Headlines from January 8, 2007
- Except for brief moments of duress, I haven't touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words--or the last half a million words of my published fiction. Novelist Richard Powers talks to his computer.
- Artist Carson Ellis breaks down and gets a blog; some previously unreleased work has been posted--more is promised.
- New South Wales now requires a permit for fake guns; "replica firearm" border control to be stepped up.
- Get your thoughts in order with A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.
- Must-see: Use those new skills to visualize zip codes.
- The early portfolios of photographer William Eggleston, sometime Big Star pianist.
- Florida is storing ice cubes at a cost of $900,000 per month, but will they expire before anyone buys them?
- If you have any spare pesos, though, you might want to spend them on pizza in Texas.
- Consumer-friendly Taser to be introduced.
- Don't worry, the world's most beautiful woman doesn't know who you are, either.
- Roman Polanski: "While parking the car, he'd managed to run over Dr. Saperstein, our dog, named after the character in Rosemary's Baby."
- New York smells like natural gas today, but it could just be the odor that's added to gas, not gas itself.
- Austin's Congress Avenue shut down over reports of dozens of inexplicably dead birds.
- Record high temperatures prompt New Yorkers to ice-skate in T-shirts, the Polar Bear club to hold a moment of silence.
- Oklahoma Senator wants us to know polar bears are not endangered, and there's no reason to think they will be anytime soon.
- UC Davis scientists find parallels between today's climate changes and the ones that happened way back in the Paleozoic era--i.e., the last time the Earth got really hot.
- ExxonMobil is upset over the Union of Concerned Scientists' report on the company's disinformation campaign.
- Remember how the government can see your library records? Well, guess who's reading your mail!
- New York City teachers did more student-groping, tutee-inventing, and outright money-stealing in 2006 than ever before.
- All the Scientologists want is little Astor Penswick to stay away from drugs.
- In today's Book Digest, Robert Birnbaum covers some of his favorites, including Robert Stone, Jim Harrison, Howard Zinn, and Francesca Woodman.
- Once you get past the ads, you will never look at watermelons in the same way.