From Ananova:

Marijuana seized by police in Chicago last month turned out to be hay from a church Nativity scene.

Angela Gunn reminds me that it’s nearly Valentine’s Day. No, it’s not like that. She’s complaining about this year’s crop of Necco hearts.

There’s a lot to complain about, apparently. Necco says they sell 8 billion candy hearts between January 1 and Valentine’s Day. You want a customized message? You’d better like it a lot, because you’ll need to buy a whole production run: 3500 pounds of hearts. For that money, at least you get to specify up to 80 phrases (two lines of four characters, max, which is a little limiting, but not impossible), or about 43 pounds per phrase.

I think I’ll just get chocolate.

The U.S. Senate, in an inexplicable display of sense, yesterday killed funding for the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program. The TIA, you may recall, is a DARPA program that hoped to suck in every piece of electronic information about everyone in the world, then examine it to find evidence of terror plots.

This obvious invasion of Americans’ privacy — ignoring the technological obstacles — turned out to be too much for the Senate to swallow, the NYTimes reports (in a story by that “major-league asshole” Adam Clymer). From Clymer’s dispatch:

… research and development of the system would have to halt within 60 days of enactment of the bill unless the Defense Department submitted a detailed report about the program, including its costs, goals, impact on privacy and civil liberties and prospects for success in stopping terrorists. The research could also continue if President Bush certified to Congress that the report could not be provided or that a halt “would endanger the national security of the United States.”

The limits on deploying, or using, the system are stricter. While it could be used to support lawful military and foreign intelligence operations, it could not be used in this country until Congress had passed new legislation specifically authorizing its use.

The Wyden amendment also included a statement that Congress believed “the Total Information Awareness programs should not be used to develop technologies for use in conducting intelligence activities or law enforcement activities against United States persons without appropriate consultation with Congress or without clear adherence to principle to protect civil liberty and privacy.”

This all sounds well and good, but do recall that the TIA is headed by John Poindexter, a senior alumnus of the Iran-Contra affair. Iran-Contra, of course, is a textbook example of the Executive Branch doing something that Congress had explicity prohibited.

So while I applaud the Senate for its action, I don’t really believe that the TIA will be killed quite so easily.

OK, boys and girls. Here’s today’s comic book question:

Are the X-Men human or not? How about the Fantastic Four? Spiderman? Is exposure to gamma rays enough to cause expulsion from the race of Homo Sapiens?  Genetic mutation? Spider bite?

The question’s not from some fanboy bull session at a comixcon. No, it’s from the U.S. Court of International Trade, and there’s a fair amount of money attached. If the characters are human, their dolls — ahem, action figures — are dutiable at 12 percent. If they aren’t, the figures are dutiable at 6.8 percent.

The dispute gives legal weight to the great underlying question that Stan Lee understood underlies all Marvel Comics: at what point do exceptional people with exceptional powers stop being people and become freaks?

Poor Judge Barzilay, that she should have to decide questions of such emotional weight. Read her decision. (Hint: if you really want to cut to the chase, start reading at page 20 of 32.)

Isaac Asimov once said that the sound of science isn’t “Eureka.” It’s “That’s interesting…” Same’s true of journalism.

An article floated across my screen yesterday to the effect that T-Mobile is rolling out “wireless priority service” in 15 markets, as part of its contract with the federal goverment. WPS was described as “priority cell telephone service to national security and emergency service personnel during emergencies.”

That’s interesting. You mean there’s a system in place to prioritize telecommunications?

Actually, yes. Googling “wireless priority service” yields some very interesting documents. This one describes the service, which development of which was accellerated after September 11. To get priority attention on the T-Mobile system, one apparently needs to dial *272 before one’s call. However, this page indicates that either (a) you maybe shouldn’t know that, or (b) you maybe shouldn’t use it if you do know — unless you’re one of these people. (I can’t tell you whether any of this works. It’s not that I can’t tell you — it’s that I don’t know. Haven’t tried it.) If you’re looking for a secure GSM phone, anyway, look here. The system is live in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

There is a similar wireline program called GETS — Government Emergency Telecommunications Service. GETS does require prior registration, and those who are authorized to use the system get a wallet card with an access code. No, I’ve never seen one but I’ve heard of this. This is the first I’ve ever seen that raises the system beyond the realm of Urban Legend. According to this document, the access numbers involve the 710 area code. This document says  70,535 GETS PINs have been issued by year-end 2002.

This whole thing is administered by an office called the National Communications System, the mission of which is:

Assist the President, the National Security Council, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in (1) the exercise of the telecommunications functions and responsibilities, and (2) the coordination of the planning for and provision for national security and emergency preparedness communications for the Federal government under all circumstances, including crisis or emergency, attack, recovery and reconstitution.

Poking around these links, like so much of the Net, is edifying. And a little scary.

Jose Luis Betancourt hit the Texas Lotto before Christmas. Won $7.5 million. But if Texas works like a lot of other states, that’s before taxes and payable over something like 20 years. The cash value today — what the Lottery Commission would cut a check for — was probably something south of $2 million. Not bad. Not Bill Gates money, but a nice little grubstake.

So, the federal government says, Jose Luis Betancourt went out and bought some cocaine. About 3.5 pounds of it. The feds found it hidden in his dishwasher and pantry. Presumably he was out to sell the stuff — at a profit — because that’s more cocaine than one would normally consume at one sitting, even for a big party.

Betancourt was found to be a flight risk, and is being held without bail.

Researchers find that a cloned cat hardly acts or looks like its “parent.” (Gotta love the name of the second generation kitty….)

The body of Ted Williams, the BoSox slugger, is on ice someplace in Arizona. Why? One guess is that his son hopes that Teddy Baseball can be cloned at some indeterminate time in the future. Too bad that there’s no indication that the clone will be able to hit a curve any better than the son could.

(And what about Walt Disney? What happens when they thaw out old Walt? Will the clock start running again on all those Mickey Mouse copyrights that Congress has been so assiduously protecting?)

Bright story in the NYTimes about inspired penguins in SanFran:

Penguin experts are a bit mystified as to why the arrival of six strong swimmers would prompt 46 other penguins suddenly to spend their days underwater spinning around each other like an errant, tuxedoed rinse cycle.

Let me get this straight: Fox is going to test our intelligence? CBS would be one thing, but Fox? The network that brought us “Married with Children” and the Fox News Channel? (Sunday nights is an aberration. What with the “The Simpsons,” someone outside the network must be programming Sundays.)

Could be worse, I suppose. Could be MTV or the WB…

The usually fine AtNewYork newsletter has an odd item today. Seems that AOL’s news server has been screwed up for a week, with the result that Usenet posts from AOL members have not been propagating to the Net. Here’s how they blurbed it: