*This Made Me Laugh

However in 1957, it wasn’t a piece of crap–it lasted! Our clothes drier just died. Plastic here we come.

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*In Memory: Dec 6/89

I remember, on the day that JFK was killed, my older brother saying to me that John F. Kennedy had been shot, as if that ought to mean something to me. I had no idea who he was, but I knew that something important had happened.
I also remember that on 09/11/01, a friend called me [...]

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*This Is About Bras

Let’s start with the word. It comes from French for “arm protector,” referring to military uniforms that morphed into breast plates. Hence the mighty brassiere that I remember from my childhood: steely, pointy, sometimes lengthy undergarments which extended into a girdle, stuffing everything in and keeping it rigid.
As an aside, the current French term [...]

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*1768–what’s changed?

From the 1768 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Stock brokers: “Are those who are employed to buy and sell shares in the joint stock of a company or corporation … as the practice of stock-jobbing has been carried on to such an excess as became not only ruinous to a great number of private families, but [...]

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*Peak Sand?

What would happen if the desert became communist?
Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.
That’s just one of the jokes collected by West German spies in East Germany back in the day. From Der Spiegel:
The jokes were gleaned from secretly opened letters and phone conversations that agents from West Germany’s [...]

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*The Viriginity Kit

For only $29.90 you too can restore your hymen. No more surgery! Hymen restoring surgery is a popular procedure in the middle-east, but it costs big bucks, and of course there is the medical risk and all.
Now you can just send your money order to Gigimo, a Chinese mail-order company. Yes everything these days [...]

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*Roman Polanski

Many people have written about this and eloquently, so I’ll keep it short. A man raped a child. His fame or talents are irrelevant. Others have stated this. And though it seems obvious, it is worth repeating. However, there is something else I wonder about, that nobody else has said, to my knowledge.
A basketball player [...]

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*Google the Next Round

Google, the Authors Guild in the U.S. and the Association of American Publishers, all parties to the original 2008 deal, filed notice in a U.S. court Tuesday that they would reopen it.
They plan to work out a new scheme with the U.S. Department of Justice, which has expressed concern that Google’s control of digitized books [...]

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*Last Day: Sept 11

I am aware of the day. Who isn’t? It has been eight years. My younger daughter was then 10 days old and spending her 10th day in an orphanage in central China, but I didn’t know that then. I was working at home and a friend called, asking me if I’d heard the news. I [...]

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*Flying Rabbis Drive off Swine Flu

Apparently a plane load of (naturally) male orthodox (of the extreme) variety, with good heart, went up in a plane to fly over Israel and through prayers and chanting and blowing of shofars (rams’ horns) drive away swine flu for the good of the world. (Video here so you can see for yourself).
However I am [...]

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*Feminists Like Men

Well who’d have thunk it. Women who support the equality of men and women like men more than women who think what is good for the goose is not good for the gander or that a man wears the pants and a woman doesn’t. Researchers at the University of Houston found that hostility toward men [...]

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*The Smell of Fear

Scientists have now demonstrated that fear has an odour and we really do react to it. Alexander Prehn-Kristenen and his team put pads under the armpits of students waiting to give an oral presentation and students who were cycling. Both were equally sweaty but what a difference!
Next the researchers scanned the brains of 28 [...]

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