John Couey: Only in Florida, I Guess

So, 48-year-old convicted sex offender John Couey was recently convicted of murder in the first degree by a Florida jury in a case where he kidnapped, raped and buried alive a 9-year old girl. He had originally confessed to the crime, but it turned out his confession to the crime was thrown out of the court — though I don’t know the whole story, I’m sure this was on some stupidly legal technicality.

It’s publicized today in the news that the jury is now going to debate on the death penalty for Couey, with the other option of life/without. How long do you think a jury is going to deliberate over this one? 15 minutes? And only because it takes 14 minutes to record the votes properly?

I don’t want to hear any of that conservative Republican propaganda about how people like this can be salvaged or don’t deserve the death penalty or how the death penalty is wrong, ok? — let’s leave Church at church and talk about State for a minute. I don’t care if you’re Billy Graham sitting at the left hand of God himself, if it was your daughter, would you want this guy sucking down your tax dollars and stamping your Florida license plates for 3.4 cents an hour the rest of his life? There’s no debate here, really. Maybe they should be debating about how to execute this bastard. Personally, I say throw him to the lifers in a max pen and let them do whatever they want with him until he dies, but if he lives more than 8 hours, it’s firing squad.

Comments involving religion in any form will be deleted immediately. Keep your Bible out of my Zen Buddhist house.

Americans: We Hate Dollar Coins. Wait, We LOVE Messed Up Ones!

When is a 2007 $1 dollar coin worth 600 times face value? Ask the person who threw down that amount on eBay for a rare misprint out of the U.S. Mint. On the thought that this may be a single coin in 300 million struck, it may have seemed like a reasonable price to pay. However, the Mint later admitted that there are more, and coin grading geeks claim there are at least 50,000 (1 in 6000 is still a small quantity) of these coins in circulation.

The properly struck dollar coins, bearing the likeness of the nation’s first president, are inscribed along the edge with “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum” and the year and mint mark. They made it past inspectors and went into circulation Feb. 15.

Of note, the misstricken coins are believed to have come from only the Philadelphia Mint at this point, and the mistake is being blamed on “new technology” used to help speed production and reduce defects.

I’m a proponent of the dollar coin as a replacement for the dollar bill — not soapbox professing level, but they make more sense and they save (hundreds of) millions of dollars in manufacturing costs over time.

Digg Traffic & Non-Diggers

Except for a few token highlights, I average about 100-150 hits a day on this blog. Most of the visitors are looking for Wii Z:TP info that is posted in some of my subpages, but I try to keep my main articles relevant. Recently, WordPress added the ability for users to post a Digg button in their articles, provided that the article has been submitted to digg.com already. I took this as a field experiment — if I submit socially-hot things to digg, will the people who use digg to find news and info in my blog actually digg the info they find?

Here’s the feedback since 2/24, listed on a by-article basis. I removed the 1 digg that comes with submitting an article:
3 articles theorizing on HP book 7: 2 diggs combined, 0 comments –> 42 digg hits
Article about Keeley Hazell’s sex tape: 1 digg, 0 comments –> 107 hits from digg.com alone in 1 day, however
Article about Heroes Ep17, posted pre-air: 3 diggs, 0 comments from diggers –> 39 digg hits
Article about Heroes Ep18, which airs tonight, and offered to answer questions about it: 0 diggs
2 Info pages about Z:TP which get hit a lot: 1 digg combined, 0 comments from diggers

Total: 7 diggs. Blog hits from digg.com since 2/24: 257 Dugg%:2.7%

Verdict: good for traffic if it contains the word “sex” or “game” or “TV” in the title. Will your article get dugg? Sure, if it’s about geekstyle or porno and actually contains those things, but probably not otherwise. Why mention that tidbit? It’s the direction the Internet multiverse has been heading for three decades (Give me a wankphoto or I’m leaving), so it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this particular article, which, I will probably not submit to digg.

Keeley Hazell’s Unfortunate Video

First of all, I must say that I had no idea who Keeley Hazell was prior to reading this story, though I had heard this same story a few months ago — possibly a separate thing but related to her. That’s probably because I live under some snow-buried rock in Denver. Secondly, if you came to this post looking for a link to the video, forget it. I’m not going to tell you how to come by a copy of it — if you know, then you already have access to it. If you don’t know, I’m not here to educate.

Out on the wild, wild Internet I came across this compromising video of Keeley with some oiled-up guy. After doing a google images search, though, I wonder how off-kilter something like this really is for her and how much of a publicity stunt it is. Sure, it’s her all right, there’s no debating who the girl is in the video. But I’m coming to a point where I’ve had it with these sex tapes. Let’s face it, if I want to watch a tape of famous people bumping uglies, there’s an entire industry dedicated to doing a *professional* job with videos of that nature. In my line of work I have to deal with this type of explicit stuff on a semi-frequent basis, so I’m not really caught up in the “omfg” attention-grabbing goal of these things anymore. I think Paris Hilton spoiled that for most of the civilized world.

But commenting on the video itself, the one I have seen is not very good after the first few of its 15 minutes (does it need to be *good quality* to be a good video? probably not). Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much all I can say about it. It’s not a very good video. And it carries less merit than Keeley shippers want to give it, for sure.

edit, 8 March 2007: You know, WordPress tracks the search terms used to hit posts. Some of you people need to go see a head doctor. /shudder