It was cruel, but admittedly novel as far as Web vandalism goes: The forums section of the Epilepsy Foundation of America was hacked recently, with hundreds of seizure-inducing blink-animated images, and links to such images, being planted on the forum pages.

This reminds me: I’m thinking that MySpace, in general, would be off-limits to epileptics. Considering that design atrocities like this (adjust volume accordingly before clicking) are allowed to roam freely in that online garden.

The Empire State is just waiting for the other boot to drop at this point, as Eliot Spitzer is holed up on Fifth Avenue, contemplating his resignation from the governor’s office.

But in the meantime, David Letterman is going off on the “luv guv” and his stalemate:

The studio audience erupted in applause when Letterman ripped Spitzer for pondering his future on the public’s dime.

“Well, I mean how does that benefit us residents of the Empire State, you know what I’m saying,” Letterman said. “I mean, should that really be his decision?”

Spitzer should “go down to the Mayflower hotel and figure that out there,” said Letterman, drawing both laughs and cheers referring to the Washington D.C. location of the governor’s tryst.

When one of the main beneficiaries of the punchline material being generated gets down and serious about ending this episode sooner rather than later, I think the writing on the wall can’t get any clearer.

As for the long-term impact, we can always look back on this as a prime example of hubris in action. Spitzer went from coronation (his landslide election victory over hapless Republican John Faso, which was telegraphed months beforehand) to condemnation in a remarkably short timeframe. And his vague apology over the prostitution sting, which came off more as an attempt to frame the issue as a private family matter than a political target, was the cherry on top.

I give you the last mortal words of Pancho Villa:

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

While making note of Villa’s penchant for Hollywood-quality self-promotion, I’ll let the statement stand.

I came across this quip over the weekend, before the prostitution scandal surrounding New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer hit the fan today. I may be the only one in the world drawing a connection between these two figures; but somehow, Villa’s coda seems well-tailored to Spitzer’s prospective hubris-filled fall from grace.

In addition to making you look vaguely hip, those iPod-tethered earbuds also mark you as a potential crime target, according to the Urban Institute. The Washington-based think tank argues that the mainstream popularity of the iPod sparked a noticeable increase in violent crime over the past few years.

Actually, this isn’t a new idea. Back in 2005, the NYPD suggested the same correlation between the spread of iPods and subway crime. And I believe the supporting ideas were that a tipping point had been reached back then: The iPods were widespread enough that a sustainable criminal resale market had developed, making it worth the while of thieves to swipe the media players.

But did it lead to an epidemic of iCrime, with people suddenly eschewing Apple’s ubiquitous gadgets? No. And I don’t expect any shifts from these findings. If anything, it’ll only pave the way for a cloned report about an uptick in iPhone crime in a year or two.

When Cashtomato, a fledgling video-sharing site, dispatched three of its employees to crowded Union Square yesterday dressed in bright-red tomato costumes, it might as well have put bull’s-eyes on them:

“Make it rain!” and “Give me my money!” passersby shouted as the clock ticked down to the scheduled 2:29 p.m. publicity stunt, timed to mark Leap Day.

With five minutes to go, the antsy mob of 100 surged toward three workers dressed to resemble tomatoes and holding sacks and boxes of prizes up to $29.

“People grabbed and pulled on the bag,” said Jason Buzi, an executive at the fledgling video-sharing Internet company.

“I didn’t feel safe, so I let it go.”

As he fled across the street, his colleagues dropped their sacks and scattered across the park - and a wild grab for the booty ensued.

Scavengers dove to the ground and elbowed each other out of the way to get at cash-stuffed envelopes and balloons and flyers and fresh tomatoes with bills attached.

The ultimate irony here? There’s no sign of any video from this Leap Year melee on Cashtomato.com, but one did make it onto YouTube. So much for competition!

I’ve alluded before about the fundamental divide in the tech world between software developers and hardware engineers, i.e. code monkeys and wire-grabbers. I’ve always gotten the sense that they operate in pretty much separate worlds.

That assumption is proved out by the discovery by Princeton researchers of a decidedly low-tech way to crack government-grade encryption: Flash-freezing the memory chips so they retain the in-transit unprotected data, then simply stripping the info off them.

Granted, it’s not the easiest maneuver. Remote hackers can’t try this — someone has to physically steal the computer, and then within minutes spray the innards with liquid nitrogen. This is strictly a professional-level corporate espionage move.

