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“President George W. Bush did 9/11. No Shit. Really.”

So says Mike Palecek at the very top of his website. This declaration is a fair summation of his new short novel Guests of the Nation, a novel that Palecek sent to Irregular Times with the request that we write a review. While written in the form of a work of fiction, its purpose is clearly to try and advance a conspiratorial tale regarding the attacks of September 11, a tale in which:

• an elevator company supposedly servicing the World Trade Center is actually a government outfit that places explosives throughout the building
• airplanes involved in the attacks are diverted by agents and replaced by replicas that actually complete the “mission”
• those on board the original airplanes are taken off and shot in bunkers, except for the chosen few to be squirreled away, and
• Ari Fleischer madly scrawls the message “Don’t Say Anything Yet” to George W. Bush on a dry-erase board as Bush reads My Pet Goat to children

This conspiratorial tale doesn’t meet the standard of a conspiracy theory, since a theory explains patterns in data. Palecek doesn’t provide any evidence that these events ocurred; he makes stuff up that’s meant to be plausible. The story is literally plausible, in the same way that it’s plausible for space aliens to be stored at Area 51 or it’s plausible that Queen Elizabeth is at the center of a cocaine trafficking ring. I mean, hey, you can’t prove it’s not true. It could have happened. I could be the King of Prussia, writing this review from the safety of my fusion-powered dirigible. To give his fiction an air of reality, Palecek peppers his 72-page story with quotations from various people in the 9-11 “truth” movement, additional quotations from historical figures such as Adolph Hitler, and some statistics compiled by New York Magazine. None of these “facts” compellingly connect with Palecek’s yarn about the events of September 11, 2001.

Neither do they connect with Palecek’s parallel story regarding “John,” a 9-11 “truth” activist who is detained by security goons for wearing a t-shirt that reveals Palecek’s truth. Dragged to a back room in an airport, “John” takes the stage during his interrogation, laying out what really happened on September 11 to the agents. This is a transparent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author, with “John” being so important for knowing the truth that he must be detained, with “John’s” tale being so compelling that it takes over the entire interrogation, and finally with “John” winning his agents over, convincing them of his rectitude before… he has to kill them! Boom, boom! I mean, wow! This is so much more exciting than being ignored or told you’re full of it, isn’t it? It’s like, you know, the Matrix or something, but without the special effects.

If I don’t appreciate Palecek’s attempt to reveal the “truth,” and I’m underwhelmed by the channeling of Keanu Reeves, I’m also unimpressed with the basic mechanics of Palecek’s writing. Sometimes spoken words are placed in quotations, sometimes they aren’t. Now and again Palecek’s characters inexplicably question their own choice of words: “Some sort of tweed? WTF is tweed?” … “a better view of this fucking terrorist in their fucking midst. Midst?” Almost no paragraphs exist to organize Palecek’s thoughts; single sentences follow, one after the other, in an apparent stream of consciousness that winds its way from describing one interrogator’s ample breasts to another interrogator’s Bill Cosby face and nappy (yes, “nappy”) white hair. If the consciousness were less simply bizarre and more interesting, perhaps I’d be more interested.

I don’t recommend Guests of the Nation to you unless you’re already a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who is looking for some easy affirmation, someone to tell you that you are not only right, but important, so vitally important that the government is getting ready to haul you off into a back room somewhere and do its work on you. As for me, I think there are enough actual, demonstrable, documented outrages for me to think about. There is a wildfire roaring through our country fueled on ethical scandal, surveillance, lost liberty, lost income, lost opportunity and war. I don’t have much time or attention for Palecek’s hypothetical tinderbox as it fizzles and spits.

I admit that when I learned about Spore, the new game out from Electronic Arts, I really wanted to get myself a copy. It’s a great creation, with an engine for the creation of a huge range of bizarre creatures that look really spiffy, and a broad-ranging application for letting those creatures go, to populate a world and eventually invade foreign worlds that other Spore users have created. Even just looking at the Spore Creature Creator, I was impressed, and found the whole experience to be a whole lot of fun.

