Category: Bits and Pieces

Just FYI, bidding has closed at $2,100,100.00. Now we’ll wait and see if it was a real bidder, or of someone was trying to scam the system (a point a commenter made in my last eBay auction post). If real, it’s wonderful. UPDATE: It’s real! “The winner of the auction

Just thought you’d like to know that, with a little more than 20 hours left on the bidding, the current high bid on the letter that Reid (along with 41 Democratic Senators) wrote in an effort to censor Rush Limbaugh is $511,100.00, with all proceeds to go to a fund

Last night, we watched Pushing Daisies, the new ABC show that has critics raving.  (See this and this, for example.)  Mr. Bookworm and I sat in bewildered silence as actors spoke their lines at such machine gun pace we couldn’t understand them without subtitles and, to the extent we understood

Last night, Mr. Bookworm got around to watching a recent Frontline episode called “Cheney’s Law.”  Here’s how PBS describes the show: For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department

In my post yesterday about the dreadful Aliens in America, I commented on the writers’ take on civil rights.  Now, a bunch of lawyers have done a very funny reductio ad absurdum video on that same point of view: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kzGSkRqRHw] Hat tip:  Power Line

The San Francisco Chronicle has a heartrending story about a couple that earns $53,000 a year, but can only afford a small rental in an icky San Francisco neighborhood: The hard truth is that $53,000 a year doesn’t cut it anymore in the Bay Area. Tens of thousands of working

I read the British papers regularly, and know that, for months, they’ve kept on the front page the story of Madeleine McCann, the four year old who vanished in Portugal. I’d assumed that the story’s continued visibility arose for two reasons: what a pretty little girl Madeleine is, and what

For the most impressive compendium of things Jewish you’ll ever see, check out Soccer Dad’s blog.  He is hosting the 136th edition of Haveil Havalim, which looks at posts blogosphere that involve Jews and Israel.  The indexing is an impressive feat, and there’s something there for everyone, Jew and non-Jew

Kim Priestap gives the heads-up that Rush is auctioning off the original letter in which Senators tried to censor him for the faux phony soldier scandal, with the proceeds to go to a Marine charity (Rush is a board member). More than that, Rush is challenging each Senator who signed

We all know by now that Wikipedia has credibility problems, because anybody can write anything — and that anything stands until it’s corrected, or falsified, or otherwise manipulated.  I tend to cite to Wikipedia if I feel that it’s a neat précis of something I already know to be true,

I’ve been researching the Legislative history of a California statute enacted 30 years ago. The statute affected how insurance companies could conduct investigations that would determine their risk in issuing a given policy. At that time, insurance companies would conduct personal interviews with neighbors and colleagues, with the results stored