The Head Heeb: The Sovereign Democratic Republic of Pitcairn. The most astonishing detail of this item is a correct use of the phrase eked out. (Cited, on other grounds, by Chris Brooke (The Virtual Stoa).)
don’t trust everything you find in a gravel pit
Piltdown Plot — includes ‘prosecution’ and ‘defense’ of seven leading suspects
we understand each other worse, and it matters less, than any of us suppose.
[Which goes well with this item.]
This item was found by Jim Bisso (Uncle Jazzbeau) and discussed at more length by and with Languagehat.
One of Nunberg’s examples is: The pool is deceptively shallow. Some take this to mean the pool is deeper than it looks, some the opposite — but I wouldn’t use it either way; to me it means that the pool both is and appears shallow, but one who infers from that lone fact that one can safely wade in it would be dangerously mistaken (because it has alligators or treacherous currents).
If you like my mathematical doodles you’ll like BIT-101 ActionScript Laboratory — hundreds of little exercises in Flash, by Keith Peters. (Found on Joshua Schachter’s muxway by Dan O’Neill)
medieval Novgorod through the eyes of a child
Children’s drawings in the Middle Ages?! Even if such things were created in period, how could they have survived to the present day? After all, finger paints, magic markers, and crayons were not yet in use, paper was far too valuable of a commodity to waste on children, and refrigerator doors were unavailable for the display of Junior’s artistic genius. Most of the products of childhood inspiration probably were expressed on the ephemeral canvas of dirt or sand.
But birchbark was a different story.
(Relayed by Eric Johansson on a private list.)
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
Robert Stewart was sentenced to five years imprisonment for being a felon in possession of firearms and of possessing illegal machine guns last year.
His attorney, Thomas Haney of Phoenix, said the decision doesn’t mean much for his client or for the gun movement. Few people have the skills to build a weapon from scratch, as Stewart did, Haney said.
Perhaps not (yet) — but that the Notorious Ninth reads the Commerce Clause narrowly, in a gun case of all things, is big news. (Link from Rational Review News Digest)
Punchline:
Stewart, meanwhile, faces about a 20-year sentence next week after being convicted this summer of soliciting a fellow prisoner at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix to kill U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver, the judge who last year sentenced him to five years on the weapons violations.
Eugene Volokh weighs in. Brett Thomas and Larry Solum debate the consequences for amateur marijuana growers.
Most of the junk I see advertised by email, I can believe someone actually wants to buy (assuming it works as advertised). But here’s a head-scratcher: something that purports to make me “cu.rn like a p0rn star”. Why would I want “up to five times” more semen??
After all the more conventional masculinity-enhancement nostrums, one is tempted to say this is the icing on the cake.