want compost within a few years, you need to shred the leaves.)

Bag after bag I emptied into the Pet Yard compost bin, in which I had stood a tube of screen about four inches in diameter right in the center of the bin — a chimney to get air to the center. I filled the bin, which is 30 inches square and 26 inches high, in about 20 minutes and still had leaves left over.

And that was that.

The next day I went to admire my handiwork. Aside from having settled a bit, the shredded leaves looked about the same. But then, crossing my fingers, I stuck my hand into the leaves.

And in the middle it was warm. Quite warm.

My compost was cooking after only a day. :)

One of my goals in this was to keep it simple. I know there are folks who have huge, complex composting systems, and who measure the exact amounts of carbonaceous (i.e., carbon-rich) material (leaves) vs. the amount of nitrogen-rich material (grass) to strike the “perfect ratio,” and who will go out every N days to turn the pile the proper number of times, but that’s not me. For me, “a lot of leaves and a few handfuls of grass” is exact enough.

I may remember to turn the thing once in a while, but that chimney I put in the middle should make that less important. I’m hoping that the weather is warm enough that I start to get compost out of the thing by mid spring.

My next adventure in this vein: Vermiculture.

Update: This morning, there was steam coming out of the chimney. :)

Not that many of you care, but just in case…
I’ve got my webcam up and running again. It had been down since I upgraded my hard drive and reinstalled everything; now it’s working again. Most evenings you’ll get to see my scowling face as I work. (”Work” being a loose term. :)

Kantor.com/webcam

“Violence erupted at [insert name of mall here] as shoppers, some having been in line since 4:00 a.m., prepared to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ by fighting one another to save a few dollars on presents they waited all year to buy.”

In an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Dinesh D’Souza argues that — to quote the headline — “Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.”

His logic: That although events like the Inquisition and the Crusades killed a lot of people,

they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match.

It’s time for a quick strike by the logic police.

D’Souza is flat-out wrong in his assertion for an obvious reason. While far more people have been killed for non-religious reasons (e.g., in WW II), no one was claiming a religious reason for killing them.

In the Inquisition and the Crusades, however, religious extremists killed (or ordered killed) other people because those other people didn’t share the same religious views.

D’Souza makes an unfounded logical leap. If someone is killed for a reason other than religion, he attributes that death to Atheism. So the people Bonnie and Clyde killed were victims of Atheism, by his view.

But Bonnie and Clyde didn’t kill anyone because those people weren’t Atheists. They killed the people to take their money. In contrast, the people killed by order of the Church were murdered in the name of religion.

D’Souza is effectively saying that, if religion is not a motive in a killing, he will arbitrarily assign the motive to Atheism. Thus, “Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.”

Sorry, sir, it doesn’t work that way.

And wrong!

They’ve been waiting a couple of days already: The line for the Playstation 3 outside Roanoke’s Best Buy. This afternoon there were 28 people in line (more than 40 left already, according to the manager), but the store only guarantees 26 units.

At UCLA, campus police are apparently trained to use their tasers not as a non-lethal alternative to a firearm, but simply as a tool to make people comply with their instructions — and as a way to deal with people who question what they’re doing.

In this case, officers from the University of California Police Department walked around UCLA’s Powell Library computer lab, demanding to see ID from “random” students. One of those was 23-year-old Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, who did not have ID. The officers demanded he leave. According to witnesses, Tabatabainejad picked his stuff up and began walking to the door. When one of the officers pushed him, he told the officer to “Get your hands off me.”

Video of the incident, which was taken by a student with a camera phone, picks up just before “Get your hands off me.”

For yelling at the officers, Tabatabainejad was then tasered — he screams and collapses to the floor. The cops then demand that he get up. Tabatabainejad evidently refuses, quite possibly because he jsut has 40,000 to 50,000 volts shot through him.

And while he was laying on the floor, the cops shoot him again.

After the officers had tasered this unarmed man who had collapsed on the floor, other students rose to his defense. The cops then threatened them. Per the UCLA Daily Bruin:

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the cops to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

The officers then dragged Tabatabainejad out of the library, but because he had gone limp (either by choice or because of the tasering) they decided to taser him again. And again. Each time you can hear him screaming.

Once again: Tabatabainejad was unarmed and did not threaten the officers or anyone else. His only “crime” was not having an ID on him and not getting out of the library fast enough.

He was arrested and charged with resisting and obstructing a police officer, and later released on his own recognizance.

Here’s hoping he sues the pants off UCLA and the UCPD, and that those cops end up working mall security somewhere.

The worst video game names ever.

Most of us know that the Recording Industry Association of America has been suing thousands of people it claims have downloaded pirated music — everyone from teenage computer geeks to grandmothers who don’t even own computers.

The RIAA’s tactics, which are akin to extortion, are to demand a “settlement” from the defendant under the threat of taking them to court and demanding far more money.

Marie Lindor was one of the people the RIAA decided to target. As with everyone else it sued, the RIAA demanded $750 per downloaded song from her. She refused to settle. And she’s fighting back.

