On our way to Thailand, stopped after our first leg, at Dulles airport in DC, I looked at my phone and noticed I just got a new voicemail. How exciting - nobody ever calls me. The voicemail was from an officer at the IRS looking for some guy with a very African-sounding name: a name which I can't even begin to decipher since the IRS guy had a heavy Indian accent and was having a hard time pronouncing it himself. The intended recipient was being informed that he needs to contact the IRS because there are multiple Federal charges levied against him and his identity is in question. Sucks to be you!

Last night I got another call from the IRS. This one was automated, but said that the person is in violation of his (?) visa and will be deported.

If it was any other organization, I might be tempted to call them back and tell them they have the wrong number. But there's no way I'm going to step into this.

Update: h.t. Ugh, prolly a scam

Today in odd deities:

Shitala (Sheetala), also called Sitala (शीतला śītalā), is a Hindu goddess widely worshipped in North India, West Bengal, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan as the pox-goddess. She is the Goddess of sores, ghouls, pustules and diseases, acclaimed by Hindus.

A class action complaint alleged the makers of Iowa’s Templeton Rye whiskey lied to customers and charged them a premium price for a product that isn’t really made in Iowa.

Templeton Rye Spirits, LLC, is headquartered in Templeton, a small town in Carroll County, Iowa. They own a distillery there, but a complaint filed in Cook County, Illinois alleged Templeton Rye whiskey is actually distilled and aged at a factory in Indiana where whiskey is also distilled and aged for “dozens of other brands.”

Add a splash of Luxardo and a bit of Cointreau you've got yourself a nice drink. It's somewhere between an old fashioned and a Manhattan. I call it a "Saratoga Radio" because that's what we hear the woman sing in the BSG intro.

Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.

Bummer.

Hell is third-party libraries.

Hell is the middle seat.

Hell is the middle east.

Hell is post-nasal drip.

Hell is a 6:15AM alarm.

Hell is a 5:30AM cat.

Hell is a multithreaded crash issue.

Netflix is taking BSG off its service at the end of the month!

And we're just 8 eps into our 3^rd rewatch!

Frak!

MSNBC.com did a redesign recently, and they chose a font called "Proxima Nova" for their headlines. It's a nice enough font, I guess. But, at FireFox's normal zoom level, the dot on the lower case 'i' doesn't completely separate from the main stroke. So, it looks pretty much exactly like a lower case 'L'.

Brltaln! Kllllngs !

This is where I graduated from high school:

HUDSON FALLS -- Numerous teens face criminal charges after a series of incidents in which they lured victims to places where they beat them and videotaped the attacks as they occurred, police said.

One of the victims later brought a knife to school to protect himself from further attacks, according to Hudson Falls Police.

Hudson Falls Police investigated three incidents in a matter of weeks involving different groups of teens, charging several people with conspiracy to commit assault and endangering the welfare of a child for incidents that happened at a home, in a convenience store parking lot and at Hudson Falls High School.

No serious injuries were reported.

The motive seemed to be the perceived thrill of assaulting other people, videotaping it and sharing the videos through electronic devices, Police Chief Randy Diamond said.

In a previous post I said my friends and I were no strangers to the police. That was true, but we never did anything like this. We never hurt anyone.

When I was 15, I bought a starter's pistol. It was a full-sized revolver, and fired .22 caliber blanks. The barrel was blocked, so it couldn't fire real bullets (and I doubt the chamber was strong enough to handle a real cartridge), but you couldn't tell that unless you were looking straight into it. And this was before they had to put orange tips on all fake guns so, it looked exactly like a real .22 revolver. So cool!

We were 15 and terribly naive, and maybe downright stupid. So my friends and I took what we were thinking was just a loud cap gun and went walking down the main street of our town - a shootin' ! And we shot the thing "at" each other. Bang! Bang! Not only did it look like a real pistol, it sounded like one, too! Loud as hell.

We were maybe a block from the police station, the whole time.

We turned the corner off the main street and onto our side street, walked about 50 feet and were suddenly boxed-in by two police cars that had silently appeared out of nowhere. We were pretty lousy kids, so this wasn't our first meeting with the cops. But when the cops got out of their cars this time, their hands were on their guns. They asked me for the gun. So I reached into my inside pocket to get it. They told me to hold still, and one of them reached in and took the pistol out of my coat. Once they saw it wasn't real, they relaxed. They asked us where our houses were and we pointed them out. Then they took each of us home and told our parents what we were doing. None of us got in any real trouble, but I never got my pistol back.

This was 1986.

I think of this now because I'm trying to figure out how that situation would turn out for a white teenager today. I'm pretty sure I know how it would turn out for a black teenager.