Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video,
raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance
of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.
network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...
Requiem for a fictional Scotsman
Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!
A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City
At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh
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dcl dialogue online!
no. we're not that kgb.
The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
"No religious Test shall ever be required as a
Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution
Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000
Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000
miscellany
"a breezy writing style and a cool mix of tidbits"
Our riveting and morally compelling...
One of 52,045 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
FCC, heal thyself...
K-WHAT? Unbuilt Maui TV station lands questionable call letters
(from Erika Engel's The Buzz, Honolulu Star Bulletin.)
The call letters KUNT have landed at a yet-unbuilt low-power digital television station in Wailuku, Maui.
Alarmingly similar to a word the dictionary says is obscene, the call letters were among a 15-page list of new call letters issued by the Federal Communications Commission and released this week.
The same station owner also received KWTF for a station in Arizona.
From Skokie, Ill., comes a sincere apology "to anyone that was offended," said Kevin Bae, vice president of KM Communications Inc., who requested and received KUNT and KWTF. It is "extremely embarrassing for me and my company and we will file to change those call letters immediately."
He thanked your columnist for bringing the matter to his attention and pledged to, "make sure I don't fall asleep on the job when selecting call signs again."
One might understand how Bae's eyes could glaze over during selection, as KM has some 80 sets of call letters and alpha-numeric callsigns for TV and radio stations in several states.
No KM station is yet on the air in Hawaii but its mainland TV stations carry programming from America One Network, My Network TV and the CW.
The call letter snafu was a source of great mirth for Bae's attorney.
"I can't tell you how long he laughed at me when he learned of my gaffe," Bae said.
Broadcasters for generations have joked among themselves about call letters resembling off-color words or acronyms knowing the FCC would never approve their assignment- but that was before computerization.
KCUF-FM near Aspen, Colo. got its F-word-in-reverse call letters in August of 2005 and has been on the air since December, "Keeping Colorado Uniquely Free," its Web site says. Uh, yeah.
Station officials could not be reached, but the automated pop-music slinger has been written about twice in the Aspen Daily News. The paper said radio regulators "blessed the call letters."
However, assignment of call letters actually is an automated process, according to Mary Diamond of the FCC's Office of Media Relations. Broadcasters use the FCC Web site to request and receive call letters with no oversight from Beavis, his partner, or any FCC regulator.
Dude, seriously. Even after years of concerns over broadcast indecency and the debate about fines for fleeting profanities that hit the air.
The Code of Federal Regulations allows applicants to request call letters of their choice as long as the combination is available. Further, "objections to the assignment of requested call signs will not be entertained at the FCC," it states.
(via Deb "Saturn Girl" Speer on the ABC World News Now Google newsgroup.)
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Friday, July 27, 2007
Photo of the day
(via The Freeway Blogger)
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Quote of the day
Just because the culture and the cultural church have joined with the
empire and its wars does not mean that we all have to go along with such
heresy, or fall into despair as if nothing can be done. It is never too
late to try to follow the troublemaking Jesus, to join his practice of
revolutionary nonviolence and become authentic Christians. We may find
ourselves in trouble, even at the hands of so-called Christians, just as
Jesus was in trouble at the hands of the so-called religious leaders of
his day. But this very trouble may lead us back to those Beatitude
blessings.
-John Dear, Jesuit priest
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Thursday, July 26, 2007
Error message of the day
(via the ineffable Cindy.)
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Deadly cheddar
Honestly, I don't care if someone is carrying a water bottle, wearing a head scarf, or buying a one-way ticket, but if someone has a block of cheese with wires and a detonator- I want the FBI to be called in.
-Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at the security firm BT Counterpane.
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Quote of the day
If the Borg were to breed with the Ferengi, you'd get Scientology.
-Arnaldo Lerma
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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Official statement of the day
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."
-UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer
British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.
Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic. (Full BBC story here.)
[About the only way to improve this story would have been if the major's statement had been: "Badgers... we ain't got no stinking badgers!"]
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Homeland what?
A couple of unattended freight cars bumped into a maintenance train, jumped off the rails and started a small fire. Not knowing at first what might be burning, firefighters evacuated homes and businesses within a half-mile and closed a short stretch of Interstate 81 nearby. It turned out to be propane, it was put out and the all-clear was sounded within two hours.
But these were not just any freight cars- they were from Fort Drum, an active Army base.
They weren't carrying just any freight- they were freshly loaded with equipment for a combat brigade headed for Iraq in September, including materials marked flammable and explosive.
And they had just rolled close to eight miles out of the base and across the countryside, all by themselves- uncontrolled, unguarded, unstopped- to the edge of a city of 27,000 people.
(Why worry about terrorists? This administration's incompetence will do us in long before Al Qaeda. Full story here.)
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Quote of the day
[T]he United States has two political parties, the Anti-Abortion Corporate Party and the Pro-Abortion Corporate Party...
-Zay N. Smith, in his Chicago Sun-Times Quick Takes column.
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Monday, July 23, 2007
T-shirt of the day
I haven't seen you in years.
Let's keep it that way.
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Copyright © 1987-2025 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker
Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse.
Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however.
I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993,
and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know
that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but
rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to
type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically
pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about
everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word
about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated
numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would
notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com
they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...
(as a matter of fact, i AM the boss of you.)
It's here!
440 pages, over 11,000 quotations!
Eff the Ineffable, Scrute the Inscrutable
get kgb krap!