The city of Seattle (WA) has decided not to use salt or other chemicals in clearing ice and snow from roads, with predictable results: To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets. But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s […]
Courtesy of Ace of Spades comes the most reviled, most wretched “holiday special” ever produced. First, here’s the Vanity Fair article to give you the entire ugly background: In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy […]
[Cross-posted from Adventures in Mormonism] Sandra and I, being empty-nesters, eat pretty simply: fresh fruit and veggies, Progresso soup, sandwiches, Lean Cuisine entrees, and the like. The only time either of us really cooks something is when we have company over for dinner. Well, our daughter Heather, her husband Mike and their three young children […]
The New York Times has an outstanding and lengthy article tracing the rise of the Madoff investment firm that, in the end, turned out to be (in Madoff’s own words) a $50 billion Ponzi scheme: The juggernaut began to sputter this fall as investors, rattled by the financial crisis and reaching for cash, started taking […]
Courtesy of The Daily Bayonet, who got it from Jammie Wearing Fool: Heh. UPDATE: And here, courtesy of Dave Barry, is striking scientific proof that white people — particularly Southern white people — are inherently rhythmically challenged: ..bruce w..
One of the proudest accomplishments of my adult professional life is that I actually supported myself and my family for a few years solely by writing. That was back in the late 1980s, when it wasn’t quite as easy as it had been in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. However, it was much easier to […]
No, I’m not talking about the current economic meltdown. It turns out that Bavaria has some interesting Christmas customs: The gallery of Bavarian Christmas photos explains: The troll-like Perchten or Krampus emerge when it gets dark. The gnarled and gruesome figures stomp through the Christmas markets of Bavaria, scaring children and sometimes even give women […]
For those of you who missed it, in this downward spiral we are now enduring, the amount of leverage (read, debt) is directly related to how fast your bank is going to go under. Now from a blog named Infectious Greed, comes this chart extracted from a Bank of Canada report: So according to the […]
I’m trying to figure out where I ran across the link for this report (PDF, 3.7 MB); it was sometime in the past few weeks and was most likely from one of the science blogs I review daily, but I just can’t remember where. The report (“A Review of Criticality Accidents”) details sixty (60) criticality […]
