In an attempt to get her re-acclimated to riding in the car, in preparation for our long drive to Arizona in less than two weeks, I brought Sasha with me on my drive to Starbucks. She was *not* pleased. :)

A 46 year old Michigan woman is facing felony polygamy charges for marrying 15 men.

Says one official, “In my 12 years here, I don’t remember there being a case involving a female polygamist. I haven’t even heard of such a case.”

This was not some happy commune family however, the woman appears to be a con-artist marrying lonely men and taking off with their money.

She should have done the honorable thing and just married some old rich guy instead.

Mmmm.

In a quirky story likely to bring up bad memories of 2004, an electoral mess in a small town in northern Ohio could have been resolved merely by the candidate’s two (voting-age) sons — who didn’t show up at the polls.

William Crawford, trying to retain his seat on the central committee of the Erie County Democratic Party, and challenger Jean Miller each received 43 votes in the primary balloting.

Officials plan to conduct a recount, but the race may have to be settled by coin flip, said David Giese, the county’s Democratic Party chairman and an elections board member.

(Both sons were registered Democrats.)

Okay, all kidding aside, I really need to cut down on the length of my “study breaks”; this blog has a bad habit of stretching them out far beyond their intended time frames. (Notice how I say it’s the blog’s bad habit, not mine. Heh. “Mistakes were made.”) As such, I’m going to take the rest of the day (Thursday) off, barring any major breaking news (and hopefully this morning’s tsunami alert filled our “major breaking news” quota for the week). I might make an exception or two for really brief quote-of-the-day-type posts that only take 90 seconds or less to publish, but otherwise, I’m signing off. I’ll reassess the situation on Friday and decide whether to extend the moratorium. Guestbloggers, the floor is yours.

P.S. Note to self: no commenting, either!! :)

Here’s the schedule for the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Sabres and the Senators. Game 1 is Friday at 7:00 PM in Ottawa.

Interestingly enough, the four favored teams in the Eastern Conference all won their first-round series, while in the Western Conferences, all four underdogs won. (The Mighty Ducks completed the low-seed sweep yesterday. Quack! Quack!!) So, what we have left now are a #1, #2, #3 and #4 seed (all in the East) and a #5, #6, #7 and #8 seed (all in the West). Presumably this means that whoever wins the Eastern Conference will be the favorite to win the Stanley Cup — but who knows how it will ultimately play out.

Anyway, in anticipation of Buffalo’s upcoming series, and with all due respect to any Canadian readers who aren’t Senators fans, I offer the following in the spirit of trash talk and utter silliness (warning: profanity)…

source file

Go Sabres! :)

P.S. Speaking of Buffalo, see for yourself (after the jump) the stark evidence sent along by Becky’s mom, proving that bird flu has reached the Buffalo area and taken a devastating toll on the suburb of Cheektowaga:

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Here, as promised, as my mom’s pictures of the pro-amnesty rally and march in Manhattan on Monday evening. There certainly were a lot of protesters. Some stayed on message; others did not. Alas, that’s pretty much par for the course. But from my mom’s first-hand report, and the reports I saw on TV, it certainly did sound like the crowd in New York and elsewhere was passionate about the rally’s primary focus, amnesty for illegal immigrants — and more power to them. What a great show of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, and all that sort of good stuff. God bless America. No, really, I mean it! Whether I agree with them, and whether their passion will translate into results or a backlash, are both separate questions, but I do love that we live in a country where stuff like this can happen. It’s important, I think, to actually stop and appreciate that every once in a while.

And here, brought to you from the Newseum via the magic of “fair use” (ahem), are a whole bunch of newspaper front pages from around the country Tuesday morning. (I didn’t get around to posting them till now cuz I’ve been, y’know, studying and stuff.) Lou Dobbs can’t be happy with the dearth of headlines including the word “illegal,” nevermind “alien” — almost all of the papers talk about this as a march for immigrant rights, and many have shamelessly boosterish headlines like “A Show Of Strength” and “‘We Are America’.” Few headlines say anything about “amnesty,” which was, by all accounts, the core underlying goal of the bulk of Monday’s protesters. More often, the headlines declare that the protesters were marching for non-specific goals like “reform,” “respect” or, most vaguely of all, “rights.” But what rights, exactly? The “right” to stay here en masse and have their presence stamped with an official seal of approval, even though they came here illegally — like it or not, that’s what these protests were fundamentally about, isn’t it? So shouldn’t the headlines make that clear? Would it have been so hard to say “Marchers demand amnesty” instead of “Marchers demand reform”? Say what you will about Dobbs (some believe he’s a racist; I’ve never personally heard him make an anti-illegal-immigration argument that can’t be legitimately justified from a non-racist perspective, but I don’t pay much attention to him, so I certainly don’t deny the possibility that he has indeed said such things, and/or that his motivations are less than pure), but I think he has a valid point here:

