She will kiss you ’til your lips bleed
But she will not take her dress off
Americana, Tropicana
All the sailor boys have demons
They sing oh Kentucky
why did you forsake me?
If I was meant to sail the sea
Why did you make me?
It should’ve been another state, oh state
Because Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Does it matter that our anchor
Couldn’t even reach the bottom of a bath tub?
And the sails reflect the moon
It’s such a strange job
playing Black Jack on the deck
Still, atop this giant bottle
dressed in white we quietly huddle with our missiles
And we miss the girls back home
Oh home sweet home
Because Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
Mary Anne’s a bitch
She will kiss until your lips bleed
But she will not take her dress off
Americana, Tropicana
Americana, Tropicana
Americana, Americana
I posted this poem because I really love the imagery and the twists of bottles and tubs, missiles and kisses. Her words are as sweet and varied as verses — sung in staccato, spiccato, and legato. She’s so very prescient, but my favorite work of hers lately is actually Fidelity. I wonder if there is any connection since the guy in Fidelity resembles a Russian sailor…
Looking at the past ten days of attacks, which covers the terrible incidents in Mumbai and afterwards, we see no such evidence of attacks, both in DDoS traffic alerts and in DDoS commands in botnets. Only a handful of attacks have reached India in this time, most against consumer lines and none against government sites. No similar attacks have been detected in Pakistan in this timeframe.
This casts a further shadow over the clumsy work by the attackers with GPS, satellite phone and cell phones. It seems clear that the attackers represented a fairly low-tech, although highly trained, threat cell.
People commonly assume attacks must have some kind of special method, or sinister device, rather than just a different approach to common every-day practices. Bruce Schneier has put some comments previously made on his site into his post for today, emphasizing this point.
The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.
[…]
“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” [Shai Agassi] said in a telephone interview. “The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”
Cute. San Francisco and other Bay Area cities already have endorsed the same electric car network, perhaps with even more smiles.
I spoke with a representative from an electric company recently, as I was working on NERC Cyber Security, and he bemoaned the fact that electric cars are starting to burnout the electric grid. A Tesla roadster, for example, pulls at 240V and a few in a neighborhood could be a major problem for the infrastructure. This reminded me of a house I owned in 1996 where we tried to install a T1 and were told by the phone company that they would have to pull a new line from four states away to provide the bandwidth.
The BBC says a man in France has documented how a drug can suppress the urge to drink:
Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France’s top heart specialists, says he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of a muscle-relaxant called baclofen.
He has now written a book about his experience – Le Dernier Verre (The Last Glass) – in which he calls for clinical trials to test his theory that baclofen suppresses the craving for drink.
I can’t help but notice a phrase offered by Dr. Pascal Garche in Geneva, as quoted by the BBC: “the book is going to set the cat among the pigeons”. Nice marketing.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995