But, when it came to actually getting and using Spore, it wasn’t so easy. It turns out that my best computer, which was top of the line just two years ago, isn’t good enough to run the program. A lot of brand new computers that you’d get off the shelf right now aren’t powerful enough to handle Spore, it turns out.

So, I could go ahead and enhance my computer, with yet more additional memory and graphics cards. That would end up costing several hundred dollars, plus the cost of the Spore software itself. For a short while, I was tempted to try to find a way to go that route.

Then I considered what I was doing. Spending hundreds of dollars on this game meant spending a lot of time working, just for the privilege of playing around with pretend monsters on screen. With the economy the way it is, that felt like an extremely irresponsible choice. I realized that there was a low-cost alternative that’s always been available to me: Getting out a pencil, and drawing a creature on the back of a piece of paper in my recycling bin.

Using my imagination, or a piece of less costly software, I can even animate the drawing.

The issue is about a lot more than just a way to be frugal with limited amounts of money. It’s about the responsibility we take for our own urge to create. Who are you going to let be the creature creator? Will it be you doing the creating, or will you need to hire the software super geniuses over at Electronic Arts to give you a paint-by-numbers canvas?

Post Script: If you’re suspecting that this is all some kind of rationalization for the fact that I don’t have enough money these days to just go off and buy software like Spore, well, then you’ve got a really good point. But, I say that it’s going to take a lot of rationalizations, including a lot of sour grapes, to get us through these lean times, and if we can use this as an opportunity to spark the renewal of our culture, so much the better, I say.

In abstract, I like the idea behind Steal Back Your Vote, the collaborative project by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast to pre-emptively protect the votes of people across the United States. Why wouldn’t I want to prevent a nefarious scheme to prevent voters from casting the ballots they’re entitled to cast?

Then, I take a look at the actual web site, which seems to be little but an attempt to promote the sale of Kennedy and Palast’s political comic book, and give the authors some personal publicity as well. The front page is filled with information about the comic book, but no actual information about how I can, well, steal back my vote. That’s not very effective voter education, and so I start to wonder if voter education is really the point.

The point seems to be to establish the idea that Republicans are stealing Americans’ votes - even before they’ve voted. There’s some evidence to suggest that this is happening, in some form, in some states, with Republican Secretaries of State attempting to get some voters placed in categories of official inactivity that will make it difficult for them to vote on Election Day.

I don’t deny that this is a genuine problem, but I do question the use of language that refers to these activities as “stealing votes”. There’s no theft involved - merely the exploitation of voters who are too busy to check that their voter registration is in good standing, and has not been challenged.

There are good, valid reasons for laws to challenge particular voter registrations. There need to be procedures through which it can be ensured that fake voters are not being invented in order to manipulate the vote. In spite of Democratic Party denials, that has been a serious problem in the past, just as voter suppression has been a serious problem.

More fundamentally, I’m concerned that conspiracy theories about voter suppression efforts serve as an excuse for Democrats who don’t want to come to grips with the fact that there are enough Americans who believe in right wing ideology to elect Republican politicians. It’s easier to blame America’s problems on stolen elections than on corrupted voters. The Democratic Party has become so hungry for swing voters that it is unwilling to speak the truth that many American voters don’t give two hoots about traditional American civic values such as liberty, equality and justice.

It’s this unwillingness to speak frankly about the flaws in right wing ideology, more than voter suppression, that led to the presidential election defeats of 2000 and 2004. In both elections, the Democrats pandered to right wing ideology, rather than confronting it, and in doing so, the Democrats strengthened the Republicans’ hand.

Yes, there were problems with the election in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. However, if Al Gore hadn’t chosen Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2000, and John Kerry and John Edwards’s war waffling were not made the weak voice against George W. Bush in 2004, the elections would not have been close enough to steal.

