Pip's Novel Free - PDF
novel, 'Faces in the Street', may be downloaded free at http://www.boilingbilly.com
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LinkThe only thing missing from the Sex.com story is a dead stripper found with a rubber alligator lodged in her throat -- though, by all estimates, to add this to the URL's outrageous legacy wouldn't be a huge shocker. It would only be adding some sex to the mix -- especially considering the Sex.com story includes a fugitive seized by U.S. marshals, hard-luck convicted felons hiding millions in Mexican shrimp farms and strip clubs, the fugitive's daughter caught smuggling over 200 pounds of pot, one multimillionaire dot-com scammer speed fiend with a Stanford MBA, a bizarre bid to buy Caesars Palace and a recent Tijuana gangland-style assassination attempt on a lawyer (nicknamed "The Toad") that left a Mexican cabbie and a 4-year-old boy wounded.
Like mobile-home scammers in Florida and billboard plastic surgeons in Los Angeles, URL grifters are part of the sleazy yet entertaining Bay Area tech-industry zoo. And so when a guy like Gary Kremen snags URLs like Match.com and Sex.com and dabbles in brokering far-reaching Web page patents and "Internet consulting" while (according to a 2005 CNN interview) working on a nice speed habit, he just sort of blends in with the rest of the money-grubbing, VC-chasing dot-com herd. Like most startup cowboys, Kremen sat on the Sex.com URL as an undeveloped property -- until a con man named Stephen M. Cohen came along and swindled VeriSign/Network Solutions out of Sex.com with fast talk and forgeries.
Previously on BoingBoing:
• Sex.com: a url worth dying for?
• Sex.com sells for over $14M,"adult social network" to follow
• Sex.com's CEO is suing Yahoo
• Verisign will have to pay for sex.com mistake
• High-tech companies need high-tech lawyers.
• More on sex.com in the BoingBoing archives
posted by Xeni Jardin
Kurimoto
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2006/12/edo-period-illustrations-by-kurimoto-tanshuu/
By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 22, 2006; 9:38 AM
The National Zoo was shut down for about 30 minutes early this morning after a clouded leopard was discovered lying along the new Asia Trail, just outside her enclosure, a zoo spokesman said.
Mook, a five-year-old cat who weighs 24 pounds, apparently escaped from the wire mesh-enclosed area overnight, zoo spokesman John Gibbons said.
NYT Publishes White House-Redacted Op-Ed Critical of Iran Policy
The New York Times has published a controversial, White House-censored article critical of US policy towards Iran. The Bush administration had blocked the piece on the grounds it contains classified information. The op-ed is co-authored by Former National Security Council official Flynt Leverett. The New York Times did not defy the White House censorship and published the piece in redacted form. Leverett has argued the White House demanded the removal of sections detailing publicly known information about how Iran cooperated after the 9/11 attacks and offered to negotiate a diplomatic settlement three years ago. In an accompanying statement, Leverett writes he will continue to campaign for the article’s publication without White House censorship.
Washington
HERE is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.
Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.
The Iraq Study Group has added its voice to a burgeoning chorus of commentators, politicians, and former officials calling for a limited, tactical dialogue with Iran regarding Iraq. The Bush administration has indicated a conditional willingness to pursue a similarly compartmented dialogue with Tehran over Iran’s nuclear activities.
Christophe Vorlet |
Unfortunately, advocates of limited engagement — either for short-term gains on specific issues or to “test” Iran regarding broader rapprochement — do not seem to understand the 20-year history of United States-Iranian cooperation on discrete issues or appreciate the impact of that history on Iran’s strategic outlook. In the current regional context, issue-specific engagement with Iran is bound to fail. The only diplomatic approach that might succeed is a comprehensive one aimed at a “grand bargain” between the United States and the Islamic Republic.