As noted previously, these kids today are not very bright. In further developments in that field of study, USA Today (that bastion of journalistic excellence) cites a study that found more than a third of high school students think newspapers should get government approval before publishing stories (though the wording I see doesn’t say they believe such approval should be mandatory). On the bright side, more than half believed such approval should not be sought.

Take this piece about the Pope’s flu, for example. It makes me wonder at least a couple things not addressed: Is the Vatican flu as bad as the Kremlin flu (or was that the Kremlin cold, and that’s why the Vatican emphasized that this is the flu and not a cold)? Why wouldn’t an 84-year-old guy get a flu shot (and related questions about whether flu shots work, or if JP2 is a closet Christian Scientist)? What up with that?
Update: now he’s been hospitalized. Not to get too far ahead of myself, but I wonder if they’ll go with the smoke grenades like last time, or if there will be some new white smoke/black smoke technology developed in the last 25 years.

Based solely on the name, I want to hate Lifehacker, but, dammit, it might be fairly cool. I’ll leave the jury out for now.

But since I’m already coughing my lungs out a couple times a day, it’s hard to be all that sanguine about human-to-human avian flu transmission.
When I’m not actually coughing my lungs out, I feel okay, but those couple times a day are not pretty.

Good news: Nicky Brendon has a movie in production. Bad news: It’s starring Adrienne Barbeau. Where’s Love Boat when you need it?

Just another "Good Baptist couple gets porno labelled as The Pajama Game" story? Maybe. My favorite part, though, is "’My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.’" So, what, they were expecting maybe the topless Italian woman was the accompanying short? Or maybe they couldn’t be sure exactly how shocked they were? After all, "’The film became progressively more graphic,’" so I guess they really did have to watch to the end to find their true level of shockedness.
I guess this demonstrates that there really are some people out there who can’t figure out how to turn off the tv when it presents them with something they (feel obligated to claim they) don’t want to watch. Pathetic, really.

If the only hammer you have is the UNIX stream editor sed, you may be surprised at the variety of nails available to you.

Again showing my fairly foggy knowledge of European history, I had no idea that the Polish scouts operated an underground resistance during WWII! I think more scouts would remain active until High School if they knew they would get to sabotage railways.

I’m probably the only reader of this blog that doesn’t read McSweeney’s Internet Tendency on a regular basis, so this recommendation is almost certainly redundant, but John Moe is funny. Not so much "ha ha" funny as "you might as well laugh; despair won’t help" funny.

Somehow, just because culture is their field of expertise, the American Anthropological Association has felt moved to issue a statement opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, on the grounds there is no basis to the argument that marriage is sacredly heterosexual.