The words chilling effect (original) come to mind, somehow. (Via regis.) This is an isolated incident — perhaps. It’s a story told by a liberal — certainly. I don’t care. This shouldn’t happen. If I call the FBI and report that someone was reading something suspicious, that’s not an incident. That’s someone reading. A few months ago, I got one of those scam emails from someone pretending to be Paypal. I called the Boston FBI office to report it. I literally couldn’t get someone to take my report. “Did you lose over $5,000?” “Well, no.” “Sorry, we don’t deal with cases in which nobody lost $5,000.” ...

Someone needs to let the Raptors know that it’s quality, not quantity. Doing PR work to discuss signing Jason Kidd is one thing. PR work to hype the signing of a guy — Mengke Bateer — who averaged less than 1 point a game last season is another thing. And they haven’t even signed the guy yet. They’re hoping to sign him. There can’t possibly be any serious competition for him. How pathetic is it to say “well, we’re hoping to sign the second best Chinese-born player in the NBA”? Pretty damned pathetic. ...

Last Sunday, I sauntered on down to the Boston Common movie theater, conveniently located on beautiful Boston Common, to see a movie. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see Terminator 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (that last being an outside chance of a choice), but I was in the mood for phat action. As the kids say. So as I walk into the theater, some woman is trying to give away a Pirates ticket for the show that starts in ten minutes. I say that’s an omen, accept it with good grace, and head up to the theater. On my way out after the show, I note that I can easily catch the next showing of T3 if I’m willing to wait 45 minutes or so, and I had my Game Boy with me, so that was that. ...

Kill Bill is just gonna be a big huge sprawling mess. Hopefully in a good way. Over three hours! Tarantino goes wild! Man, the guy doesn’t have any self-restraint as it is. But I’m gonna see it. I’m even looking forward to it. His lack of self-restraint has led to some amazing things, so what the hell? I’ll think of it as his big unrestrained double album rock opera and see how it sounds.

That’s interesting. The pricing on CafePress books just dropped to 4.5 cents a page for wire-o and saddle stitch and 3 cents a page for perfect bound. The base price for wire-o stayed at five bucks, saddle stich base pricing dropped to four bucks, and perfect bound went up to seven bucks. So the hypothetical 32 page comic book now costs, um, $5.44. The 250 page paperback costs $14.50. Now we’re talking.

hypocorisma (original) is a weblog dedicated to naming. Just naming. Not names for gaming, not choosing names for your kid — those are aspects of naming, and S. V. Affolee is into the process of naming itself. There’s a domain expert for everything out there. Via Perverse Access Memory (original).

Sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Eight words: “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Hint to Roger Clemens: nobody likes you much. Poor guy. He has a milestone season, gets his 300th win, strikes out his 4,000th man, and yet nobody wants him to get that final All-Star appearance in the final season of his career. The public didn’t vote for him, the players didn’t vote for him, the manager didn’t select him, and now Commissioner Selig doesn’t want anyone to make an exception for him. Possibly all that stuff about not showing up for the Hall of Fame induction backfired, huh?

The AltaVista saga continues: Yahoo’s buying Overture. The purchase price is 1.63 billion, which is pretty damned impressive. You gotta figure the AV and Fast purchases made the deal much more attractive to Yahoo, considering that those portions of Overture will allow Yahoo to replace Google as their search provider. Congratulations go to my compadres at AltaVista.

Sports Illustrated recently launched a new fantasy baseball game. It complements their existing fantasy baseball game, I suppose. It’s called Baseball Challenge: Salary Cap Challenge. Yep. It’s a fantasy baseball game that sells itself with the salary cap. As a Celtics fan laboring under the emotional weight of the Vin Baker trade, I find this painfully depressing. It doesn’t look like it’s really that different than any other fantasy baseball game — salary caps are nothing new in that world — but did they have to sell it as the “Cripple Your Team For Years With One Stupid Guaranteed Contract Challenge”? (Rephrasing mine.)