The weird stuff about Japan you were afraid to ask about. The Seldom-Asked Questions are interesting, but what I find the most fascinating is the pictures of various Japanese subcultures. [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]
I've ranted before about privacy policies and how they don't actually protect your privacy. (All they're required to do is disclose the policy; there is no requirement that the policy must be any good.) Today I read MetLife's privacy policy and found to my surprise that it does not actively offend me. It's written in plain English, it's...
Something is wrong with the world when fark finds something "real" news organizations miss. (When I first learned about fark, I confused it with FARC, a different organization entirely. That's right, a terrorist organization has its own official web site. Gotta love the Internet.)Anyway, fark has pointed out that the guy that Pakistani fo...
So it happens that Opening Day of the baseball season coincides with Good Friday, a day of "fasting and abstinence" according to Catholic tradition. (Then again, after Vatican II, the definition of "fasting and abstinence" weakened significantly. All that most people remember any more is "no meat".) Catholics in Boston have applied to the ar...
For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "Hey, ...
I was exchanging e-mail with one of the people I will be visiting while I'm in Uppsala [link repaired 10:43pm]. and we wrote in double-translation, first in Swedish, with English translation beneath it. But eventually he gave up and wrote exclusively in English. I went back to my previous dual-language message and found a few pretty stupid gra...
A Georgia State University study shows that U.S. senators have an uncanny knack for picking stocks that outpace the overall market. Professor Alan Ziobrowski's analysis of senators' financial disclosure data found that over a period of six years, the lawmakers outperformed the market by 12 percent. Professor Ziobrowski seems convinced ...
Commentator and novelist Christian Bauman recalls the excitement of receiving mail from anonymous well-wishers back home during his deployment with the U.S. Army in Somalia in the early 1990s. This was a fascinating listen. The coup, of course, was getting a letter with a snapshot or two inside. I don't know why, but the further west...
The skater you love to hate is back. Tonya Harding will lace up for a single game tomorrow with the Indianapolis Ice, which coincidentally happens to be "Guaranteed Fight Night". (If there's no fight, you get a free ticket to another game.) Ah, minor-league hockey... Personally, I don't think it's right when somebody benefits from ha...
I am not making this up. There's a new television show based on The Department of Homeland Security, titled D.H.S.. I guess they realized that The O.C. was a hip edgy name so they'd try it too. The audio clips I heard on the radio seemed to make the DHS sound like a non-stop adrenaline-rush guns-drawn kind of department, when my personal experienc...
