Entries from July 2007The Posts You Asked For

Why are all these Fox News ads appearing here? Does Google think I want to look at Bill O’Reilly’s face? (I don’t, unless it’s in a coffin.)
Of course, mentioning him here will probably cause even more ads to appear, gendering more snide comments from Yours Truly, causing more ads… it’s like a sick game of [...]

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So apparently Chief Justice John Roberts could officially be said to have epilepsy. That means he’ll need to weigh the possibility of more seizures against the side effects of anti-epilepsy drugs. Those include, apparently, “irritability, mental slowing and forgetfulness.” I don’t see the problem. He’s a Bush appointee, so would anyone know the difference?

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The NAACP has weighed in on Michael Vick:
R.L. White, president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the Atlanta Falcons quarterback has been vilified by animal rights groups, talk radio and the news media and prematurely punished by his team and corporate sponsors.
“If Mr. Vick is guilty, [...]

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Read the whole story at Snopes.
Money quote: “I saw that his leg was completely open. It was ripped open. You could see everything inside. And so we knew we had a problem…”

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If you’re a woman in the habit of giving away your magazines when you’re done reading them, especially to your officemates, there’s something you should think about:
If you dog-eared an article about how to overcome your problem having orgasms, it’s probably a good idea not to include that issue with those you give away. That [...]

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One of the annoying things about Windows Vista (and there are plenty) is that every now and then I’ll run into a file that doesn’t want to to be deleted. Vista tells me I need permission to do that. As I am a god on my computer — all right, an Administrator — I shouldn’t [...]

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I got a press release the other day, “Congressional support builds for publicly funded research.” And it’s about time. The scientific-journals market is a huge scam being paid for by taxpayers, while the publishers laugh, to be cliché, all the way to the bank.
And bank it they do.
Here’s how it works. Scientists get grant [...]

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I’ve been experimenting with and reading up on the idea of embedding news and info from other sources into a site (not necessarily this one, but a site in general). The idea is that I could make a mini Google News of sorts by pulling in links to specific content.
I’m able to do that thanks to [...]

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I was thinking about newspapers.
I’ve written before that they are incredibly profitable businesses — in the top three or five market sectors in the world, right up there with pharmaceuticals, with an average profit margin of about 20 percent.
That’s huge; petroleum companies (your ExxonMobils and the like) have single-digit profit margins. They [...]

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I’m messing around with the blog’s database structure, so things might come and go for a bit. Not that you care, but just in case you see something disappear and reappear, you’ll know why.
Much more to come, of course.

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Lorie Byrd is, well, sad.
Writing on Examiner.com, she shares with us the tale of the site she’s created that will “keep track of questionable news stories.”
Amusingly, her column itself is full of glaring inaccuracies and hearsay. It’s yet another example of right-wing bloggers trying whatever tricks they can to expose the Evil Left-Wing Media — outright [...]

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If you ever want a laugh, you may know that Craigslist is a good place to go — just check out your city’s casual encounters section.
Along those lines, while looking for a local company called (I thought) VAMP, I stumbled upon the Vampire Meetups page for Roanoke.
Twenty-eight people have posted there looking to meet other… [...]

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“Early iPhone owners are overwhelmingly happy with their devices, a survey out Friday says….”
So begins a story in USA Today.
I’m not surprised. Not because the iPhone is a fine phone (ahead of the curve on interface, behind the curve on features), but because it’s an obvious conclusion.
When people spend a lot of money on something, [...]

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When I was in junior high, my friend Andy Needleman had a joke of sorts. He would ring your doorbell, and if you asked “Who is it?” he reply in a deep, guttural voice, “Avon lady.”
For a 12 year old, it was hilarious.
This came to mind when I got the following spam the other day, [...]

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I was thinking about overcrowded cities, and how a friend of mine, Ian Mackenzie, once commented that the only people who complain about the world being too crowded are people who live in crowded cities.
So I finally went and did the math.
Figure six billion people on Earth, and imagine them standing in a space three feet [...]

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There’s nothing quite like asking strangers, “Is five squares of toilet paper enough?” But I got to do just that for my story today on Kimberly-Clark’s new electronic toilet paper dispenser, which gives out five squares at a time.
According to a Kimberly-Clark study, bathroom visitors used 20 percent fewer squares “per event” with an electronic [...]

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…and other things I learned doing a story about keeping your car cool in the summer. My goal: Making the kind of story that we’ve all read before into something a little more fun and new.
Lemme know if I succeeded. :)
 

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“Unfortunately named authors.”

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Ladies and gents, meet Michael K. Brandow.
 
(Big hat tip to Gnomic!)
 
Update: The guy’s famous.
 
From Above the Law:
Michael K. Brandow, of the Chicago firm of Brady Connolly & Masuda, P.C., is an irresistable-force, immovable-object, Chuck-Norris-like-awesome worker’s compensation attorney. How does he do it? By sucking the life force out of his opponents and anyone else who [...]

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My story on combating mosquitoes with smarts and technology is on the front page of today’s Roanoke Times. I’m particularly proud of my lede:
Mosquitoes, like vampires, won’t go near running water.
That’s one thing to keep in mind as mosquito season gets in full swing.

The final graf is also pretty cool. I had a whole [...]

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