Pun Salad

• Not to get all mawkishly patriotic or anything, when it's still nine months until Independence Day, but I liked "Born American, But in the Wrong Place." Those of us born in the right place ("here but for fortune") shouldn't take that for granted, should we? (Via PowerLine.)

• But moving to the more prosaic: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin recently decreed that businesses looking for federally funded (but locally administered) disaster recovery money be at least 50% locally-owned, and 35% female/minority-controlled. Hans Bader at the CEI Open Market blog details the impressively large number of ways that is probably illegal.

• Warning: massive geek content ahead. The PNG image at right is actually a computer program in the Piet language. When fed to a Piet interpreter, it prints "Hi", and a newline. (Really. I checked.)

  I fed my blog picture to the Piet interpreter, and it printed out the first act of Hamlet, which I thought was pretty amazing. Well, except that instead of "A little more than kin, and less than kind." it printed "Man, you best back off, I'm gettin' a little pissed here."

  (Via Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front, who makes the obvious point about the DMCA and the First Amendment. What, you don't think it's obvious? Better check the link.)

• I did some blogroll maintenance over there on the right. In case you care:

  Dropped are:

  • The Miami Herald's Dave Barry column page, since it's pretty rare that they ever have anything but "classic" Dave columns.

  • Cato's main page. The interesting stuff is elsewhere, Cato-wise.

  • Liberty and Power. One too many non-compliant RSS feeds.

  • Ninth State. Just stopped posting back in August. Wha' happen?

  • Mike Pride at the Concord Monitor. Also seems to have lost the blog fever.

  • Eric Raymond. Keeping busy elsewhere, no doubt.

  • Soxblog. Now blogging elsewhere, see below.

  • John Stark Review. "Web Site Suspended." That's not a good sign.

  Changed URLs:

  • Hugh Hewitt's blog moved to Town Hall, and now with additional Dean Barnett (Soxblog) content.

  • Daily Webshots. How do they stay in business? They seem to be trying the "let's hide the free stuff" business plan. It's here now.

  Added:

  • And Rightly So, from the opinionated and entertaining Raven, a fellow Granite Stater.

  • Ken Jennings, who's really quite funny and smart.

  • Jeremy Lott. Except Shawn Macomber is there now. Hopefully the quality will stay high when Jeremy Lott returns.

  • Betsy Newmark. Constrained Katie's mom, which is good enough for me.

  So go over there and click away.

This movie is a modernized noir, and much better than I expected. It boasts two Oscar-winning actors, Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman. Plus another couple I'd give Oscars to, Bruce Willis and Stanley Tucci. Also Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu, who give decent performances as well.

They're helped out by a script that combines sharp and funny dialog with a devilishly twisted plot; you really have to pay attention the whole way through. Some critics found the whole thing too clever for its own good, and I've been in those shoes before, but it worked for me.