How weird — I had no idea that pirates still existed. Four hundred and sixty nine attacks in 2000? Wow.

Thanks to Rafe for pointing out Molly Ivins’ latest column, the one pointing out that John Ashcroft is a member of the secret right-wing group Council for National Policy. Makes me really happy that this man will be the one deciding what laws to enforce.

Pathetic — way more Americans rank their car as the most important thing in their lives than do their kids or spouses.

Also pathetic — I can’t stand the fact that I don’t have a New York quarter yet. I’m about ready to ask cashiers to root through their registers for me…

It is truly scary how close we can get to another Columbine before a completely lucky break prevents it. A few neurons which recognize the stupidity in bringing photos of his arsenal into a quickie photo lab, and this guy may have pulled off his massacre.

Slate’s Culturebox takes aim at the omission of contemporary musicians from Ken Burns’ Jazz series.

I think it’s pretty great that, despite Ray Lewis winning the MVP in the Super Bowl, the “I’m going to Disneyland!” line went to Trent Dilfer. Perhaps it’s because nobody accuses Dilfer of either participating in or observing the stabbing deaths of two people in an Atlanta nightclub after last year’s Super Bowl.

A lot has been made of the vulnerabilities in bind, the domain name server that most of the ‘net runs on, and how intelligent crackers could do a lot more than deny access to Microsoft for a day. If you want to read a good technical summary of the vulnerabilities, COVERT Labs had put one together. (Most Linux distributions now have fixes available, too; while I can’t find a single page that points to the fixes, a good start is Linux Weekly News.)