Willie Nelson drives a Mercedes. And instead of using that super duper high-octane stuff at the pump, he uses an alternative fuel. Namely, used french fry oil. He’s even marketing the stuff, and it has a brand name, too: BioWillie.

BioWillie is a type of biodiesel, a fuel that can be made from any number of crops and run in a normal diesel engine. If it sounds like a joke, a number of businesses, as well as city and state and county governments, have been switching their transportation fleets to biodiesel blends over the last year. The rationale is that it is a domestic fuel that can provide profit to farmers and that it will help the environment, though environmentalists are not universally enthusiastic about it.

“I knew we needed to have something that would keep us from being so dependent on foreign oil, and when I heard about biodiesel, a light come on, and I said, ‘Hey, here’s the future for the farmers, the future for the environment, the future for the truckers,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview this month. “It seems like that’s good for the whole world if we can start growing our own fuel instead of starting wars over it.”

Biodiesel sounds great! Imagine: instead of filling your tank at $2.20 a gallon (or whatever high price the oil companies want to charge today), you can pull into the back of your favorite McDonald’s, White Castle or MexiFry, and load up on Fryer Vat Leavins. Don’t restaruants normally have to pay some waste disposal company to cart off all the cooking oil they’ve used at the end of the day? You would think they’d LOVE to let someone load up their VW bug or other Diesel machine for free.

Actually, it looks like someone has already beaten me (and Willy) to the Fryer Vat Leavins idea.

Lesson #1: If you visit relatives you haven’t seen in almost two decades, and your sweet dear grandmother says something like “I’m sorry your grandfather and uncle aren’t here, but they just went to the emergency room because they’ve been suffering from this horrible cold…” then you should immediately do the following:

1. Peel off your skin, and incinerate it immediately.

2. Soak the remainder of your body in a vat of chlorine bleach for 1 hour to disinfect, and

3. Drain the vat, fill it with pure Lysol, and soak in that for one more hour to finish disinfecting.

If you don’t do this (you poor, poor bastard) then the remaining lessons you’re about to learn are going to be, well, a bit unpleasant.

Lesson #2: Three days of sleep deprivation caused by the symptoms of the uber-cold you experience as a result of not heeding the warnings of Lesson #1 are so much fun. This won’t be a wimpy avian flu thing, no sir! What you will experience is a full-blown upper respiratory extravanganza. You won’t have time to sleep when your body is demanding to cough, sneeze, refuse the clear fluids you try to ingest and expel as many fluids as possible, all simultaneously, 24/7.

Sleep deprivation due to illness really does do wonders to your attitude, outlook on life, and psyche. And it makes you such a joy to be around, too! Especially during the holidays. Only a skinless, Clorox-and-Lysol-bathed You will be far more personable and approachable.

Lesson #3: Drug makers love acetaminophen. If they could put it in candy and sell it to kids on the street, they would. And they sure as hell throw it into every conceivable cold remedy you can buy. Therefore, if you want to experience any relief from your cold whatsoever, be resigned to the fact that you will unintentionally overdose on this drug, even if you had no intentions whatsoever of taking acetaminophen at all. The only way to avoid it is to simply follow the decontamination procedure outlined in Lesson1, or suffer the symptoms of your uber-cold. I assure you that you will wish you had picked decontamination.

Lesson #4: If you’re sick, just don’t fly. No really, don’t, even if it’s the only way to get back home. And I’m not saying this because flying while ill with a contagious uber-cold is inconsiderate and will likely spread the same cold to everyone on the flight (au contraire, you will be feeling so miserable by now that you’ll consider 100+ people being forced to experience your misery in the near future a bonus). No, I’m saying this because Airplane Ear is by far the most excruciating, insanity-causing, agonizing pain you will ever experience. It will make any misery you’ve experienced thus far seem like a walk in the park… assuming the pain allows you to remember what a walk in the park entails. Seriously, you WILL want to stab knives into your ears and carve them out of your head, and if you happen to catch brain matter too, well, so much the better.

