Speaker For The Diodes

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2014-01-23:

...In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard.</i>

-- Margaret Atwood, from her poem February.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:24 am - QotD

"Feel bad for all these guys who angrily call me a man. They must think being a man is terrible. Fortunately we have solutions for that." -- Zinnia Jones (@ZJemptv), 2013-12-16

05:24 am - QotD

"Biological sex is a construct imposed upon human bodies in an effort to understand their reproductive capabilities. Since the interpretations necessary to this construct were made BY HUMAN BEINGS, they are flawed." -- Vivian Doug, 2014-02-06 ( two tweets)

From the calendar file:
1904-02-07: Great Baltimore Fire begins
1964-02-07: Beatles land at JFK airport to begin first U.S. tour
1984-02-07: Bruce McCandless completes first untethered spacewalk
The photos of that spacewalk haunt me. I have not stopped wanting to be there doing that.

05:24 am - QotD

"The thing about playing percussion is that you can create all these emotions that can be sometimes beautiful, sometimes really ugly, or sometimes sweet, sometimes as big as King Kong and so on. And so there can be a real riot out there, or it can be so refined." -- Evelyn Glennie (b. 1965-07-19)

05:24 am - QotD

"I will never apologize for being me, but I will apologize for the times that I am not." -- Michael Carini

05:24 am - QotD

From a series of tweets posted by Parker Marie Molloy (@ParkerMolloy), 2013-12-16 (that link goes to the first tweet but the rest should be visible underneath it when you click there):

"Why do you care about someone using transphobic slurs when there are REAL problems that impact trans people?"

Fair question. The reason? Many of these REAL problems are rooted in a basic disregard for trans ppl's humanity. When it becomes so easy to treat trans lives as somehow unworthy of the same basic human dignity everyone else gets. When you say "I saw a tr*nny," you're treating the person as something completely different. Not even the most virulently anti-LGB person will other LGB folks out of humanity. When it's so easy to dehumanize us in speech, it becomes easy to self-justify discrimination and violence against us. After all, we're not men or women, you see... In their minds we're these broken bodies with diseased minds. To them, we're "just a tr*nny." And therefore, the humanity others are granted should be withheld. So, THAT'S why I take the time to care about this issue. It's not for fear of "getting my feelings hurt;" it's for the sake of others not becoming self-justified victims of horrible crime/discrimination.

05:24 am - QotD

"The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don't understand." -- Gertrude Stein (b. 1874-02-03, d. 1946-07-27)

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2014-01-06:

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, responding on Reddit when asked "What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?"

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qccer/i_am_neil_degrasse_tyson_ask_me_anything/]

(submitted to the mailing list by Bob Bruhin)

05:24 am - QotD

"And like early sailors who died on the sea
 They knew where they went was a hard place to be
 And all too soon, we'll all be where they have gone
 I'm sure if we asked them they'd say, "Carry on"

 To these seven angels, let's raise up a cup
 We haven't stopped sailing, we must not give up
 We'll never stop flying in the air and beyond
 Just because seven angels have gone"

-- from "Seven Angels (for Columbia)" by John C. Wiseman [thanks to jmthane for pointing it out]

[A blessed Imbolc to all who celebrate it today!]

05:24 am - QotD

"A lot of my life happened in great, wonderful bursts of good fortune, and then I would race to be worthy of it." -- Julie Andrews

Happy Chinese New Year!

05:24 am - QotD

"I have been singing folksongs of America and other lands to people everywhere. I am proud that I never refused to sing to any group of people because I might disagree with some of the ideas of some of the people listening to me. I have sung for rich and poor, for Americans of every possible political and religious opinion and persuasion, of every race, color, and creed. The House committee wished to pillory me because it didn't like some few of the many thousands of places I have sung for." -- Pete Seeger (b. 1919-05-03, d. 2014-01-27), 1961 Statement to the court prior to his sentencing on contempt of Congress charges for his refusal to reveal names of communist or socialist acquaintances before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. (via WikiQuote)

05:24 am - QotD

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?" -- Dr. Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers)

"It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises." -- Ambassador de Sadesky (played by Peter Bull)

(From Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which premiered 1964-01-29 (and someday I must get around to seeing it)

05:24 am - QotD

"We want to explore. We're curious people. Look back over history, people have put their lives at stake to go out and explore ... We believe in what we're doing. Now it's time to go." -- Eileen Collins (first female commander of a Space Shuttle)

