Hey, it’s Cockeyed.com appreciation day! First off,
The Hans Blix Ultimate Fanpage. Next — Cockerham’s Special Report on Those Annoying Work-From-Home signs. Finally, but certainly not leastly — How Much is Inside?

There is a ridiculous amount of content on Cockeyed.com if you can find it as the navigation is often confusing, but keep digging!

In case you were wondering, Hans Blix is not actually a rally driver.

Or, perhaps more accurately: “something i wish wouldn’t happen”:

I enjoy Jolly Ranchers (the candy, not the commune). Specifically, the lemon variety. Thai Smile 4 has a large bowl of them. I took a lemon, as is my want. I got back to work, and realized I had yet to eat it. Now, I’m not one to just chew it up and swallow it. The lemon variety of Jolly Rancher lasts for quite a while — and I intend on enjoying every bit of it. Well, that is, I intended on enjoying it, until a twist of my tongue shot it into my throat at an unretrievable velocity. As the lemony goodness was fast disappearing, I briefly considered attempting to regurgitate it. However, imagining both agreeable and unagreeable outcomes of such a solution, I decided against it.

Oh well. Unexpected swallowing is something I wish wouldn’t happen.

V to make a comeback on NBC

“reworked” GI JOE Public Service Announcements

Crazy ‘The DaVinci Code’ web-puzzle thing

Quicktime of Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV movie awards

So Sammy gets an 8-game suspension, meanwhile we went to go see a Louisville Bats game last night, and who should be leading off for the Bats? None-other than the last (caught) bat-corker in major-leagues, Wilton Guerrero. Guerrero has bounced between teams since 1997 when he was playing for the Dodgers, then went to the Expos (where he played with brother Vladimir Guerrero), then to the Reds in 2001, then to the Florida Marlins, and then to the Expos again, and then finally back in Cincinatti.

I just found these two great baseball-info sites:

Baseball Library – a great overall view for ballplayers, including a listing of notable events in the players career.

Baseball Reference – a great site with scads of info (batting, fielding, etc), including a player’s salary history. Includes such Bats favorites as Corky Miller and Gookie Dawkins (note that you can also sponsor a players entry for $5)

update: corking is great, but why not use racquetballs?

You may or may not remember me linking to a blog called Dear Raed written by a purported Iraqi citizen under the moniker of “Salam Pax” a while back, but for those of you who do…

Salam Pax’s real identity was quite a mystery — was he a CIA plant? A real citizen? Something else? Well, it turns out that he is very real, and a very real Iraqi citizen — at least according to this story by Peter Maass on Slate. It doesn’t give away Salam’s real name, but certainly lays out some backstory on him and his connection to Maass. Further, The Guardian UK will be publishing a column by Salam Pax fortnightly (every two weeks, for those of you who didn’t know that — and you know who you are). The first column appears here. The Guardian also has a good interview with Pax here.

Justin frankel wrote WinAMP, the worlds most popular MP3 player. He also wrote Gnutella, an intriguing decentralized file-sharing system that became the basis for Morpheus, BearShare, etc. He works for Nullsoft, which is owned by AOL. He recently wrote and semi-published a cool little instant-messaging app called W.A.S.T.E.. It was all open-source goodness, but apparently AOL didn’t like that, and removed the release from their servers. An encrypted, non-centralized instant messaging app competing with AIM? NEVER!

Well, it would seem that frankel has had enough. i can’t say i blame him. i’m sure there are plenty of people out there that would respect his wishes and allow him to write code at his will.

I don’t know if i’d really want to buy a ghost in a jar, but its probably safe to say that if i had one, i’d want to sell it.

If you don’t win that bid, you can always just buy one off the shelf.

Then again, you could just make your own.

Next week — are you a ghost looking for a jar?

thanks to jason (via m@) for the ebay link. thanks to memepool for the style.

If you are a baseball fan, it’s your civic duty to vote. keep in mind that the winning league this year gets home-field advantage during the world series.

Ye olde Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on easing media ownership rules today. They are considering removing the 28-year-old ban on a single company owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city (small cities are exempted). Other changes include increasing the percentage of the national audience a single company may reach from 35% to 45%, and allowing a single company to own up to 3 channels in a regional market.

The folks that come out to protest this thing are as varied as I’ve ever seen — the NRA standing next to womens groups, etc. They come out in bulk, too — apparently both the email and voice mail systems were crashed at the FCC due to extremely high volume. Something on the order of 500,000 piece of voice and email.

Is it just me, or most of these rules in place because of the ignorance of most Americans? I’m not quite sure on that position, though. Time and time again, it has been shown that if you throw enough information at a person (or a society) that they will be blindsided. When the market feeds on the consumer (as it does in most broadcasting), the free market system becomes a bit like a meat market. The average citizen doesn’t have the time or energy to keep up with the varied, shifting winds of media companies. I’m not crazy about constricting business to safeguard our freedom of speech, but in this case, I think it is much needed. A monopoly of steel, oil, or technology is one thing — but a monopoly of information is the most dangerous of all.

a simple chart of proposed rule changes (by the way, that existing 35% cap — yeah, Viacom and News Corp (FOX, et al) are already over the limit with 39% and 38%, respectively.

Oh, and Clear Channel owns 1200 radio stations nation-wide after radio deregulation, and you wonder why radio sucks? Why don’t you just go and ask Rocky and Troy.

I’d like to point your attention to the Katy Dixon Memorial Birthday Gallery to view pictures of the get-together.

And yes, Hulk-Hands will always be funny.