I haven’t written anything about this horrible crime. I doubt I will write much. But I will say that if you had asked me a few days ago who my favorite wrestler has been since the mid-1990s, I probably would have said Chris Benoit, from the effort he gave in his performances, the odds he overcame to be a success, and the fact he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy from his interviews and what his friends uniformly said about him. ...

So far, I’ve seen one news outlet after another talk about the disappointing opening weekend for Evan Almighty: $32.1 million. That return might not be so bad for a comedy, except this one cost anywhere between $175 million and $220 million to make, according to the same outlets. Now, personally, I have almost as little interest in seeing Evan Almighty as I did Bruce Almighty. The only difference? I’ll see most things with Steve Carell in them, but I avoid movies with Jim Carrey in them. So, for me, spending that much money on the movie doesn’t seem like a good decision. However, maybe that’s just me? ...

U.S. to fingerprint E.U. visitors: Visitors from European nations traveling with visas or visa-free to the United States will soon have to give 10 digital fingerprints when entering the country, a senior U.S. Homeland Security official said Monday. Let’s see, the last time I had my fingerprints taken by a digital scanner owned by the U.S. government, it took 30 minutes and continual rewetting of my fingertips because the system was having trouble matching the individual prints to a ten-print scan. Since that was in April, and the machine was fairly new and expensive, I doubt the technology used in the various points of entry has any reason to work much more consistently. I wonder how they plan on handling the extra delays? ...

Nuts, my Cat Interest Quotient just fell off: Previously, on The Phantom-Thought, Interested Cat.

You know that Ohio state government data storage device, containing the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, that was stolen from an intern’s car? You ever wonder why that kind of information would be in an intern’s car? Well, the Associated Press explains: Under protocol in place since 2002, a first backup storage device is kept at a temporary work site for a state office along with the computer system that holds all the employee information, and a second backup device is given to employees on a rotating basis to take home for safekeeping, officials said. ...

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

We went to see Nancy Drew last weekend, partly because we were curious what Hollywood might do with the character, and partially because we weren’t quite in the mood for seeing another comedy or comic-book action blockbuster on opening weekend in a crowded theater. You know what? It was good. Not one of the best movies of the year – well, I shouldn’t say that, the year’s been moving a little slow so far – but a good story that conveyed what’s appealing about the novels. It also would have been a good movie for parents to take their kids…as opposed to Ocean’s Thirteen, where we saw several children getting dragged. ...

I just ran across my first phishing email referring to Amazon.com! Usually they’re “from” Ebay, PayPal, or MySpace. Anyone who knows me knows I’m far more likely to be interested in an email from Amazon. Tricky…uh…phishermen? :)

I love the Akismet integration in WordPress. It does such a great job of protecting me from comment spam I barely have to moderate anymore. 9,048 spam comments and counting. However, sometimes I do wander into the spam room to see what’s popular lately, and this time one particular entry struck me: Thanks for the good site and usefulinfo. I found amanda bynes feet That’s good, Spam. You found her feet. I hope the rest was still attached, and no tragedy has befallen Ms. Bynes. ...

For some reason, the question of age and web innovation has popped up again. It can be summed up like this: Are people over the age of 30 likely to create anything really new or special on the Web? (Disclosure for the rest of this entry: I’m 36.) For Clay Shirky, age means you simply have too much experience to deal with a new world as effectively. The most successful innovators will be the young ones who take the new things for granted. ...