In 2008, the Democrats have had a similar problem. With Barack Obama standing with Wall Street on the fat cat bailout, working to help George W. Bush spy on Americans with the FISA Amendments Act, joining in the chant of drill, baby, drill, and calling for an expansion of Bush’s megachurch kickback scheme (faith-based initiatives), the Democrats lost a huge amount of ground, and what should have been a landslide turned into a neck-and-neck contest.

Even with Barack Obama pulling ahead a few points in national and swing state polls, there’s a lot of concern among Democrats that the presidential election may be too close to call in the end. That’s why you have political operatives like Kennedy and Palast hyperventilating about stolen votes once again. They’re playing a game that wouldn’t have to be played if the Democrats worried more about persuading voters than pandering to them.

For the sake of addictive watching, turn off your reality TV shows, and go download (for free) the simple yet gripping survival simulation program Swimbots.

If you’re old enough, you may remember the evolution simulation game SimLife, developed by the same people who brought us SimCity and the Sims. Swimbots is a bit like SimLife, but it seems to work better. It’s just as addictive, in that it creates little simulated living things with a genetic makeup that determines their structural function and behavior, gives them a food source, and lets them go.

It’s a basic program, and for that reason, it’s evading my attempts to give you a screen capture. I’ll just have to tell you then, that right now the thick red breeders look like they’re heading for a showdown with the rainbow twirlers. Change conditions of the environment and see what happens to the critters that evolve.

Yes, evolve. Someone go see if they can get Sarah Palin to try to understand the program. Now that would be evolution.

As a follow-up to the successful His Dark Materials trilogy of novels (adapted disastrously to film last year as The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman has published a new story entitled Once Upon A Time in the North. Although the story has been published in book form, don’t let that fool you into thinking you’ve got a big, meaty novel like Pullman has written before. Once Upon A Time in the North is a short story puffed out to 96 nominal pages with the insertion of some lovely engravings by John Lawrence and some “documents” associated with various plot points in the story. Also useful in getting Pullman’s story to 96 pages is the use of a large typeface and a rather small book size. The techniques are so transparent that I chuckle rather than grimace at them, but hey, you oughta know.

Within its modest size and scope, Once Upon A Time in the North is enjoyably entertaining. The size I’ve already described; the scope of the story is a set piece in one location with just one main character (Lee Scoresby) and only a handful of secondaries (including the adored and feared Iorek Byrnison). Despite being set in the Arctic North, this is a Western through-and-through: honorable and laconic gunslinger with a comic sidekick tumbles into a frontier town with suspicious townsfolk and a no-account politico hell-bent on destroying the way of life we hold so dear. Will there be a ruckus raised? Well, sure. Are we headed for a gunfight at high noon? It isn’t a spoiler to say “you betcha.” Is there a gal in the saloon? Sort of. OK, there’s a polar bear too, a first in the Arctic Western genre.

Pullman gets tedious only once in his story. In a heavy-handed effort to clue in those who haven’t read His Dark Materials, Pullman has our hero Lee uttering verbal doubletakes: “you mean they speak????” “armor?????” Otherwise, the author succeeds in pulling off a loping adventure with flair, or as close to flair as you can get in a tiny and icy port. War And Peace it ain’t, but an afternoon’s enjoyment under a cozy blanket isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. If you have enjoyed Pullman’s other books, pick this one up at your local library. Just be sure to grab another book to read after this tidbit’s been washed down.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m stuck here in central Ohio without power for at least 4 days, thanks to the remnants of Ike. No power, no internet access.

No internet access. So how am I communicating with you?

Today also happens to be the release day for Peek, a new mobile e-mail device working independently of any cell phone contract. I’ve been considering a purchase of some new gadget or another that would allow me to write on the go. There are a lot of PDAs out there like the Palm Centro or the Sidekick or iPhone that allow surfing on and posting to the web, but these devices either cost a lot of money (iPhone) or require a new cell phone contract (Centro, Sidekick) or both. They also typically require a hefty monthly fee for usage on top of that. For someone like me who isn’t rich and is in the middle of a current contract, that option is unaffordable.

