flickering pictures

South Korea’s president is not a popular man. He’s not so much George W. Bush unpopular — more like the bastard love child of Joseph Stalin and Richard Nixon unpopular. People here hate him like they hate Mondays, mortgage payments and bumper-to-bumper traffic. And no one seems to know why. Nevertheless, they’re mad as hell [...]

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It was a long, long haul, but it was so worth it. It took one short flight from Montreal, one busted airplane hydraulics system, a six-hour wait in Detroit, a looong trans-Pacific flight over Manitoba, Yellowknife and Alaska to Tokyo, and a mad scramble through Japanese security to catch a delayed (for our benefit — [...]

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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 [...]

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So I decided to run a little experiment — disabling the feature that requires commenters to provide an e-mail address before their comments are posted. I’m really not looking to e-mail anyone, so I thought I could make things a little easier for good people with interesting ideas to share. Turns out it wasn’t such [...]

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But it’s hard. Three days ago, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which aims to “defeat hunger” around the world, was addressed by Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, who has singlehandedly turned his country from Africa’s wealthy breadbasket into a violent, starving, terrifying place. He also built Zimbabwe’s infamous “rape camps,” routinely kills, tortures and/or imprisons [...]

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Someone has dug up a very trippy poem by a 20-year-old Barack Obama, penned back in 1981: Under water grottos, caverns Filled with apes That eat figs Stepping on the figs That the apes Eat, they crunch The apes howl, bare Their fangs, dance, Tumble in the Rushing water Musty, wet pelts Glistening in the [...]

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Yes, I know the title is cheesy. Has that ever stopped me before? Found by Asher on divine caroline — a site I’m really starting to like — is a layman’s analysis of some of the chemicals, drugs and other heebie-jeebies in your food, by Brie Cadman: The other day I was snacking on some [...]

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Last night I stumbled upon one of the most chilling and touching print journalism pieces I’ve seen in a while, courtesy of the Guardian‘s Tania Branigan. It is painfully human and will make you want to cry. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Tenderly, she eased the clean fleece over her little boy’s hand and [...]

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As plucked from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and promptly googled: “I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I [...]

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Really busy day today, so no time for lunch — or updates — but here’s a quickie. Kevin and Amanda want to turn your handwriting into a custom-made font for free. Just scan your writing, send it off to them, and if they choose your submission, you’ve got yourself a personalized font like no other. [...]

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