And that’s only the ascent portion of the flight. The descent portion, now, that’s where the fun begins. You know how every so often, someone will mysteriously go bezerk during a flight in an “air rage” incident, and an air marshall will be forced to gun them down? I swear, the real cause of all of these incidents has to be the severe, insanity-causing pain of Airplane Ear. Especially since airline pilots like to spend a good hour descending their planes, bringing them down eeeever so slowly and gently, causing you to scream in agony as you feel every millimeter of cabin pressure change.

And don’t assume the fun stops there! You’ll still have lingering hearing loss and ear pressure issues you’ll have to deal with once you’ve managed to finally kill the pain. You will know how entertaining it is for a doctor to look into your ears, startle, and then have to scream at the top of his lungs “SIR, IT LOOKS LIKE YOU BURST SOME CAPILLARIES AND BLED INTO YOUR INNER EAR!!” while you hear nothing and the ringing in your ears drives you crazy.

Fortunately, if you actually survive the ordeal and make it to the ground, you can go into any airport gift shop and easily overdose on acetaminophen (see Lesson #3). The loss of hearing should subside in a week or two, and giant horsepills you have to take to try and force a reset of your ear pressure (I’ll take photos as soon as I can) are mildly amusing.

The Most Important Lesson of All: All you had to do to avoid this was burn your skin and bathe in caustic chemicals. But nooo, you had to do this the hard way, didnt’t you?

So, after the big blowup over international calls being intercepted by the NSA without a warrant, there’s now word that due to a convenient “technical glitch,” the NSA happened to intercept a number of purely domestic phone calls as well. Whoops.

The officials say the National Security Agency’s interception of a few communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact international.

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the NSA to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cell phone call or sending an e-mail. As a result, people that NSA may think are outside the United States can actually be on U.S. soil.

I don’t buy this explanation. It seems to me that it’s very easy to determine whether a call is domestic or international, based solely on what number was dialed. Any dialing sequence from a US location that begins with ‘011’ or ‘+’ is a pretty obvious indicator that an international call is about to take place, don’t you think? And wireless companies could very easily determine whether a call is staying in the US, or whether the recipient is globally roaming. Besides, it is generally the policy of most wireless carries to disable international calls and global roaming unless a customer specifically requests it.

But then, why is all this blowing up now? Have we already forgotten about the NSA’s alleged Echelon project?

I also love Bush’s feeble attempt to resurrect the old and feeble “if you [don’t] do x, then the terrorists win” argument. Because if we talk about how the Bush administration is openly violating the law, then the terrorists win. Lovely.

So this may be it, ‘Berry addicts. After all the courtroom battles and patent disputes and appeals, RIM’s Blackberry network may actually be on the ropes relatively soon, thanks to a tiny company whose sole business is trying to squeeze money off a patent from a deceased developer.

The latest word is that a last-ditch meeting between the two sides yielded no progress:

Late last week NTP, the company who’s suit threatens to shut down Research In Motion’s popular BlackBerry service, made a settlement offer to RIM in the form of a 5.7% royalty on future RIM BlackBerry sales until 2012. Merrill Lynch valued such a deal at US$900 million. RIM rejected the offer and countered with an offer of their own that NTP felt was unacceptable. After this last round of talks failed, it now appears that the companies are no longer negotiating.

All that’s left is a potential injuction that could be imposed by the courts, effectively ending the Blackberry service in its current form.

The interesting thing is that RIM swears that it has a workaround that can be implemented in the event an injunction is enforced. However, RIM is tight lipped about the details, and the question that has been burning for a long time is: if the fix exists, why not just implement it right now?

The New York Times has more (registration required).

So, instead of a “Red Star,” which evidently would have been too provocative, Israel enters the international humanitarian effort with the Red Crystal.

My question is, why is humanitarian aid made inherently exclusive by sectarian interests? Who was the genius who came up with that idea?