A gas for drivers / Price wars break out in Fresno, which posts the average fuel cost in the nation A gas for drivers

Price wars break out in Fresno, which posts the average fuel cost in the nation

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Report Tuesday, August 28, 2001

For one brief, shining moment, California has the distinction of being home to the city with the cheapest gasoline in the United States.

Gas in Fresno, where some stations are charging a refreshingly retro 99 cents per gallon, is rock-bottom for the nation, according to the Lundberg Survey of 8,000 stations nationwide.

In fact, up in raisin country, where forecasters expected it to hit 108 degrees yesterday, the thermometer is showing bigger numbers than the gas stations.

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Here’s a way for big oil to silence those California fuel critics!! Just ‘buy’ their loyalty and silence with cheap gas!

iMarketingNews.com | News | Article Man Plans to Webcast Amputation of His Feet

Aug. 24, 2001

By: Christopher Heine

Associate Editor

chris@dmnews.com

Perhaps no other medium could help conjure images of the French Revolution, jack-o’-lanterns, prosthetic limbs and millions of dollars at the same time.

Savor the Internet era.

Here’s Paul Morgan, paralyzed from the ankles down, preparing to have his feet cut off by guillotine on Halloween night on a Webcast that costs $20 per subscription. After completing a credit card transaction at his site, http://www.cutoffmyfeet.com, subscribers can visit a chat room to discuss Morgan’s amputation and enter comments in a virtual suggestion box. The site also has links to send information about the Web site to a friend, about advertising on the site and on how to make donations.

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Happy Halloween!!

Salon.com Politics | The Chung and the restless The one thing you can say for Condit’s creepy behavior is that, perhaps, an attorney got him alone in a room early on and said he was in legal danger and talking about it might really get him in trouble. (His defenders on the talk shows make the point that there are a lot of innocent people in jail who spoke too much at the wrong time. The only problem with this argument is that none of them are U.S. congressmen.)

The contention that it’s just about a person’s private sex life, and beyond public purview, is wrong for a number of reasons. For the first, he’s already been caught. We all know what he was doing; it’s an insult to our intelligence for him to stonewall.

Second, he’s a family-values politician who’s supported sticking the Ten Commandments up in classrooms. And is there any better image of Christian hypocrisy than a Bible-waving pol shtupping at least two women not his wife?

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It’s the hypocrisy, stupid!!

Salon.com Technology | Fingered by the movie cops Fingered by the movie cops

Under today’s copyright laws, you are guilty until proven innocent. I know — it happened to me.

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By Amita Guha

Aug. 23, 2001 | One recent Monday, my boyfriend and I returned home from a long weekend away. As usual, one of the first things we did was check our e-mail, only to discover, to our dismay, that Time-Warner Cable, our Internet service provider, had cut off access to our account sometime around midnight the Friday before. My boyfriend, a software engineer who takes his e-mail seriously, called the tech support line and was transferred to several people that evening, none of whom could help. All he could find out was that the account had been suspended for “security reasons.”

The next morning, we received an express-mailed letter from Time-Warner Cable, which stated that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had accused us of distributing copyrighted material. The MPAA had determined that someone, supposedly with an Internet protocol (IP) address assigned to our computer by Time-Warner at the time, had distributed the material on July 4. The part that got me was the second paragraph: “In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section 512, (ISP name) has removed or disabled access to that material.”

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That DSL option is looking better and better every day, at least until the phone company absorbs Time Warner, or vice versa.

Lustful Priests Sign Here / A huge molestation settlement against the Catholic church, and some embarrassing new rules Thou shalt now imagine a new and unsavory piece of paper, an unsightly little legal agreement, one the Catholic church recently agreed to foist upon some of its beleaguered priests regarding molestation which said priests must now sign before taking the proverbial priestly reins, and which we can imagine must go something like this:

“I, (enter priest’s name — and no more cute nicknames like ‘Big Daddy’ or ‘Muffins’ or ‘Uncle Salty’), do solemnly pledge to uphold the duties of my largely unhappy and sexually neutered and probably borderline alcoholic station in life, as outlined in the Fun ‘n’ Immutably Heartless Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord, circa 1297.

“And furthermore, I extra-super promise not to allow my profession’s rather obvious and well-documented levels of sexual repression and amative angst to manifest themselves by way of coming on to or openly molesting any youngish males with really cute smiles who come to me for advice or counseling or the URLs to really good adult sites.”