A judge in Washington, D.C. is facing an interesting conundrum — holding a capital punishment trial in a city that hasn’t had one in over 30 years, and overwhelmingly voted to reject a death penalty law in 1992. It’s a federal case, with the federal death penalty, and once you factor in that two-thirds of the potential jury is automatically disqualified on belief, that the defendant is not accused of killing anyone by his own hands, and that the jury will remain anonymous, the case is expected to be an epic.

Thanks to Matt, I now know a little about what happened to my favorite former news site, All Star Newspaper. Wow — what an effing disaster Brill’s seems to have been. Seems like we all graduated from fifth grade a long time ago, but some seem to deny it. Meanwhile, Tim Carvell (a college friend of mine, the only friend I have who’s in the know, as it were) has a good essay questioning how well Brill’s and Inside.com will get along.

Awesome — Marlon Brando will have a cameo in the upcoming Scary Movie 2. Charlton Heston apparently turned down the role (for which I am very thankful, being as he makes me ill).

I don’t know about y’all, but there’s a bit of outrage brewing in me about how blatant and out-in-the-open it was, UPS bribing two-thirds of our national elected officials in order to secure a U.S.-to-China shipping route. Of the 368 Congressmen or Senators who wrote letters of support, 279 of them received checks from UPS; even more, both UPS and our elected representatives are quoted denying the link between lobbying and donations. Bastards, all of ‘em, I tell ya’.

Did anyone else know that there’s a registry setting in Windows 2000 that allows you to intentionally crash your machine with a single key combination? Seems kinda dangerous, but I guess there does need to be a way to test these kind of things…