005
HOW TO ENTER U.S. AND BECOME A TERRORIST
Kamikaze pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi received posthumous student visas to undergo pilot training in Florida from the US Immigration last week.
The website TheSmokingGun.com uncovered some interesting documents of this major bureaucracy screw-up.
http://thesmokinggun.com/archive/terrorvisa1.shtml
http://thesmokinggun.com/archive/terrorvisa2.shtml
THE MYSTERY OF ROBERT G. KLINGLER
AKA RAVI G. DESAI
Online mag Slate published two installments of a planned week-long diary of one Robert Klingler, apparently the CEO of BMW's North American operations. The German carmaker pointed out that no such person exists.
Read how Slate staff tried to make amends by giving the juicy insider's gossip (and speculating way beyond the realm of credible journalism) that it may be one Ravi Desai, failed poet and one-time high-flying technopreneur of TheStreet.com.
Link: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063114
WRETCHED ADVERTISING
Banner ads flopped. So those dumb ad people went back to drawing board and decided: “Hey we'll make them larger and splashier.“ They also took whole right sides of your screen's real estate and called them towers, just so you won't miss their phallic messages. For added irritation, they even made pop-ups and pop-unders. You've seen those painful webcam ads.
Now the final infernal beastchild - no doubt the coupling product of a crazy creative director and his techie gimpslave has arrived.
These ads are the digital equivalent of some evil skin disease. Your page loads, then the ad sort of oozes right smack in the middle of your screen, obscuring text and throwing you off, lingering just long enough for you to click it to try to dislodge it. Instead, you pop into the advertiser's site, serving them with free clickthrus.
One company called eyeblaster.com is calling it "out-of-banner" ads. You can see some examples of these here:
http://www.eyeblaster.com/WebSite/default.htmClick on the Now Running Selected Campaigns icons (flash-enabled).
The ING ad paints right across your screen. There should be a campaign AGAINST these ads. Do you know whether anyone has started one? We should start one.
GET OUT, GET OUT NOW!
Last year they gave three people £5,000 of fake money and asked them to invest in a fantasy portfolio. A year later, financial astrologer Christeen Skinner is down 6.2% while independent analyst Mark Goodson's portfolio sunk by 46.2%. Guess who is still in the lead?
Click here: StockwizWHAT'S IN A NAME?
These sites sure beat creative paperclip bending, or paper-plane making to kill the boredom.
http://title.flywheel.org/
Type in your name and watch a title pop out. Or just click NAME ME and re-christen yourself: "Lesser Tsar of Naughty Bits, Howard Oompa Loompa Rand" or something.
http://www.brunching.com/toys/toy-cyborger.html
This one determines whether you should be filed in an X-file. Just type in your name and click the button and see what happens.
http://www.kabalarians.com/gkh/your.htm
At the bottom of this page is an instant name analyzer that determines your fate. Scary stuff.
Yours, Julian
POSTED: MARCH 22, 2002
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