arbitraryaardvark

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• Commented on Jim Flora 2010 hand-printed calendars
  i was walking around knoxville, passed that shop,and had to go in and gawk at this guy's distinctive art style....
• Commented on XKCD on Linux users' faith
  Title text: Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm....
• Commented on Banned Books Week and "most challenged titles" of 2008!
  False claims of censorship annoy me. Whether to include a book in a class reading list or even a library is a matter of editing, not of banning. Real censorship is a real problem. Maybe there's a problem about which...
• Commented on The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
  "the have engaging pots" I stumbled onto a blog today of a hanabarberra cartoonist, http://powsley.blogspot.com/....
• Commented on Mouse nesting in ATM
  "He was evicted from his nest but set free outside the station." Generally you have to take a mouse 5 miles away, or they'll just move right back in where they were....
• Commented on Anthropological images from the Belgian Congo, ca. 1900
  Mark Twain wrote a book about King Leopold and the Congo. Here it is http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html...
• Commented on Baby pictures in lost wallets increase the chance they will be returned
  I wonder if they refunded the postage for the samaritans. Meanwhile, I'm off to rent a baby....
• Commented on Supreme Court declares strip search of 13-year-old student unconstitutional
  here's the opinion http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-479.ZS.html of note, the school officals got off scott free, qualified immunity. it now goes back to a lower court to decide if the district has to pay damages. (so it'll settle.)...
• Commented on The Pyramid of North Dakota
  http://www.indypyramids.com/ as seen in "rock and roll starship II"...
• Commented on Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed
  [David Bernstein, June 22, 2009 at 12:56pm] Trackbacks Helping the Iranian Protestors: This seems like a good idea for Twitterphiles: Do you twitter? Change your twitter setting to GMT +3:30 (Tehran time) and your location to any city in Iran....
• Commented on The Marshallese in Arkansas and other unexpected diasporas
  #68 got here ahead of me. There are more Pitcairners on Norfolk Island than on Pitcairn. Norfolk considers itself an independent part of the British commonwealth, but Austrailia considers it Australian, so there's some tension. An interesting thing about Pitcairners...
• Commented on Wails and Murmurs: Eating Couscous at the Chi-Chi's in Walla-Walla
  On Pitcairn Island, everybody speaks English as their primary language, but they also know a unique dialect which, like their culture, is a blend of Anglo and Polynesian influences. It has lots of those tautonyms, which are apparently common in...
• Commented on Media Matters: O'Reilly falsely claimed he only "reported what groups" were calling Tiller
  As far as I can tell,, what OReilly is saying is that he didn't originate the term baby killer, but was using a term already being used by Tiller's opponents. That's probably an accurate statement, not a lie. Quoting...
• Commented on Investing in litigation: beat the street by buying a share in someone's grievance against a big company
  The first time I ran for office in Indiana, one of my campaign signs was confiscated because it didn't have a "paid for by _" disclaimer. I sued, got the statute tossed out, collected $2,000, paid the donors to my...
• Commented on Jo Walton on THE SPACE MERCHANTS
  I don't like the cover. Pohl and Kornbluth were coauthors, but Pohl's name is splashed across the cover. Kornbluth died young, Pohl went on to be a big name as an author critic editor and now blogger. But it's a...
• Commented on Chess pieces made from nuts and bolts
  Joe Biden tells a story about being the shy poor kid invited to a big dance, but he didn't have cufflinks. So his mom got him some nuts and bolts to use, and told him, if teased about it,...
• Commented on Ganging up Ikea shelves for a striking, cheapass wall-o-books
  Nice, yes. Cheapass, no....
• Commented on Woman places 3 calls to 911 to complain about McNuggets incident
  The police report http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0303091mcnugget1.html doesn't tell us how long it took the cops to get there; calling back might have been reasonable depending how long it took. She didn't violate the statute she was cited for; it wasn't a...
• Commented on When is a free credit report not a free credit report? When it's from freecreditreport.com
  This scam advertises on many apparently legit web pages, such as yahoo. While their site explains that it isn't really free, the ads do not. The ads are lies, false advertising,and somebody should sue somebody until it stops. freecr.....
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: "The Unabomber Was Right"
  I read an obscure autobiography of a doctor in kalamazoo. He discusses how when ted was a baby, he got (i think it was rheumatic fever) and was hospitalized. When he came home from the hospital he was withdrawn...
• Commented on Suburban Japan: 1
  http://www.walgreens.com/happy/default.html our local drugstore was called happy harry's....
• Commented on Free MOO Card holder for Boing Boing readers
  That isn't what "free" means....
• Commented on Spraying hot water at -29.4C
  http://dekerivers.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/throw-a-cup-of-boiling-water-into-the-frigid-air/...
• Commented on Fast Forward 2: original sf from the cutting edge, including "True Names," a novella by Benjamin Rosenbaum and me!
  I think you mean "taut"....
• Commented on Mackerel economics in prison
  >6: soups Yup, at Marion County CCA ramen packages "soups" were the currency. They had these nissan chile ramens that have only recently become available outside. I'm a vegetarian and CCA wouldn't feed me, so bartering or playing chess for...
• Commented on The Ellsberg Paradox
  Instead of marbles, package contained Bobcat. Would not play again....
• Commented on New Brad Sucks CD: "Out of It"
  Brad is also the person behind www.stripcreator.com, an easy to use create your own comics site, where you can, for example, http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/AccentuateNegative/ make sarcastic gay Gabe comics, or keep an online diary like mine, http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/arbi...
• Commented on Fingerprint test reveals if owner has touched drugs, explosives, and poisons
  when i blogged about this thursday http://vark.blogspot.com/2008/08/mini-mass-spectrometer-from-small.html [blogspot.com] i put in a link to the company that makes the gadget (oops, company makes the spray, not the spectrometers.) http://www.prosolia.com/ [prosolia.com] The technology has numerous benign applications, like sniffing out cancer....
• Commented on Man shoots lawnmower
  Bubba hollered out, "Reckless, hell, I hit right where I was aimin'" One of the questions left unanswered in US v Miller (1939) was whether a sawed-off shotgun is protected by the 2nd Amendment. It got a bit cloudier in...
• Commented on Historical scenes in Etch A Sketch
  The hindenburg is universally known, maybe because like 9/11 it got live coverage. Less known is the wreck of the Shenandoah, America's first helium zeppelin. I happened to see a sign about it at a rest stop near where...