[1986-01-28: Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff]

05:24 am - QotD

"It's human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice, really; it's an imperative." -- Michael Collins, astronaut

[1967-01-27: Apollo I fire kills Grissom, White, and Chaffe]

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2014-01-01:

"Saying that food is the essence of place can seem like a sentimental throwback, or like something we've totally lost. But here's the thing: it's still always true. It's true whether you're eating a grilled sardine, or a tomato selected for perfectly voluptuous freshness, or a Whopper. Beind the sardine there's a rock-rimmed bay, thick with drifting kelp; behind the tomato there's a farm, and a farmer who chose the fruit for flavor instead of rubbery durability. And the Whopper-flat, gray, salty, and otherwise tasteless-represents wholly and without deviation the sprawling but cruelly confined pens that produce fast-food cattle. A McNugget has as much terroir as an oyster; it's just not the terroir of a place you want to be." -- Andrew Beahrs, Twain's Feast

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

[Happy birthday, Sheepie!]

05:24 am - QotD

"It's hardly in a body's pow'r
 To keep, at times, frae being sour,
 To see how things are shar'd;
 How best o' chiels are whiles in want,
 While coofs on countless thousands rant,
 And ken na how to wair't;
 But, Davie, lad, ne'er fash your head,
 Tho' we hae little gear;
 We're fit to win our daily bread,
 As lang's we're hale and fier [...]"
-- Robert Burns (b. 1759-01-25, d. 1796-07-21), "Epistle To Davie, A Brother Poet", 1785

05:24 am - QotD

"We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them." -- Warren Zevon (b. 1947-01-24, d. 2003-09-07)

[I'm dead certain that's not the main reason a lot of my friends buy books, but it's an interesting perspective.]

05:24 am - QotD

"This has been going on for years. If all of these moments are 'teachable', why has no-one learned?" -- Parker Marie Molloy, 2014-01-21 ( direct link to MP3) interviewed by John and Molly Knefel.

05:24 am - QotD

"In Apple's ad, a woman with blond hair and a get-up like Olivia Newton-John might've worn in her Physical video, runs into a sci-fi setting packed with bald human drones who are listening to their leader address them on a giant TV. The aerobics woman, chased by storm trooper types, throws a sledgehammer through the screen.

"Afterward, she no doubt gets arrested and tortured, but the commercial ends before that happens."

-- Kevin Maney, 2004-01-28

[The memorable Macintosh ad was shown 1983-12-31 on a single television station so as to qualify for awards given out in 1984 covering 1983, and then to a national audience during Super Bowl XVIII on 1984-01-22, thirty years ago today.]

05:24 am - QotD

"One of the guys starts lecturing me about how much more visual sexual attraction is for guys than girls. I point out that there is always a crowd of girls watching the pick-up shirt and skins football game on the green during the summer months and no girls when it gets cold enough that the guys stop stripping to the waist. The guys were so shocked they couldn't talk for about 5 minutes...." -- Patheos commenter Mel, 2014-01-17? [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier]

05:24 am - QotD

"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the Community." -- Aneurin Bevan (b. 1897-11-15, d. 1960-07-06)

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-12-16:

"People believe that the CIA is forever--that it's an immovable fixture of American government, like Congress or the Supreme Court--but it was begun with an executive order by a president and it could be ended just as easily. It exists by presidential whim. Obama could shut it down tomorrow, but he doesn't want to. People believe that wars are inevitable, that human nature can't change, but think of capital punishment. In England people were once disemboweled and castrated in front of a cheering crowd, with their heads put on spikes for viewing. In India they executed criminals by dragging them through the streets and having an elephant step on their heads. Now most countries have outlawed capital punishment. Or think of dueling. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel. Manet dueled an art critic and wounded him with a sword. Pushkin, who fought dozens of duels, died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. Abraham Lincoln almost fought a duel. Nobody duels now. It's inconceivable. It isn't basic to anything. Centuries of patrician tradition, absurd rituals, faces slapped, gauntlets stiffly thrown, times appointed, companions holding out pistols in velvet cases in the park at dawn, the iron laws of honor--we know now it's all hokum. Progress is possible. Drones on autopilot are not inevitable." -- Nicholson Baker, in his novel Traveling Sprinkler.