Today she won a major battle. Lindor challenged the idea that the songs she’s accused of downloading are worth $750 each. In fact, she pointed out, those songs are sold for only 99 cents — only 70 cents of which goes to the music label. That $750 price tag is, as the judge in the case ruled, “1,071 times the actual damages suffered.”

Lindor wants to be able to challenge that $750 price tag in court as part of her defense, and now she’s won that right (against the RIAA’s frantic objections).

Note to journalists: If you write that the music industry loses such-and-such amount of money every year due to piracy, you cannot use the industry’s figures; they’re wildly inflated.

No RIAA lawsuit has ever gone to court. The cases are either settled, or the RIAA drops the complaint when it finds it has targeted the wrong person. In one of those cases, when the defendant (one Paul Wilke) fought back, the record label admitted it didn’t have enough evidence and demanded the right to search Wilke’s computer to find evidence.

You read that right. The record label, Elektra in this case, sued the guy without having enough evidence. Amazing.

In that case, it was ruled that simply having a name, IP address, and list of songs allegedly downloaded wasn’t enough evidence. Now, with the ruling in the Lindor case, the RIAA faces the possibility that not only is its primary tactic weakened, but the damages it claims are also under attack.

Good.

When the Germans want to try you for war crimes, you know you’ve really crossed the line.

So Ted Haggard, who was ousted by the New Life Church in Colorado Springs after confessing to “sexual immorality” with a a male prostitute, is going to undergo a “spiritual restoration.”

According to H.B. London, vice president for church and clergy at Focus on the Family, the right-wing extremist group:

“From the Christian perspective, we think in terms of prayer, we think in terms of what we call godly counsel, where godly men who are clean themselves insert themselves in the life of the one who is struggling,” London said.

Perhaps they should keep the insertions to a minimum, huh?

[ducking]

Didja Know that the new Senate will have only one independent member? James Jeffords of Vermont is an indy, but Joe Lieberman of Connecticut is not — technically, Lieberman is a member of the Connecticut for Lieberman party, while Jeffords has no party affiliation.

Brought to you by the Committee for Future Trivial Pursuit Answers.

A black firefighter in L.A. won a $2.7 million lawsuit against the city because his co-workers fed him spaghetti with dog food on it, then laughed about it.

His claim, per his lawyer: ‘the association of a black man and dog food “resonates with the deep historical roots of slavery and the corresponding dehumanization”.’

Interesting, seeing that dog food didn’t exist until the 1940s. Dog biscuits have been around since the 1860s, but the firefighter, Tennie Pierce, wasn’t complaining about a cookie, but of canned food. That’s pretty new, so any “historical roots” can’t be terribly deep.

Argh! I keep seeing this — news articles that say the GOP gets control of the Senate if Allen somehow wins Virginia. From USA Today, for example:

If Allen prevailed in a vote challenge, the houses would be split between the parties.

No no no no no!

No!

If Allen prevailed, the Senate would be split 50-50. (The two independents have both said they’ll canvas with the Dems.) Yes, yes, in a tie vote the vice president gets to cast the tiebreaker, and obviously Cheney is a Republican.

But that’s only when votes come up and come to a tie. When it comes to the more important things, e.g., committee chairs, the Senate is tied. Tied.

And that hasn’t happened since (as I mentioned earlier) 1881.

There are no rules for how committees should be handled in a tie, because political parties are outside the Constitution. Would each committee have a split leadership? Would the committees themselves be split, some to the Dems and some to the Reps? No one knows. And — if Allen actually had a chance at winning — it would be an incredibly important question.

So someone has to tell these writers and editors to check their history and get a better read on what a tied Senate means. Grr.

If the Dems and GOP end up in a 50-50 split of the Senate, Dick Cheney gets to cast the deciding vote in a tie. Okey doke. But that doesn’t affect things like the all-important committee chairmanships. Only once in US history has there been an evenly divided Senate — in 1881, and it was chaos.

Hmm… I wonder which family value this falls under.

Via Kos:

Tim Daly from Clarendon got a call saying that if he votes Tuesday, he will be arrested.

The transcript from his voicemail reads:

“This message is for Timothy Daly. This is the Virginia Elections Commission. We’ve determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote on Tuesday. If you do show up, you will be charged criminally.”

Daly has been registered to vote in Virginia since 1998, and he has voted for the last several cycles with no problem. He has filed a criminal complaint with the Commonwealth’s attorney in Arlington.

Oh, and if you think it’s just hysteria, you can listen to the message here.

Guess who’s making a comeback.

Just in case you haven’t seen it mentioned: It only takes a simple majority vote in the House of Representatives to impeach the President. But the Senate needs a 2/3 majority to convict him (and conviction would be expected to lead to removal from office, although the Senate doesn’t have to do that).

As Wikipedia puts it, being impeached is somewhat like being indicted, not convicted. In Clinton’s case, the House impeached him, but the Senate voted to acquit.

Just thought I’d share this.