Becky will be happy to know that Wil Wheaton has what it takes to be Governor of California.

Since some of us have taken to extolling the virtues of our current home towns, I thought that I would take a minute to hype my absurd adopted home, Los Angeles.

No, this is not going to be about beaches, earthquakes, or celebrity encounters (although the last two times I went to the local Ben & Jerry’s I met Bruce Springsteen and Chris Rock). This is about one of LA’s less-inspiring (but often fun) exports, stereotypes.

More specifically, this is about those stereotypes affecting residents of LA’s redneck inland backwater, the self-proclaimed Inland Empire (a community consisting of cities such as Fontana and Riverside, but better known to locals as the 909 , Fontucky , a cute bastardization of Fontana and Kentucky, or Rivertucky, a cute bastardization of Riverside and Kentucky). Even more specifically, this is about how a somehwat mindless show on Fox has managed to piss off the residents of the Inland Empire.

September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day

There aren’t enough techies reading this to answer my question, I think, but I am going to put it out there anyway: Every “ how to secure your wireless network “ document I have read does not mention restricting access to certain MAC addresses. That’s what I am doing and I don’t understand why that would be any less reliable as a security measure than WEP (which I don’t do to save a little bandwidth). Sure, someone could spoof a MAC address, but first they’d have to know what MAC addresses are open — which seems to be just as difficult as decrypting WEP…right?

Whatever the truth, the Florida recount is a done issue, but I thought this was a bizarre/amusing format for political argument.

Perhaps we could have all presidential candidates create a 2-minute flash video to argue their case for election. Have FAIR approve them all for factual accuracy and put them all on one Web site. It would be just the thing for today’s busy voter.

Will he still have it? We will all know soon enough when Berkeley Breathed returns to the comics page with “Opus”.

The Washington Post Writers Group, which will syndicate the strip, is expected to officially announce Breathed’s return this Sunday. The reclusive Breathed, who rarely gives interviews, could not be reached yesterday for comment.

The new strip will appear on Sundays in The Washington Post starting Nov. 23.

Berkeley got his start at U.T. , btw. It turns out that my favorite Bloom County strip is one of his favorites .

One of my favorite features of any website is the “Most Emailed Articles“ link from any story in the New York Times.

I love it because it’s a guaranteed way to find the most interesting recent articles, ranked by popularity. Lately the political red meat has been high on the list, for good reason in my opinion. Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman generally make the top ten, Willam Safire generally doesn’t. The best is that this is a real-time ranking, so you can check back later in the day and find new stuff.

I have a good excuse for not understanding the structure of Texas politics because I grew up in Louisiana, but the truth is I don’t understand La. politics either. A speaker on local NPR radio this morning brought up the point that we were voting on a ton of constitutional amendments this weekend and queried why amendments were neccesary to make laws. Is that how Texas works? Is the only way to make a law by making an ammendment? If not, why are there so many ?

The Texas Constitution is one of the longest in the nation and is still growing. As of 2001 (77th Legislature), the Texas Legislature has passed a total of 584 amendments. Of these, 410 have been adopted and 174 have been defeated by Texas voters. Thus, the Texas Constitution has been amended 410 times since its adoption in 1876.