A bit deeper mystery than the origins of "All your base are belong to us", publishers, web developers, typesetters, and other creativs all over hte world use the same text as 'dummy copy.'

In last week's Straight Dope, Cecil Adams uncovers the truth about the text's origins.

(thanks Jason!)

Okay, I don't profess to be an expert in politics, but then you shouldn't have to be to understand the basics of our government.

Here's what I don't get: As I understand it the very concept of a pardon is simply a president's (or governor's) right to make individual exceptions to the carrying out of laws against specific people, for whatever reasons they deem appropriate. The idea being that the framers and future lawmakers couldn't come up with every possible consequence of their actions, and there had to be a safety valve at the top where one person could simply say "this application of the law is wrong" even if the law itself doesn't allow for leeway (like the guy who got life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza on federal grounds, technically his third felony).

So how do either the legislative or judicial branches have the right to turn around and say "well, you can't pardon him"? The presidential pardon is an oversight authority for the judicial system. How can the judicial system then turn around and claim to be an oversight authority on presidential pardons?

What's the point, and where's the line? By definition anyone being pardoned is someone either convicted of a crime or wanted for a crime. How can any branch of the government look at a potential pardon and say "you can free that one and that one, but not that one"? By definition they've already passed a guilty verdict or an indictment on every person who could potentially get a pardon. Isn't that as far as they can go? If nothing else, attempting to overthrow a pardon could be seen as a form of double jeopardy, specifically forbidden in the bill of rights.

Ah, what do I know? I'm still miffed that the guy who sells bumper stickers downstairs from my apartment is still proudly hawking "Bush and Gore make me want to Ralph" and "Why vote for the lesser of two evils? Vote Green!" bumper stickers right next to "Bush stole the presidency" stickers, apparently oblivious to the contradictions...

I don't know if they have any Johnny Rockets where you are, but just to get you on the right page, it's a mock-50s diner, with sparlky vinyl stools, soda jerks, chili fries and nickel jukeboxes.

After interviewing at Yahoo on Tuesday, I went to San Jose's Tech Museum (5 minutes before they closed) and went to Johnny Rockets to grab a bite before meeting up with Rick and Ammy.

Drinking my vanilla malt and eating my fries, I was thinking about how these places, like so many movies (like Back to the Future and the Wonders), paint a picture of the idealistic 40s and 50s, just like those and later decades presented an idealistic year 2000 (Jetsons and Tomorrowland), when "That Thing You Do" came on over the jukebox.

It just pushed the level of fiction over the top. As if it wasn't good enough to make a living diarama of a 50s burger joint, they had to use fictional retro 60s songs to complete the effect!

Then I spent the last half of my meal listening to one of the waiters trying to teach the other about multiplying a negative number by a positive, and why the answer is always negative, and I felt firmly back in the present...

Continuing on the 'All your base' thread of the past few days, James sent me a great pic of Wean Hall on the Carnegie Mellon campus:

The word is spreading...

I read this great story in the Chronicle today.

This guy, returning to Portand from Mexico by way of San Francisco, was trying to smuggle a gun on board the plane by having it encased within a block of cheese. The kicker? Well, you can read the quote:

---

Security officers told police that they had run Gonzalez's bag through an X- ray machine and seen what looked like the image of a gun. They had frozen the machine with the bag still inside. Police said they asked Gonzalez whether there was a metal object inside.

"Nothing," Gonzalez said, according to police. Then, under further questioning, he allegedly said: "Ooooooooh, I forgot, it's a little .22 in the cheese."

---

I understand. Sometimes I forget where I left my Palm V, I guess it's reasonable he forgot he packed his pistol in the cheese...

So AOLiza is a finalist in the SXSW interactive competition, and in addition to the division awards, there's a people's choice award. Visitors are allowed to vote once a day for their favorite site. Check out the finalists, and if you think AOLiza's worthy, well, vote early and vote often! Tell your friends!

Thanks!

Do you ever have that feeling that there's a studio audience watching your every move, with their own opinions, only they don't know what's going on inside your head?

No?

Okay, it's just me then.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Yes, "All your base are blong to us" is a quote from Zero-Wing, a Japanese game for the Sega Genesis that was rushed through localization, apparently translated by one of the coders who was taking a night class in English.

The whole thing had been pretty much dormant for a few years until a huge thread started up on Tribalwar.com, with a lot of the graphic that ended up being incorporated into the flash movie linked to earlier (now on my site because of bandwidth limits on its other host).

Thanks for the help to all those who wrote in! I got about 12 emails all with the subject: "all your base are belong to us" which is just about as amusing as the rest of it.

Maybe this is just a matter of underspecification, but I'm afraid to click on the 'video' link on the front page of SFGate.com without knowing what I'm getting.

You know, the weird thing about word of mouth media explosions is that only a relatively small number of people actually witnessed the sparking incident. When "WHASSSSSAAAAAAPPPP!!" was everywhere, it took a few weeks of beseiging before I actually asked anyone where the heck that came from.

I'm sure the "Not!" phenom was the same for lots of people. One week it's an SNL skit, the next it's the latest ideosynchracy of the American dialect... not.

So suddenly, in a dozen places in the last 48 hours, I come across references to

"All your base are belong to us."

Google searches come up with lots of leads, but they all use it as a descriptor of something else, never defining it or saying from whence this thing came. I can guess it was a mistranslation, either intentionally put in a TV show or game, or it was a mistake by someone in power. (Realize that if you don't know where it comes from, I sound interesting, and if you do, I sound stupid and clueless. That's exactly why the message travels so much further and faster than the meaning.)

So what's up with this one?