I was checking my stats yesterday and noticed that washingtonpost.com was my top referrer site. I found that a bit odd; why would the Washington Post web site be referring readers to my blog? On Thursday, I had linked to a Post article. Ric & Debbie's Place is now listed in the Who's Blogging text box for that article. That's just plain weird. Kind of cool, but still weird, especially when you consider that I got the link from Jerry Pournelle's web site, which receives more hits in an hour than mine does in a month. Yet, no mention of Jerry's site and there I sit in the number two slot.

This will be a typical early-week linkfest, but first, news from the home front. Verizon continues to work on running phone line to my house. I now have, not one, but two of the little green boxes on the side of my road, both placed by seemingly intelligent people that realize that my road needs to be snow plowed. I can't believe it was Verizon employees; they must had hired some big guns from the local group home. During the last call they made to Debbie at work, the customer "service" drone made the astute observation that our number appears to be disconnected. The mind simply boggles. Do these idiots really believe I would continue to pay for non-functioning service while they screw around? It has now been three months since I first reported the problem. And why is the local repair office unaware that I am no longer a Verizon customer?

Anyway, back in the reality-based world:

This has to be one of the more accurate descriptions of YEC "science" I have come across. As I have said before, Wiley Miller has a front-row seat to the on-going silliness of the Dover trial.

And speaking of silliness, Pat Robertson is still doing his best to make everyone who claims to be a Christian look stupid. Two hurricanes make land fall and it's the second coming. Randomness tends to be "clumpy;" that's why human eyes can pick constellations out of the random distribution of stars in the night sky. Hurricanes, earthquakes, even deaths that affect a given family tend to come in bunches with long dry spells in between. Debbie lost her grandfather, two uncles, and her father in three months. Was that God's judgment? Does the decade-plus absence of the death of a close relative since mean that God is blessing her and/or her family? This sort of stupidity is exactly why rational people are leaving evangelical churches in droves. Hey Pat; if you are truly interested in not making a public ass of yourself, take a statistics course at your local community college, then go look at the hurricane statistics over the last one hundred years. And Hal; would you just shut up already?!?! The world didn't end in 1999 like you predicted. We all thought you were an idiot when you said it, and it was confirmed when 1999 came and went and the world was still here. Just shut up!

Vox Day has a new column up that needs to be read by every teen-age girl. I've always argued the issue from a different direction. The insistence made by Christians that no sex can occur outside of marriage is made into a bad farce by their insistence that no one can marry until they have completed at least a 4-year degree and are secure in a career. Is there anyone out there with a higher-than-room-temperature IQ that is having problems figuring out why illegitimacy among church members is higher than the surrounding community? If you don't want your grandchildren to be bastards, then encourage your teenage girls to marry and have a family before worrying about college and career. With average lifespan increasing with no corresponding increase in the window of female fertility, it just makes sense. Ask any 40-something spending themselves into bankruptcy on fertility treatments.

And in a development that will be sure to stun millions, Katrina disaster relief is becoming a vast black hole for federal dollars. Of course it has; we are a nation raised to have our lips permanently attached to the federal tax tit. Anyone surprised by this would be surprised by gravity.

Flint, Michigan, my home town, gets another "humiliating kick in the crotch" (free cookie to the first person to identify the origin of that phrase). This article doesn't mention it other than the carefully-worded phrase "high legacy issues," but what is killing our manufacturing sector are the retirees: they simply refuse to die when they are supposed to. Thirty-and-out made sense when the average shop rat died a couple years after retirement. Now it means paying more people to not work, than you pay to work. There is no way out. We can argue about how we got to this place or who is at fault, but the bottom line is that we are at the bottom of a very deep hole, and yet we keep digging, hoping to find a secret tunnel to the surface.

To wind up on a lighter note, Kiko seems like an interesting concept and something we are sure to see more of. It is a web-based application developed over the summer as part of the Summer Founders Program. It is still in beta, but it is certainly interesting. The most intriguing aspect to me is that the site loads faster than the calendar application from my employer's network, and has better on-screen performance as well. The specific technology is called AJAX. This could prove to be interesting. I'm typing this on a perfectly acceptable web-based word processor. All the files are saved on some server out there on the internet. It is available to me from any internet connected PC in the world with a web browser. Currently, everything I save is displayed on a blog, but it would take a competent programmer about one day to make it into my own personal web-based word processor. Image editing inside my Flickr account. My e-mail is already web-based. Add in a spreadsheet and Quicken, and I won't need anything installed on my local PC other that a browser and related plug-ins. I'm not sure that I'm ready to trust my financial data to the web, but the concept is becoming reality.

OK, I need to get back to work before I get fired.