An Amazon wish list? Fuck that. Buy me this. Richard Branson has one.

Snowboarders are sexy as hell. So is most of Apple’s product line. But, umm, what the hell is this?

Now back to your regularly scheduled day.

Penn of Penn & Teller has a great story on his site recounting his interaction with an overzealous airport security officer. It’s good reading, especially if you’ve read the rant carried on some right-wing site that’s making the blog rounds.

In fact, when I read Penn’s “freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I’ll spend to find out how to get people more of it,” I officially forgave him for his unfortunate tenure as a Pizza Hut shill.

Update: Hmmm. It seems Penn gets a little nuts in his next entry. The word “pig” is used frequently. I think I’m just going to have to undergo this screening process myself and make my own judgment. In the very near future.

Permit me to go all geek for a moment.

I’ve never owned a Mac but wow do I want one of the new 17″ PowerBooks. A huge screen, built-in wireless (802.11g and Bluetooth!), IEEE 1394b (finally!) plus that cool-as-hell slot-loading DVD burner.

The new backlit (via fiber-optic strands) keyboard and auto-dimming screen (see QuickTime clip, 250K) are also lovely.

Now if they’d just work on the processor speed…

Yesterday I received a spam (image) purporting to come from support@icq.com. It asked me to specify my ICQ username and password, in order to verify that I was still an active user.

The e-mail originated from an IP address in Turkey, and uses a Canadian Web to e-mail gateway provider to send the information to who knows where.

Obviously the whole procedure is suspect, and there were tip-offs (“the ICQ Inc.”, “you confirm us”, “filling the empty spaces”) in the text that cast further doubt, but even I did a double-take because I do have a lapsed ICQ account.

It makes me wonder: how many people were ensnared by this approach? Just what does the sender intend to do with that information? Will we have better trust mechanisms (and user education) before single sign-on programs like MS Passport and Liberty Alliance get off the ground?

Gentle reader, allow me to introduce you to the Buy.com model girls. (Should you wish to see these ladies in, ahh, context, you may click for a larger image.)

They come from “buy magazine,” the “magalogue” from buy.com. This approach to drive traffic to an e-comerce site has been done before and is worthy of discussion. So is the use of quasi-editorial à la A&F Quarterly.

Of course, at the moment I have no interest in those discussions. I’m just fascinated by how gratuitous these girls are. A few other girls in the catalog actually pretend to use the products, but most are just eye candy. Why? Does this drive sales? Are buy.com customers overwhelmingly (straight) males? Does anyone actually believe that getting a Palm Zire will in any way get a hot chick in a cowboy hat to write her phone number on it, as page 32 suggests? What do women think of all this?

It was at this point that I was going to launch into a mini-rant about the use of pretty people to dress up just about anything. Then I realized why I opened the damn thing in the first place. So I’ll just shut up now.

Just went to see the flag co. boys for whom I do some work on occasion. The brothers who run the firm are very laid back, but today I locked horns with one (intellectually speaking, of course.)

When I dropped the phrase “white bread Republican,” it was off to the races. He did all the Reaganite greatest hits: Entitlements Are Out of Control, Taxes Will Suffocate Us, Let Me Invest My Retirement Money, Let’s Drill in Alaska, and of course that old classic, Bill & Hillary Clinton Are Satan Incarnate.

It would be in poor taste to brag, but I have to say I gave as good — better than — I got. I pulled out all the stops, from mentioning essential agencies established through liberal initiatives (FDA, SEC, FDIC), to bashing the war on Iraq and dependency on the petrochemical cartel, through to a question of what exactly the Clinton Administration cost nearly $80 million”>$40 million we spent on Starr brought us other than the revelation that yes, the president didn’t want to admit an ugly intern sucked his dick. (Seems like a poor value, especially when compared to the widespread, systematic criminal activity uncovered from the $50m Iran-Contra probe.)

Anyway, I won’t rehash any more but suffice to say we had an enjoyable go-round and the secretaries just loved it. One actually asked me if I would be her brother’s divorce lawyer. The other said she’s been trying to make the same point for years, and now she didn’t think her boss would ever be the same.

Just before I left, the guy predicted that within 10 years I would be a Republican. It would happen soon after I entered the work force, he said. I flashed back to a claim Brandon once made that if it “weren’t for that one issue” I would be a Republican now. My dear employer will learn what B-don has long since divined: there’s no way in hell I’ll ever join Club Conservative Christian.

Did W. muzzle the messenger? David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle had a very interesting article Friday in which he reported the Bush administration has killed a layoff tracking program. The $6.6m initiative provided statistics about the number of “mass layoffs” (when greater than 50 employees were let go at once.)

Sharon Brown, the program’s overseer, said the move ended “a high-quality program, producing timely information on important developments in the labor market.” Not so, says deputy assistant secretary Mason Bishop: “We didn’t see how this program was helping workers re-enter the workforce.” Not a bad argument, but Lazarus convincingly destroys it by noting the Dept. of Labor is doing plenty of volunteerism studies, and nobody gets a job from that, either.

