With a bit of last-minute help from Eaton I pushed my new cck_taxonomy module out the door. It is very similar to the Content Taxonomy module, and might be a totally duplicated effort, but that module has some subtle bugs and is big and I couldn't be bothered to understand the code, so I wrote my own, and learned a ton along the way.

What does it do? For every taxonomy vocabulary (except freetagging... that's coming later), you now have a new field type to add to content types. So on my site that I'm building I have an Instrument vocabulary (horn, violin, tuba....), and when I go to "add field" I can add an Instrument field. But I can rename it, and I can add more than one if I want. Plus I can override some of the configuration from the vocabulary (required and description), so they can be individualized.

Lately, visiting Drupal.org has been a painful experience, with horrendous load times and frequent timeout related errors. As of today, the site feels zippy again, yay! What made the difference? New hardware? Extra memory? New exotic caching? Nope. The optimization of one query, the one that returns the "recent posts" is to thank. And who came through with this miracle elixir? David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios (who paid him to work on the problem all day!)

(Thanks also go to dww, webchick, killes, FiReaNG3L, pwolanin and a bunch of others. It was a team effort in the end.)

When and why did we start allowing the police and military have so much power that they regularly get away with torture?

“Let me tell you what we're gonna do,” explained Franklin, the moral tutor to Campbell County's youth, as Siler – who had already been beaten once – cringed in terror. “We're gonna put them handcuffs in front of ya. Cut you a little slack. But if you don't start operating [sic], we're gonna put the motherf****rs behind your back, and I'm gonna take this slapjack and I'm gonna start working that head over, you understand?”

Officer David Webber elaborated on the plan: “We're gonna know everything about your business today. And you're gonna take us and where you got your money, we're gonna take every dime you have today and if we don't walk out of here with every piece of dope you got and every dime you got, your f*****g a** is not going to make it to the jail.... We're doing this on our own, and you're gonna sign a consent to search form and you're gonna give us permission to be here and you're gonna do it our way, cause we're tired of f*****g with your a**.”

Make sure (if you can) to listen to the mp3 recording (transcript) of police beating and torturing a small-time drug dealer trying to coerce him into signing a form that would grant the officers beating him consent to search his home.