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Amazon v. Macmillan, round 3
I went to Borders yesterday, not because I was really anxious to buy books but because it was a sunny day and that's rare here during the winter. I wanted to get out of the house.
I had fun. I drank coffee and browsed and ended up with a couple of paperbacks. I saw other people, which seems unimportant until you realize that I spent the last ( Read more... ) -
Blackout
Because the most relevant phrase is "chilling effect." Because more people will be hurt by the law than will be helped by it. Because it's reasonable for violating the law to bring penalties, but it's really kind of a good idea to make sure there is an actual violation before inflicting any penalty.
More information here: creativefreedom.org.nz/ ( Read more... ) -
Italian, again
I wonder just how important it is to learn an Italian word for a type of food that I don't eat and wouldn't recognize. Like "zwieback." In books, zwieback is the sort of food you fall back on when you're really hungry and there's nothing else around. Or you give it to teething babies. From which I deduce that it's hard and something that doesn ( Read more... ) -
Black Monday, round two
*eyes market*
Well, this really isn't good. -
Writer's Block: Change of Law
So far, our sorry world has seen:
-wars (there are laws about war)
-genocide (there are often laws involved in this, too)
-slavery (legalized in nearly every country on earth at some point or other)
-torture (a legal procedure in most countries at some point in their past)
-the death penalty applied to innocent people by mistake
-massive prison systems ( Read more... ) -
Hunh?
* is genuinely sorry that people seem to have been concerned about the world's ending last night, but is unsure why anyone would think that a test of the Large Hadron Collider would cause the world to end ( Read more... ) -
Make it stop
When the U.S. invades some poor third world country and there's a newscast with the sound of shots and bombs falling and all that ( Read more... ) -
You know your phone call has been routed to India when...
...in the U.S., it's between five in the afternoon in the U.S. (eastern time) or two in the afternoon (pacific time), but the first words out of the customer service person's mouth are "Good morning ( Read more... ) -
Toaster
Yesterday, our toaster died a horrible death of short-circuits and fried wiring. Today, A and I went shopping for a new toaster.
Did you know that a toaster costs more than a small microwave? I was impressed.
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Weather
For the last couple of maternal phone calls over the weekend, I've gotten "So is it spring there yet?" and "It was hot here today ( Read more... )