"Thompson's ashes to be shot from cannon"

CNN: 'He loved explosions'

Tuesday, April 5, 2005 Posted: 5:28 PM EDT (2128 GMT)

DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high (16.15 meter-high) sculpture of the journalist's "gonzo fist" emblem, his wife said Tuesday.

The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer's long-cherished wish.

"It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions."

Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on February 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil.

The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson's life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, his wife said.

She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 100-foot pillar, making the monument 153 feet (46.63 meters) high. It will resemble Thompson's personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with "Gonzo" emblazoned across it.

Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer's 100-acre property.

Thx to Judge Deason for telling me...

A Real Technical Error

Sorry readers,

Sometimes Dan becomes so involved in his tech-speak that he forgets that you neither know what he's talking about, nor care. From now on, we'll try to trim these bits and bobs out of this august journal.

Thanks for understanding,

The Management

[a followup from Dan: That is precisely the genius of Linux. I myself had no idea what the effect of those errors really was, inducing uncertainty and a drive to pick things apart until it was fixed. Totally inscrutable, and yet so satisfying when it's finally solved!]

A bug is fix0red

This didn't have any effect on the front end that I could see (except for when the site was off because I rebooted and forgot to reset the HTTP forwarding), but there was a weird problem that was causing HongPong.com's all-important Gentoo Linux server box to emit ugly messages whenever it did something called "caching service dependencies, like so:

Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
Caching service dependencies...
/var/lib/init.d/depcache: line 16: overwritten!!: command not found

This has been a pain for quite a while but I did some looking around in the Gentoo linux forums and their bugzilla bugtracker. Read what happened here (the forums weren't terribly useful) or ignore this message. Hopefully some googler in the future will find the info helpful. The trick was to empty out a config directory, /etc/conf.d/, and then run 'emerge baselayout' to replace the config files. It took quite a while to determine this. A special thanks to Borja Pacheco on Gentoo Bugzilla entry #74404 for his useful solution to a similar problem.

Missed opportunity or war defeat?

According to AlertNet, as much as 70% of the standing residential structures in the city of Falluja have been razed in Coalition attacks, displacing as many as 210,000 households.

Though the occupational authorities (because I feel like calling a spade a spade today) have set aside $100 million for the reimbursement of affected families, real relief has been slow coming:

Muhammad Abdul al-A'ani, deputy minister for industry, told IRIN that of the total number of houses damaged in the city, only 90 families had received compensation of around US $1,500 each so far[...]

According to Ahmed Salah, a senior officer from the public works ministry, two electricity substations, three water purification plants and two train stations were badly damaged, along with the sewage and surface water drainage subsystems throughout the city[...]

Sewage running in the streets, hundreds of thousands displaced, 90,000 still waiting to return to the city, this is beginning to smell of, dare I say it? Failure.

There's been little formal discussion of complete mission failure, as even the harsher critics of the war seem intent on playing "how do we make the best of it now that we're here" in the face of ever more certain defeat.

Cracks may be showing, however, as some early war proponents have begun to balk at the expense and conduct of the Mess O' Potamia. The premiere example of this burgeoning mutiny is the break from the party line of the Orange County Register in a recently-published editorial in which they called for a complete pullout of the Iraq conflict.

The kicker here, of course, is the Register's position as the editorial voice of the most Republican district in the United States. Could this be the start of trend? Hell if I know...

This post was an incomplete thought, but it's late and I'm tired, so goodnight.