Somehow I managed to talk my boss into having me lead a brown bag lunch discussion on the topic of health care privacy in two weeks. If anyone knows how that happened, please clue me in.

Perhaps I just need to work harder at projecting an air of incompetence.

Here's a fun Fourth of July thing. (Not the easiest site to load, but nifty when it works...)

Well whaddaya know.... turns out that St. Urho's Day is the day before St. Patrick's day. And all these years I was misled into believing it was on St. Patrick's day. Guess I'll have to alert the relatives.

Competitive hellfire and damnation. This needs to be on CSPAN.

If you haven't seen the new Ren and Stimpy, then you haven't truly lived.

Here's a parody of that nifty Honda commercial.

And, especially for comic book geeks, the heromachine is a great waste of time.

This is pretty well done. Something of a cross between viking kittens and political commentary.

I knew the Chinese should never have caved. Now look what's happened. Damned PETAnese.

Eminem mocks everybody's favorite mutant.

Also, an update on "Virgin Wha?!?"

In case you thought your job sucked, it can always be worse:

There are plenty of challenges. If Hauge is too early the annoyed cow can bolt, if late then he loses much of the sample to the ground. And even when he gets it right, the pan doesn't get it all, sometimes his arm gets it, sometimes his face.

"I just have to wait until they do it. Once I sat an hour and a half with one, waiting. But there are 21 cows in the project, so I can go to the one that's ready to crap," Hauge said.

"Sometimes it just sprays in all directions. The consistency varies from cow to cow. It's important to note things like this, so that I can run away if I need to," Hauge explained to VG.

All for $10 an hour.

The Onion AV Club is running a best interviews of this week, including Berkeley Breathed. Here's a little nugget:

O: Is the liberal stance of the early strips indicative of your own personal politics?

BB: Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.

Hallelujah!

if you're trying to break into country music, make sure your publicity photo doesn't look like a drag king Corey Feldman.

"Scatalogue: 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art, is on display at Ottawa's SAW Gallery."

Modern art has finally realized its potential.

UPDATE: Be sure to recommend the book "in addition to" rather than "instead of."

Upon recommendation from a certain non-blogging luddite, via Michael Malice, I have joined the crusade to link Hillary Clinton's Living History with ASIN #0395925037 on amazon.com. Shoppers looking for supplemental reading material will now know where to look. Feel free to join in the fun by filling in the ASIN number in the customer advice section.

Kyoto 'Flatulence Tax' Plan Causes Turbulence in New Zealand

You know, as a member of the House Environment Committee at Buckeye Boys' State, I pushed to introduce a bill mandating the research and implementation of methane containment devices for livestock. We were prevented from introducing the bill by the Speaker, who wanted to preserve the seriousness of Boys' State legislation. While that was exceedingly lame, it's good to see those Kiwis know where to look for their greenhouse gases.

Casablanca is one of my favorite movies, perhaps that's why I really enjoyed this deconstruction of the recent Al Qaida bombings as an attack on a city symbolic of civil society. Having visited the city, however, I think we could do better.

I'd snicker too.

In honor of a weekend where I will be sitting home piecing together an outline for an article tentatively titled "The Horror of HIPAA: You Don't Know What They Can't Tell You" - or something like that - I thought it would be appropriate to post a list of some of the places I'd much rather be right now.

My soon to be realized dream themeparks:

Habitat for Humanity Poverty Park
Transylvania's Vlad Tepes Funland

And of course, the ones that have been on my pilgrimage list for some time now:

Dollywood
Branson, MO - if only for the Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Museum and the possibility of catching a Yakov Smirnoff show (and didja know, Yakov is the one responsible for the giant heart mural that is at the World Trade Center site?!? What a country!)
The Winchester Mystery House

And things I would see if I happened to be in town:
The Corn Palace (which, btw, has its own webcam)
Dale Earnhardt Tribute (I have faith that the NASCAR fans will eventually ban together and create something outrageous and garish... for now, its just a lonely sign in a park... but time will tell....)
The World of Coca-Cola Museum

And in case you're wondering, I have no interest in seeing the Spam Museum, any of the 4 or 5 giant balls of twine littering the countryside, or any kind of frontier anything museum. (Although I might be talked into visiting Pioneer Village just outside Kearney, NB, as I owe them a favor, but that's another story.)
And, if your tastes are anything like mine, I can't recommend www.roadsideamerica.com too highly.