| Quotes of the Day | Top 10 | Robert Benchley
"Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people."
| William G. McAdoo
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument."
| Ralph Hodgson
"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
| Samuel Goldwyn
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
| Lord Acton
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."
| Albert Schweitzer
"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory."
| Alex Levin
"The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law."
| Garry Shandling
"I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know."
| Douglas Adams
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
| Noel Coward
"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."
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| | Salon.com | Top 10 | Grief, cancer, Nietzsche and Santa
Arnaud Desplechin's wrenching "Christmas Tale" gets a lukewarm reception at Cannes despite its cast of French superstars. But it might just be a dysfunctional-family masterpiece.
Andrew O'Hehir
| The $45 million bargain
That's a lot of money in the real world, but Brewers slugger Ryan Braun went cheap.
King Kaufman
| How will Barack Obama get to 270?
This November, a Democratic victory will probably hinge on the Electoral College votes of a handful of swing states. Howard Dean's pollster examines 17 fall battlegrounds, one by one.
Paul Maslin
| "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"
Grand battles! Dazzling special effects! But where are all the people?
Stephanie Zacharek
| Gay marriage, so what?
Maybe I should be more grateful, but the California Supreme Court hasn't told me anything I don't already know.
Louis Bayard
| In the land of believers
Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi goes undercover into the nation's fringes and finds surprising similarities between the religious right and 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
Vincent Rossmeier
| How I misspent my European vacation
My trip to Italy was perfect -- except for the part where I couldn't stop worrying about money, my children and the state of my marriage.
Ann Bauer
| Ask the pilot: With oil prices soaring, airlines are struggling as never before. What's in store for fliers?
These days you can't crack open a newspaper or click to a Web site without stumbling across one or more front-page stories about the airlines. Bankruptcies, safety scandals, fuel woes, you name it. And if there's a common thread in this media barrage, it's that none of the stories are positive. For carriers the future looks uncertain at best, nightmarish at worst.
Everybody knows the airline business is cyclical. The boom-bust cycle has been playing out since before deregulation. What's different, this time, is how potentially devastating this latest scorching might be, and how quickly it followed on the heels of the post-Sept. 11 industry wipeout. The recovery period was brief, to say the least.
...
Patrick Smith
| If I die, I want my friends to raise my children
My parents are too old and my siblings are too mired in difficulties. But I'm hesitant to bring up the idea with friends.
Cary Tennis
| WayLay
The thing under the futon disappears!
Carol Lay
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| | kuro5hin.org | Top 10 | The Freewinds Are Carcinogenic
Dry dock workers of the Curacao Dry Dock Company (CDM) discovered dangerous levels of blue asbestos while conducting routine repairs on the Freewinds, flagship of the Church of Scientology's Sea Org and home to the Flag Ship Service Organization (FSSO). Scientologists like John Travolta and Tom Cruise attended several events and religious get-aways aboard the luxury cruise liner and subsequentally were potentially exposed to the deadly carcinogen. Worse yet, an affidavit signed in 2001 alleging the presence of blue asbestos has surfaced. In it, Lawrence Woodcraft describes encountering "a powdery blue fibrous substance" he identified as asbestos on the ship early 1987. Thousands of tweenage girls the world over are expressing their outrage over the potential threat to their #1 crush by pre-ordering Battletoads this Saturday, May 10th.
| Towards the Reformation of a Once Great Site
Kuro5hin.org sure has changed a lot over the years. When it was first fired up it promptly drained what little brain power existed at slashdot including the more intelligent slashdot trolls, which was fine by taco as they've been able to revel in half-baked ideology and presumptions ever since, with nary a challenge to spoil the party. K5 went on to produce a stimulating culture and an excellent body of work, and things were looking pretty good. But then something odd happened. Some genuine mentally ill people appeared and started to wreck up the place. Perhaps they resented the superior intelligence of k5 discourse, or maybe they got riled up when their stupid opinions were brushed aside and deservedly ignored. Their response however was quite ferocious- aggressive and persistent vulgarity flooded the site. Any attempt by smart people to have a good conversation would be targeted and clobbered under their offensive offensive.
| Texas Flood
"It's coming down pretty hard. Maybe we should just come back and get my car tomorrow." It was the first week of June, 2001. 9/11 was still months away. People just mildly disliked Bush, and for comparitively trivial reasons. Iraq was something that happened about 10 years ago. I was just wrapping up my first year of graduate school. My daughter was 6 weeks old, and we were on our way home from the obligatory 6 week checkup. I had had a test that afternoon, so I had been up at the school. My wife is insane, so she had insisted on getting to the appointment herself. This meant driving 25 minutes through Houston traffic with a baby, after extracting said baby from her body just a bit more than a month prior. She even picked me up at school to go to the appointment, and even that only at my insistance. She had planned to go solo.
| Who Owns Your Home?
