The best mirror is an old friend.

— George Herbert

Registration is open for a limited time on a Sunday evening. Read the fine print and do not transgress, lest ye be blocked.

UPDATE at 10/12/08 8:31:09 pm:

Registration is now closed, with 65 hatchlings.

The major-seventh wisdom of Archie Bell and the Drells echoes down through the ages.

Make it mellow, now.

Youtube Video

Go ahead, Ace. It needs to be said.

Trolls can really ruin your day. And even, your presidential campaign.

In the latest tech note that will inevitably become an open thread, still more outdated code has been trimmed, modernized, and tightened up in the LGF Blog Engine templates. The comment entry form that registered users see is now table-free, using floated elements to create a table-like look for the form inputs, with labels right aligned and fields left aligned on a central point.

There are two areas left that still use tables: 1) the comment meta line with username, icon, etc. (we could do it with lists or DIVs, but CSS vertical alignment within block level elements stinks and it ends up looking lopsided and breaking as soon as the text size is increased), and 2) the Statistics drop-down menu in the left sidebar (because a table is appropriate for that kind of tabular data).

That vertical alignment thing is a sore subject with many web designers; it’s currently the top-rated item on Webmonkey’s CSS Wishlist.

An update to the story of the death of Austrian Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider: Austria far-right leader Haider speeding before fatal crash.

VIENNA (AFP) – Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider was driving at more than twice the speed limit after going to a nightclub when he crashed and died this weekend, court officials said Sunday.

Haider was doing 142 kilometres (88 miles) per hour in a 70kph zone when he crashed in the early hours of Saturday, the prosecutors’ office said.

Prosecutor Gottfried Kranza did not say whether Haider had tested positive for alcohol.

A ray that causes intense pain but (when used as directed) no lasting injury: Army Orders Pain Ray Trucks; New Report Shows ‘Potential for Death’.

After years of testing, the Active Denial System — the pain ray which drives off rioters with a microwave-like beam — could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it’s shipped off to the battlefield; a new report details how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer.

The contract for the pain ray trucks is “expected to be awarded by year’s end,” Aviation Week notes. “A year after the contract is signed, the combination vehicle/weapons will start be fielded at the rate of one per month.”

It’s been a very long time coming. As we’ve previously reported, there have been calls to deploy the Active Denial System in Iraq going back to 2004. But it’s always been delayed for legal, political, and public relations reasons. Anything that might be condemned as torture is political dynamite. Interestingly, the version being bought is not the full-size “Version 2,” but a containerized system known as Silent Guardian, which Raytheon have been trying to sell for some time. They describe Silent Guardian as “roughly 1/3 the size and power of the other Active Denial Systems,” and quote it’s range as “greater than 250 meters.” The larger system has a range somewhere in excess of 700 meters.

The Cleveland Leader has a series of posts tracking the Obama campaign’s lies and evasions about the candidate’s long history of connections with ACORN, and their attempts to quietly edit the Obama website as more information leaks out: Obama Campaign Involved in More Cover-Ups in ACORN Scandal.

Wikileaks.org has an article from the Winter 2003 edition of the magazine Social Policy (the full article is here, but requires registration), making it very clear that Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN are extensive.

(Here’s our local copy of the PDF file.)

[Photo caption: “ACORN members meet with Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama. Photo courtesy Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.”]

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

Barack Obama may intend to meet with Iran without preconditions (yes, he did say it, no matter how often he tries to deny it now), but Iran isn’t granting Obama the same courtesy: Iran’s Vice President Sets Two Preconditions for Talks with US.

They’re very simple conditions, really. Just remove all US forces from the Middle East, and abandon Israel to the wolves.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

It is the Americans who are in dire need of reestablishing ties with Iran, he underlined.

Iran is not obliged to reestablish ties with the U.S., he said. “If they take our advice, grounds for such talks would be well prepared,” he said.