Poor Mojo's Newswire

Dear Giant Squid: Something I read online led me to believe that I may be spending too much time on the internet. How can I tell if I should cut back on the time spent reading internet news sites and editorial columnists? --------- My Dear and Beloved and Devoted and Besottedly Drunk Reader, I am reminded of something my dear, undead friend Ambrose Bierce once said while crouching over me in a Mexican tent. ...

...the little portable lake of a kid holds up this Brownie camera he's toting with him and says, "I got pictures." "Yeah? Pictures of what?" I ask, being all Joe College cool. "The Lizzie G," he says. And then he adds, because he sees I ain't looking particularly impressed and/or interested, "getting smashed on the rocks." "That a fact?" "Yes sir, it is. And if'n you want pictures of the wreck of the most famous lobster boat in these here parts so's you can run 'em in your newspaper there, it'll cost you plenty." ...

I did speak to my congressman about it. I'm not exactly sure what he said (it was a bad connection) but it sounded something like "it being a lovely day, go into deep woods, seek out the gorgeous scarlet tanager." ...

We arrived safely at Dulles International Airport at 12:30 p.m. with a connecting flight at 1:00 p.m. We immediately checked the status of our connecting flight, which was marked as delayed until 2:00 p.m. Ahh, that's nice, it gives us time for a leisurely lunch there in the airport concourse. After eating we went back to our gate, and as we were again checking the status of our flight, the board changed from delayed to canceled. Not good. ...

Our greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking and lead to widespread looting. This seemed a logical outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin, with everything from potsherds to pieces of the Great Wall on the auction block for a few dollars. But a very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade.

How is it possible? The short answer is that many of the primary “producers” of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities. I’ve been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and from what I can tell, this shift began around 2000, about five years after eBay was established.

Apple has banned a new iPhone newspaper reading application after it was found to contain "obscene content": Page 3 of The Sun.

Newspaper, an application that brings content from worldwide papers to your iPhone, has been pushed back to OS 3.0, at which point there will be a suitable category for "that sort of thing". Namely, topless ladies.

To those not familiar with The Sun, it's one of the delightful English tabloids that give "the working man" the news in bite-sized chunks, and throws in pictures of half-dressed men (page 7) and women (page 3).

U.S. right-wing radio host Michael Savage is among 16 people who have been barred by the British Home Office from entering the United Kingdom since October, the British Home Office said Tuesday.

The list also includes Islamic extremist clerics, Russian skinhead leaders, Neo-Nazis, a Hamas murderer, a Jewish extremist and an American Baptist preacher who claims the deaths of U.S. troops are a punishment for U.S. tolerance of homosexuality.

"Coming to this country is a privilege," Home Office Secretary Jacqui Smith said in a statement. "If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what's more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded."