Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Miscellaneous

Damn

Published April 4, 2017 9:28 am by Claire

I wandered about town yesterday paying bills. Thanks to property taxes, doctor bills and such, I spent in one day more than double what I spent in March’s entire Month of Frugality. But thanks to a friendly conspiracy of blog readers and mysterious others, I’m still staying ahead on everything and even gathering money for summer’s icon-painting class. During my stop at the lumberyard (where I am a seasonal regular and where one of the managers is the great grandson of the incompetent drunken bootlegger and fugitive from federal “justice” who built my house), the guys informed me that Handyman…

Continue readingDamn
15 Comments

Tuesday links

Published April 4, 2017 8:58 am by Claire
  • Will Obamacare really require Dominos Pizza franchises to post calorie counts for 34 million potential variations of pizza? Kevin D. Williamson examines the profit-killing absurdities.
  • Yet another court justifies yet another literally unwarranted shooting-by-cop. Hershel Smith turns up the outrage.
  • More on Tim Berners-Lee’s plan to re-create his monster creation, the worldwide web. He wants to return its power to the people.
    Continue readingTuesday links
    5 Comments

    • Weekend links

    Published April 2, 2017 1:07 pm by Claire
  • Sloppy science. It wastes billions, produces non-reproduceable results, and sometimes kills people.
  • Well. Elio Motors may not yet actually have a product to sell. But this is still a pretty cool map of where their registration holders are.
  • Am I following this correctly? The DoJ drops two kiddie-porn charges rather than having classified material brought out in court. Said classified material already being publicly available thanks to WikiLeaks.
    Continue readingWeekend links
    6 Comments

    • Midweek links

    Published March 28, 2017 1:50 pm by Claire
  • A civil rights lawsuit is in the works against warrantless searches of laptops and cellphones. According to the article there were as many such searches last month as there were in all of 2015.
  • You might think it would be a waste of money for the National Park Service to spend $150,000 on Bigfoot research. But rest assured the money isn’t entirely wasted. It’s also covering research on sea monsters and mysterious lights.
  • This demonstrates exactly how dumb “smart” appliances are. A brand-new dishwasher with a security bug that was the hottest new thing … 20 years ago.
    Continue readingMidweek links
    6 Comments

    • Weekend links

    Published March 26, 2017 2:42 pm by Claire
  • Thanks to a link Shel dropped into comments on my “Theda’s Kin” post, I fell down a rabbit hole of the brain’s striking ability to make accurage snap judgments. Here’s a short version of what Shel was getting at: how we can tell criminals from non-criminals with only their faces to go by. And similar accuracy turns out to apply with our “gaydar,” “mordar,” etc. (What’s mordar, you may ask? Why, it’s our unusual ability to quickly recognize Mormoms, even when they’re not walking up to our doors wearing suits and ID badges.)
  • But then, sometimes, as in this short story, identity is a trickier matter. (H/T. MJR)
    Continue readingWeekend links
    18 Comments

    • Friday links

    Published March 24, 2017 10:30 am by Claire
  • Utah adopts the nation’s lowest blood-alcohol limit for DUIs. This affects gun owners, too. And may soon infect many more states, as the NTSB recommends the (absurd) limit. Do I smell a government looking for more opportunities to make money by creating new offenders?
  • How the fedgov made health care more expensive and made heroin cheaper.
  • Flash story: “The High Cost of Contact.” Favors delivered by force do tend to be expensive. (H/T MJR)
    Continue readingFriday links
    8 Comments

    • Yet another “build it in a day” tiny house (with a difference)

    Published March 23, 2017 7:28 pm by Claire

    Yes, yes. We’ve all seen plenty of those tiny-house, build-it-in-a-day (as long as you don’t consider permits, site prep, plumbing, electricity and probably half the other things that go into building a house) miracle structures that are going to solve all urban woes/disaster aftermaths/third-world housing needs. But this one’s different. Aside from being roundish, it’s 3D-printed on site. Is that cool, or what? The video explains. The video also starts out obnoxiously like a corporate promo ca. 1988 (and I should know because back then I wrote a bunch of the things). But eventually it shows how the house “grows.”…

    Continue readingYet another “build it in a day” tiny house (with a difference)
    2 Comments