Perhaps I am being pedantic, but the myriad of home financing issues that are being lumped under sub-prime is driving me nuts.

"...crappy, formerly overpriced sub-prime housing..."

The housing may or may not be a prime piece of property and therefore, you could call it sub-prime.

But that is not the "sub-prime crisis," which relates to the extremely generous terms, lack of down payment and waived income documentation requirements for borrowers with less than prime credit, i.e. sub-prime borrowers. Naturally, a higher than normal percentage of these have defaulted.

The current real estate market, foreclosure rates and credit crunch issue is a more diverse and complex set of issues.

With great relief, I can state that Hamster's Lunch Paypal purchasing is now back in effect. I apologize for any consternation this disruption may have caused.

Elvis, you make a compelling case.

Oh, it is more hilarious than you realize. That diminutive Darth Vader is Steve's son.

Re: Fujichia and hbml junk store
Junkiest junk store is a title I will gladly forgo. You win! Game over.

Re: Jodi
Hamster's Lunch back in stock! Allow tea time rice cracker nibbling to continue.

Re: Spatula
Thank you for the business! I also call it a spatula or pancake flipper.

Re: Rental Bikes
Unfortunately, our bicycle shop insurance does not extend to rentals. Buy a bike! Enjoy it! Sell it back to us a week later!

Thanks for the kind words re: Dispatch.

@#1: Many more dinosaur and robot references than I would have thought. I wanted to call it mastadons.com. I like the hand puppets on Dino Vs. Robot.

@#2: Two files: Yeah, it was a major pain in the neck. The original PDF was 12mb but the Yahoo/PDF portal can only handle files to 5mb. I had to reorder the pages and re-edit photos to get it to size. I should have zipped it originally.

Mediafire: I have used Mediafire before without issue. No pop-unders on my Mac. Mark called and suggested archive.org, which was a much better idea. It is there now and zipped.

@#3: Being ignorant, being tracked, etc: As I stated in the post, you can choose to disable the ads in Acrobat. Or, you can avoid ads altogether by using any other PDF reader.

@#4: Help, blog club: And your help we want! The blog isn't live yet. Real soon now.

@#10: Tacky file sharing: I am twice as tacky as Mediafire. I am lucky they would have somebody as tacky as me. Luckily, archive.org has similarly low standards. Now hosted there:

http://www.archive.org/details/DinosaursAndRobotsDispatchVolume1