A Porn Domain

There's .com's, .net's, .org's, and website address endings for nearly every country in the globe and the porn industry wants to add another: .xxx

They've been throwing the idea at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for a while now. However hard they try to get this domain name ratified, ICANN keeps shooting down the idea, and has once again shot it down.

Ironically, the porn industry proposed this ideal for moral reasons. For once, they are "thinking of the children". Parents are always afraid that their kids will stumble across porn sites by accidentally misspelling some common .com addresses. By having a .xxx domain, all adult entertainment sites would have to be restricted to .xxx addresses, therefore freeing up all those tangly .com addresses.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Harder for people to accidentally stumble into porn sites, and easier for those looking for porn to find it. So why does this seemingly good idea keep being turned down by ICANN? Screening websites. Somebody will have to go through all the websites, billions and billions of them, and find any porn ones and give them the boot. And, to be fair to the porn kings, they'd have to trudge through all those .xxx addresses to make sure non-porn or even anti-porn sites appear. That's a hefty job for anyone to do... and so, ICANN won't be making the .xxx address... and a loud cheer erupts from the NetNanny corporation.

Promise-lie... Potato-Potato

Okay, so that "po-tay-toe" / "po-tah-toe" thing really doesn't work when you type it, but you get the picture.

Basically, Stephen Harper doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between a lie and a promise. To help him out a bit, I had this interview with a specialist in the area, 5-year-old little Billy from kindergarten.

"So, Billy, do you know what the difference between a lie and a promise is?"

"Yes. A promise is when you say something and you got to do it no matter what. And a lie is when you say something that isn't true."

Very good Billy. Hear that Harper? They're not the same.

This is all because Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams placed a pile of ads in newspapers across Canada. The ads quoted various "promises" made by Stephen Harper during the last election, and then contrasted these statements with what actually unfolded in the recent budget. In big bold letters, the ad quotes Stephen Harper as saying "there is no greater fraud than a promise not kept."

Despite the full page ad, stuffed full of promises broken by Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister still says he has done nothing wrong. He doesn't feel he has broken any promise.

The odd part about this whole thing, is that Danny Williams seems somewhat surprised at the whole thing... as if he expected a politician to keep his promise. Danny Williams threatened Harper long ago, saying that if he didn't keep his promise, Newfoundland would deliver a "goose egg" for the Tories in the next election. Although it is quite possible that this will happen, Harper doesn't care. Newfoundland has 7 seats. It's "only" Newfoundland to Harper... we don't need any particular attention. Seriously Danny, who do you think we are? Alberta?

Stealing a "Star's" Thunder

So Heather Mills thinks people like her. She is pissed because Paul (former husband/bitch) was seen in public with his new girlfriend. The nerve of him, a full grown man... going out in public with a girl. Scandalous!

She claims that McCartney is trying to "steal her thunder". What thunder, you might ask? Well apparently Heather is going to be on "Dancing With The Stars". I never knew. Not only did I not know, I didn't even care. You know what's worse than reality TV? Reality TV with washed up celebrities. You know what's worse than reality TV with washed up celebrities? Heather Mills.

If anything, she should be thankful that Paul is taking some attention from her sad attempt to get famous again so she can continue her crusade to unemploy hard working Newfoundlanders.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat some seal oil capsules.

Hula Hoop, or Air Humping?

The host of this new CBC show, "Living Newfoundland and Labrador", Krista Rudofsky sure can't hula hoop. She was killing time on the CBC news hour tonight by showing that the "sport" of hula hooping is alive and well in St. John's by talking to some lady with dreds who was all about the hula hoops.

Anyways, Krista decided to give it a shot. One word can describe it. Hilarious. She spread her legs out as if she were riding a horse and went to town with the pelvic thrusts. Looked more like air humping. But she was loving it. Big ol' smile on her face and everything. Despite her best humping, she only managed to keep the hula hoop up for a couple seconds. However, the girl with dreds was actually quite impressive. I didn't think I would ever think hula hooping was ever "impressive", but she kinda was. She had three going at once... going around her waist, around her arms, hopping on one foot, and moving them from her knees up to her neck and everything. It was crazy.

This is in no way news of any sort... but hey, this is Newfoundland. I think having an exciting news story is really too much to ask for. Sure there's the whole "Stephen Harper hates Newfoundland and Danny's pissed at him" thing... but that's boring.

Swimmin' on Mars

There's water on Mars. Lots of it, in fact. A bunch of old NASA guys used some infrared technology to track down a huge lump of ice at Mars' south pole. They're estimating there's enough water there to flood the entire Martian surface in 30 feet of water if the whole chuck were to ever melt.

Translation: humans shouldn't live on Mars. We have a tendency to pollute planets until they're broken and overheated. At least on Earth if we melt all the water, not all the land would be submerged. Despite what a bunch of panicky naive tabloid readers will tell you, the vast majority of Earth would stay dry. Yes, a lot of it would be wiped out, but life could still go on.

No so on Mars, however. Now I know that moving humans to Mars is still a long ways away, but if they want to do it, they're really going to have to get this whole "Global Warming" thing figured out first... or all that money NASA putting into this Mars jazz is all going to be flushed down the crapper.

On a somewhat related note, on December 18th, 2007, Mars will reach its closest points to Earth in years. Because Earth and Mars both orbit the sun in elliptical orbits (non-circular), they are at varying distances from each other. So, if you ever wanted to get a good look at Mars, break out your telescope on December 18th. They're saying that you should be able to see surface features and everything even with a normal department store telescope. Neat.

Yep, I'm still Alive. Thanks for asking.

Well it's been far too long since I last posted. I want to write something more regularly, but I just have so much going on between school and whatnot. But I'll make an effort. And thanks to all those spammers who kept emailing me, trying to get me to put links from my blog to your websites. I give you all a collective "no".

Anyways, keeping with the theme of spamming... I have a new book out. Buy it.

It's called The Oris. It officially goes on sale April 16th, but you can order a copy from Amazon right now if you like. For more info on the book and whatnot, just check out my website (www.BradNorman.com)

Cool... so with that out of the way... I suppose I should write something that is at least somewhat newsworthy.

Apparently, Viacom decided to sue the popular video blog site YouTube. For how much? One BILLION dollars. Yes. Billion. Why? Viacom (the company behind TV stations like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc) asked YouTube to remove unauthorized clips of Viacom shows from their website. There's over 100 000 of these "unauthorized" clips, including episodes of Sponge Bob and segments from The Daily Show. But come on... YouTube doesn't put those videos there themselves... their millions of users upload them. It's unrealistic to expect them to search for hours and hours every day to weed out all the "non-blog" videos. Sure they could do what other video-blog sites (such as Revver) did, as not allowed videos be available to the public until it has been viewed first by a moderator to ensure there's no copyright violations... but with the number of videos uploaded daily to YouTube, it could take days before a video gets approved. And that defeats the purpose of a blog. Imagine getting your newspaper three or four days late (not that my paper delivery person is far off that mark)... it would stink.

In conclusion... MTV is among the worst things to ever happen to the planet. For many many many more reasons that this.