To no-one’s surprise, Bush Sr. made exactly the same moves during his administration. Let’s all hope his son meets with the same fate.

Update: Not related to layoffs, but Helen Thomas has an interesting take on what W. and his cronies appear to be spending their time on instead of jobs creation.

The overwhelming majority of this site’s visitors break down into two groups: people who know me and people who type in the URL on speculation that it has something to do with a certain Web technology that will continue to remain nameless.

I don’t get too many visitors from search engines. I run an analysis program every now and again to keep track, and up until 24 Dec the only Google queries used by visitors were “www.jsp.org”, “jsp.org”, and “jsperkins”.

Then came a surprise: an AOL user clicked through 7 pages of results for the phrase “tanned boys” and then picked my site. (It occurs here, but Google actually served up the archive for the month.)

I’m sure (s)he was disappointed.

It all reminds me of summer 1999, when I did my original site with daily updates and Infoseek threw up a warning for some of my pages. The offending item then was my use of the phrase “emotional pornography.”

A postscript: If I note that B-don‘s latest e-m to me carried the subject line “Suckee-suckee,” I wonder if I’ll eventually find a search for that in my logs…

Is it just me, or does Buffy have a pretty heinous sunburn? What’s the story there? I thought she was slaying all these vampire dudes at night. (What hours does she sleep, anyway?)

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Wired has an interesting article concerning the use of remote-control and GPS technology to catch car thieves. Unlike the consumer-oriented LoJack, these systems are used by the police for “bait” cars. When someone drives off with the car, police can track it and choke off the gas when the suspect moves to a good intercept point.

Though I sometimes think it appropriate to take police actions with a healthy slice of skepticism, this approach seems innovative. Sneaky, yes, but in a oooh-I-like-it sort of way. That’s why I find it so surprising that some are calling it entrapment. Doesn’t entrapment involve some variety of coercion? An artifical manipulation of the situation? Here, you’re parking a car. It looks like the other cars. Nobody encourages you to steal it.

I don’t get it.

(One caveat: the article left a hint that they’re leaving the keys in the car. If that’s the case, I’m more inclined to doubt the tactic.)

Painted on the back left window of an Econoline van: “On November 1, 1992 a stranger saved my life.” Back right: “Be an organ donor.”

On the radio: “this Christmas, give your child a gift that will last a lifetime.” That gift would be “legal parentage” — take in your sexual partner to legally establish that though you two are unwed, (s)he is responsible for the kid. Thank you, Indiana Dept. of Health.

Also on the radio: one voice asks another what’s wrong with his forehead. An eyebrow pierching gone wrong, says voice #2. That’s not even near your brow!You should have gone to (blah), says voice #1. I got my tongue ring done there. What? says #2. You’re not even old enough. My mom went with, says #1, and she was so impressed she got her belly button pierced.

Lovely.

I’ve always hated the mistaken identity conceit because I know the character will always get busted in the end. However, this film managed to mitigate that familiar queasy feeling by taking a light tone, starting from the wonderful ’60s title sequence.

Spielberg deserves kudos for achieving that playful vibe, but he sure could have leaned on the editor: at 140 minutes, Pech correctly pronounced that the film “drug” in parts. Lop 30 minutes off the end and you’d have something even more fun.

Stayin’ in. Watching movies with my sister. Downing Wendy’s and Champagne. See you in aught three.

Two indepedent items mentioned in today’s StudioBrief that I found interesting simply by their juxtaposition. First, from the film news:

Finally, My Big Fat Greek Wedding showed it still could surprise after 37 weeks. The film earned $2.8 million on just 951 screens for an average of $2,903 per screen — 89 percent more than it earned a week earlier — to lift its domestic gross to $222,517,469.

And from television:

In the latest example of corporate synergy in the Viacom empire, the company’s CBS affiliate in Seattle will begin producing a nightly newscast for its UPN affiliate in the same city. The 10:00 p.m. newscast being produced for the Cox-owned UPN station, KSTW, will employ the same anchors and sets used at 11:00 for the newscast produced for Viacom-owned KIRO. … KSTW General Manager Gary Wordlaw commented, “We’re very pleased to be able to bring Seattle TV viewers a local news alternative at 10:00 p.m.”

On the one hand, we have a $5m film, developed outside the studio system and ranking as the #5 film of 2002 (and within $5m of the #4, Signs.) On the other, we have a corporation working to keep down costs by eliminating any discernible difference between news on two networks in one market.

Mr. Wordlaw and his masters are delusional if they truly think the same sets, with the same newscasters, from the same corporate owner, represents any real “alternative.” When will we see the indie nightly news?

I thought a doc’s “GOT BOTOX?” ad was going to take the cake until I saw the Aftermath Inc. offering. The two suited experts in clean-up for “homicide, suicide, and un-attended death” apparently expect they’ll drum up business from drivers on 294.

Inappropriate? And then some: Turn on your speakers and get a load of this.