You know, there’s probably a special place in heaven for a guy who takes time to fix his broken goldfish.

Another Monday, another moment of bizarre identification. Actually this one’s pretty great: A Peruvian legislator hands Bill Gates his ass on open source. It’s all just too gorgeous — a long read, but you’ll be very happy throughout and after.

Lots of dead microbiologists lately. Is it a conspiracy? Spooky.

Just posted this over at an old discussion on Doctor Weevil, but thought I’d throw it out here for your contemplation: Bloggers and to journalists as mosaicists are to sculptors. Journalists tend to spend their time whittling one story out of a big block of material, while bloggers tends to put together a lot small pieces of material to create a larger work. And both mosaic and sculpture can be very good or very bad, depending on who’s doing the work. Yeah?

Not that I can claim I was in a good mood something shook me out of, but I was in a better mood before some asshole used one of my addresses as a return on some Earthlink-relayed spam. If you’re visiting to complain about that, you’ll want to take it up with Earthlink, the company that left a mail relay hanging open for spammers to abuse. You can reach them here; you’re writing about their mail server “207.217.120.62.” (No, I’m not an Earthlink customer — this is why.) If you’re curious about grid.net (the apparent originator) or about other spam-house operations, you can read up on that stuff here.

Moving from fury (I can do that?) to something a little nicer for this Sabbath evening, a great reminisce from a minister at her first parish. Lovely reading.

I’m asthmatic and occasionally use an inhaler. If you told me during one of my non-breathing episodes that I had to ask permission to get my inhaler, I would put my foot so far up your ass I’d be able to tie my shoelaces through your eye sockets — provided, of course, that I lived through the asthma attack. All this to say: The so-called “War On Drugs” is colliding with bureaucratic stupidity in ways that are pissing me off today. (And if you think I’m pissed, read this piece; I love this writer’s well-placed fury.)

Found online at www.interesting-people.net, and faithfully reproduced for your perusal:

Interesting People / There are not so many of them out there / From the few that are really interesting / We like to publishing their biography on full service base / We know how to create and promote biographies / Both in english and a local language / Both in book and on the Internet / Just because there are enough boring people / Everbody likes interesting people / Because they have made a difference

Sadly, the only link on the page was malformed. It meant to go here, though. And now you know where I’ll be for much of the rest of the night.

Eliot Van Buskirk over at c|net has a wonderful blonde moment in the middle of his excellent interview with Rep. Jim Boucher this week. (Boucher, if you haven’t been paying attention, is the Congressman spearheading the latest attempt to protect the Net from the evil Disneys and Vivendis of the world — in this case, jumping into the fight to save Net radio.) Eliot notices that a certain bill, while called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, actually doesn’t promote it. Egads! Important lesson here, for Eliot and everyone else: To find out what a Congressional bill is really about, read the title… and assume the opposite. The inimitable Dr. David Farber taught me that and he is, as with everything else, quite right. (That said, read the interview. Nice work.)

Last month, four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed when an American fighter pilot confused them with the other side and dropped bombs on them. To express our grief over this terrible accident and our gratitude for Canada sending soldiers to die on behalf of US interests in another hemisphere, some of America’s bravest and finest this week set fire to a Canadian flag after a hockey game while chanting “USA! USA!” If I were Canada, I would be thinking seriously about grabbing a jet and aiming at the Empire State Building right now. How did a country this unspeakably stupid get to be a superpower?