Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!: Books: Katharine DeBrecht,Jim Hummel - "This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland."
No, this is not a parody.

The Straight Dope: Nearly half the U.S. population believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old? Say it ain't so! - "How does the U.S. compare with other countries in terms of belief in evolution? Not so hot. A study of attitudes in 34 countries published in Science in 2006 shows that the United States ranks last in popular acceptance of evolution except for Turkey. Almost 40 percent of Americans in this study flatly rejected evolution, whereas the comparable numbers in European countries and Japan ranged from 7 to 15 percent. That may partly reflect U.S. high school kids' dismal math and science scores relative to other developed countries, which to my mind underscores a home truth: the more you know, the less you take on faith."

ARTS CONNECT 02/06 - "I did a bit of research to write this piece. I called several respondents – former students – and asked them what was the first thing that came to mind when they thought back to their days in NUS. I regret to say that not one spontaneously offered that it was the scintillating discussion on the partitioning of total sums of squares into orthogonal components. Their answers were invariably hanging out with friends. (I can almost see their eyes rolling heavenwards when they answered the question, as if to say, if this is not one of your trick questions, isn't the answer so very obvious?) Those were the best moments, they all chorused. It all seemed like yesterday, they all sighed. What sentimental twaddle, I said under my breadth."

YouTube - NUS Demo Against Tuition Fees - No, I'm not joking. This is a NUS demonstration against fee hikes.

Facebook | COMMUNIST, and proud of it! - "wo men gen shi dai jing xing. ok so i went to nanyang and i looked like a chump because i had to keep my hair short. but so bloody what! at least i shaved my armpits. long live castro! those who wish to be part of this group, please ensure that your underarms are free from stubble before you click "Join"."

Polish Exchange Student in US: My Half-Year of Hell With Christian Fundamentalists - "When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul."

Retired husband syndrome - "In Japan it is estimated that 60% of older women have a common problem - their husbands. Having spent years "married to their jobs", retired men are having an extraordinary effect on the health of their partners."

Bus air-con gives medics the chills - "The combination of fridge-like conditions on buses and the choking, hot roadside air is increasing the health risks for Hong Kong commuters, doctors and environmentalists have warned."

Bug 112848 - Does your grandmother know what POSTDATA is? - ""The page you are trying to view contains POSTDATA. If you resend the data, any action the form carried out (such as a search or online purchase) will be repeated. To resend the data, click Ok. Otherwise, click Cancel." That message is very confusing for normal people. Mr. End User & his dog, neither of whom can tell the difference between DNS and DSL, surely have never heard of POSTDATA."

Huggers end up in police custody - "Just 20 minutes after the free hugs campaign arrived on downtown East Nanjing Road on Saturday, 11 huggers and several journalists found themselves in a nearby police station. Their sign boards offering free hugs in both Chinese and English were confiscated. A middle-aged man who claimed to be the director of the station said public hugging was not right in a crowded place like Nanjing Road. He also said the organizers lacked the necessary certificate to hold an event in a public place. The director refused to give his name. The huggers were released after about an hour and told not to organize any more public group hugs."

Sir Elton: Ban organised religion - "Sir Elton John has said he would like to see all organised religion banned and accused it of trying to "turn hatred towards gay people". Organised religion lacked compassion and turned people into "hateful lemmings", he told the Observer."

smile for the camera by *bri-chan on deviantART - "SPARKLY PINK BACKGROUND OF DOOOOOOOOM! I got tired of seeing all the D*sney princesses in the same old boring princess-y poses. :XD: Sometimes they just need to let loose and go crazy."

New Zealand high-schoolers to use "text-speak" on national exams - "High school students in New Zealand will be able to use "text-speak" on this year's written national examinations if they so desire"

Morse code trumps SMS in head-to-head speed texting combat - "93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin' to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code."

The 19th-century critique of big philanthropy. - "About 120 years ago, when Andrew Carnegie declared in his "Gospel of Wealth" essays that he was going to give away his entire fortune and asserted that it was the duty of other rich men to give away theirs, his announcement provoked as much criticism as praise. Labor leaders condemned Carnegie for giving away money that did not rightfully belong to him. Prominent churchmen, including Methodist Bishop Hugh Price Hughes, characterized him as "an anti-Christian phenomenon, a social monstrosity, and a grave political peril."... "Millionaires at one end of the scale involved paupers at the other end, and even so excellent a man as Mr. Carnegie is too dear at that price," he argued. His point was well-taken. One doesn't have to a Socialist—and Bishop Hughes certainly was not —to wonder whether a more equitable distribution of wealth might be better for society than the idiosyncrasies of large-scale philanthropy... Carnegie responded in a speech in Pittsburgh that he kept wages low to remain competitive, and that even had it been possible for him to share some of his profits with his workers, it would have been neither "justifiable or wise" to do so. "Trifling sums given to each every week or month ... would be frittered away, nine times out of ten, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit; upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich nor poor." The lower the costs of labor, the higher the profits. Far better, in his view, to squeeze money from workers' paychecks, aggregate it, and give back to the community in the form of public libraries and concert halls."

Pay up or we'll send the eunuchs round: how city's tax dodgers are being shamed - "Frustrated with not being able to meet its annual target of revenue collection, city authorities have employed the incomparably colourful services of eunuchs to embarrass habitual defaulters into coughing up."

Fright | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation - "An extension for all practical jokers out there. I recommend you install it in all your friends profiles. Have fun and get a fright!"

pageaddict | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation - "PageAddict is a Firefox extension that will help you monitor your Internet addiction. Once you install it, it will display a summary of the time you've wasted on each web site for this day, and a graph of your web surfing habits from the past. You can categorise different sites and restrict how much time you spend in each category in a day."

Cinque Terre Utilty Page - "How to get to Guvano Beach. It's public property now that Guvano is a nudist beach. You can access the beach by about 20 minute walk through a cool, moist, and dimly-lit unused train tunnel, but I advise not to use it (you have to pay 5 euros per person: the price of this ticket is daylight robbery!) Otherwise, you can take the path from Corniglia to Vernazza; after about 15 minutes walk you'll find a plain on your left (see the picture below): maybe you can read "free beach" written on some stones on the ground."
Bloody hell.

Mr. Bland Goes to Washington - "When you go into the voting booth, you’re trying to decide whom to accept or whom to reject. Are you judging who the good candidate is or who the less bad candidate is? The effort by each side to coat the opposition in slime has made many of us cynical, giving us the sense that our task is to reject the worst, not select the best. Nobody’s any good, we think, but some are worse than others. Let’s keep those candidates out of office. Our job becomes one of denying, not awarding, office. What that means is that if you want to win an election, you need to find candidates like Parent A, who give us no reason to say no, rather than Parent B, who present a complex set of features, some attractive and some problematic."

The Engineer's Ring - "What is the Order of the Engineer? The Order is the roster of engineers in the United States who have participated in an Engineer's Ring Ceremony and who have publicly accepted the "Obligation of an Engineer.""
This is not a joke.

Method of exercising a cat (US5443036) - "A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct."

Infinite Loop: Users report MacBooks and MacBook Pros randomly shutting dow... - "Complaints from angry MacBook and MacBook Pro users about their computers "randomly" shutting down seem to have suddenly started flowing in by the somewhat freakish masses over the last several weeks on websites and discussion boards across the Internet, although the causes seem like they could be attributed to many different factors."
Mac - it just works.

Couple in khalwat raid may drop second home plan - "Retired American policeman Randal Barnhart, who was subjected to a 2am raid by religious enforcement officers, is reconsidering his plan to make Malaysia his second home."