Today’s required reading: Thom Hartmann’s essay, “When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History“. Go read it right now. I’ll wait.

Megnut links to a cool app called IndyJunior which takes an XML file of latitudes and longitudes and creates a Flash map of one’s travels.

Chris Hellman links to an interesting article on the uphill struggle to market wine to Americans. Chris’s rant on Calfornia wine is spot-on: Don’t get me wrong, I like California wine. They have the prettiest vineyards, their wineries smell heavenly … Continue reading →

The OC Weekly has a nice feature on Sandow Birk’s hilarious sham-documentary In Smog And Thunder which is being featured at the Newport Beach Film Festival next week.

File this under “you have got to be kidding”: Two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population. The … Continue reading →

The New York Freemasons are conducting a recruitment drive to increase their ever-dwindling membership. As part of the campaign, they’re offering a one-day class “compressing the rituals that could take a year to master.” [via Gawker]

Today’s Word Spy is good enough to post in it’s entirety… scam baiting (SKAM bay.ting) pp. Teasing a scam artist – particularly someone running the Nigerian advance fee fraud scheme – by feigning interest in the scam and forcing the … Continue reading →

Texan state rep. Wayne Christian, has introduced a bill that would triple the state’s taxes on French wine and triple the 14 percent liquor tax that the restaurants pay for the wine. So if they’re so outraged about European non-support, … Continue reading →

Via BBC. You may begin freaking out at T-minus 10… 9… 8… 7… The World Health Organization expert who first identified the mystery pneumonia that has claimed dozens of lives has himself died of the disease, the UN agency has … Continue reading →

Folks, I’m having massive DNS and DNS propagation problems right now. Expect basically nothing to work until… well until it starts working again.