"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young." - Willa Cather

***

Excepting Mrs. Pentherby by Saki - "A woman will endure discomforts, and make sacrifices, and go without things to an heroic extent, but the one luxury she will not go without is her quarrels. No matter where she may be, or how transient her appearance on a scene, she will instal her feminine feuds as assuredly as a Frenchman would concoct soup in the waste of the Arctic regions. At the commencement of a sea voyage, before the male traveller knows half a dozen of his fellow passengers by sight, the average woman will have started a couple of enmities, and laid in material for one or two more -- provided, of course, that there are sufficient women aboard to permit quarrelling in the plural. If there's no one else she will quarrel with the stewardess."

The New York Review of Books: 'THE SINGAPORE WAY' - "Crucially, the claim of differential cultural identities also enables Asian establishments to reject the democratic ethos already present in modern Asian history—from the May Fourth movement in China to the nationalist, anti-colonial struggles in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—as an aberrant foreign importation. Such erasures of recent Asian history are especially useful in Singapore because the state there is itself the agent of a democratizing process—involving social and economic enfranchisement as well as the ballot box—that it also wishes to contain. The very success of Singapore's modernity has led the state to formulate a sanitized cultural inheritance to restrain its citizens from demanding rights and responsibilities beyond those already granted to achieve modernity. By misrepresenting, thus, political possibilities within Asian modernity as a choice between Eastern and Western cultural identities, the state can contain the threats to its power that its own success has generated."

Straight Dope Staff Report: How do gun silencers work?

Wanted: for crimes against common sense - "A Chief constable was accused of 'madness' last night after refusing to release pictures of two escaped murderers amid fears it might breach their human rights."

Blogger Gets 'Un-Cease-and-Desist' Note - ""Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody," wrote Ginsu Yoon, a lawyer for Second Life. "Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception."... A lawyer for the virtual world "Second Life" has responded to a parody with something that's quite different from the usual corporate cease-and-desist letter. Vancouver-based blogger Darren Barefoot had put up a one-page site, GetAFirstLife.com, that imitates the look of SecondLife.com but promotes a real-life existence where you can work, reproduce and perish -- all for free... With a link, Barefoot invited cease-and-desist letters, the type lawyers often send threatening lawsuits if a site doesn't pull down objectionable material."

Man gives finger to sheriff, crashes car - "Police said they arrested a South Charleston man for driving under the influence after he flipped his middle finger at Kanawha County Sheriff Mike Rutherford and then crashed his car... "He was looking directly at me, giving me the finger and just ran into the guardrail,""

Woman hospitalized after Trivial Pursuit game - "A 21-year-old woman was hospitalized for intoxication over the weekend after "continually providing wrong answers" during a game of Trivial Pursuit where participants drank alcohol and did drugs when they answered incorrectly."

Popagandhi » Dear SMU - "So when you stick me in this stupid conference room threatening not to recognize my internship until you’ve put me through a thorough brainwashing session full of business school jargon; like: pedagogy and elevator speech and being different and value-added. Like profit-maximizing and corporate innovation, your corporate spiel takes us nowhere. Fuck you for all the days you stuck me in a suit and heels (every presentation, and sometimes every other day), fuck you for all the times you tell me I’m going to be stuck in a low-end job because I’m studying something that “won’t make very much money”."

The PC vs Mac ads return - now from the PC’s perspective! - "We’ve all seen the PC vs Mac ads by Apple, there are plenty of them. But now it’s time for the PC to counterattack, with the help of director Laurie McGuinness, who created four small hilarious clips, with the same character personalities (the PC being older, “boring”, and the Mac being younger and cooler), but this time the Mac doesn’t get the spotlight. What I liked about the clips is that they’re not made in order to harm the Mac, and they don’t deny the qualities portraied in the Mac ads, but they observe the PC’s own qualities, without denying the Mac’s."

Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules - "In a telephone interview, Dr. Ross said his goal in studying at secular institutions “was to acquire the training that would make me a good paleontologist, regardless of which paradigm I was using.”... But he has also written and spoken on scientific subjects, and with a creationist bent. While still a graduate student, he appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago. Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists."
Maybe I should pursue a degree in a seminary.