France seems to be seriously considering legalizing the peer-to-peer exchange of copyright-protected material. Wow. No doubt the day after it happens, Hollywood and the record labels will close up shop and we’ll never have another movie or record again.

I was expecting to see a whole bunch of different bingo options for Sunday night’s awards show, but a quick survey reveals only M&Ms and the St Cloud Times have made the effort. I’ll be printing the M&Ms versions later this weekend.

A whole bunch of writers miss the point: the problem is not "Islamism"; the problem is religious fundamentalism of any stripe, whether it’s bombing abortion clinics, referring to fellow believers as Nazis for having the audacity to pray at a holy site, or rioting because somebody made fun of your prophet. And the problem isn’t really even fundamentalism qua fundamentalism; the problem begins when the fundamentalists want anybody outside their clique to have to live by their rules. The Amish, as far as I know, haven’t ever taken to the streets busting heads in response to their culture being misrepresented or treated with a lack of respect.

Some canned beans are being recalled after the discovery of a bird head. As with coughing up roofing nails, this sort of thing happens more than you might think…

Religious fundamentalists in Indonesia have succeeded in getting an artist and his models arrested, even before they’ve gotten their desired anti-porn bill passed into law. Religious fundamentalists here already use "pornography" and "obscenity" interchangeably, implying that porn is not constitutionally protected. I’m interested to note that virtually all the coverage I’ve seen of this issue is from the Australian press, even though the pressure in Indonesia is from the same factions that are so upset about those cartoons.

For no particular reason, here’s some Mark Twain for your reading pleasure, courtesy of Project Gutenberg (bless ’em!).

MY WATCH–[Written about 1870.]

AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE

Continue reading →

Via Lifehacker, the 4INFO Mobile Search service gives us yet another way to waste time (and money, for those of us who have to pay for messaging) with our cellphones. Want to know what the weather’s like where you are (may be limited to US locations)? Text “w [zip or city]” to 44636 and get back current conditions and forecast. The most useful other services I saw were airline flight and FedEx/UPS tracking. You can also set up alerts at their web site.

At least the tards got reassigned (fired would have been better, but they are government jobs, after all) in this story of raid caps gone to the head.

They’re really controversy-averse, but if you can find something that couldn’t possibly offend anyone, or infringe on anybody’s publicity rights (among lots of other restrictions), you could get it printed on M&Ms.

An item from the FDA announcing more stringent requirements for foods being labeled “whole grain” explains why so many foods were whole grain for a while there, since it was good for you and did not yet have a legal meaning. Back to eating oat hulls and wheat chaff for breakfast, I guess.