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The New York Times reports that the Bush Administration, stepping boldly into the realm of utter self-parody, is working on a new weapon: a giant laser.

Sources say Bush’s plan is to point the frickin’ laser at Iran, then call Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the phone and demand ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!

:)

(Actually, this particular laser is aimed at destroying enemy satellites in orbit. But previous reports indicated that the military was indeed looking to develop a weapon that could “literally obliterate enemy ground targets with a laser beam.” And before that, there was talk of using lasers for missile defense. And yes, I’ve made the obvious Austin Powers references both times. I’m nothing if not predictable. But c’mon, can you blame me? This stuff writes itself!)

P.S. InstaPundit: “DEATH RAY!! AAAHHHH!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Or not.” He links to this article.

“Did you know that Kelsey Grammar’s brother was killed by a shark?” –Becky

“Wow… that is the most random fact you’ve ever thrown at me.” –Brendan

Well, here we go again. Barely a month and a half after I switched to a semi-dedicated server because my then-brand-new WestHost account was using up too much CPU for a shared server, I just got an e-mail and a phone call informing me that my site is still too busy — it’s regularly using as much as 20% of the CPU load on a server that’s supposed to be able to accommodate 20 business-level clients, and WestHost is getting complaints from its other customers — and, as a result, I need to either find a way to reduce my CPU usage or upgrade to a fully dedicated server, which would cost $150/month.

The former option seems unlikely to succeed (with the help of a phone technician, I just installed eAccelerator — as a result of which, incidentally, Bloypedia is temporarily disabled — but the early returns suggest it isn’t going to help enough), and the latter option isn’t really affordable for me. As a result of which, I’m wondering… would anyone be interested in splitting a dedicated server with me? As many as five different Virtual Private Servers can be set up on one dedicated server, each with its own dedicated IP address. Details on the server are here. There should be plenty of bandwidth and disk space for all of us, and if there were only five of us on the server, my site using up 20% of CPU wouldn’t be a problem! Hell, even if there were just three of us on the server, that’d be $50/month per person, which would be a heck of a lot more affordable than $150.

Any takers? Anyone at least mildly interested? If so, please leave a comment or e-mail me at bloy[at]nd.edu.

P.S. For the record, WestHost has been great about this whole thing. They’ve actually contacted me in advance of any true “crisis” — something that my old, pre-Katrina host, Total Choice Hosting, had a bad habit of not doing — so that we can try to work together and solve this problem without my website being shut down or some such thing. And although my site’s high load is creating problems for them, they’ve given me ample time to try and figure out ways to solve it. I really appreciate their excellent customer service. After the jump, the full text of their latest e-mail to me.

UPDATE, 5/4, 12:45 AM: It looks like we may have our merry band of five all set (this is going to require a whole new level in the “Brendansphere” — the server fellow-travelers!), and I am going to go ahead and upgrade to the dedicated server. That said, if you’re interested, please still feel free to comment or e-mail me, because if someone changes their mind, we might end up with a spot open again. I told the four who’ve expressed an interest that this is like the Fellowship of the Ring: on them no oath or bond is laid to go further than they will. In other words, they can bail at any time. I am the Ring-bearer when it comes to this server. :)

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Hotel heiress and world-renowned socialite/slut Paris Hilton — on the rebound after Lindsay Lohan reportedly stole her man, Stavros Niarchos — is reportedly dating Matt Leinart, the former USC star and newly drafted Arizona Cardinals quarterback. The story was broken by Norm Clarke of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Whether this development qualifies as the latest “blow” to the ‘SC football program will probably remain unclear until the inevitable sex tape emerges… but for now, I would humbly advise Leinart, given Hilton’s history, to follow the advice on the t-shirt: practice safe sex, make love with a Trojan. And if you see a blinking red light, run. :)

(Hat tip: Bfloblog.)

