First Looks category archive

Cramming is back:

Increasingly complex bills for cell phones and conventional phones have made it more tempting to try to slip in charges that customers might not notice.

This week, the FTC filed charges against two San Francisco brothers, accusing them of fraudulently billing people for services supposedly provided by numerous companies with names such as GoFaxer.com, Global YP and Inc21. A federal judge issued an injunction halting operations by the businesses while the men await trial.

Crammers use a wide variety of ways to stick consumers with charges they never approved.

More of that fee hand of the market that righties are so fond of talking about.

Souls are lined up to enter Heaven. As each one enters, St. Peter gives the soul a harp.

On the other side of things, other souls are lined up to enter Hell. Each one receives an accordion . . . .

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This one comes and goes; the callers claim to be calling from Canada.

A 93-year-old New Castle County man received a call Wednesday afternoon from a man purporting to be his grandson Ian, county police spokesman Senior Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said.

The caller said he was in Canada on a fishing trip with friends when they accidentally trespassed on an Indian reservation and were arrested. They needed $2,000 to get back to the United States, the caller said.

When the elderly man told the caller that he didn’t have any money, the caller hung up, Navarro said.

He then telephoned his daughter to find that Ian wasn’t in Canada but at work.

The blogger whose writing was worthy of his nom de blog has passed away.

Via Mithras.

After the earthquake in Chile:

Sure enough, water in a monitoring well in Christiansburg, near Virginia Tech, rose at least 4 inches and then dropped about 2 feet as energy waves rippled through the Earth. But Nelms, a groundwater specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Richmond, saw something unexpected, too.

“The weird thing about this one was we saw it in wells we normally don’t see response in,” he said, looking over water level charts called hydrographs. “There’s one out in Clarke County that we’ve never seen anything like this in, but there’s a little blip up.”

Business Week quotes Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as reporting that the whole thing was earthshaking:

“The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

Business Week story via GNC.

From the BBC:

Officials say the residential scheme at Port Fairy, 300 km (186 miles) west of Melbourne (Australia–ed.), will not go ahead because of safety concerns.

There is growing fear in Australian coastal areas about storm surges and possible inundation from rising oceans.

The Victoria state government’s decision was based on a projection that sea levels will rise by 80cm (11.8 inches) over the next century.

Chinese temple art:

I have moved this site to a new server. Please use the email link at the top of the page to tell me of any broken links, missing pictures, or anything else whifty. Please include a link to the specific post or page in your email so I can fix it quickly.

I have deactivated the Gatekeeper plugin in favor of Akismet.  If all goes well, no more “What color is an orange?”

I’ll muck with the theme tomorrow. Something’s not working with my Pine View Farm theme, but the database has been restored and seems to work okay on the new hosting outfit. There won’t be much posting until I finish unpacking and have the place looking more like home.

It’s been kind of nice to have a little vacation from blogging. Feeding the blogbeast can take some effort.

But I have saved up this gem, which pretty much sums up Republican Economic Theory:

Addendum, the Next Day:

Well, I’ve fixed everything but the color of the title at the top of the page. It’s starting to feel like home–like a new place with one piece of furniture that just doesn’t match and needs to be reupholstered. The upholstery has been ordered.

Down for two weeks.

Database problems. I hate databases.

Also, the modem seems to have lost its IP address. I had to reboot the modem to get the connection working again. This was exacerbated by my having been away when the Snow Gods clobbered the area, delaying my return so I could shoot the trouble.

But I’m back. For a while. I’ll be offline for a planned outage on Sunday, but, this time, I should be able to post a “Gone Fishing” notice.

Melamine, that is:

China has seized 72 tonnes of milk powder believed to be tainted with melamine and is searching for another 100 tonnes, state media has reported.

The powder is thought to be from a batch recalled after it killed six children in 2008 and made 300,000 ill.

Two dairies were shut down at the weekend after they were found to be selling products using the powder, which should have been destroyed.

More here. A nugget:

Is it already too late for America? I’m starting to think that the anti-tax, anti-government conservative movement that started in the mid-70s, elected Reagan and led to the terrible Bush Presidency may have effectively destroyed the country, leaving it bankrupt, corrupt,ungovernable, ruled by a wealthy elite — and we’re only now just starting to realize it. To cover tax cuts we stopped maintaining the infrastructure and started borrowing. To satisfy their hatred of government we increasingly stripped away rule of law, regulation, and belief in one-person-one-vote. We are seeing the consequences of all of that . . . .

Video also via Seeing the Forest.