Midweek NPR Meme

Ever notice NPR seems to have cornered the market on interesting names for presenters and reporters? Well, someone else has. The short of it being your NPR name is your first name with your middle initial stuck in it somewhere and the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

‘Nick’ doesn’t lend itself well to adding a ‘B’ so I’ve used my given name to get Nichoblas. Having gotten up close and personal with the German countryside I’ve got my pick of towns to choose from. Going for sonorous over accuracy (who really knows which is smaller of all the tiny villages surrounding Baumholder) I chose Wickenrodt.

Reporting from the Palatinate, I’m Nichoblas Wickenrodt for Public Radio International.

Sarah Palin Yahoo account hacked

Sarah Palin Yahoo account 2008 – Wikileaks

Come for the lulz, stay for the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps hacking email because you are able to might possibly be worse than using private email accounts for government business. Seriously, though, it takes some kind of stupid to use an email service like Yahoo!/MSN/Gmail for anything other than one-off membership signups. It takes some seriously kind of stupid to conduct government business [allegedly] on one of these account. Sure, the thought of end-running open document and transparency laws has some allure for the politician with something to hide, but security through obscurity never ever pays in the end.

Caveat: It has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Sarah Palin has used private email for public business, but there are some pretty damning allegations that she has. Further, from what I saw, nothing in the b/tards’ dump approaches any kind of smoking gun. Then again, I glanced at this while at work.