flickering pictures

From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault […]

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The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

People with two children are more likely to be actively […]

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How brilliant is this interactive little site?
Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length […]

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From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ […]

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The Food and Drug Administration says the promises of decreased cholesterol and heart disease prevention on Cheerios boxes mean that America’s best-selling cereal is not actually food, but a drug.
From the FDA’s warning letter:

Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is […]

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So you’re an advertising exec at Burger King. In these tough economic times, you reason, Burger King needs a children’s commercial that will grab attention and boost sales. Kids, you know, like Spongebob Squarepants. They also like rap. And lord knows, they totally dig a nice big bedonkadonk. There’s really […]

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So there’s this guy with a broken foot in New York who has been hobbling around town on crutches, and who’s fed up with perfectly healthy people who refuse to give up subway seats reserved for people with limited mobility. He’s so fed up, in fact, that he started taking their pictures and posting […]

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The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.”
Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan […]

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It’s a sign of time times — the economy’s in the toilet, America lost 694,000 jobs in March, and a three-bedroom bungalow in Detroit will set you back a cool $500. The natural response to all this? A reality show, of course.
And no, Donald Trump isn’t in it.
Proving yet again that America will […]

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If Joe Higgs’s “There’s a Reward” doesn’t send shivers up your spine, you don’t have one.
Widely regarded as the father of reggae, Higgs grew up in Kingston’s famous Trenchtown ghetto and was a major influence on a generation of reggae musicians, including some guy named Bob Marley. He died of cancer in December 1999 […]

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