Oh, this is too freakin’ cool. NASA has a moblog from Spirit! (thanks to bOINGbOING for the link)
Here’s the first color image Spirit sent back.
I was in Virginia working on The Day Lincoln Was Shot (something I’m very proud of, by the way) when Pathfinder landed, and I’ll never forget the feeling I had standing in my hotel room, watching the photos come in. My mom and dad said that it felt like Apollo 11 all over again.
I’m really glad that the Martian Earth Space Probe Defense System didn’t shoot Spirit down, because we’re in for some really cool images over the next few weeks.

RetroCRUSH is a pop culture website run my my friend Robert Berry.
On November 20, 2003, Robert wrote a humorous article called The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes”.
On December 30, 2003, his article was stolen by the UK Tabloid The Daily Star. Robert writes,

“The UK tabloid ‘The Daily Star’ printed the same feature, with the same movies I used (even failing to omit a joke entry for the film Deliverance that I also included in my feature). Instead of crediting my site, however, they credited a seemingly fictitious American magazine named FILM. Not only did they highlight the films I mentioned, but they lifted three separate quotes from my article and attributed them to FILM magazine readers who responded to a (apparently non-existent) poll.”

It was subsequently syndicated to at least 30 other news organizations without crediting Robert, who is the author of the story.
Robert recounts his conversation with Kieran Saunders, the News Editor at the tabloid:

“He said, ‘Well, if it’s on the internet it’s up for grabs. You can’t copyright anything on the internet.’ I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London. I even tried to call back an hour later to speak with the actual author of the piece, Emily Rose, and Saunders answered the phone, stating, ‘I told you never to call here again, speak to our legal group’ before ending the call.”

Robert is looking for a copyright attorney who is interested in handling this slam-dunk case. His contact info is at RetroCRUSH.

On Friday morning, I woke up and felt like myself for the first time in almost a month, so I spent the weekend making up for the lost month of December.
Friday afternoon, Anne and I finally saw The Return of the King. I won’t discuss specific spoilers, because I would have been pissed if anyone had done that to me, but I will say this: I left feeling incredibly saddened that it was over. I love those characters, and that world, and I was so sad at the final fade out that their journeys were over. I’m holding onto faint hope that Peter Jackson will make The Hobbit, so we can return to Middle Earth (and see Smaug!) one day . . . but just barely.
While I was sick, and couldn’t get out to the movies (there was no way I was going to be that asshole in the theatre who’s coughing and sneezing the whole time), I watched the extended version of FOTR and TTT, as well as all 10 or so hours of the appendicies, so I was really pumped up for RotK, and I wasn’t let down at all. I can’t wait for the extended DVD version, (which I hear will be about 5.5 hours long!) to come out!!
Saturday was pretty windy, and by the end of the day, the sky was so clear, I felt like I could reach up and touch it. When the sun set, it was like someone had painted the sky on a glass globe, turned it upside down, and placed it over Pasadena. The Eastern sky was a deep, deep indigo spotted with a few stars, and the Western sky was crimson and orange, and Venus hung just above the horizon. I’ve seen some beautiful sunsets in my life, and Saturday’s easily makes the top ten.
Sunday, we took advantage of the clear air and unseasonably warm weather and went on a hike to Echo Mountain with my brother and his wife. The views were spectacular, and we all had a wonderful time. While we were up there, Jeremy and I finally found the Echo Mountain Geocache, that we couldn’t find last year.
When we came back to my house, Anne and I made pizzas for all of us, with yummy artichoke hearts and freashly-made sauce, and then we played the Pop Culture edition of Trivial Pursuit. If you’re in your early 30s, like me, you probably remember playing the original Trivial Pursuit in the 80s, right? Of course, by “playing,” I actually mean “wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork because we could never answer any of the questions.” Well, I am happy to report that the Pop Culture edition was built just for us! Trivial Pursuit is significantly more fun when you can actually answer the questions . . . especially when one of them is “What did Dennis Moore distribute?” (Answer: Lupins!)
It was a truly wonderful weekend, one that (to steal a phrase from Steve Jackson) restored many of my hit points. I think I may have gained a level, too, but I won’t know until I tally up my XP.

