Monkey monkey

Every once in a while the Onion outdoes itself, and this week's sports edition is just phenomenal.

NHL Admits Slam-Dunk-Contest Portion Of All-Star Skills Competition A Mistake
"Unfortunately, Jonathan Cheechoo severely injured his back and neck attempting his 360-degree, between-the-legs slam, and Sheldon Souray sliced Ryan Miller's back with his skate blade when he tried to hurdle over him to complete his dunk."

Confused Bill Simmons Picks The Departed To Win Super Bowl
Simmons added that if The Departed doesn't win the Super Bowl, it will be eerily reminiscent of the time the expansion Florida Marlins "practically stole" the Best New Artist Grammy from the Colorado Rockies in 1993.

Bears Lead Rex Grossman To Super Bowl
"They almost literally put Rex on their collective back and carried him through that game. All season long, the Bears have shown that they can win, even in the presence of Rex Grossman."

And two more visual entries:

Michael Vick: 'That Wasn't Marijuana, This Is Marijuana'

Getting The Monkeys Off Their Backs

Picspam, busy week edition

The good news about busy weeks is that they tend to pass relatively quickly. The bad news is that it's less time that gets spent in the collection of precious, precious picspam. Sorry. Let's all hope life gets good 'n' boring here any second now. ( 35 pics below! )

Tumbling out of democracy

It could very well happen that we, as a country, become too stupid to maintain a legitimate democracy:

It was revealed in the course of last summer's landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company uses the same key to open every machine. It's also an easy key to buy at any office supply store since it's used for filing cabinets and hotel mini-bars! That is, if you're not a pollworker who already has one from the last time you worked on an election (anybody listening down there in San Diego?).

The Princeton Diebold Virus Hack, if you've been living in a cave, found that a single person with 60 seconds of unsupervised access to the system, who either picked the lock (easy in 10 seconds) or had a key, could slip a vote-swapping virus onto a single machine which could then undetectably affect every other machine in the county to steal an entire election.

But the folks at Princeton who discovered the hack (after our own organization, VelvetRevolution.us, gave them the Diebold touch-screen machine on which to perform their tests) had resisted showing exactly what the key looked like in order to hold on to some semblance of security for Diebold's Disposable Touch-Screen Voting Systems.

But guess what? Diebold didn't bother to even have that much common sense.

This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website's online store!

Of course, they'll only sell such keys to "Diebold account holders" apparently --- or so they claim --- but that's hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold's website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!