(submitted to the mailing list by Rob Wood)

05:24 am - QotD

"We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think." -- Tina Weymouth (b. 1950-11-22)

[Happy birthday to merde

05:24 am - QotD

"Existing halfway between genders is stressful. Imagine for a moment if you woke up one morning with the wrong factory equipment. Most people can't, but Chloë Sevigny, who played a transgender assassin on 'Hit & Miss,' found wearing a prosthetic penis unbearable. 'I cried every day when they put it on,' she said in an interview. This, for a prosthetic that she knows isn't real, and comes off when the the day is over.

"When lesbian journalist Norah Vincent tried to live as a man as a social experiment, it took less than a year before the strain caused her to have herself voluntarily committed.

"When straight, healthy people try and pull off what transgender people do on a daily basis (live in the wrong gender), the strain is enough to make them suicidal too."

-- Brynn Tannehill, "Myths About Gender Confirmation Surgery", 2013-12-08

05:24 am - QotD

"The marketing around New Year's resolutions suggests that we should flip a switch, 'be a brand new you,' and transform ourselves overnight with the flip of a calendar page. There is no shortage of products and services to buy that will give us an edge in the fight against ourselves. We are promised that spending a certain amount of money will win for us this one, decisive battle, so that we finally become employable and lovable for all time. Lasting, healthy growth does not work that way.

'A tree is beautiful throughout its life. From the first seedling, to the tender sapling, through fruit-bearing, and even in the decay that gives life to other creatures, a tree can inspire feelings of grace. There is nothing wrong with being a seedling. If we're trying to make room for a future fruit-bearing tree, caring for what the seedling needs now is a better plan than yelling at it to make it produce a persimmon right this minute. For those of us who are using January as a goal-setting time or supporting others who are nurturing change, let's honor the seedlings."

-- Rev. Lynx Cox, 'New Leaves', 2013-01-12

[And yes, her references to trees and my choosing this quotation for today are intentional connections to Tu B'Shevat being today.]

05:24 am - QotD

'Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? Even deserts can be irrigated and top soil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-five million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.' -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929-01-15, d. 1968-04-04)

05:24 am - QotD

"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail." -- Charlie Parker

(Happy birthday to maugorn!)

05:24 am - QotD

"Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was alarmed when we showed her emails that revealed that the Oakland Police Department has already started using the [Domain Awareness Center] to keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity. 'The fact that the focus so far has been on political protests, rather than the violent crime that's impacting Oakland residents, is troubling, and telling about how the city plans to use the DAC,' she said.

[...]

"While the emails reveal a great deal about the DAC, they are also notable for what they do not talk about. Among the hundreds of messages sent and received by Oakland staffers and the city's contractor team responsible for building the DAC, there is no mention of robberies, shootings, or the 138 homicides that took place during the period of time covered by the records. City staffers do not discuss any studies pertaining to the use of surveillance cameras in combating crime, nor do they discuss how the Domain Awareness System could help OPD with its longstanding problems with solving violent crimes. In more than 3,000 pages of emails, the terms 'murder,' 'homicide,' 'assault,' 'robbery,' and 'theft' are never mentioned.

[...]

"But Rajiv Shah, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who conducted a study on the efficacy of Chicago police's crime cameras, said surveillance systems aren't guaranteed to help police reduce crime. They do, however, serve political goals of looking tough on crime.

[...]

"During construction of the first phase of the DAC, from roughly August 2012 to October 2013, city staffers repeatedly referred to political protests as a major reason for building the system. [...]"

-- Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston, "The Real Purpose of Oakland's Surveillance Center", East Bay Express</a>, 2013-12-18

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2014-01-02:

"On a macro level, 'we need to track everyone everywhere for advertising' translates into 'the government being able to track everyone everywhere.'" -- Chris Hoofnagle, lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley Law on the use of advertisers' web cookies by the NSA.

[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry labach)

05:24 am - QotD

"It's sad how Wile E. Coyote is remembered for his violence, and not for his brilliantly realistic paintings of tunnels.", -- @rolldiggity, 2011-10-15

05:24 am - QotD

"The Kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roof garden: it's inside you!" -- Dr. Edward Cummings, Unitarian minister and professor of sociology and political science; father of poet E.E. Cummings

05:24 am - QotD

"So. The campaign against the CA trans students law is named 'Privacy For All Students'. But that privacy concerns suddenly spring into existence when trans women use sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms with cis women. As in, we're somehow not woman 'enough' to be seen as not posing any sort of issue or threat. That we somehow constitute an inherently different 'kind' of woman that must be treated differently and separated from cis women. All of this means that a referendum on this law is, quite literally, serving as a referendum on the legitimacy of trans people's genders." -- @ZJemptv, 2014-01-08, in a series of tweets. (The thought continues for a few more tweets after what I quoted.)