Still, that’s probably the most dangerous target to leave unguarded. And it comes back to a fundamental lapse in how advanced computer functions work:

“The software world tends not to think about these issues,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “We tend to make assumptions about the hardware. When we find out that those assumptions are wrong, we’re in trouble.”

Expecting 100% bulletproof security is unrealistic, but is it too much to ask for a little bit more in the way of coordination?

As far as Times Square fixtures go, the Naked Cowboy is something of a hybrid. He’s well within the context of the district’s current tourism-friendly ethos, in that he’s a harmless crowd-pleaser. On the other hand, the outlandish year-round underwear-and-boots outfit, along with the borderline-psychotic warbling, tells me that he wouldn’t have looked at all out of place had he been around 20 years ago, when Times Square was crawling with less-marketable street weirdos.

Weirdo or not, the Cowboy knows trademark infringement when he sees it. That’s why he’s suing a big-time candy company for unauthorized use of his image — displayed within sight of the Cowboy’s usual performance spot.

The suit looks strong so far:

“They took down the video two days ago. Everyone’s telling me it’s an open-and-closed case,” the Naked Cowboy, whose real name is Robert Burck, said about his $6 million lawsuit against M&M’s manufacturer Mars Inc. for using the image without his permission.

The tighty-whitey-clad candy cowboy once filled two towering video billboards for several seconds of a nearly five-minute video loop, but was nowhere to be seen yesterday.

What did appear was another blue M&M with an embarrassed expression on its face, shooting quizzical looks around Times Square.

It occurs to me that, had someone at Mars thought this out, they could have incorporated the Cowboy into their little advertisement. Had they gotten with him ahead of time, and arranged for him to cue up a special song and dance whenever his blue M&M likeness appeared on the video billboard, it would have been an even more effective promotion at the end of the day. They’d have paid him a little something — I’m thinking much less than $6 mil — and everyone would have been happy.

Instead, the Cowboy cashes in, Mars writes off a chump-change loss, and some marketing peon’s head rolls. As sordid a Times Square story as there ever was.

It’s a veritable ‘roid rage on Capitol Hill, as the crusade against performance-enhancement drugs in the sports world trots toward the horseracing circuit.

And just to underline that they’re not going to pee-test the jockeys, this excellent headline tells it all:

They Juice Horses, Don’t They?

In keeping with the cinematic reference, I would have also accepted, “They Shoot Up Horses, Don’t They?”. The classics never die.

The Homicide Report is a crime-beat blog from the LA Times with a simple theme: Record every reported murder in Los Angeles County.

Reporter Jill Leovy handled those blogging duties until the end of 2007, and now provides some perspective on the act of online commemoration of some victims, and the need that fulfilled.

One could know the numbers in the abstract yet still be unprepared for the sheer volume, similarity and obscurity of the victims…

At a crime scene in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Newton Division, lifelong friends of a victim said they knew him only by a nickname. At another scene, a family had no recent photographs of their 19-year-old son. For some of those victims, a police mug shot was the only record of their presence in the world. A detective in Watts once asked me to run a photo of an elaborate norteño-style belt buckle, the only clue to the identity of a victim whose body had been burned.

Detectives routinely admitted that the names and ages they had recorded for victims were, at best, conjecture: Many victims, including illegal immigrants or career criminals, had lived entirely underground.

Ironic that a life in the shadows doesn’t get exposed to light until it ends.

Imagine a remake of everybody’s favorite comedy, Weekend at Bernie’s, only instead of the beach, it’s set in Hell’s Kitchen, and instead of a couple of bushy-tailed go-getters finding their boss dead at his house, it’s a couple of senior-citizen heroin junkies looking for one last score from their just-deceased “vein brother”.

Lights, camera… action:

After [Virgilio “Fox”] Cintron recently died, [Jimmy] O’Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, without success, to cash a Social Security check of Mr. Cintron’s, the police say. They realized that they needed their dead buddy’s help.

So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron’s corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

Just think, I was only a couple of blocks away, trudging down the street, when all this was going down. I really need to develop a better radar for this sort of weirdness.

One of the odder tangents to emerge from the Mitchell Report: An ex-minor league pitcher is mulling a class-action lawsuit against Major League Baseball on behalf of all the farmhands who didn’t get a shot at the big show thanks to juiced-up work culture:

“If everybody was playing on the same level playing field, Rich would say, ‘OK, you beat me,’” says Hartmann’s attorney Michael Salomon. “But this is not right.”

