Richard Martin (R-Ohio) is a fine upstanding citizen of the united states. His bio states that:

As CEO of Ohio Petroleum and Synthetics, I guided the stock to an all-time high before I left. It wasn’t easy to leave, but based on the advice of my wife, my children and the FBI, I knew it was time to go. When my golden parachute landed, I had quadrupled the share price*. Do I regret secretly dumping in the Ohio river? No sir.

Anyway, his website (although slightly Frontpage 2000ish) boasts an immpressave array of sinppets from public performances. In these 2 minute vigettes, he answers some frank questions from the audience. Gems include:

Q: Does G Bush really hate black people?
A: No! He just doesn’t think about them.

Q: Why does the government continue to give tax breaks to big oil companies instead of helping the poor?
A: Because cars don’t run on ‘the poor’ (even though the poor are indeed oily).

Q: Why are republicans against abortion but pro death penalty? » Read the rest of the entry..

The monkey situation is still tense in New Delhi. Its all fine and dandy when they pick on the underprivileged. But when they show a total disregard for the law and pick on the lawyers… well then…. this means war:

The court gave city authorities one month to get rid of the monkeys, which have been harassing people at Tis Hazari — the largest law complex in Asia, with 162 courts. The order came after a petitioner complained the monkeys were attacking lawyers and their clients and snatching their food, the BBC reported.

Monkey catchers have been reluctant to sign on for the job because…

a [former] monkey catcher hired by the municipality was mauled during an operation and needed 72 stitches.

Yes what could possibly be added to this story? Perhaps that the expanding human footprint is reducing the natural habitat of the monkey. In effect, we are waging war on them. If their best retaliation is to steal lawyers lunches, then I wholeheartedly support our new monkey overlords.
[via]
» Read the rest of the entry..

Not that at this time, these intructions are valid for V163 only. Thats not to say they won’t work with later versions (I’m sure it will), but finding the exact code to change may be hard. Anyway, read through them all before starting. In some cases, you may want to just comment things out instead of deleting them (read how to do this at the end). And feel free to ask questions.

1. Install http://semiologic.com/software/static-front/ and don’t activate just yet
2. Create a page and give it the slug of home. This will become your static front page.
3. Create a category called blog, and shove all posts into this category or just move all other categories into it. (you don’t have to call it blog FYI)

4. [optioinal] Edit your permalink structure. You cannot remove /category/ from the permalink structure so I changed

» Read the rest of the entry..

Over at Popmatters, Roger Holland has written an excellent article on American Idol 5.

19 [Group, the company that owns American Idol] and its founder, Simon Fuller, have succeeded beyond most people’s wildest dreams with American Idol. The company is paid lavishly per episode by Fox, harvests additional money from the telephone-voting system and various sponsorship deals, and then cashes in on the contestants’ popularity across a variety of media. Essentially, they’re being paid, and paid handsomely, to benefit from one of the single most effective marketing campaigns in history.

Boiled down points of the article:

• There are two pre-audition selection rounds before contestants are allowed to meet the judges.
• American Idol finalists sign a “cruel and unusually restrictive contract with 19 Group”. This contract [reportedly] forces contestants to relinquish ownership of their names, likenesses, voices, and personal histories “in or in connection with” the show in perpetuity. Further, they are unable to reveal anything about said contract without incurring damages in excess of $5 million per infringement.
• Connections: the horrid (IMDB user rating of 1.8/10) movie From Justin to Kelly, starred Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini (another finalist) was written by Kim Fuller, brother of Simon.
• Kelly Clarkson’s first single was co-written by Cathy Dennis, who is managed by Simon Fuller.

» Read the rest of the entry..

Update 16/03/06: Download the latest version of Sociable at its new home. This is a full blown version 1.0 with many new features. Namely, no template editing. Wow! Good job PH!

Paul Stamatiou has contributed several interesting tutorials on how to customise K2, a theme for wordpress. One of his customisations is a set of icons at the bottom of a post that allow you to quickly bookmark the current page at a number of social bookmarking sites (Digg, Del.icio.us, blink, furl, etc.). You can see it in action on his blog, www.paulstamatiou.com, and here at MaxPower on the bottom of every page that is a post. He credits this idea to Mr. Veloso.

Features:

» Read the rest of the entry..

Stephen Harper

You can read more about him at Wikipedia
» Read the rest of the entry..

Introducing Sawchuk, a scheme for the K2 theme for Wordpress. Sawchuk is a theme loosely based on the style of webreakstuff.com, you can view the scheme in action right now, simply by roaming around maxpower.ca. There are no modifications to the K2 core, so all you need do is upload the CSS file and associated directory and you are ready to go.

To Install: upload chosen scheme to the styles dir. in your K2 dir. in the Themes dir. otherwise known as themes>k2xxx>styles> In this folder.

Activating A Scheme: Go to the Presentation tab, then to the K2 Options SubTab, and select the scheme that you’ve chosen using the K2 Scheme drop down menu. Click the Update Options button on the bottom of the page.

Now compliant with K2 V0.9

Download the Sawchuk Scheme v0.5

Using the styles featured for this theme:

Go to the Test Style Post and view all the things that Sawchuk for K2 can do. In each case, the example style contains the needed text to implement the style in your post. So for example, in order to create the “Now compliant with K2 v0.9″ message above the code would be:
[css]

Now compliant with K2 V0.9

[/css]

Updates will be made as they happen with a complete v1.0 release of the K2 theme. Also, the current version does not include the Navigation Tabs shown in the sidebar as it requires modifying the Sidebar code.

If you use and like this theme, spread the word, bookmark it, tell your friends. Just somewhere on your site say that you got
this from maxpower.ca. Heck, here is some HTML you can cut and paste:
<a href="http://www.maxpower.ca/sawchuk/" title="Maxpower: Sawchuk for K2" />
Sawchuk Scheme at Maxpower</a>

» Read the rest of the entry..

In celebration of the release of the K2 scheme, Sawchuk, I have also released a companion wallpaper. I think its great. You can see a big of it below, or just download it [jpg] using the link below.

[Via Wikipedia] Sawchuk’s ability to play despite painful injuries, a valuable asset in the days before goalies wore protective facemasks, was shown early in his life. A neglected injury he received while playing a friendly rugby match when he was 12 was discovered two years later to have been a broken arm that had healed poorly, leaving Sawchuk with one arm two inches shorter than the other. In his professional hockey career, Sawchuk played for more than a dozen years without a mask and received over 400 stitches to his face.

Sawchuk: The Wallpaper

Here is a little taste of what the wallpaper looks like. [Via]

» Read the rest of the entry..