the last 40 minutes of red eye are so much awesomer than they have any right to be.

Yeesh. Via Atrios, check out this Post column, which is in the sports section, and about intelligent design. Cause, you know — athletes are impressive. Which means they're complex. Which means they're irreducibly impressively complex! I realize the argument is a little complicated, so I'll just cut to the end: Sally Jenkins is a fucking idiot. Q.E.D.

And she doesn't even live in the area! That's right, for the past several years she's been phoning it in from NYC. C'mon, Post editors. This column puts her well past "irrelevant" and deep into "embarassing" territory.

A little while ago I mentioned that I've been tunnelling my web traffic out of work and through my home connection. That post inspired a firestorm of public interest (one person emailed me about it). Here's the beginning of how to implement such a setup yourself. When it's working your boss won't be able to snoop on which websites you're visiting, or block them, or really tell anything about your internet traffic apart from how much of it there is (and that it's strangely hidden).

First, the big picture. I've explained the idea behind ports at least a couple of times. We're going to take our browser's web traffic — the stuff going out through port 80 — and send it through an encrypted tunnel to a PC at home that's running a proxy server. The proxy server will make an unencrypted request for the webpage we're trying to access (using our home connection) and send the data back through the encrypted tunnel.

We're going to need a few things. We'll need a PC that's at home and turned on at whatever times the link should be available. And we're going to need to make some assumptions. So this is going to be a Windows tutorial. All the software required is free and open source, though, and you could certainly accomplish this setup under OS X or Linux. In fact, in some regards it'd probably be quite a bit easier. But Linux users don't need my help setting up a proxy server, and Mac users are used to being ignored. If anybody with a Mac really wants this functionality, just let me know. I'll be happy to dig up the relevant links.

Finally, I'm going to assume you know how to open up ports on Windows firewall (or at least turn it off) if you're running a version of XP that has it installed. Same thing with ZoneAlarm, or whatever other software firewall you might be running. I can't account for everything, people!

So let's get started. In this post we'll take care of the software that supports the encrypted tunnel. This is the hard, but not that hard, part.

don't forget bluestate tomorrow night at saint-ex! i will be there, though fortunately it won't be the last bluestate i attend. that'll come at the black cat september 10th, the night before i leave. i already made NM promise to play a request of mine that night. mwahaha. y'all best be ready to break it down to "like a prayer." or "since u been gone." too tough to call.

seriously. what is up with yahoo's news photos accompaniment?:

mooning a hurricane, crude oil prices, same thing!

anyway, all my thoughts and prayers with the people in LA. i'm sitting here watching MSNBC, dribbling coffee and leftover chicken fried noodles from china express down my chin and shirt. i went to the dentist one more time this morning to get some final work done on my teeth, and he novocained me all to hell, and frankly, i can't feel my face. i also think my left eyeball is numb, but i am not sure. just watch me try to smile. i look like a retarded puffy penguin. er, or something. it's grotesque.

today looks to be slow. so i think i will make this.

Citizens of the internet: it's the last Monday in August. Shouldn't you be back at your desks, pretending to work? That's right, you should be. So why is my bloglines window empty? C'mon, people. Let's see a little hustle.

On Saturday I stumbled across MTV's The 70s House, a reality show in which contestants live in a seventies-themed residence, complete seventies-themed challenges, and irritate me in a distinctly seventies-themed way. Or at least, what I assume to be a seventies-themed way; I was born in 1980, so I'm pretty much taking MTV's word for all of the wood panelling and stupid haircuts. So are the contestants — most of them look younger than me. I'd be surprised if any of them were alive for more than a couple of years starting with 197.

Yesterday afternoon I had lunch with my mom at the Silver Diner in Clarendon, a chain restaurant awash in chrome, patriotically-themed desserts, and looping videos of Elvis. It's like an Archie comic come to life, except without the prurient Betty/Veronica subtext (and therefore totally uninteresting). Again, most of the people there were too young to have been alive for the time period being evoked.

Why do we participate in these ridiculously-themed charades? I realize that nostalgia is a powerful commercial force. But the people buying into these enterprises don't seem to be driven by nostalgia per se, because they don't have relevant memories to evoke. It's more like playing make-believe, but with an unusually boring premise.

I wish someone would inject just a little imagination into these synthetic eras. You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to have dinner in a restaurant devoted to, oh, let's say the 1240s, when people rode tyrannosaurs like horses in undersea cities ruled by a race of heatray-wielding alien vixens. I could see myself getting excited about ordering jalapeno poppers under those circumstances. It's not like I'd know any better.