"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." - Daniel Webster

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Age of Fable - "Age of Fable is a free role-playing game which you play through your web browser. Its style is deliberately 'retro', based on the gamebooks whose popularity peaked in the 80s, such as Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Tunnels and Trolls, and Fabled Lands."
Good for a few hours of fun.

Eco-boat powered by human fat attempts round the world speed record - "The fastest eco boat on the planet will attempt to break the round the world speed record using fuel made from human fat. Pete Bethune, the New Zealand skipper of Earthrace, said the attempt to circumnavigate the globe would begin from Valencia in Spain on March 1 next year. Bethune and his wife mortgaged their house and sold everything they own to help make the project happen, while continuing to seek support from sponsors. "
It's docking in Singapore!

Latin primers for everybody. - "For Mount, the main danger in learning Latin is that it may earn those who master it the derogatory label of wankers from ordinary blokes—"prissy, fussy, priggish, prim, and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own," as Kingsley Amis put it. British upper-class philistinism involves feeling embarrassed about knowing anything, especially any esoteric knowledge or knowledge that may have taken some effort to acquire. (At the Oxford college I attended as an undergraduate, the motto was "effortless superiority": You should never seem too hard-working or too interested in your studies, unless you want to seem like a "swot," a "wanker," or a "girl.")... cultural imperialism is only partly a linguistic phenomenon. Ostler's claim that Latin was "the glue that held the empire's people in place" for more than 2,000 years seems less plausible when we remember that for a long period, most educated Romans were bilingual (in Latin and Greek), and in the first and second centuries A.D., many intellectual Greek writers under the empire—such as Plutarch—had only a sketchy knowledge of Latin, or none at all... As Tacitus remarks of the Britons, "They even adopted our fashion of dress, and started wearing the toga; little by little they were drawn to touches of vice, such as colonnades, baths, and fancy conversations. Because they didn't know better, they called it 'civilization,' when it was part of their slavery" (idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset). The analogy with the modern world is not hard to draw: the "Americanization" of China, Russia, and Europe has as much to do with the spread of Nike, Coca-Cola, and modern big-business capitalism as with the spread of the English language."

My short life as a drag king. - "For Human Guinea Pig, a column in which I do things that readers are too well-adjusted to try themselves, I have subjected myself, and innocent audience members, to many excruciating performances... I was familiar with drag queens—men who dress flamboyantly as women for shows or events, but I wasn't aware of a complementary drag king culture until a Slate colleague suggested I enter it. I quickly found the D.C. Kings, founded in 2000, which bills itself as "The World's Longest Running Drag King Troupe."... Most important: My package needed to be in good and tight... wearing the package would rapidly help my transition. "You'll understand why guys are always grabbing their crotches," Herbie explained... My first order of business from Herbie: Start watching men around me, squaring up my shoulders, and walking in a relaxed state—leading with my package. "Men don't care, they just move. Women are much more intentional," Herbie instructed... there was something revelatory about walking around with this cotton appendage. I suddenly felt I wasn't alone in the world. I now had a secret friend nestled by my leg, giving me strength and encouragement."

U.S. border delay kept fire crew from blaze - "The Quebec firefighters were trying to help put out a blaze at a restaurant in the United States. Their nerve-racking delay at the border ignited a furor instead... The six-man crew from the border town of Lacolle raced toward the border in a yellow fire truck, lights flashing, at about midnight on Sunday... Meanwhile, the landmark Anchorage Inn in Rouses Point, N.Y., burned to the ground."
I see where they're coming from, but still...

Der Cataloguefüror - "When catalog merchant Lands’ End offered German customers the same thing it offers customers in 175 other countries — a lifetime warranty on their clothing — an organization of German retailers sued them for “unfair competition”. The merchants lost. “Trying to make a customer completely happy is still a very new concept here,” said the head of the company’s German subsidiary."

A Zulu's last line of defense: Heritage - "Taking the stand for the first time last week in the rape trial, Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. Zuma, who turns 64 this month, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with her legs crossed, revealing her thigh. Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and "in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready." To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape. Such arguments have stirred a storm here, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex - he-said, she-said arguments are not unheard of in rape trials worldwide - but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy."
Naturally, condemning him would be ethnocentric and racist.

Study Links Abortion and Preemies - "Abortions increase the risk of low birth weight in future pregnancies by a factor of three, and of premature birth by a factor of two, according to the largest U.S. study of its kind... the researchers behind the JECH study, which evaluated just over 45,000 single-child live births from 1959 to 1966, were able to adjust for an impressive array of confounding variables, including race, age, weight, height, marital status, occupation, the number of prenatal visits, the number of previous children, smoking and drinking habits, drug habits, infant gender and both parents' education levels."

Only a Game: Marxism - "A religion can be understood as a belief system comprised generally of mythology (or a central narrative), metaphysics and ethics, and often relating to numinous or transcendent experiences... There is indeed a mythology (or central narrative) – one which tells of the future liberation of the working class from the bondage of a class system. There is a metaphysical component underlying both the assumptions of the ideology itself, and in the specific criticisms of religions, which presupposes atheism. There is an ethical component contained in the general provisions for the idealised socialist society that Marx proposes."