05:24 am - QotD

"Where I live, even if it's getting brighter out, the weather is going to get worse until mid-February. There should be a Canadian Solstice, marking the point when the temperature stops dropping." -- Robot Hugs, 2014-01-07

[Happy birthday to Stephen Hawking (who probably doesn't read this).]

05:24 am - QotD

"She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm." -- Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

Merry Christmas again! This time for "old calendar" Orthodox churches^[1] such as most Russian Orthodox congregations.

[1] (Most?All?) Eastern Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar to set the date of Easter, but "new calendar" Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas (and IIUC, other feasts that aren't tied to the date of Easter) on the Gregorian calendar. "Old calendar" Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar for all (again, IIUC) their liturgical dates, including Christmas. So if an old-calendar Orthodox church celebrates Christmas starting on 25 December^[2], that winds up being 7 January on the Gregorian calendar most of us use for secular stuff (whether we also use it for religious dates or not).

[2] Some churches -- old-calendar and new-calendar -- celebrate Christmas on 6 January^[3]. And that can be either Gregorian 6 Jan or Julian 6 Jan depending on whether a particular church is old-calendar or new-calendar. So converting everything to Gregorian dates, there are five possible dates for the first day of Christmas (Coptic leap years can shift Coptic Cristmas by a day relative to the Gregorian calendar -- that's the extra date): 25 December, 6 January, 7 January (Julian 25 Dec), 8 January (Coptic 29 Koiak, wich can be either 25 or 26 December in the Julian Calendar and thus either 7 or 8 January in the Gregorian calendar), and 19 January (Julian 6 Jan) ... that I know of so far. So, look ... instead of celebrating Christmas from Black Friday until a week before New Year, just celebrate it from the last week of December through the first week of February!

[3] I learn so much when I look up something I already knew to make sure I've remembered it right and there's stuff I didn't know yet right next to it. Or when reading an article about something I thought I knew that I didn't have quite right, like why 25 December is most folks' Christmas.

05:24 am - QotD

"She achieved every girl's dream, and none of it required singing to any damn bluebirds." -- image caption (re: Princess Zhao of Pingyang) in the Cracked article "5 Real Princesses Too Badass for Disney Movies" by Jacopo della Quercia, 2011-10-20 [I don't know whether della Quercia or an editor wrote the caption]

[Whether you call today Epiphany, Theophany, Little Christmas, Old-Calendar Christmas Eve, or just Monday, may it be a joyous day!]

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2012-10-16:

"We elevate people to the status of heroes in order to let ourselves off the hook: 'I'm just a mere mortal -- I could never even dream of doing something like that.'" -- Jarvis Cocker, writing in The Guardian.

[

05:24 am - QotD

"The opposite of 'transcend' is obvs 'ciscend'. Right?" -- smut clyde, 2013-12-13 (thanks to realinterrobang for quoting this earlier)

05:24 am - QotD

"In the nineteenth century, Fritjof Nansen wrote that skiing washes civilization clean from our minds by dint of its exhilarating physicality. By extension, I believe that snow helps strip away the things that don't matter. It leaves us thinking of little else but the greatness of nature, the place of our souls within it, and the dazzling whiteness that lies ahead." -- Charlie English

05:24 am - QotD

"I'm reluctant to tell a coming out story, in part because which one would I choose? There are so many coming out moments. I'm also reluctant to tell a coming out story, because there is such a cultural fixation on stories of starting to transition. The media likes to focus on the big reveal, the moment of first coming out, 'the shockerâ' 'the betrayal'. My life is not a day-time TV special episode. 'Transition' is presented as full of drama, but focusing on the one moment hides that we are all still daily making decisions to come out, or not. They make transition into the biggest events of our lives, and while for some of us that might be true, for many of us, we would like it to be a non-event, a time that is past, and we would like people to pay attention to our accomplishments, our writing, our work, the way we support our friends, the way we create our families, the things we imbue with meaning. Many of us would also tell you that there is no single moment of transition -- it's a process, and it takes time." -- ishai-wallaceg, 2013-09-17

05:24 am - QotD

"The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future." -- Eric Hoffer

[Happy New Year to everyone using the Gregorian calendar!]

