Drunken Pumpkin

George W. Bush, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso have all died. Due to a glitch in the celestial time-space continuum, all three arrive at the Pearly Gates more or less simultaneously, even though their deaths have taken place decades apart. The first to present himself to Saint Peter is Einstein. Saint Peter says “Can you prove who you really are?” Einstein proceeds to describe with arcane mathematics and symbols his general theory of relativity. Saint Peter is suitably impressed. “You really are Einstein! Welcome to heaven!”

Just then Picasso arrives. Saint Peter asks for proof Picasso is Picasso who then proceeds to sketch out a truly stunning mural. Bulls, satyrs, nude women: he captures their essences with but a few strokes of the chalk. Saint Peter claps. “Surely you are the great artist you claim to be! Come on in!”

The three are standing there as George W. Bush appears. Saint Peter says “Einstein and Picasso easily proved their identity. How can you prove yours?” George W. gave a bewildered look and said “Who are Einstein and Picasso?” Saint Peter said “Come on in, George.”

WARNING: sending me junk-email will be interpreted as granting permission to bomb your offices and machine-gun your children.

…but on 43Things.com, a website on which members publicly share their goals and their progress or acheivement toward those goals with other members, they have included the topic Find the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

If you don’t understand why this struck me funny, then it’s due to either one of two possible reasons.
1) You haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - visit Wikipedia and all will become clear.
2) If you have read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or visited Wikipedia and this still isn’t funny, then it’s just me. My apologies if this is the case, but you’re getting your money’s worth.

Security is such a strange thing. In order for most security measures to work you have to defeat them a little. Let’s take money as an example. The U.S. mint has included a tremendous number of security features in order to make American bills difficult to counterfit and easy to spot as real. Now, they have to release what those features are to the public at large in order for them to be useful. By doing so, they are giving counterfeiters a blow by blow account of how to defeat their security. I wonder if our government could save some time and money on printing costs by just releasing a few bills with all of the added “features” and letting the counterfeiters handle all of the actual production.

Dreamhost (the folks that host the Pumpkin) recently had a security hiccup and lost some passwords. Well, I say “some” but I mean 3500, which seems a little more like “a lot”, but maybe that’s just me. Dreamhost owned up to their mistake and then later said that they were working to make sure that it didn’t happen again. And those are both good things. But some folks over at this blog, where I heard about the problem from, seem to think Dreamhost should tell us just what the problem was and what they have done to fix it. Personally, I disagree. If they release what the problem was, they are giving hints as to how folks can do it again, especially if they also publicize the fix. I’ll stick with hearing them say, “we found the door that they came through and have since locked that particular door.” And that will do for me. The more they talk about the new locks they installed, the easier it is to pick that lock.

And it isn’t just security that works that way. There are a lot of books and articles that tell you how to avoid certain scams by giving up the inner workings of that scam. Now, it is easier to avoid something if you know the particulars of that something, but there is an easy rule of thumb, if it looks like you have a chance to sucker some poor shnook out of some money, you are probably being taken for a ride. Free money does not exist, despite what the Rich Jerk may tell you.

Speaking of free money. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you were a Ninja? Just click the link in the Pseudo-Sponsors section, and you too can be a ninja. Seriously. And if you send us pics of you in your new occupation as a high level assassin we promise not to turn you in to the proper authorities, and we’ll post them on the site.

Tune in tomorrow for more ranting and, with any luck, more humor.