• Fortune Magazine: Is a Futures Market on Terror Outlandish?

  Yet another mainstream publication stumbles upon Salon.com’s patented technique of writing contrarian articles that trample both logic and good taste in order to draw a few extra readers. On message boards this is called “trolling“; on Madison Avenue, this is called “guerilla marketing”. Dude, Fortune — when the Cato Institute is crapping all over your market-based solution, it’s time to pick up your marbles and go home.

• Speaking of good ol’ contrarian Salon.com, it turns out they’re (surprise!) rather enamored of the movie Gigli. Although reviewer Charles Taylor deems it a “minor failure”, the film still “deserves credit for its refreshingly frank sexuality.” Heh. If “It’s turkey time! Gobble, gobble!” constitutes “refreshingly frank sexuality”, you Earthlings are straaange cats indeed.

• John Gruber solves his labor shortage problem in Code Monkey:

  See, back in 1998 I became the owner of a South American woolly monkey, whom I named Paco, with the intention of training him to assist in my freelance graphic design work. Everyone told me this was a terrible idea, that it would not work, that at the very least I would need a chimpanzee or orangutan, that a mere monkey would never be able to do graphic design.

  Everyone in the Bay Area is worried about losing their programming jobs to cheaper labor from overseas. Meanwhile the real danger is lurking right around the corner, brandishing a banana.

• Darren Barefoot and his Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness: “Note that I’m not looking for just bad technical writing–there are plenty of examples of that. I’m looking for the inexplicable, the surreal and the strange.” By the way, if you’ve somehow gotten it into your head that all young male technical writers are as suave and handsome as this Darren character… well, you’d be dead right.

• Speaking of suave and handsome, take a gander at ESPN’s Eric Karabell and DiveIntoMark’s Mark Pilgrim. Separated at birth?? We report, you decide.

• The Onion, NPR Listener Acquires Kick-Ass Tote Bag
  (scroll to bottom):

  “If I knew listening to Morning Edition every day before breakfast was gonna get me this cool bag, shit, I woulda sent them money a long time ago.” Hasaji added that Renee Montagne’s insightful interview with author Diana Abu-Jaber was “totally off the hook.”

  I think we would all have to agree that Renee Montagne is indeed “totally off the hook.” Still, she ain’t got nothin’ on my Nina.

• Finally… in case you were wondering, it turns out that Xena Is the Very Model of a Heroine Barbarian:

  Xena:
  
  I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
  Through Herculean efforts, I’ve become humanitarian.
  I ride throughout the hinterland — at least that’s what they call it in
  Those sissy towns like Athens (I, myself, am Amphipolitan).
  I travel with a poet who is perky and parthenian
  And scribbles her hexameters in Linear Mycenian
  (And many have attempted, by a host of methods mystical,
  To tell if our relationship’s sororal or sapphistical).
  

  Chorus:
  
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphistical!
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphistical!
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphisti-phistical!
  

Yup, I’m out.