AdamSmith

Whuffo? The doodah around this contest can be fun, and the PR doubtless good for the nominees and winners. But the actual "voting" is pretty much done by the escorts themselves, consisting of their advertising volume with rentboy.com over the past year, plus their agreement in advance to participate in promotional events should they win (a precondition for being made a nominee). At least according to some who have been involved.

Acquaintance who is a network engineer with CenturyLink (formerly Embarq, formerly Sprint) did tell me this morning (personal convo, not business) that their system is sputtering a bit from the solar event. But that officially the carriers are not too keen to say much of anything that would acknowledge vulnerabilities in their networks, even to acts of nature.

Apocalypse begins. Well, not exactly, but I am having intermittent problems getting both cell and landlIne calls to go through. This should really excite the two nice Jehovah's Witness ladies who rang the doorbell the other day all eager to talk about Armageddon.

Even Hasselbeck parted from him on the substance. Although she then picked up his line about free speech etc. Will be interesting to see how both Kirk and Rush fare with their First Amendment defense/excuse. Yeah, even hate speech is protected so long as it does not seek to incite violence (legal beagles, is that about right?). But gratifying to see them now having to take just as they gave, in the public discourse.

The Guardian does its usual accurate drollery with today's headline... Super Tuesday: Republicans fail to awake from their nightmare ...and summary of what yesterday did, and didn't, mean: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sOB0h8dyo_QJ_ev4Q2pP53Q/view.m?id=15&gid=world/2012/mar/07/super-tuesday-republicans-mitt-romney&cat=world

Well, as pundits have observed, Newt and Paul will stay in as long as they get paid to do so, each having one extremely affluent backer. Can't recall, but is there also one particular fat cat behind Santorum?

Leviticus is a hoot, ain't it? Another larf riot is Deuteronomy. E.g.: He that is wounded in the stones or hath his privy member cut off shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. ...and other such pleasant advisories.

They may get their rewards in heaven. (We can hope!) Fortunately their own behavior is ensuring they will not get them in the general election.

Hito, interesting. The book seemed, to me, to x-ray all the campaigns about equally fairly. In what ways did it seem unbalanced to you? Too favorable to Obama? Other ways?

ROFLMAO Hito, that is the most uproarious thing that you or anybody have said on here in a long time!

So the TV flick focuses on Palin and the McCain campaign. I can see why. But it would be great to see a multi-part movie that does justice to all parts of that really good book -- not only McCain/Palin but also the Hillary-v-Barack war, and then the national campaign. Would also love to see someone make a good movie of Paulson's riveting book.

Shocked, shocked, EXPAT! Poor man has bills to pay. The deeper under cover you have to keep your habit, the more expensive it gets. ... cf. Spitzer, Eliot. Client 9 paid more than 15 times what I do for a pop from a girl, hoping for some extra security thereby. (Oh, well.)

ROFL. And thank goodness they omitted the you-know-what trailing out behind. ...Wonder if that was in the original draft? I read that The New Yorker has cartoon editors for both captions and graphics.

Her being part of Everybody Loves Raymond, for a start. ...I will now prepare to dodge people's brickbats. But honestly...

TY is right. Especially after the Dem debacle that gave Brown his opening last time around -- namely rival Martha Coakley expecting to coast to her coronation. Haunted by that lesson, Warren and party can be expected to fight like dogs, as Brown, I grudge to say to his credit, did then.

MsGuy! A fellow traveler, Order of Dagon? (apologies in advance for the following hijack...) You will doubtless have seen the web is rife with Lovecraft takeoff ditties like this one. I compiled a long list and sent it as an e-card at Xmas to a longtime friend who is an HPL fanatic. He it was who dragged me to several Lovecraft festivals held early '90s in Providence, RI, Lovecraft's home town. A weekend affair, this so-called NecronomiCon (what else?) culminated Sunday morning with a Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast presided over by one Robert Price, a defrocked Christian minister and Lovecraft scholar. High point was his leading us in song, to the tune of "Jesus loves the little children": Cthulhu eats the little children...

A shoggoth! ...if not Great Cthulhu himself?

Time-honored tradition! I must have wrung 30 or 40 posts out of that long Wallace Stevens poem. Not counting the side excursions into spittoons and so forth. I owe his estate a royalty check, I suppose.

Welcome! Do you have a profile on this site, or an ad anywhere?

Money talks. Its flight also looks to be giving at least a little spine to at least some Repub politicians, who until now dared not cross The Blimp. Also electoral pressures: Scott Brown's tight Senate race in MA drove him to be the first Repub to speak out, tweeting "reprehensible" about Rush's spew. Could this become a replay of the downfall of McCarthy? Once the first blow connects, the deflation can sometimes be swift. Sorry, can't copy/paste the text on my phone, but if interested, scroll down to paragraph 15 in this obit of Senator Sam... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/ervinobit.htm

OZ, thanks much. I will research it, but one thing: why the need for both iCloud and Dropbox together?

if the strategy is to confuse would-be intruders as much as it flummoxed me, it is indeed strong security. ... One is put in mind of the classic Python routine Confuse-a-Cat.

Know what you mean, EXPAT. Whole idea gave me the willies, UNTIL I got going on Salesforce.com. Whole viability of their business rests on their proposition of (1) no data loss, ever, and (2) bank-level account contents security against breach by others. Reasonably priced too. In 8 years I have not had one single solitary glitch from them. When I think of the blood, sweat and tears my former company poured into maintaining our ACT contact databases on our local server... Free at last, free at last! Now I want similar for all my data.

JK, thanks for that perspective. For now at least, business and personal data files from MS Office apps are my main interest. That, plus as you note removing my backup device/media from environmental risks of fire, sprinkler system, etc. You, or anyone, have recs among the competing services?

They taste better too.