Last 100 posts

(Trying out a new feature on kottke.org today in which I revisit the last 100 or so posts — about 2-3 weeks worth — and follow up on some of them. We’ll see how it goes.)

Ken Jennings is still 0wn1ng Jeopardy. He’s won 28 straight games and $920,960. If he ever loses, expect a book deal and a made-for-TV movie, I Was Never Really in Jeopardy: The Ken Jennings Story.

Apple has created a bit of a shitstorm with Dashboard. Cries that they ripped off Konfabulator have given way to the improper addition of new tags to HTML, improper namespaces, and even that a new round of browser wars are beginning. Does anyone dare try to add new features to HTML before the lumbering W3C can get around to it? (Yes, please.) Dave Hyatt is publishing lots of info on his site about Dashboard and Safari.

The whole Plain Layne thing continues to limp along. First noted here, it was eventually revealed to be a hoax. Odin Soli, the man behind the curtain, is still publishing as Plain Layne, but now that everyone knows it’s fictional, it’s unclear whether anyone will still be interested in reading it (I’m not).

Anil won the SEO contest and is all but blamed for cheating. My take: most SEO “professionals” are hucksters, scammers, and have a poor understanding of what makes Google tick.

Friendster, which can’t make up its mind about their priorities with regard to security, is allowing Dreamworks to create fake profiles to promote Anchorman (noted early on by waxy.org, a favorite source of Wired News stories), even after they raised a hell of a stink about the whole fakesters thing. No, no, this is different, says the company…there’s money involved this time. Friendster gets dumber every day.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has taken in $80 million so far at the US box office and will probably be the first documentary to break $100 million at the box office. People are fact-checking the movie and I’m sure there will be fact-checking of the fact-checking, ad infinitum, but with all the partisanship going on around this movie, actual facts will be hard to come by. On the plus side, I will never again forget how to spell Fahrenheit. Celcius Celsuis Selcius Centigrade is another matter.

The Atlanta Time Machine was a popular link and a reader sent in a link to similar then/now photos of Marietta, Ohio.

Got lots of emails that the 8th grade exam from 1895 is a hoax. Wrong. What Snopes actually says is the assertion that “an 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards” is false. That may be, but the test itself is authentic (PDF).

Greece prevailed in the final match of Euro 2004. If you missed seeing the game in the US (because it cost $20 on PPV), Fox Sports World is showing reruns of the quarters, semis, and finals. Check your local listings.