A topic mentioned briefly in some of my library school classes was the Infoshop- a storefront librarylike affair intended to be grassroots, revolutionary, and aimed at opressed persons. My impression was that they ended up being collections of “underground” magazines and newspapers that the opressed were no more interested in reading that they were before […]

The BBC’s discussion of Brian Wilson makes that Barenaked Ladies song make more sense.

Speaking of deadly and mysterious incidents, do you miss the terrible tragedies of Kent, WA? Sure! We all do! Well, catch up on your old hometown’s mayhem.

Yes, the “funny” aspect of this story is the killer lava lamp (actually a much less funny shard of glass through heart), but here are the elements that make it an FP story: 1. Kent, WA 2. Trailer home 3. the lamp was being heated on the stove for reasons unknown 4. “Police found no […]

Some time ago, I deactivated fpcraig at this domain, after entering it into a "remove me" page. The spam bots are still hitting it—my mail host bounced ten messages in the last month—but even more troubling than that is that my gmail account with that alias is getting spammed. I can only infer that eventually […]

If you live in a western state, you may, as of today, go to www.annualcreditreport.com to try to examine your credit report at any of the three major credit reporting agencies. So far, Experian’s server failed (the NSAPI plugin says "No backend server available for connection"), and both Transunion and Equifax have been "unable" to […]

Earlier, I was all sarcastic about some advice on protecting your child from syphilis by making sure that no visiting relatives have it. But in the 1920 book The care and feeding of children: a catechism for the use of mothers and children’s nurses, page 195: “Are there any valid objections to kissing infants? There […]

Another piece of spam caught my eye today, and a brief examination of its target link confirms that eMarketResearchGroup (or maybe eMarket Research Group) is indistinguishable from the Consumer Research Corporation. It’s unlikely you’ll get your free tv, and it most assuredly won’t be free by the time you get it.

Historic Australian travel posters!

Maybe I’m just a sap, but I enjoyed the near-poetry of this excerpt from yesterday‘s Cascade Range Volcano Update: Visibility is excellent and likely will remain so throughout the day. A steam plume is rising passively and drifting northward out of the crater. The plume occasionally contains minor ash, which falls out in the crater […]