BuzzMachine

Guns ‘n’ roses
: I think this is a little sick, though I can see Glenn Reynolds et al love it: In Toronto, a weekend-getaway travel company is pushing a Charley’s Angels tour:

The morning starts with a visit to a private gun club. Here you polish your gun shooting skills with personal, side-by-side firearm instruction. You learn basic gun safety and how to load your own magazine, then you fire-off 50 rounds of ammo at a paper target. The target is yours to take back as a souvenir.

Then off you go to Stillwater Spa, one of the hottest spas in Toronto, for a manicure. Relax in the whirlpool, have a cold drink and enjoy being pampered for a couple of hours.

After the manicure, trot back home, get dressed to the nines and get ready for a night on the town. Dance, meet new people and party the night away….

Program includes:

– Firearm instruction

– Use of protective eye and ear wear

– Use of handgun, ammunition and paper target

– Use of whirlpool, sauna and other Stillwater Spa facilities

– A manicure treatment at Stillwater Spa

Will it be long before the girls on Sex & the City are armed? Is gun chic on the way? Please, no.

Nick Denton fact-checks Google’s ass
: Here.

Just what we need: Four Saddams
: ZDF, the German TV network, says it has proof that Saddam uses doubles, long rumored. They analyzed hundreds of photos in their archives and determined that he has sent out at least three doubles lately, each surgically enhanced and each trained in Saddam’s mannerisms. One source said that the real Saddam was not seen in public, on TV, from 1998 until last Saturday. Will W get the right one?

: Babelfish translation here.

Blog the prom
: Metafilter points to a high-school student who’s getting in trouble for blogging from school.

I was in the office again today, balling my eyes out. Lets just say one of the options is to have me expelled from the school. I was gasping for air half the time I was in there. I had to write this affidavit telling them everything I knew about my blog, how long I had been posting from school, who else from my school had a blog and everything. I was crying the entire time. And don’t you dare joke me for crying. I mean, you’d cry too if you had a PERFECT perm. record and then have it screwed up in high school and mess up your chances of getting into the college of your choice.

If true, this is obnoxious and the kid should fight. He’s cleary smart and eager and he should be encouraged to develop those talents, not called before HUAC and made to name names because of it.

Why, in my day, I brought the ACLU into my junior high to fight a dress code (I was defending the rights of girls to wear slacks, not my right to wear sandals and socks). Defending free speech is a much better cause.

Enron
: The update from the auction this morning: Plastic Enron beer mugs sell for $14 each.

Infamy has a value.

The latest reality show: Selling off Enron
: You can listen to the Enron auction right now (midday Wednesday). Sony 27-inch TV just sold for $300.

: Thanks to Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers for pointing me to the auction. I’ve been listening off and on all day long (while doing more productive things, of course). It’s riveting. This is what becomes of crooks. The loot is so telling: Not just the chairs, lined up like those Chinese clay soldiers in an archeological dig, but lots of Enron briefcases and balls and best of all, beer coolers with the Enron log and the slogan, “Ask why.” Indeed.

I look forward to the auctions for not only the companies but also their executives.

I want to pitch this as a reality show for the Home Shopping Network.

: The show is going into overtime tonight and they’re not nearly done unloading all the servers and laptops and chairs. It starts again Thursday morning. Tune in.

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
: Here is Tony Blair’s paper detailing evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Spam, another solution
: I’m sure someone will tell me what’s wrong with this but I come to think we are all attacking spam from the wrong direction.

We are trying to make lists of spammers and their tricks so we can block them.

We should instead be trying to get ourselves off the lists of email addresses the spammers are using.

How?

I want someone to invent an email function that lets me easily and manually bounce email from spammers so they think I don’t exist and so they don’t want to waste time and money sending me spam and so they take me off their lists.

Surely, this can’t be hard.

I mark a bunch of email in the morning and direct my email to send bounce messages to all of them.

The program sends a (faked) bounce message via my mail server.

The spammer counts this as a bounce and takes me off the list.

And that’s one fewer spams I’ll get the next morning. One by one, piece by piece, we kill the cockroaches.

Make sense?

: Update. Gotta love this Internet. Within minutes, I got an email from Danny Jobe pointing me to Mailwasher, which does what I want and for free. The key description from their web site:

MailWasher works directly with your email server, exactly like your email program does. But there is one important difference: you can tell MailWasher to delete a message at the server, without downloading it – or you can bounce an email back to the sender so that it looks as though your address is not valid.

Bravo!

So much for the future of journalism
: Here’s the list of luminaries Columbia’s president appointed to a commission to rethink the future of Columbia Journalism School and thus journalism itself.

Don’t hold your breath for anything new to come from this.

Though there are unquestionably some smart and capable people on the list, the cast as a whole is quite predictable.

And you will not find any emissaries from the future of any weight, experience, or credibility. I could nominate people here in blogdom but that would take on the air of blogrolling for the sake of aw-shucks links back to me; you make the list. I could nominate people who have changed journalism and reporting and commentary using the tools of this new medium and the new relationship with the audience they create, but what’s the point.

Too bad. Opportunity lost.

: See also Columbia J’s interim dean, David Klatell on Romenesko, responding to Michael Wolff‘s excellent column on the future of Columbia J and journalism. The guy completely misses the point and the point misses him. Wolff was writing about a new vision for journalism education and media study; the temp dean whines about Wolff not listing the school’s name-brand alums. Forest, meet trees.

Google news
: Google’s automated news is cool but Nick Denton points out the fatal flaw in how it works.

Missed opportunities
: Old blogging pal Thomas Nephew gives me the punchline I should have gotten myself (I’m so ashamed!) for the HAL Internet-connected refrigerator post below:

You overlooked the chilling possibilities of a wired fridge:

The morning after
: Forget the Emmys. People are talking about the Sopranos. And the best place to listen in is in the NJ.com Soprano’s forum (full disclosure: one of my company’s sites). It’s great reading for true fans.

Meanwhile, in Germany
: The election is incredibly close. Bild speculates that the Greens are saving Schroeder. It appears that the Social Democrats and Greens will govern again even though the Conservatives won more than the Social Democrats. Note that the Greens are now almost 9 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, Yahoo offers you the change to build your own chancellor.

: Update: Schroeder and the Greens win. Note that they did this in part by opposing war in Iraq.