random sick links

Hope you all had a delicious holiday. A few links dredged up in the last week or so (some in the last 72 hours of oft-bedridden intestinal distress — praise be for wireless networking and a new Powerbook):
Don’t worry: Your cell phone won’t blow up any gas stations.
The political impact of Plan B going OTC.
Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe, an ongoing critique of Howard Dean by the frightened Jon Chait.
Um, $3.5 million for DailyCandy.com?!? Now, I have a special place in my heart for DailyCandy, since they gave me a nice writeup last year for the CD Mix of the Month Club. But I repeat: um, $3.5 million?!? (That said, that web site has some serious power. The day I got mentioned in their email newsletter, I got over 18,000 hits. When this site was mentioned in the lead story of the New York Times’ Circuits section, I got barely 2,000.)
– Not sure how I missed this one during the California recall, but Nao Bustamante, sister to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, is a San Fran performance artist whose most controversial work (“Indigurrito”) featured her fastening a “burrito to her loins and call[ing] for white men to come up on stage, take a bite out of the burrito and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man’s guilt.”
A panel discussion on the year in books, featuring valued crabwalk.com readers Maud Newton and Jessa Crispin.
Great Forbes piece on how the Wright brothers managed to screw up inventing a little ol’ thing we like to call flight.
– If you’ve ever thought about having your own web site, 1and1 is offering three free years of hosting if you sign up before Jan. 21. Yes, three free years — no catches that I can see. While it’s not the absolute most full-featured account possible (only one MySQL database allowed, fr’instance), it’s certainly good enough for the vast majority of people. Plus, with their cut rate on domain registry, you can have www.yournamehere.com for a total annual cost of $6. It’s hard to beat that. I’ve grabbed an account and moved a couple of my domains to 1and1’s servers — no complaints yet.