Ben Goldacre's latest Guardian column says horrible, hurtful things about the upstanding individuals at free-energy company Ecowatts, whom I previously mentioned here, and who've now gotten themselves publicity on the BBC.
Staggeringly, it seems just barely possible that they may be full of shit.
I'll be disappointed if this really turns out to just be another "amazing discovery" that only appears so because someone didn't buy a good enough multimeter.
I'm listening, for the first time, to Louis and Bebe Barron's soundtrack for "Forbidden Planet".
And then the MAKE blog lays this trip on me too.
...
I see now.
This world is not real.
The camera can see.
Let me help you see.
I will change you into the truth.
For years, it's been virtually impossible to buy Nerf guns here in Australia.
Giant pump-up water guns? No problem.
But guns that shoot sucker darts or foam balls? Not happening. You could go to a discount store and buy one of those crappy off-brand guns with the one-piece translucent rubber darts, but if you wanted something from one of the major brands, you were out of luck. Well, unless you were crazy enough to pay four times the purchase price for shipping from the States.
I presume this was because some pressure group or other convinced all of the toy shops that sucker dart guns were responsible for the Port Arthur massacre, or something.
But I'm happy to say that it's changing.
Why, just the other day, I successfully bought a few Nerf N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3s (one for my Toy Weapon Wall, the rest for the all-purpose Present Pile) for nine bucks a pop, on special at Kmart.
The Kmart catalogue promised that the much cooler Maverick six-shooter would also be on special, for only ten Australian dollars per unit.
But it was Kmart, so their stock as usual looked as if it'd been piled up by people with push brooms, and after you sorted through the mess you found that the thing you really wanted wasn't there.
Apparently Target stocks Mavericks as well, now - but the nearest Target store to me is more than forty kilometres away, while Kmart's just up the road.
[I've been there, now. They didn't bloody have any either.]
The EX-3's better than I thought it'd be. Surprisingly accurate, and the fake laser sight (a red LED with an adjustable lens in front of it) is cool, too. Like a proper laser sight, it turns on when you partially depress the trigger. Unlike a proper laser sight, children cannot damage their eyesight with it. And if you don't like it, you can just not put batteries in the gun.
I still definitely need a Maverick, though. I think I can survive without the celebrated Longshot sniper rifle, but I would also like the Buzz Bee lever-action rifle and totally awesome double-barrelled shotgun.
(Kmart had the Buzz Bee Tommy 20 battery-powered submachine gun for cheap, too, but video of it in action left me underwhelmed. I've got rubber-band guns for when I want to spend far more time reloading than shooting. And then there's this ridiculous thing.)
And yes, I'm aware that Nerf fans modify their guns for (much) greater power and accuracy, and apply amazing paint jobs. I can't be bothered with the painting, and would rather keep my toys safe for kids and drunks to use than crank 'em up by drilling out the air restrictors and installing an umbrella spring.
If you're one of those eBay dudes who sells pre-modded guns, though, do feel perfectly free to send me one for review!
You never know when a Nerf gun with a hundred-foot range may save your life, after all.
Another outstanding piece of mystifying spam:
Join the Thousands of Americans GETTING OUT OF DEBT!
Be DEBT FREE in as little as 12 MONTHS.
Please visit the link below and get a free debt consultation today. NO OBLIGATION!
http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html
Euro. Casino. BJ?!
Why, that's exactly the sort of URL at which I'd expect to find sensible debt reduction advice!
If you go to the root of http://eurocasinobj.com/, you find exactly what you'd expect to find - a casino site offering you a no doubt completely kosher $555 Welcome Bonus as long as you run the SetupCasino.exe file they want you to download.
http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html, on the other hand, redirects to the similarly mystifying URL http://heroesthai.com/, which is a generic Web-2.0-looking "Goodbye Debt" site.
And which, of course, is probably also a big fat scam.
It's an example of the peculiar rule of thumb which states that people with little money are easier to scam out of that money than rich people. Actually, "debt elimination" scams take it even further - they screw money out of people who have less than no money to start with!
A search of the Federal Trade Commission's site for "unsecured debt" is enlightening.
Sometimes the scammers claim that they'll negotiate with creditors in some special magical way that a normal customer couldn't, accept payment for doing so, and then just don't do anything. Genius!
The more creative scammers come up with a line of bull akin to that spouted by "tax protesters". There are a bunch of peculiar arguments in this category. Generally, they all assert that widely-held assumptions - like, for instance, the notion that it is legal to lend money at interest, or that when a person borrows money he personally now owes it to the lender, or that civilian courts are not military courts - are not true.
These arguments also have in common the fact that not a one of them holds more water than a tea bag.
The FTC's actual advice to people who're knee deep in debt is also useful. They advise debtors to seek out cheap-to-free credit counselling, and specifically avoid one-size-fits-all expensive "debt reduction" outfits.
Especially the ones with weird URLs.
One of the Evil Mad Scientists discovered that it is possible to use ask.com's search string suggestor to frighten yourself. Just type in an innocuous start to a question, and Ask will suggest umpteen possible ways for it to finish, chosen from the input of Ask's impressive cohort of users-too-dumb-to-just-use-Google.
This looked to me like a rich vein of entertainment waiting to be mined, so I had at it with a number of bland and innocent sentence-starters.
What is a metaphor? A metaphor is a tree in a golden forest.
