Halloween has come and gone. We live within walking distance to two schools, and trick-or-treating is so formalized here that it gets its own scheduling announcement in the newspaper, so I expected a small swarm of sugar-seeking munchkins to descend upon the neighborhood. We bought enough candy to fill two large glass jars, and set them out to hasten the appeasement of the costumed.

The sum total of the encounters of the evening: 3 visits, less than a dozen kids. We still have two half-full jars of candy.

I'm just now wrapping up posting the second day of pictures from the June Washington trip, and included in them were some cat pictures, just in time for the Friday Cat Blogging tradition. I'm tired at this point, so it's only fair to show a tired cat:

The automotive mount for my GPS arrived today. Inside the shipping box was the hermetically sealed package containing the mount itself... and a free sample of "Degree for Men", an "Ultra Clear Deodorant Stick" with the catchphrase, "For men who take risks, it won't let you down."

I wonder if the seller is trying to tell me something.

SecurityFocus has noted that the Sony BMG rootkit is being used to bypass World of Warcraft anti-cheat measures. The stealth backdoor functions of the rootkit are so good, that even the spyware that World of Warcraft puts on your system to check for anything that might possibly be used to reverse engineer or interact with the World of Warcraft game client can't get past them.

I'm inordinately amused by this particular side effect, because truly there are no good guys in this scenario. World of Warcraft is pushing spyware, Sony is pushing a rootkit, and cheaters are using one to attack the other.

In the end, I suspect that makes them all losers, in all senses of the word.

Apparently, despite the amount of coddling the human race receives from its safety-conscious societies, the human genome is still evolving, finding 9% of our genes evolving rapidly, and another 13% showing signs of negative selection.

This cheers me immensely, as I'd figured that by this point we were simply breeding for brutality. But then, I'm a cynical sort.

The Abstract Factory has posted an entertaining, if violent, fantasy of how a debate with a creationist might run.

Framestore CFC has put out a press release about their most recent Guiness advertisement (warning: that's a 16MB Quicktime movie, and may take a while to download) titled noitulovE featuring three men reverse-evolving from Guiness-drinking humans in a bar to pond-muck sipping mudskippers.

It was too much to hope for that they'd actually keep it remotely scientifically accurate, and so some of the transitions, while cool looking, are obviously very silly. It remains highly entertaining, however, and although I'm not a beer drinker personally and don't find even Guiness to be "worth the wait" as the advertisement pronounces it, the advertisement itself is well worth the download time.

Hat tip to Pharyngula.

Since someone I know absolutely loves these small, toxically sweet, warningly red, plasticy balls of modified fruit, I felt compelled to note that Majikthise has posted notes on how they are made. Although I would make sure anything soaked in sulphur dioxide and calcium chloride as part of the standard processing gets a "For External Use Only" warning label, it's probably the addition of rats that will bother most everyone else:

Okay, admittedly this is a cheap shot, but it's still funny:

This was broadcast on Sky News Ireland, and published on Daily Kos. Hat tip to Tennessee Guerilla Women.

Reuters reports that the Canadian search-and-rescue team was rescuing people in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, a full five days before the U.S. military got anyone in.

It's so hard not to take any one of a number of cheap shots after that headline.

To be fair, the U.S. military probably did the right thing by focusing their resources on New Orleans proper, considering the way that the place degenerated, but this does underscore just how badly undermanned the area is, putting lie to the claims that FEMA didn't need more help, and that there were enough National Guard units in the area that it didn't matter that half of them were off in Iraq.

Hat tip to Tennessee Guerilla Women.