I’ve been casting my eyes in the direction of the Nokia N810, which costs a few hundred clams but requires no contract, working exclusively over WiFi. The N810 has a camera and a mike and a QWERTY keyboard, which is great. Unfortunately, the WiFi-only communication would limit my communication range to homes and coffee shops, which is not great.

What I’ve really been looking for is a mobile blogging device that I can slip in my pocket and slip out and write with anywhere. I think my new Peek may fit the bill.

At a cost of $100 plus $20 a month, the Peek isn’t outrageously expensive. The $20/month fee requires no contract and can be canceled at any time with no penalty.

Measuring just 2.5×4 inches, it fits easily in my pocket. The device has a full QWERTY keyboard, and it can send e-mails from almost anywhere using the T-Mobile network. Now, sending e-mails is all it can do, but for someone like me stuck without power or for someone like me who takes his kids out a lot or for someone like me who wants to occasionally blog from the scene, “only” e-mail is a lot. Right now I am emailing these messages to J. Clifford, who’s posting them for me. When I get power and a web connection back, I’ll configure posting to Irregular Times by e-mail, a feature on wordpress, blogger, movable type and other blogs.

The Peek isn’t perfect. I’d like the keyboard to be a bit larger to fit my big thumbs, and the teensy black spacebar sitting against a black background is irritatingly hard to find. I wish it had a SD slot so I could upload attachments from, say, a digital camera or sound recorder. I could wish for a lot of things, but then I’d be back to insanely expensive or unportable, wouldn’t I? For what I really, centrally want in a mobile blogging device, the Peek will do just fine.

I just saw a three-in-one convincing argument against genetic engineering. It was a hybrid of Melissa Etheridge and Donny and Marie Osmond, singing a medley of God Bless America, Born in the USA, and The Times They Are A Changing… with the lyrics begging senators and congressmen to please heed the call conveniently left out, of course.

Was she a real rockin’ mama in the USA, or frankenfolk?

I’ve been a fan of Lewis Black’s stand-up comedy for a while. He has an ability to make righteous outrage so hilarious that I find my anguish vented and deflated when he’s done with me. His video comedy (which you probably have seen on The Daily Show) directed me to his books, Nothing’s Sacred and Me of Little Faith. My reaction to these books is not what I had expected.

To be blunt, Lewis Black’s brand of stand-up humor doesn’t translate well to the page. When Black wants to communicate a sort of primal scream on the page, he uses exclamation points (!) and ALL CAPS. Perhaps because I’ve been on the internet at all these past thirteen years, for me READING SUCH WRITING IS THE EQUIVALENT!!!! OF DRIVING!!! TOWARDS SOMEONE WITH THEIR BRIGHTS ON HIGH-BEAM!!! It has the effect of being off-putting rather than sarcastic. Anger has to be handled just right to be amusing in comedy: to be really funny, anger can almost never be directed straight at the audience, and it has to be leavened or sharpened or made absurd by something else the comic mixes in. For Lewis Black, that’s the visual aspect: his clownish eye-crosses or spastic movements or slapstick pacing make it clear that he’s being both absurd and self-deprecating, so you don’t get the sense of threatening straightforward aggression. On stage Lewis Black is also a master of timing, using sudden bursts of anger to twist a previous straight-faced statement into something else altogether. Timing is hard to read on a page and there’s no body language on a page either, so his ANGER just looks like ANGER!!!!

The non-yelling brand of Black’s humor as written seems kind of trite and cliched. Take Lewis Black’s piece on the difference between Christmas and Chanukah in Me of Little Faith:

Next to Christmas, Chanukah looks like a retarded crafts fair. To begin with, Christmas is celebrated with electricity. There are lights everywhere: on the streets, on the tree, on the house — everywhere, for Christ’s sake. And what are the lights saying? They’re saying, “We’re having fun! We’re having fun! And you’re not, ’cause you’re a Jeeeew!”

