It appears that, no matter how much you practice, there’s no guaranteeing that you won’t accidentally pierce your wife’s skull with an arrow during your William Tell circus act.

Despite having a large mobile divison, British Telecom has launched an ad campaign urging the English to forego making that cellphone call, and use a payphone instead. No, seriously.

Each weekday, Jim Metzner and National Geographic release a new Pulse of the Planet feature, self-described as “a two-minute sound portrait of Earth.” Today’s feature is the mating call of the Bulwer’s pheasant, as recorded in the Bronx Zoo. I have to remember to check this out more often; I’ve added it to my bookmark bar over on the right.

Boooo hissssss — Princeton Video Image is back in the news, this time for planning to add advertising to the electronically-generated first-down line in foreign broadcasts of this year’s Super Bowl.

It appears that John Ashcroft is every bit a problem appointee for Dubya. In addition to being an evil arch-conservative, he used Missouri state employees to do campaign work in his 1984 campaign for governor; his nephew also got preferential treatment in a 1992 bust for growing 60 pot plants with the intent to sell. (Mind you, at the time of that 1992 sentence, Ashcroft had pushed through legislation that would trigger Federal charges in cases where more than 50 plants were involved, but despite this, Alex Ashcroft only faced state charges.)

When all is said and done, I agree with Edward Lazarus: “If the Senate does reject Ashcroft, no one should lose sleep over it. It would be poetic justice for a man who deprived so many others of confirmations they rightly deserved.”