I know from personal experience that The Media are often a miserable failure when it comes to getting the story right, but this story that I read yesterday really upset me.
Last month, Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade had a fantastic idea: show the world that gamers are not the mindless idiots the Mainstream News would like to think we are, and help out some children at the same time. Thus spake Gabe:

“If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one – where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill – you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.
With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call “Child’s Play.” Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children’s Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It’s full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.”

Well, the Penny Arcade readers responded, and over $200,000 worth of toys and games were donated to the children’s hospital. Others who couldn’t or didn’t give toys, gave donations that totaled just over $27,000 dollars.
Think about that for a second. It’s a fairly big story, isn’t it? Those Gamers, the ones who play GTA: Vice City and want to come to your home to eat your children actually aren’t so bad after all. Those Gamers, who are planning the destruction of our American Way of Life when they get together for LAN parties are actually a caring and thoughful group of people. It kinda screws up the search-and-replace The Media have done on “Heavy Metal Music Listeners” or “Marilyn Manson Fans” for their shock-and-horror stories, doesn’t it?
A Google News search turns up three stories about the kindness and generosity of Penny Arcade and its readers.
Three.
The other story that seems to have captured The Media’s watchful eye returns 11,100 stories. Those are some great priorities, News Media.
Finally, let’s give Tycho the last word on their experience with The Media:

One hears a lot about media bias, quite a lot indeed, but the accepted formula goes like this:
the “Media,” capital M, an imaginary monolith with a supposedly synchronized perspective, is saying things that I disagree with. The things that I believe are right, therefore these factual distortions are the result of some lens – a bias which is deeply ingrained, like a vein of rich silver.
That’s all well and good, but let me propose the CFR Hypothesis, where CFR stands for “complete fucking retards.” Let’s see if you like it.
The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child’s Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they’re still retarded. When they came to the Children’s Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that’s neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That’s above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here’s where the depression sets in.
What we – this is a grand We, which includes you – what we did was completely amazing. It was worth doing purely on account of its own virtues. But the other part, what we might call the “Secondary Objective,” was to promote the idea that we are not fucking murderers. This is an effort to combat media portrayals. Here’s the trick, the dark revelation, the Empire Strikes Back which produces our moment of darkness: we need to rely on that selfsame inept machinery to broadcast our new message as well. They’re simply not capable of it. I understand that there’s just no story in people being good to each other, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened from time to time.

Everyone who produces Penny Arcade, and everyone who reads Penny Arcade did an amazing, thoughtful, kind and compassionate act. They should be recognized for what they did, and that’s what I’m doing today.

Please read MORE for a Journalist’s response to this entry.

Every year, Anne and I make tons (tonnes) of Christmas cookies for our friends and family. We do gingerbread men, snowmen, ginger snaps, and sugar cookies with pounds of sugary “frosting” on them. Oh, it’s the opposite of healthy, but so much fun! We take these cookies, put them on a nice festive plate, and deliver them to our neighbors on Christmas Eve. Of course, this year, we were both sick as hell in the weeks leading up to Christmas, so we didn’t bake anything for friends (family still got some plague with their cookies, but if you can’t give plague to your family at Christmas, what can you give them?) Yesterday, we were both well enough to make several plates of cookies, and last night we delivered them as “New Year’s Treats.” Our neighbors are so wonderful, we ended up spending the entire evening in their homes, looking at pictures, drinking wine, and catching up. People talk about “your friends and neighbors,” and we’re incredibly lucky that our friends are our neighbors.
When I bought my first house about ten years ago, I was totally oblivious to the importance of location, and I ended up living next door to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell. Their ability to be slovenly, inconsiderate jerks was stunning. They were so terrible, we ultimately sold the house we loved to move away from them. When we were looking for a new house, even if the neighborhood looked nice, (which many of them did) I went out of my way to knock on doors, and meet the potential new neighbors. (“Hi, I’m Wil, and I may be buying a house on this street. Are you cool?”) I’m sure that seems a bit weird, but if you’ve ever lived next to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell, you may understand why it was so important to me.
I was a long, tough, and sometimes frustrating process, but we finally found a great house, on a great street, surrounded by great people, and that’s where we live now. In a way, I’m glad we lived next door to The Absolute Worst Neighbors From Hell when we did, because they taught us the value of neighbors, and the value of living on a street where there’s real community.