That’s just insecure. And how about this:

On the first night of Chanukah, Jewish families do something that can only be described as sadistic. They give their children a top to play with. That’s right, A TOP! A TOP! They call it a dreidel, but I know a top when I see one. You can call it the king’s nuts if you want, it’s still a top.

For God’s sake, a top is not a toy. A toy is something you play with. You stare at a top. All a top is good for is if you have toddlers and want to see how they are going to do in school. Just spin a top in front of them. If they stare at it for more than fifteen seconds, you are fucked.

I can hear the voice of Jackie Mason in this. Here comes the Jew joke. There goes the Christian joke. It’s bread and butter stuff, here are two groups of people and boy, are they different, and that earns a weak smile but not really a laugh from me.

I recommend these books nonetheless because Lewis Black has led a hell of a life and is really good at telling stories about it, especially when those stories abandon attempts at humor. They really suck me in. Did you know that Lewis Black was a community organizer in New Haven in the sixties and a political activist in Chapel Hill? Did you know that he’s a playwright who went to school to learn that skill? Did you know that Lewis Black has toured through a number of communes and colonies and cults, and hung out with their leaders and members? Do you know about Lewis Black’s drug-taking experiences and his first-hand thoughts about psychedelics? How about Black’s contact with avowed psychics? These are uncommon experiences for most Americans, most of whom disapprove. Black’s uncommon attitude about all of them stems from his up-close contact with them. It’s pretty darned interesting to read what he has to say because I’ve never read anybody saying them before and because he communicates a willingness to set bullshit aside and write with an honest appraisal.

I should say that I’m not taken in Black’s credulity in one regard, and that has to do with the psychics. In Me of Little Faith, Black exults for a chapter about a psychic named Michael who becomes his friend after contacting him out of the blue in a series of calls and stating things — like about his then-staggering career, or his brother’s recently diagnosed cancer, or a conversation he’d recently had about kids — that Lewis Black concludes he had no way of knowing about — NO WAY!!! Except that sure, of course there’s a way. Each of these subjects was about something social having to do with Lewis Black and his interaction with others. Ask a private detective how to find out about a person’s interactions with others.

And then there’s this passage regarding a horoscope in a book by Sydney Omarr he’d picked up:

Since I was born under the sign of Virgo, I figured I’d leaf through the booklet. Couldn’t hurt, I thought. Seeing how my ex-wife was a Leo, I immediately looked up the romantic compatibility of that sign with Virgos. Here’s where my eyes popped out of my head. The booklet said that the coupling of those two signs would create a rocky union but that under absolutely no circumstances should a Virgo marry a Leo born on either July 23 or July 24. This would lead to disaster.

BING-FUCKING-O!

My ex-wife was born on one of those days. Coincidence? My dick….

Okay, so let’s do the math. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, and Sydney Omarr — with his charts and graphs and whatever — nails one of the two days that my wife shouldn’t be born on. What are the odds? That is more than dumb luck. That’s unbelievable.

No, it’s not unbelievable. The proper set of days to compare against is about 30, the typical number of days in an astrological sign. The passage Black writes implies that the astrologer Sydney Omarr had written up profiles on Virgos’ compatibility with all other signs. But Lewis Black was only looking up information on Leos, which narrows the number of possible days down to 30 — there are no Leos born on February 12. Omarr names two of these days. What are the odds, Black asks? 1 in 15. That’s not unbelievable. It’s a lucky guess, not entirely inconceivable.

It’s the same trick used by carnival barkers who promise to guess someone’s birth month within two months. Wow, sounds like a one in six chance, which is a pretty good odds, isn’t it? But it’s actually a five in twelve (or almost 1/2) chance, since March and April and June and July are within two months of May, and then there’s May itself. If the barker charges you $2 for the bet and the prize for guessing wrong is some 80 cent trinket bought in bulk, the barker is bound to make money over the long term. We tend to calculate odds incorrectly, just like Lewis Black did, and that’s why we’re suckered in.