(Coincidentally, that's also the meaning of life.)
Who is God? I'm betting on either Jeeves or the Vice President.
There's evidence pointing both ways.
Apparently, people really miss Jeeves.
Only the third-last one there actually worries me. But it's a biggie.
Hey, it's Metaphor Guy again!
And now I'm envisaging a freshly re-fertile woman sitting, hopefully, in a hot tub.
(I'm not sure where the frozen cheese fits in.)
After you leave home at 16, kid, this list contains a bunch of great suggestions for what to do with your life!
Look! It's the ask.com Magic 8-Ball!
I'm hoping this is just one really worried girl, and not a whole flock of 'em.
OK, now it's starting to get depressing.
I don't see why John Cena's marital status has anything to do with your plans to give him your bronchitis and pneumonia.
I think we've found the Words That Start All Questions From A Stoner...
...but now we're back in Scarytown.
(The Evil Mad Scientists are now running a competition for the best/worst ask.com suggestions!)
Herewith, another of my half-ridicule, half-public-service posts about Lousy Spam Offers.
And yes, it's yet another link-trading deal, with the usual complete lack of any trace of relevance between the sites the spammer would like linked. But this one has some special extra garbage all its own!
From: john@antique-engagement-rings.info
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 09:06:38 -0500
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: dansdata.com....Link Exchange Request + Free Software Worth $200Hi,
We at Antique Engagement Rings (http://www.antique-engagement-rings.info) would like to exchange links with
http://www.dansdata.com.We have already placed a link to your site and your link can be found here:
null [not linked to anything]
As you know link exchanging is an excellent way to increase your overall profile and strength within the Internet community.As an added incentive I have arranged with one of our sister sites (who specialize in Internet Marketing) to GIVE you software worth over $200, just for swapping links!
Please go to this page here to add your link:
[link starting with http://antique-engagement-rings.info:8080 ; the server doesn't answer requests on that port]If you do not want to receive any further emails from us please click on the link below:
Click Here [another useless antique-engagement-rings.info:8080... link]Best Regards,
John
antique-engagement-rings.info.PS Details of the f-ree software, worth $200, can be found here:
http://www.internet-marketing-sense.com/1-2-3-in-just-6-weeks/
This also includes a f-ree course on how to get your sites to positions 1,2 and 3 in just 6 weeks.
I had to tidy this up a bit, since "John" is a big fan of using the <br> element for formatting.
But that "f-ree software" must be a big winner, too.
As I write this, a Google search for "antique engagement rings" turns up antique-engagement-rings.info not as result 1, 2 or 3, as you'd expect if they were using their own "f-ree software" and it worked, but as result... nineteen (for separate words or the phrase "antique engagement rings"), despite the fact that this exact search is a perfect match for their domain name.
This, and antique-engagement-rings.info's PageRank of zero, could be in some way connected to the fact that their site is self-evidently useless.
A while ago, it came to my attention that there are people in the world who have not seen They Live.
This is understandable. They Live can sneak past you. It looks as if it ought to be a really, really terrible movie.
I mean, Roddy Piper is the 80's sci-fi leading man you hire when you can't afford Kurt Russell. And They Live shows on TV in terrible-movie timeslots. And a precis of the plot could easily leave you with the conclusion that the movie is just a Twilight Zone episode padded out to ninety minutes.
And a lot of its fans only seem to remember the big fight scene, and a quote involving bubble gum.
But They Live is actually pretty freakin' awesome. If you have not seen it, I really must insist that you do.
This subject came up on the excellent, though not terribly well confined to its stated purpose, Skeptic discussion list. Someone mentioned that if you like one sci-fi B movie with Roddy Piper in it, you'd better see another - namely, Hell Comes To Frogtown.
I have now seen that second film.
At first glance, Frogtown appears to have all of the same problems as They Live.
And at second, third and all subsequent glances... it still does. It's terrible. But quite funny.
Frogtown also continues the sterling reputation of the amazingly popular Vasquez Rocks shooting location. If you visit Vasquez Rocks and don't see a starship's away team and/or someone having an unconvincing fistfight with a man in a reptile suit, I think you may justifiably demand monetary compensation from the government.
I think I may manage to survive without seeing Frogtown's several inexplicable sequels, though. This despite the fact that, in the first sequel, the Roddy Piper role is reprised by the inimitable - and I use the word advisedly - Robert Z'Dar.
Since nobody else seems to have gotten around to creating a torrent of the now-they're-there, now-they-aren't Exploratorium iPhone-format Secret Life of Machines episodes, I just did it myself.
That's the torrent's page on Mininova; feel free to distribute it to other torrent sites if you like. This is the Azureus magnet link for the torrent.
I've only got a poxy home DSL account to upload with, so don't expect speedy downloads until a few more seeds show up. If you've already downloaded the files, you can help seed: Start downloading the torrent, stop it, copy the files you already have into the directory that's just been created for the download, and then restart the torrent. Your BitTorrent client should check the files, see that they're finished, and switch over to seeding.
(Note that you can also help seed even if you don't have all of the files. Just follow the above instructions, copying whatever files you do have to the download directory, and when you restart the torrent you'll seed the files you have while downloading the others.)
UPDATE: The original version of the torrent seemed to have stalled (dead tracker, or something), so I've re-announced it on The Pirate Bay, here.