The collapse of the U.S. housing industry is the big news of the day. While independent journalists and other comentators have been covering the rise and fall of the housing industry blow by blow, the corporate media joined the party just as the bubble was peaking, and only caught on to the perils of the situation in the 7th inning of the market cycle. It is now common for people who owe more on their mortgage than the home is worth to not bother contesting foreclosure filings. The unsavy borrower stops making payments and sends "Jingle Mail" (keys) to the lender after they've vacated the property. More sophisticated borrowers delay for a few more months, perhaps by declaring bankruptcy or using the services of a business that understands the foreclosure process. Sometimes people stop making payments and wait for the eviction notice - sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't. When they can, the savviest homeowners politely tell their mortgage manager to go fuck themselves, get the foreclosure proceedings dismissed, and stay in their home in perpetuity sans mortgage payments. Poll inside.
| Attention Beijing Olympics Visitors
Leave your kids at home. A national alert has been issued (finally). Yes, there was apparently a cover-up of news about the spread of the EV71 virus, just as there was a cover-up in 2003 at the start of the SARS outbreak.
| Wii Love: A Review
Nintendo redefined the relationship between man and games console with the creation of the Wiimote, and continued to riff on that successful theme. Ever since the Wii came out, Wii crossbows, guns, wheels, golf clubs, baseball bats, tennis rackets and balance boards have all appeared. In their latest release, Nintendo continues to push the limits of a games console with the release of Wii Love. For the uninitiated, Wii Love isn't really a game, but rather a lifestyle accessory. Similar to Wii Fit, Nintendo have co-opted a boring and mundane everyday activity and made it fun and engaging. I managed to get my hands on a (second hand) early preview box from a corporate client, so I thought I'd give you a quick look at the technology that wowed the crowd at the Nintendo stand at the last E3 conference, and has taken Japan by storm, shifting over 2,000,000 units in the first three months.
| It's time to take Kuro5hin back from the trolls
There was a time a long time ago when I would log into Kuro5hin and I'd see that a known name had posted a new diary. I'd go over, read what they had to say, and post some comments. Then I'd go over to the story queue, make some suggestions on spelling on a story or two, vote up a story on Technology, vote down a story on politics, then go to write my passionate reply to a diary I had read the day before. It was fun, it was calming, and it was home. Today I log into Kuro5hin, and I see that right now, undermyne writes: Given the length of the baseball season and the number of games required (162), it is not surpising that lazy niggers are opting for a 16 game NFL season or an 82 game NBA season. This is not how things should be, and we have to change. There is no hand of God that will come down to make things change, each and everyone of us here can create this change that we need.
| "Does 'Sleep Gas' exist?" or "Ethnic Cleansing in the US"
This article describes harassment and barrage of assaults I have been experiencing on my body during the past five months. I am an American citizen, an immigrant of Middle Eastern origin. I have been living in the US for 35 years; I am non-religious; my politics tend in general towards left-of-center. Around the beginning of the Iraq war, years 2003 and 2004, I expressed on Internet forums - mostly on this site - my opposition to the Iraq war in strong language and talked about George W. Bush in unflattering terms which are commonly heard now but were not so commonly heard then. The precise beginning date of the series of events I will talk about is uncertain because only towards the end of November 2007, I realized that I was being drugged and walked backwards in my mind and traced the start of this approximately to the beginning of that month ...
| Military Patches You Should Not Be Seeing
There's a guy named Trevor Paglen. His obsession is military patches, the kind you wear on your sleeve. Many military programs are top secret and only identifiable by two things: 1. An undescribed line item on a Department of Defense expense report. 2. A military patch. He has written a book entitled "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me" (the emblem on a particular patch he has uncovered). The book is nothing but a giant compendium of some of the bizarre, strange, and often very funny top secret military patches the man has discovered: CIA paparazzo Trevor Paglen is a thorn in Uncle Sam's side. Known for snapping telephoto candids of CIA planes and Area 51, the artist also gathers "patch intel," which he's collected in this provocative book (main title: "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me"). The fruit of several Freedom of Information Act requests, Paglen's book proves that classified black opps concoct esoteric team insignias just like other military divisions. The photo-driven work presents 75 de-classified patches with colorful eagles, skulls, swords, dragons, wizards and even aliens (!). Surveying iconography that was never intended for your eyes is both exhilarating and frustrating. Decoding them is often impossible, which only leads back to the obvious: How else are our tax dollars being spent in secret? Unlike grainy, questionable YouTube clips of UFOs, Big Foot and Loch Ness, in this case, seeing guarantees believing.
| Stonehenge, The Health Spa
A new excavation at Stonehenge, which started March 31st, will attempt to once-and-for-all (again) determine who built Stonehenge and why. This week's theory - it was a health resort, where people across the country visited to receive magical healing from the blue stones.
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