Pre-Fleming Goldeneye?
Would you believe a 5,000 year old eyeball?

The Crunchy Ones are the Tastiest
NYC Rats a la KFC et Taco Bell

More Furry New York Rodents
First Beaver spotted in NYC in 200 years. What . . . are short hemlines back in?

Is your Faux Fox or Fideaux?

‘Maybe it’s Just Me’ Dept
. . . but isn’t all this media interest in Anna Nicole Smith’s still-unburied corpse . . . um . . . unseemly?

Clowns Down
Two circus clowns shot while performing in Colombia are dead. The shooting apparently had nothing to do with the performance, leaving the unknown gunman’s motive a mystery.

In and Out and In and . . .
Britney Spears is reported to again be out of rehab a day after admitting herself after . . . actually, by the time you read this, she could be anywhere. Kevin Federline may be making a legal grab for their child before Ms Spears starts playing in traffic with a plucked goose on her head.

Items of Intense Interest:
1. Britney Spears, having recently had her head shaved (and her arm lip-tattooed) after leaving rehab, is once again in rehab.

What she’ll do when she gets out next time is anyone’s guess . . .
2. Scotum, scrotum, scrotum.
3. Here’s the obligatory 4-legged duck.

Penny and Aggie, a well-written and well-drawn comic by Gisèle Lagacé and T. Campbell, is absolutely worth a look should you never have surfed by their vicinity, before. There’s a forum on the site where Campbell and Lagacé address their fans’ concerns and questions.

Yeah, it’s soap opera, but so’s Strangers in Paradise.

Some relatively recent stuff from around th’ big blue orb:

1. North Korea agrees to shut down its nuclear weaponry program in 6-nation talks in exchange for aid, release of seized assets and other considerations.

This is a(n) historic event. Seriously; it will appear on modern history tests in a few years. With any luck, its a foot in the door to an eventual opening of the border ‘twixt the two Koreas. The link above, incidentally, leads to the agreement’s text on korea.net.

2. Salmonella! It’s not just for spinach, tomatoes and green onions any more. This week, we discovered that cantaloupes and peanut butter can make you sick, too.

Well, sir — I remember a time when you could eat food and not have liquid subsequently hurl itself from orifices upper and lower. We digested our food . . . and we liked it.

Not yet 40, Anna Nicole Smith died today. There are few facts currently known about the cause of death, but People has plenty of reading for you, if you’re interested . . .

No doubt you’ll remember the recent wave of trojan-laden spam which is still trickling in.

I have a theory about what the Peacomm trojan’s been up to.

At 3:36am EDT, the floodgates opened and this site (and no doubt several million others) was bombed with comment spam.  For the next half-hour (exactly), 47 comments — all containing links to one of 5 sites on hometown.aol.com — were posted here.  Some of the IPs involved were:

58.216.243.2
59.31.53.252
60.31.167.224
61.133.214.194
61.253.171.235
65.184.195.252
66.230.167.213
68.23.34.164
68.101.37.15
68.216.187.22
70.227.232.194
71.84.196.11
72.187.201.227
82.114.68.194
82.242.222.98
121.155.56.59
125.178.179.207
195.175.37.6
200.88.125.9
202.29.22.197
203.28.159.167
203.144.143.2
203.144.144.164
203.144.160.246
203.144.160.247
203.144.160.248
203.144.160.249
203.144.160.250
211.99.196.117
222.235.250.112

What does all this mean to the average Joe/Josie?  Very little, I imagine, unless you click one of the links.  The addresses and text indicate they lead to pornographic writing, though I wouldn’t bet on it; if you went to the time and trouble of setting up a world-wide botnet, would you use it to drive traffic to dirty stories?

Only, I imagine, if the web pages either contain code to add aspiring pervs’ computers to the Borg collective, or contain a load of pay-per-impression ads . . . and that business model was dropped a day or two after it was implemented.

The only thing I can think of which obviates the theory is the small number; only 47 computers (including those from at least one LAN).
More on this as the morons phish.