Like the barker, an astrologist wins in the long term. Here’s the connection to Sydney Omarr — did Omarr make any other predictions about Virgos in that book? You bet he did… after all, as Lewis Black notes, it was an entire book about Virgos’ love lives. A whole book. But Lewis Black didn’t mention any of those other predictions, because they had not, as he describes the feeling on the next page, “given me pause.” If Sydney Omarr makes just 15 predictions with a 1 in 15 chance of being true, chances are there will be one that makes you go, “Oh. My. God. How did he know that?” In the entire book that Lewis Black picked up, I bet Sydney Omarr made hundreds of predictions, guaranteeing that he scored multiple zingers for every person picking up the book. As long as those readers gloss over the bullshit predictions, Omarr will come out looking like a million bucks.

That’s why I have some problems with Lewis Black’s credulity on psychics. But regardless, his account of meeting with and interacting with these people, and the cult leaders, and the commune participants, and the street activists, and the purple rainbow drug-induced floating visions, are gripping. Read the books (Nothing’s Sacred is my favorite) and judge Lewis Black for yourself. If you’re like me, you’ll end up asking yourself, “How do I get me a life like that?”

I enjoy the way that cheese can provide a powerful eating experience without much investment - not in the way that Pop Rocks would, but in the sense of rewarding an attentive sense of taste, focusing the the mind on what’s happening as a cheese moves through the mouth. Last night, I picked up a cut of Montboissie in the hopes that the interesting character of the cheese would translate into something good to eat.

The cheese looks interesting, like a light quartz crystal with a black vein of impurity running through it. It’s the impurity, and not the cheese, that grabs attention. That vein is made of “edible ash”, which is also described as “vegetable ash”.

Ash was traditionally used as a preservative on the outside of a cheese. The ash from a fire was used, and added flavor to the cheese, but vegetable ash is mostly tasteless. Vegetable ash is just dried processed vegetables - kind of like a hot dog puree of the vegetarian world. The ash is placed in Montboissie in order to provide visual attention, giving eaters a cue that there will be something special about the cheese.

Is there? The taste of Montboissie is buttery and rather unsophisticated, with only a slight sharpening to it. Some people claim that adding a vegetable ash to a cheese can help it ripen, but the Montboissie I tasted wasn’t very ripe. Maybe I’m just not enough of an ash connoisseur, and that’s why I don’t value its contribution.

The personality of this cheese is like that of someone who books a music hall for a concert, and sells tickets, but performance night only sings two notes before walking off the stage.

My wife’s comment was, “This cheese isn’t bad if you can eat it fast.”

Montboissie is a semi-soft French cheese, on the brie side of cheddar. The texture is profoundly smooth, like a perfect custard that holds together more in the mouth than a custard could. That smoothness makes eating the cheese flat, like how flat water is flat. That flatness should allow tastes to come through.

As “part of a regime of daily activities to keep my brain limber,” which is my excuse for “fun,” I like to work on kakuro puzzles. Kakuro is the name of a paper puzzle that’s like Sudoku on steroids. As with Sudoku, a grid must be filled with the numbers 1-9 without repetition in every row or column. Kakuro adds new wrinkles: columns and rows can be less than 9 spaces long, meaning that some numbers between 1 and 9 will be left out. Which numbers will be left out of a row or column? You have to figure that out, given one new piece of information: the sum total that each of the rows or columns has to add up to.

If you’re given two blanks and they have to add up to 16, that’s easy: 9 and 7 are the only two (non-repeating) numbers between 1 and 9 that add up to 16. If you’re given four blanks and they have to add up to 16, that’s trickier. A kakuro puzzle overall can be simpler or trickier by including more of the simpler solutions or more of the tricker solutions.

Having played kakuro for a while, I look forward to the more devilishly difficult kakuro puzzles. I thought I’d find that in the collection of Kakuro by Johnny Wong. It advertised four sets of puzzle difficulties: beginner, intermediate, advanced and “extreme.” I started from the back, which is where Johnny Wong’s “extreme” kakuro puzzles were located. Sadly, these puzzles were only mildly difficult, as mildly difficult as pepper jack cheese is mildly spicy. This book heads to my eight-year-old son, who is starting off with the beginner puzzles, which are great for someone still nailing down his addition skills. But Johnny Wong’s Kakuro book isn’t what I was looking for.

