Oh, Iceland, so civilized even when you’re totally flipping your shit. First use of tear gas in 60 years, one cobblestone injury, everyone quieted down for the funeral. OK, there was fire and egg pelting, but that is so wholesome and traditional. And I bet there were hot dogs after. Best in the world!

“The devil has as much right to take part in a religious meeting as the Macon Telegraph has to a voice in Democratic councils, says Sparta Ishmaelite.”

I’ve been watching Mythbusters episodes on DVD and agree with my friend Craig that some of the questions they address would be better answered by some rigorous book research rather than blowing things up (as entertaining as that is). But that would be a different and altogether more boring show.

Episode one of that boring show, hosted by me: Pirate eye patches as way to retain your night vision by swapping which (functional) eye it covers when traveling from light to dark and dark to light. While they showed that it was quite effective in retaining night vision, there was no evidence presented that pirates actually did that.

My research: from Daily Life in the Age of Sail’s section on Pirates, it was pointed out that pirates themselves didn’t really keep records, since they were criminals. Most accurate records were kept by the people in charge of ending their criminal activities, and this did not include handy eye patch tips. More damning, the Oxford English Dictionary entry on Patch defined it only as a covering for a damaged or missing eye, with no information or usage as anything else.

My verdict: no evidence for this usage.

As implied by a recent twitter/twitpic update (and a less recent one, too), I’ve taken to relatively high levels of cacao in my chocolate lately. This is partly due to Sandra Boynton’s advice (as reported by a local chocolate reviewer and friend of the Collective), but also because chocolate packaged as baking chocolate is far less expensive than the same strength of chocolate from the same manufacturer packaged for eating.
One slight drawback of the 100% cacao chocolate, though, is that it doesn’t go as well with salty snacks; I find, in fact, it goes best with something a little sweet.

Except that we’re not trading, I suppose. Turns out some gang of ne’er-do-wells in Portland is claiming that they are the FPC. Well, accept no substitutes. The impostors have nothing to do with us.

Since we moved, I think we may have picked up some more address harvesters—or maybe the blocks of IPs I banned via .htaccess at the other place were keeping them out. Anyway, I am a little surprised that address at example.org is getting spam (not really example.org, but you get my point), while otheraddress at example dot org is not. I had thought the harvesters were smart enough to see through “dot”, but so far they are demonstrating that they are not. It’s still early days, of course; we haven’t even had our first comment spam attempt.

An interesting article on various movements to restrict the breadth of species used as service animals in fact raises the need for a new right: the right for anyone to physically punish people who say their regular pets are service animals. Possibly with garden implements.

If you’re reading this, you’re seeing us at our new hosting outfit with our new WordPress software. A bunch of internal links will be broken for a good long time, but we’re hoping that this will be the last time that happens.

A crazy English guy (not to be confused with a wackjob English guy) team of scientists has recreated the Antikythera.

This guy’s work is so cool. SO COOL!