flickering pictures

To the 20,999 unique visitors from 166 countries and territories who’ve checked out this site since it launched six months ago, thanks.
You’ve made a little blogger happy.

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From a Flickr gallery devoted to the “most interesting” photos taken by Cory Doctorow, the Canadian sci-fi novelist, Guardian columnist, public speaker, copyfighter, civil liberties campaigner and co-editor of the most linked-to blog on the Net.
And I haven’t met him or anything, but he appears to be an all-around awesome guy.

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I’ve never posted an XKCD comic here before, but this one was just too good to pass up.
Let it be a lesson to us all.

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In a powerful op-ed piece for the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof points out something we already know but try not to think about: rape has moved from a by-product of war to a weapon of war, used coldly and calculatingly to inflict maximum pain and intimidation on an entire population. It’s […]

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Here’s a story I bookmarked a few months ago and was saving for a rainy day.
On April 17, Pakistan’s Daily Times picked up an Agence France-Presse article about Iran’s experiments with condom and syringe vending machines targeted at drug users.

“Five machines will be installed at Tehran city’s welfare shelters for addicts,” the deputy head of […]

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About 25 young ne’erdowells are being forced to take court-ordered poetry classes after they threw a party in Robert Frost’s summer Vermont home, smashing windows and furniture and littering the property with plastic beer cups.

And yes, I came up with that headline all by myself.
From AP/AOL News:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” [the teacher] […]

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In the winter of 1914, German and British soldiers spent Christmas Eve in the trenches, wading through mud, supplies and the corpses of their fallen friends. Their main activity was dodging the bullets from the enemy bunkers that were sometimes just 60 yards away.
To raise their sinking morale, both armies’ governments sent their troops […]

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You know we’re in a sad state of affairs when we call customer service and we’re happy to spend “just” 10 or 15 minutes waiting to talk to a human being. Other than saying a few choice words to your poor hapless customer service rep, there’s never been much you could do about it. […]

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Burmese ex-pat women are taking advantage of their ruling military leaders’ anti-panty superstitions to turn subjugation into subversion, resulting in one of the neatest political write-in campaigns I’ve ever heard of. So far, women across Europe, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines and Singapore are taking part.
From the Panties for Peace Canada website:

The Panties for Peace […]

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I hadn’t heard of her either, but I wish I had.
In 1958, at the tender age of 18, a pregnant Mildred Jeter travelled to Washington, D.C. to marry Richard Loving. Mildred was black, Richard was white, and interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. In spite of their novel attempt […]

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