Miniver Cheevy

Burning Man is this weekend. I'm not going this year. Many burners have already left San Francisco. There's a subtle thing that hap...

Teller, “the shorter, quieter half of Penn & Teller,” explains the Indian Rope Trick. Turns out there's no such thing. In 1890,...

The AK-47 is, unhappily, one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century. It can pour out its 30 round magazine in three seconds. It...

Good gods, I almost forgot. Laissez les bons temps rouler encore.

I see that the Daily Show has a new correspondent: Aasif Mandvi. He's a keeper.

Think you have nothing to live for? Via Dragonladyflame, I learn that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are gonna film Sweeny Todd. Really.

Gordon Lightfoot seemed sadder than any Canadian I had ever met. So speaks my colleague Scout in a story about a different celebrity, as ...

Here's an amusing thing to do. Make sure the sound on your computer is on, pay a visit to The League of Independent Satanists, then don...

Raed Jarrar has an unhappy encounter with airport security at JFK. You can't wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport....

So you've probably heard that the new season of Survivor will divide competitors into four tribes by race: White, Black, Asian, Hispan...

Via Neil Gaiman, I learn about “22 Comics Panels That Always Work,” by legendary comics artist Wally Wood. Three thoughts: If you h...

Via Warren Ellis, I learn that Bloody Foxtongue has figured something out about James Dobson's ministry / political organization Focus...

Chris Capel of Metablog has a good long post about “Why and how to debate charitably,” which offers several rules. Treat the person’s pos...

This morning I saw a young woman wearing suspenders dangling around her hips as a style choice. I last saw this in 1986, which may have be...

Via Geekologie, I learn of a Flickr collection of satirical versions of classic corporate logos, making fun of contemporary “Web2.0” fashi...

The article Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence ran in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1975. Dig the first sentence: ...

So is Pluto a planet, or what? Patrick Nielsen Hayden offers a brief guide to some of the best commentary on this profoundly important sub...

Funny ... if you're a science nerd. Otherwise, not so much. Follow through to the whole comment thread. And if you don't underst...

Apostropher is annoyed with the President's comments on Iraq. What does it take to qualify as a civil war? General Lee rising from his...

It looks like some changes to the source code of the Blog*spot version of my blog just spat a couple of dozen recent posts back out to the...

I know a bunch of folks who practice Anderson Feri Witchcraft. Without attempting a long description of Feri that will only reveal the mu...

Some Kind of Wonderful was John Hughes' last teen fairytale movie. I saw it on the big screen when I was in high school, holding han...

The internet really is making everything run faster. It took the Rocky Horror Picture Show decades to develop a complete audience participa...

The Brick Testament adapts scenes from the Bible to Lego dioramas. I had thought that it was mostly a silly matter of making witty or impr...

As usual, Bruce Schneier is thinking clearly about security. None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11—no-fly lis...

The Transportation Safety Advisory warns us about the new security precautions. Beverages purchased in the boarding area beyond the screen...

You know I don't pass along a lot of silly little videos, but this one is so peculiar I feel I must pass it on. Via Ogged at Unfogged, ...

Mark A R Kleiman sums up the geopolitical costs of quagmire nicely. A successful occupation of Iraq leading to the installation of a power...

One of my most prized books is The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3 , edited by Terry Carr, published in 1974. It's a good collec...

Many of my readers are probably familiar with the ideas in George Lakoff's book Moral Politics. Lakoff suggests that there are two mode...