…it’s probably a bridesmaid?

Yesterday on IM, Kristy mentioned that she had dressed up as a duck to throw out the first pitch at the minor league New Hampshire Fisher Cats’ baseball game on Saturday. “My dream in life!” she explained. “I’ll dress as WHATEVER to throw a pitch!” Not until just now, though, did I find out, thanks to Kristy’s dad, that there are pictures.

Heh!

I have no idea, incidentally, why a team called the Fisher Cats wanted a duck to throw out the first pitch. Alas, the Cats were not the recipients of any duck luck; indeed, one might say they were f**ked. :) They gave up 7 runs in the top of the 1st, and lost, 9-2, to the Connecticut Defenders (formerly known as the Norwich Navigators).

But that doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that we all make fun of Kristy for wearing a duck suit. :)

More photos here.

Quack, quack.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the obvious pop-culture reference to the event that this reminded me of: Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live, dressed in a turkey suit, singing “Still Crazy After All These Years.”

Heh. Now that’s quality television.

Our army should march to the Canadian border. I mean, right at the Canadian border, as in one step forward is an invasion and a sneeze is a biological attack on Canadian soil. Then, in chorus, our army should shout, “Not touching, can’t get mad!”

The jury in the sentencing phase of 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui recommends he should serve life in prison. Visit CNN for the latest.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the years, it’s that nothing motivates me to do non-school-related chores and tasks like the pressing need to procrastinate from schoolwork. Thus, when exam time comes around, Becky has observed that the dog gets more time outside when I walk him, the kitty litter gets changed more frequently, the garbage gets taken out more regularly, etc. Anything to avoid actually studying! :) The same principle applies to those annoying back-end blog tasks that I have a tendency to put off and put off. I might have been delaying that pesky database project for weeks or months, but when push comes to shove, and it’s a choice between procrastinated blog tasks and procrastinated schoolwork, that’s when the blog tasks finally get done. I know, I know, my priorities are in such good order.

Anyway… as a result of this principle, which might be called Brendan’s Iron Law of Procrastination, I have just recently finished, during one of my “study breaks” (whose exorbitant length sometimes brings to mind that question in our FedCourts casebook about whether “exceptions can swallow the rule”), the final stages of a task that I started literally months ago: converting my blog from Blogger/Haloscan to WordPress. The last stage in this process, the part I just finished, was the Haloscan part; you may recall that when I switched the main blog to WordPress in March, I apologized for the fact that the Haloscan comments hadn’t yet followed the Blogger blog posts from the old site to the new site. Well, those old comments—approximately 14 months’ worth, from when I was forced to switch to Haloscan as a “stop-gap measure” in January 2005 until my WordPress launch in March 2006—have finally joined their bloggy bretheren. I imported a grand total of 43,878 comments from Haloscan, more than doubling the total number in my WordPress database. The grand total, at least check, is 84,990, or 62.4 MB worth of comments. Man, you guys like to talk! Heh. (The total size of my blog database, incidentally, is 93.5 MB. The 11,657 posts consume 20.7 MB, and the rest is miscellaneous stuff like categories, my anti-spam blacklist, etc. Should I have some sort of celebration when I hit 100 MB? :)

Anyway… because this whole process of switching from Blogger/Haloscan to WordPress was really complicated and took forever (I’ve been working on it, on and off, since last July), and because I had to invent most of it as I went along, I figured I should document it, so that if anyone else ever needs to do the same thing (or some portion of the same thing), they won’t have to start from scratch like I did. Instead, they’ll be able to Google something like “convert Blogger Haloscan WordPress MySQL” and find this post, and hopefully it will be at least somewhat helpful to them.

So, that said, what follows after the jump will be of no interest to anyone except those looking for advice on this topic, and those who are such utter geeks that they can think of nothing better to do with 15 minutes of their lives than read a bunch of computer jargon. (And if that isn’t a ringing endorsement that screams “click the link,” I don’t know what is… heh.)

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