I had breakfast this morning with a bunch of California expats. It’s a weird label. We don’t normally think of ourselves that way. But I’ve been feeling nostalgic about the land of my birth lately. Not sure why, but it probably has something to do with seeing palm trees, citrus groves and bougainvillea last month …
HOLBROOK, ARIZ – I grew up entranced by radio. There was something about the magic of the disembodied voice, always deep-throated, speaking to me from a world I could only imagine. It was Vin Scully calling a baseball game, or the mystery of hockey play by play (imagine a kid lying in the dark with …
Longtime Inkstain readers will know of my interest in giant scissors (see here and here, for example). I’m happy to report that Stuff Journalists Like has advanced this important story with an exploration of its close relationship with really giant fake checks: The giant check screams: “Giving anonymously is for suckas.” Journalists wonder how much …
Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is …
This picture of student protests at UCLA, which came across the twitter today, reminded me of one of my all time favorite bits of graffiti: It must have been 1975 or ’76, and I was at UCLA with my dad to see art. In the parking garage elevator was this poem, written in black felt …
Is this how it begins? Kelloggs said today production problems have led to a shortage of its popular Eggo frozen waffle products. They say they will be able to restore full waffle production by the middle of next year. Of course that’s what they’re going to say – that it’s all OK, that this is …
Lots of accumulated blathering from me in this morning’s newspaper. First up, a fun thumbsucker on the Obama administration’s rhetoric regarding zero nuclear weapons (sub/ad req.) and what it might mean in practice: Supporters of a world without nuclear weapons, who include prominent hawks like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, argue the world would …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere I: Big Think Nukes’ »
Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223 In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of …
In Vol. II of his exhaustive 1882 treatise “Legal Medicine“, Charles Meymott Tidy, M.B., FCS, Master of Surgery; Professor of Chemistry and of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at the London Hospital, Medical Officer of Health for Islington, Late Deputy Medical Officer of Health and Public Analyst for the City of London, Etc., Etc., noted …
Giving my desk at work its Labor Day holiday shift cleaning (I’m the warm body in case news happens), I stumbled across a bit of history: the notebook from the day nine years ago when Wen Ho Lee made the first of a series of appearances federal court that ended his prosecution as the spy …