“that’s not what I meant!”

Review of a German book which “tries to show that many of the obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic.”

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fatherhood changes you

There’s a man in my neighborhood who has batwings tattooed around his eyes, a crown of thorns on his forehead, demons and such covering both arms . . . . He was in the Kwik-E-Mart just now, wearing Pikachu slippers.

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web-logging the old-fashioned way

It occurs to me that I ought to be logging not only the good stuff I find for the first time but also the sites to which I return periodically. So. Sites of the last few days. (Most of these are serials, and my bookmarks point to a specific date in the archives; for you I stripped the link down to a front page.)

Steve Jackson Games Illuminated Site of the Week. Some are satirical, some are genuinely loony. Warp 9 to Hell, a tasteless comic strip. Snail Dust, an introvert’s college strip, named for a shape-changing character that grew from the dust behind a computer. Science News (the magazine, which I also get in hardcopy). Bizarro, the surreal newspaper toon; painfully slow loading. Zortic, a silly space adventure strip. Alice, a strip about a middle-school girl with Calvin’s imagination. The Straight Dope. Astronomy Picture of the Day. The Periodic Table: Michael Swanwick (author of Vacuum Flowers, which I loved, and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which I did not love) is writing a short-short story for each element, in order. No Outlet, a deadpan philosophical college roommates strip. The Geometry Junkyard: Recent Additions. Plokta fannish news. How Stuff Works: Articles of the Day. Dirty Old Men’s Association International. White House in Orbit, a retro-scifi secret agent strip. Ron Paul’s weekly column.

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there’s one in every crowd

Petition to Rename The Two Towers to Something Less Offensive. (Thanks and a tip of the whatsit to Astraea for the link.)

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by Piraro

Ultimate Bizarro Awareness (uses Flash)

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hey, I can see where your house was!

New NASA Satellite Zooms in on Tornado Swath – May 2, 2002

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the name of the word for it is called Haddocks’ Eyes

Thousands of Inca Mummies Raised From Their Graves

About 40 of the large mummy bundles are topped with false heads, known to archaeologists as falsas cabezas.

Can’t quarrel with that! (Cabeza is Spanish for ‘head’.)

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