George Clooney helped plan and recruit celebrities (aka “slebs”) for disaster relief again, this time for tsunami relief. The telethon aired Saturday. Clooney also put together and recruited for a 9/11 sleb telethon. He’s a standup guy. I always thought he was mystery sleb bloggist “Rance.” Not so sure now. The very funny lady who has taken over the old Rance digs as a favor is keeping the lights on with some good stuff and the old crowd still gathers, but we all still wish the real Rance would please stand up again.

House G.O.P. Voids Rule It Adopted Shielding Leader Now that the elections are safely over it’s okay to repudiate that ethically shaky rule, which was the Congressional equivalent of dust bunnies under the bed. This post is to test the NYT Link Generator, as I’ve been avoiding linking to the NYT owing to their Subscription-required access Fee-based archives Crappy angle brackets used as separators So if this works well, I’ll be very happy to link to NYT articles, rather than just reading them.

BBC NEWS | Business | System gremlins resolved at HSBC You mean those things are REAL? So that’s how online banking is really done – gremlin labor.

The earthquake/tsunami disaster just keeps getting worse and worse. Many people and sites are working to get aid workers, donations and supplies out, and refugees, survivor messages, and information back. BoingBoing has been covering the relief effort extensively. The IRC has got a family contact database and also a disaster clearinghouse. Google has a special link to disaster relief organisations, websites, and blogs. When the first wave came in, we were happy that we were seeing something that was really strange, but it was a very mild wave. Then the sea receded back, and we didn’t know what that meant.…

“I uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status of a person who had been in my employ as a housekeeper and nanny,” Mr Kerik said in a statement. “It has also been brought to my attention that for a period of time, during such employment, required tax payments and related filings had not been made.” Masterful use of the passive voice and other linguistic tricks to distance yourself from the issue there, Mr. Kerik. By the way, has anyone ever counted how many nominees of either party have scuppered themselves by employing illegal immigrants and paying…

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmour our vehicles?” Army Spc Thomas Wilson asked. Why, indeed? Good for you, Army Spc Wilson.

I always knew my old school was just a little cooler than the other places I considered for my not-so-brilliant college career. They just bought 250,000 scifi “zines” from a long-time collector. As it happens, a good deal of my time at UO was spent reading science fiction… probably one reason why my academic career wasn’t so brilliant. Via BoingBoing

New images of prisoner torture by US forces in Iraq have surfaced after the AP released images they purchased from an online photo-sharing service after Googling for them. The date-stamping shows they were taken much earlier than the notorious Abu Ghraib images, which date from months later. The site has since password-protected the pages, but the images are still apparently in Google’s image cache. The BoingBoing post is here; they are asking for help from “133t” readers in Googling more images, or finding the original cache. The photo-link leads to a Spanish newspaper site: the first caption reads “New images…

We’re a nation of violent lawless gun-crazy psychos, that’s why. And we’re the leaders of the Free World. The news story reads like a classic British police-procedural crime novel, except more violent than most (more in the tradition of P.D. James). An ordinary American ex-Marine with a shady past is pulled over in a routine traffic stop, and shoots the police officers, killing one point-blank as he plead for his life. A second officer was saved when a shot meant for him hit his radio instead. It happened in Leeds on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas, and a family…

A man who lived in a trailer in Kent, WA had a lava lamp that he decided to heat up on his stove (probably because the light-bulb heating element was busted, also probably because he salvaged it from somebody’s trash). So he put the sealed glass lamp – it’s actually a bottle, complete with bottle-cap lid that is normally covered by a metal topper – on the burner. After it exploded (an inevitable event) he was found dead by his parents with a large shard of glass in his chest. Our Lava(TM) lamp is quite safe and still catching odd…