Hartmann says several former teammates have agreed to join the lawsuit if it is filed, and Salomon says he is exploring legal theories that would serve as the basis of a lawsuit. But mostly, Hartmann says, he’s looking for a platform to point out that the biggest losers of baseball’s steroid era weren’t the fans, they were minor leaguers who were cheated of their dreams because a rival for a major-league job got a boost from steroids.

Hartmann never made it higher than the Class A Florida State League — in other words, the bottom rung of MLB’s developmental system. With a fastball clocking in at sub-90MPH, it’s a stretch to think he would ever have gotten within sniffing distance of a major-league roster, even accounting for the expansion and pitching dearth of the 1990s.

But even moving beyond Hartmann personally and considering the body of minor-leaguers who theoretically were competing against players with an unfair advantage, it’s still a tough sell. Career advancement in pro athletics comes down to meritocracy and timing: Not only do you have to perform at a top level, but you have to count on whoever’s above you to falter so you can take over his slot. A lawsuit here has to prove that performance enhancement drugs would have either opened up that slot (by MLB vigorously enforcing a ban) or given a minor-leaguer a better shot at moving up (by forcing the prospect to risk his health). Too many variables to conclusively prove that either scenario would have shaken up major league rosters.

That’s not to say that there’s no merit in a suit. A strategy of depicting a “steroid ceiling” that kept “honest” players like Hartmann from at least a fair shot at advancement would deserve a long legal look, as would the idea of Major League Baseball fostering a dangerous work environment that rewarded taking steroid-related health risks.

One of the persistent challenges of blogging is coming up with a reliable supply of material to write about.

Unfortunately, there’s little danger of Los Angeles Times crime reporter/blogger Jill Leovy coming up dry. She maintains The Homicide Report, where she’s attempting to create a running permalinked chronicle of each murder committed in Los Angeles County to date.

The bulk of the postings consist of simple police-blotter reports noting a random killing. But it looks like Leovy contributes some follow-up reporting, as in this look at a family’s lingering grief six months after a death.

It’s not exactly a revelation to see the steady stream and sheer volume of homicides in LA, but viewing it in this format is certainly sobering.

When I learned of the parlor game called Mafia recently, I didn’t remember the rules covering a mobster perversion of the 10 Commandments.

That’s what Italian police uncovered in Sicily last week, and here’s the translated rundown:

1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.

2. Never look at the wives of friends.

3. Never be seen with cops.

4. Don’t go to pubs or clubs.

5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty, even if your wife’s about to give birth.

6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.

7. Wives must be treated with respect.

8. When asked for information, the answer must be the truth.

9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.

10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t have moral values.

“Moral values”… The jokes just write themselves.

Actually, this makes being a gangster sound pretty stilted. No bars or clubs? No lying? Punctuality? You might as well be an accountant or something. And what’s with the “money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others” — this suggests Mafia can’t steal? I’m thinking there’s plenty of grey areas in the rules of this game.

As Michael Mukasey starts his stint in the Attorney General chair, he might want to include a couple of history texts in his reference library, just to help him out on his fuzziness regarding waterboarding.

Because apparently, this technique was debated as a form of torture during America’s colonial ware in the Philippines, more than a century ago. And if the “water cure” from those days wasn’t definitively identified as torture, then it certainly was by the Vietnam era.

So if the issue was already decided decades ago, why the confusion? Is it because of the supposedly new terrain that the War on Terror represents? Mukasey will have to hash that one out as he guides the Justice Department during the remainder of the Dubya years.

Good to know that the town of Dover, New Jersey is securing the homeland via gumball-machine inspections:

[City alderman Frank Poolas] was not, he told the reporters and photographers who assembled in this northern New Jersey town, really all that concerned that candy posed a terrorist threat.

“Our main concern was health. Period,” Mr. Poolas said, explaining why he and some colleagues started a project six months ago to inspect all of the town’s candy and gum vending machines to make sure they were properly licensed.

Sure, he had mentioned terrorism, Mr. Poolas said, but only as a “worst-case scenario.”

If rogue candy wind-ups are causing this much of a fuss, imagine what Dover would make of the Trashball treats being dispensed in Washington DC, pictured above. I’m thinking town council would ban the artistic expression as a public health and/or security risk.

Apparently, the Jewish High Holidays season of September-October is considered prime recruiting time for white supremacists and other hate groups. That explains the rash of anti-Semitic vandalism in the tri-state area of late: Swastikas appearing on synagogues, parked cars, and — most bizarrely — cut into a cornfield in Mercer County, New Jersey.

