The latest edition of Deviant SynCast is now available! This week we focus on comedy material, including bits from Bill Hicks, Paul Mooney, Ellen Degeneres, Mitch Hedberg, and others. Check it out!

Correction: I erroneously state in the broadcast that Bill Hicks died of prostate cancer -- it was in fact pancreatic cancer.

Blog News

Also check out my pal Dave Goulding's new blog, where he'll feature the same reflections on society and politics that he used to send only to privileged folk via email. Now if we can only get him to skip lines between paragraphs..

And the saddest news in the Blog World so far this year -- Kilgore Trout is hanging it up. This sucks in a royal way -- Chaotic Not Random is one of the most consistently entertaining blogs out there, and I'm bummed that he has to power down. Best of luck to ya, Kilgore.

HalliBush Wars, Inc.

Newly-released Italian journalist and former prisoner of the Iraqi insurgency Giuliana Sgrena is insisting that US troops did not warn the people in her car before shooting.

The U.S. military has said the car Sgrena was riding in was speeding and Americans used hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and warning shots to get it to stop at the roadblock.

But in an interview with Italian La 7 TV, Sgrena said, "There was no bright light, no signal." She also said the car was traveling at "regular speed."

Well, she works for a communist newspaper -- and you know how they are. (Still, I'm obviously quite dubious of her claims that she was intentionally targeted because the Italian government negotiated with her abductors and the US disapproves of such activity.)

Meantime, how do most Americans feel about Bush's priorities?

Overall, Bush does not appear to be much more in step with the nation on what the White House has long viewed as his strong suit: 58 percent of respondents said that the White House did not share the foreign affairs priorities of most Americans.

On domestic issues, four months after Bush won re-election over Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, 63 percent of respondents said the president's priorities on domestic issues were different from those of most Americans. When respondents were asked to chose among five domestic issues facing the country, Social Security came in third -- behind jobs and health care. And nearly 50 percent said Democrats were more likely to make the right decisions about Social Security, compared with 31 percent who said the same thing about Republicans. . . .

In the poll, 51 percent said that permitting individuals to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts, the centerpiece of Bush's plan, was a bad idea, even as a majority said they agreed with Bush that the system would become insolvent about the middle of the century if nothing were done.

But, you know -- he's got good moral values and stuff.

Other

Thanks to Diane for this article on the Korean animation process for The Simpsons.

"When it comes to Bart's spiky hair, if you make one mistake in drawing or pencil thickness, the animation looks funny," Shin said. The elaborate stories and the range of emotion shown by each character, it turns out, make "The Simpsons" an exceedingly difficult show to draw, he said.

TPCQ: "Korean animation studio!" "Everybody work! Everybody work!" "He big mean man, whip us. We are slaves."

And thanks to Diane also for organizing a kickbutt Women's Day event!

Ohmigod! The BABY! Oops, I mean the CAT!

Would you believe I still haven't given up on my quest to find the perfect MUD? Right now I'm giving Cryosphere a whirl. One nice thing about SF-themed MUDs is that I can listen to techno whilst playing them. (With medieval MUDs I keep it locked to Enigma and Delerium.)

TimeWaster™

Have fun with the Tinky Winky Virtual Paper Doll. Yeah, okay -- that's pretty dumb. Okay then, here's Jokes with Einstein. Very nice. And the even-better sequel. Both via ABS.

Today I'm listening to: Hardstyle!