If you’re looking for kakuro puzzles that will not only kick your ass but grind it into fine meaty bits and stuff it into sausage casing, I suggest that you try The Kakuro Challenge with puzzles by Peter Gordon. As often as not, I find that I cannot successfully complete the puzzles, and I wrinkle my forehead in frustrated despair. That’s the way I like it, because when I do succeed in finishing one of Gordon’s kakuros, I feel a wave of elation.

If you are looking for comfort puzzling (or are just starting with kakuros), you can’t go wrong with Wong. But if you’ve been doing kakuros for a while and are looking for some really tricky puzzles, get Gordon.

ThisNext bills itself as a smart way to go shopping, using the power of social networking to help people find just the sort of things that they ought to be in the mood to buy. That sounds interesting, if you think that it’s a laudable goal to encourage people to buy more stuff they weren’t really looking for.

How well does it work? I decided to test the system with a product I’m familiar with: The first volume of the Irregular Times book, 2,008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President. I entered the book into the system in order to see what kind of related items ThisNext would recommend.

Here’s what their system came up with:

Oh dear.

I just tried out the new Cuil search engine that claims it’s better than Google. Specifically, Cuil claims that it indexes many more web pages than Google. But I found that a number of websites with a number of pages just don’t appear in Cuil search results.

Well, here’s the kicker. The Cuil search engine apparently doesn’t even index itself. I’m not kidding. Here is a screen capture with the result of my search on Cuil for “Cuil”:

I just checked the calendar. It’s not April 1. Um, er, well. They ask me to think of a different word. Uncuil comes to mind.

Today’s that some of Google’s disgruntled ex-employees have just introduced a new search engine, Cuil, that they claim is a better search engine than the Google search engine. The people at Cuil have had access to loads of venture capital money and have been working on the new search engine since 2006. Among other things, they claim that Cuil is better because it indexes 120 billion Web pages, which they claim is a much larger number than even what Google indexes.

I decided to give it a try, searching for content on a few websites I’m familiar with. None of these websites are indexed. Not a single page from them occurs on Cuil search results.

irregulartimes.com
lowtechmagazine.com
ourtomorrow.blogspot.com
repealfisa.wordpress.com
windmillworld.com

What about searching for content? I typed “windmill world” into Cuil, and I got no results. Cuil told me that I either had a typo, or was searching for something that was “very rare” (in which case I should at least get something), or I had entered too many search terms.

When I typed “windmill world” into Google, I got 6,200 results. Windmillworld.com was right at the top. Gee, I guess I’ll be sticking with Google for now.

In a follow-up to yesterday afternoon’s article on jet skis, I was searching for books with more information on the environmental and social impacts of the machines. I found no such books, and instead came upon the toy that you see to the right:

Yes, it’s a jet ski for kids - the Motorized Wave Rider from Banzai.

The idea is a rotten one. You’re supposed to put a child on this jet ski in a pool or swimming area at the park, and let them wreak havoc, zooming around where other kids are in the water. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

The Wave Rider is also an invitation to obnoxious behavior. Unlike jet skis for grownups, this vehicle has a water cannon coming out the front, so the rider can shoot a stream of water at other people before running them down.

If they have the opportunity to get into some water, kids ought to get some exercise by practicing swimming. The Wave Rider is like an easy chair for the pool, encouraging children to just sit when they could be using some muscle.

Even if you think that putting your child on a machine like this is a good idea, the Motorized Wave Rider doesn’t seem to be worth the $40 dollars it costs. Reviews indicate that the vehicle only works well for a child under fifty pounds, even though the specifications say that it’s for kids between the ages of 5 and 10. The durability of the machine also seems to be a weak point, as one parent writes, “The picture seemed good, but in less than 12 hours these were garbage.”