I got a phishing email purporting to be from the Royal Bank of Canada (I'm not a client of that bank). Over the years, I've received dozens of these things, but never actually checked them out. This time, I did.

That email pointed to this URL:

http://www.missmissouri.org/members/pro/rbunxcgiF6=1&F7=IB blah, blah, blah ... )

The site is (poorly) branded as the RBC Financial Group.

I wonder how many people, when confronted with a pallid imitation of a bank website, would -- if their spidey sense wasn't already tingling -- not look at the URL and wonder why the domain was www.missmissouri.org before they inputted sensitive financial information.

Here's the real one: http://www.royalbank.ca/ ... er, I think it's  the real one. :)

No second chance for Stephen Colbert at the next White House Correspondents Association dinner in April after his skewering of Dubya at the 2006 one.

Instead, the dinner will be going with Rich Little (?!?!) as the featured entertainer -- thus ending rumours of Mr. Little's demise.

Here's a news release about the 2006 dinner. Methinks they buried the lede. :)

I would link to video of the performance on YouTube, but I found this nasty message on the page:

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

However, Google Video has it.

The Washington Post's Dan Milbanks wrote a column earlier this month wondering what journalist would be invited to speak at Dubya's funeral when that time comes. Oddly enough, Colbert's name never came up. :)

You know how to make a vacuum cleaner last 20 years? Don't use it very much.

From NYT columnist David Pogue's blog today, a riff on The Village People's YMCA. He's blasting the Recording Industry of America Association for using lawsuits to prosecute low-level music pirates:

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Help, I'm surrounded by jerks.

I did some shopping downtown today. When done, I walked up a certain major street on my way to College Street.

A middle-aged woman is on the street. Her facial expression screamed befuddlement.

"Excuse me. What street is this?" she asked as I passed by. "Yonge Street," I told her (more to the point, Yonge St. just south of Gerrard).

"I'm looking for the Delta Chelsea Hotel," she said.

I pointed across the street. There it was, big as life.

She walked off without saying thanks, which had me thinking she might be a Torontonian after all. :)

There are at least four Democrat-sponsored bills on controlling greenhouse gas emissions currently before the U.S. Congress. According to this NYT article, at least one of them will likely become law.

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An excerpt from the NYT obituary:

During the Cold War he marched alongside missiles, tanks and troops in a May Day parade in East Berlin. Another time, he rented a chauffeured limousine to tour Eastern Europe. He wanted the people there to know, as he put it, alluding to his plump physique, what a “bloated, plutocratic capitalist really looked like.”

More often, though, he skewered targets closer to home. In the Watergate years he wrote about three men stranded in a sinking boat with a self-destructive President Richard M. Nixon. As the president hid food under his shirt, he bailed water into the vessel.

In the early 1960’s, Mr. Buchwald theorized that a shortage of Communists was imminent in the United States and that if the nation was not careful, the Communist Party would be made up almost entirely of F.B.I. informers.

“The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor,” his friend Ben Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post, said earlier this year, “but that he made you smile.”

It was an amiable brand of wit that sprung from a man who had been reared in foster homes and an orphan asylum and who had decided, when he was 6 or 7, that his life was so awful that he should make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them. He had at least two serious bouts of depression in his middle years and regarded himself as occasionally suicidal.

Here's a feature I did for CTV.ca on the damage done to Vancouver's Stanley Park by the horrible windstorms out there this fall and winter and some thoughts on planning the recovery.

A recently captured Taliban spokesman says that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban, is living in Quetta, Pakistan (a known Islamist snakepit) under the protection of that country's ISI security agency.

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