From the email alert of today's New York Times:

• QUOTATION OF THE DAY -
  "If I didn't believe in God I wouldn't be here, I'd be in a mental home someplace." - IRENE SMITH, of Brooklyn, whose firefighter son, Leon, died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Of course, in a sane world, the reverse would...

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Blue Girl In a Red State had me in a bit of a lather with a post about how she could avoid shopping if she gave (or didn’t give; it wasn’t at all clear to begin with) her hubby Shag Buns. Being a squeeky clean sorta gal from somewhere or other, she had no idea that the juxtaposition of “shag” and...

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Michael C. LaBarbera at the University of Chicago has an archive of what must have been interesting lectures on The Biology of B-Movie Monsters.¹ Maybe he's the person to illuminate P.Z. Myers on Buffy's biology?

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Below please find the two lead paras of a Guardian story filed last week. Thanks to Frinktank. I have no comment whatsoever.

A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight w...

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Where's that damned plagiarism detector when you need it?

The Observer last Sunday drew attention to what it calls “biopiracy”. Syngenta developed a new kind of Busy Lizzie that trails, and is therefore a boon to the hanging basket business. which is big. It says that Syngenta’s original patent on...

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