My Own Thoughts

Or, rather, with the guy who interviewed the suicide bombers can be found at Counterterrorism Blog. Thanks to Blackfive for the heads up.

A new “Stonehedge” type place has been discovered in Brittany, France. Read all about it in The Independent. But what I found interesting was this: The middle and late-neolithic (or Stone Age) and early Bronze Age in western Europe – roughly from 4000 BC to 1500 BC – was a period of rapid and revolutionary [...]

Farmers have preferred uniform ripening in tomatoes, for example, enabling mechanized harvesting. Also, they’ve bred them for a hearty consistency to ensure they’ll survive transcontinental transit. What’s sacrificed, however, is taste. “With the tomatoes you find in the grocery store,” says Mary Brittain, of the family-run Cottage Gardener, in Newtonville, Ont., “people say they’re just [...]

Carrots, for instance, have not always been orange. In nature, they’re also red or purple or white — and they’re just as likely to be spicy as sweet. Over the past 50 years, thanks to modern farming techniques, North American consumers have lost touch with the white peaches, tart “lemon cucumbers,” and chocolate-tinted tomatoes that [...]

No. I haven’t changed the blogs I read. But I’m getting more and more weirdness coming out in the ones I do read. Language Log gives “authoritarian conservative” Kilpatrick the arguments LL thinks he’ll respect. Is he an “authoritarian conservative”? I don’t know. I do know that appealing to the experts would be a good [...]

I enjoyed the Funeral Museum. Does that tell you something about me you didn’t already know? Probably not. I liked the hearses, some from the 1800s. I liked seeing the carved wood, knowing how they carried the caskets. The museum had lots of samples of old caskets, including iron ones from the Civil War. They [...]