Someone needs to get out more

Maybe walk to the liberry and read a few books. "Thanks to a song in the 1940s, Money is the Root of All Evil has become a common phrase." -- Adam Dachis at lifehacker.com

A list of fallacious arguments

It's really quite comprehensive.

MAN IN SIDE! HELP!

If I were a Russian astronaut, I'd be embarrassed to fly in one of these hunks of junk. Really, most of this crap looks like it was built in the back yard by crazy Uncle Yuri who went on a weeklong vodka bender and welded together whatever junk he found in his garage.

Homage

In the 1998 film Enemy of the State, a character chasing Gene Hackman as they zero in on his surveillance-proof workshop is wearing the same sort of horrifying translucent plastic rain jacket Hackman wore almost constantly in the 1974 film The Conversation. (If I hadn't seen plastic jackets like that when I was a kid, I'd never believe they existed.)

Grab it

What's the fastest you've driven?

105 mph on a relatively empty I-57 from exit 160 to 159 in my then-new 1993 Pontiac Grand Prix. As the perfessor notes, that was before I had dependents.

"Leaders"

Why don't these "world leader" morons and their lackeys meet in some remote hunting lodge in Nunavut? Look - I've already googled it for them! If they don't like being around fellow citizens, this would be perfect. Up there they could even look out their windows and pass the time agonizing over receding Arctic ice, or whatever it is they do for fun.

Nameplate fun

I've spend odd moments working on a blog redesign in drupal. Here's a possible nameplate centered on a funny bird I found in an old book at Project Gutenberg; the font is Windsor, which I discovered via the inimitable Andrew Cusack. The notion of putting a large thingamajig between the words came from Mr Cusack's own blog design and his note about the International Herald Tribune's evolving dingbat.

Bzzzzzt

For the first time since the American invasion of Iraq I turned to CNN to see what's new.  The big news was some movie about Michael Jackson called "This Is It."  Wrong answer, CNN.  I'll check back in another decade or so, if you're still around then.

A disappointing discovery

Sugar hides the taste of what it's in. I don't know why I didn't notice this sometime in the last 20 years. I've been drinking fresh-brewed tea without sugar for a few months, but recently I idly added a couple of teaspoons to sugar to a cup. It was disappointing to find half the tea's flavors gone, replaced by vile sweet sugar.

After a day of 16th-century poetry

When you've immersed yourself in lines of lofty stately metre
Your thoughts do tend to fall in line and march a little neater.

Nuts!

Ralph Kreider, secretary & editor of the Illinois Nut Tree Association (parent organization here), stopped by our house this morning to take a branch from the female ginkgo tree in our front yard. (Well, he just pulled up in the drive and helped himself, but I was feeling neighborly and he was venerable, shall we say, and we had a good long discussion about ginkgos and oaks and I wound up thanking him for stopping by and inviting him to come on over anytime to show off the tree.)

It seems that male ginkgos are common in the area, including our south yard (the tree on the left in the picture), but this is the first female of the species Mr. Kreider has ever seen. Ginkgos are unusual in that each tree is a specific gender; the female ginkgo bears nut-like seeds. These make the female unpleasant as a shade tree because during the autumn the fallen seeds produce butyric acid which also gives rancid butter its overpowering stench.

More ginkgo information here.