Now comes the audio assault: A CD filled with music in praise of Adolf Hitler, dropped on front lawns in Yonkers.

It’s not all the predictable speed-metal crud either:

Track 17, called “Hitler’s Dance Mix,” combines dance music with speeches delivered by the Nazi dictator.

Aside from the obvious stunt tactics, I actually find it refreshing that these morons are desperate enough for new members that they have to use such a scattershot approach. What’s next, a Lawrence Welk number?

I’ve certainly been aware of sniffer programs like PC Pandora, and how popular they are with otherwise happily-married couples.

I wasn’t aware just how popular they are:

“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”…

Divorce lawyers say their files are filled with cases like these. Three-quarters of the cases of Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, now involve some kind of electronic communications. She says she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives in the computers of her clients’ spouses, particularly if there is an opportunity to glimpse a couple’s full financial picture, or a parent’s suitability to be the custodian of the children.

Yep, I’m aiming to get married real soon.

Why deal with mail-order bride brokers from Russia and Thailand when MarryOurDaughter.com can hook you up with all-American young ladies, all Biblically bride-priced by their parents?

And when I say “young”, I mean young:

“Our 15 year old daughter Mary wasn’t very popular and did nothing but mope around the house bringing everybody down, so we decided to marry her off through your site. Now our house is a lot cheerier and we love our new swimming pool and Jaccuzi! We’ve told our youngest that when she turns 15 we’re going to marry her off too!”
—Mrs. James P.

“My mother thought I was getting ‘too frisky” and that I had to get married right away before I lost my purity to some high school boy. Marry Our Daughter found me a husband and my parents were able to keep their house and pay off my mother’s medical bills. I was so glad I could help them, and being married at my age (I’m 16 now) has a lot of advantages, like my own credit card!”
—Nancy A.

I looked throughout this site, waiting/hoping to uncover the punchline. The above blockquote is the closest I came, because apparently, everything is nice and legal here.

Upon initial consideration, the concept of biopiracy seems like a ludicrous overreach of state dominion over nature.

But not if you consider the practical possibilities:

Fears of biopiracy, loosely defined as any unauthorized acquisition or transport of genetic material or live flora and fauna, are deep and longstanding in Brazil. Nearly a century ago, for example, the Amazon rubber boom collapsed after Sir Henry Wickham, a British botanist and explorer, spirited rubber seeds out of Brazil and sent them to colonies in Ceylon and Malaya (now Sri Lanka and Malaysia), which quickly dominated the international market.

In the 1970s, the Squibb pharmaceutical company used venom from the Brazilian arrowhead viper to help develop captopril, used to treat hypertension and congestive heart failure, without payment of the royalties Brazilians think are due them. And more recently, Brazilian Indian tribes have complained that samples of their blood, taken under circumstances they say were unethical, were being used in genetic research around the world.

If countries can guard non-regenerative natural resources like oil, then why not other exploitable resources? As clumsy as the framework is now, I imagine techniques will be refined enough to make this a major national-security topic by mid-century.

Is it really arson if someone prematurely sets fire to The Man of Burning Man?

Now, organizers are trying to figure out how to proceed. “The Man is still standing,” a news release announced. “And an assessment is underway to determine the structural integrity of The Man.”

Never fear, the scheduled burn will take place, with a reconstructed burn-boy. But I’m amused by such loose references to “The Man”. Out of context, it evokes some kind of proclamation from the Black Panthers party.

Maybe there’s some underlying significance to this premature immolation. This is, after all, the festival’s 21st year — it could be the way to signify The Man turning legal.

The following headline was attached to this police blotter item from yesterday:

Bronx: Woman Shot to Death

This is the latest occurrence of a phrase which, while commonplace, I find somewhat misleading.

“Shot to death” is the accepted way to describe someone being killed via firearms. I understand that no more than one bullet, strategically aimed, is needed to kill human or animal. But for some reason, in my mind, this particular phraseology implies multiple shots being administered, even when that’s not the case. (For instance, the linked story above describes the victim being shot once, in the head.)

Does anyone else interpret the phrase “shot to death” this way? Maybe it’s just me. For whatever reason, I instantly think of a barrage of bullets being pumped into someone — a sort of overkill to ensure death. Maybe it’s the “shot to” part that implies a repeated action?

Which is why I think the more compact “shot dead” would be more accurate, or at least more neutral in tone. To me, it’s more direct and self-contained, somehow.

I suppose I’m in the minority on this. Probably a minority of one. But that’s how I read it.