05:24 am - QotD

"listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." -- from "pity this busy monster, manunkind", by Edward Estlin Cummings (aka E.E. Cummings or e.e. cummings; b. 1894-10-14, d. 1962-09-03) ( thanks to thespian)

05:24 am - QotD

"So let me make this abundantly clear once again.: It's past time we stop using the oppressor's language to describe our lives. We do not live a trans 'lifestyle', we live trans lives." -- Monica Roberts, 2011-10-05

Today is:
Gregorian: 2013-12-30
Julian: 2013-12-17
Hebrew: 5774 Teveth 27
Islamic: 1435 Safar 26
Persian: 1392 Dey 09
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.1.0.14
Indian: 1935 Pausa 09
The birthday of Bo Diddley (1928), Del Shannon (1934), and Bjarne Stroustrup (1950).
The 6th day of Christmas.
The 5th day of Kwanzaa.

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-12-14:

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:24 am - QotD

"You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong." -- John von Neumann (b. 1903-12-28, d. 1957-02-08)

[Happy birthday to Melanie Parr Cardell!]

05:24 am - QotD

"A lot of us Christians, rather than being followers of Jesus, we're defenders of religious certainty. And having certainty about what is and isn't true, good, and holy is actually not faith, it's just certainty. And certainty regarding matters of faith isn't Christian.

"So we end up acting like jackasses, kicking and galloping and trolling around like we own the place. All the while bellowing scripture and unfounded statistics...

"We can't love people when we're intoxicated with certainty. We can't serve people with a pure heart if we're burdened by certainty. We can't be anything remotely close to 'Christ-like' when we're certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that we know what's up regarding God. Why?

"Because we're too busy defending our rightness to be kind, thoughtful, and good.

"So instead, we kick, stomp, and wake up the neighbors shouting. And then we blame Jesus for the messes we make."

-- Matthew Paul Turner, "Why Does Jesus Turn Decent People Into Jackasses?", 2013-12-23

05:24 am - QotD

"It is difficult to pronounce on the opinion of the ministers of our Church as a body : one portion of them, by far the least informed, protests against anything which can advance the honour and the interests of science, because, in their limited and mistaken view, science is adverse to religion. This is not the place to argue that great question. It is sufficient to remark, that the best-informed and most enlightened men of all creeds and pursuits, agree that truth can never damage truth, and that every truth is allied indissolubly by chains more or less circuitous with all other truths ; whilst error, at every step we make in its diffusion, becomes not only wider apart and more discordant from all truths, but has also the additional chance of destruction from all rival errors." -- Charles Babbage (b. 1791-12-26, d. 1871-10-18)

05:24 am - QotD

"Jesus called his followers to grow in their faith, leaving behind prejudice and fear, while accepting the Kingdom of God is in all places." -- Fr. Daniel Kostakis, 2013-12-20

"The beautiful thing is we can't point to one thing and say 'That's it. That's the Kingdom'. No sir. It shines in all things." -- Alan Hooker, 2013-12-20

[To my fellow Christians (most of you anyhow -- I won't forget the Rusian Orthodox an any other old-calendar Orthodox folks later), I wish you a blessed Feast of the Nativity of Our Savior. To my friends and kin who treat this as a nonreligious family holiday, I wish you a merry Christmas however you celebrate it. And to everyone else, I wish you simply a happy day and a peaceul one, wiith so many of the rest of us out of your hair.]

05:24 am - QotD

"We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting." -- Samuel Johnson

05:24 am - QotD

"Anyhow, Krugman is on the money in his assessment of the impact of the TPP on trade. But the point is that the TPP is not really about trade, it's about changing the regulatory process in ways that would almost certainly be opposed by the people in most of the countries included in the deal." -- Dean Baker, 2013-12-12

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list</a>, 2013-12-11:

What Do We Do With the Information We Collect?

Sharing is one of the joys of Christmas. For this reason, we share your personal information with our affiliates, non-affiliated third parties, and anyone else who has a legitimate financial stake in a successful holiday season. Mrs. Claus also likes to have a look-see.

-- Laurence Hughes, from Santa's Privacy Policy.

[ http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/santas-privacy-policy]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)