Dowbrigade

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.
From WIRED, today

William Safire looks at new dictionaries and slang, specifically
the first complete revision of Merriman Webster’s Collegiate in a
decade, released this week, which includes such new entries as Frankenfood [...]

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — By the time they died in a 1999
plane crash, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, were
living
a life of separate beds and violence, and Bessette was [...]

T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick’s coffin
Thank goodness I am too cheap to run out and buy all the things I
absolutely HAVE TO HAVE! This saves me from mistakes like the T-Mobile
Sidekick, a combo cellphone, PDA, wireless [...]

God is All-powerful and Omnipresent, and knows all that is knowable.
God had a good 3,000 year run as the ultimate authority, repository of
knowledge, dispenser of advice and receipient of pleas, supplications
and [...]

Some
of you (like me) may have missed Thomas
Pynchon’s rather remarkable introduction to the new edition of George
Orwell’s 1984, [...]

Speaking at a public symposium, a member of Parliament, Seiichi Ota,
recently made light of reports of gang rapes at a Tokyo university. "Boys
who commit group rape are in good shape," Mr. Ota said. "I
[...]

“

Tattoos are not against the law in South Korea, but they
were a foolproof way of avoiding the draft.  Until the government
started arresting young men for ”willfully tampering with their bodies
to avoid [...]

The controversial science of mother-infant bonding gets a new look

A nice review of "Attachment Theory", once discreditied, newly rediscovered,
which basically holds that "children who develop strong bonds with their
[...]

I hated Krispy Kreme donuts long before I ever tried one.
I hated the whole concept of donuts after converting in my 40’s to a
"healthier lifestyle". I especially hated Krispy Kreme donuts for their
[...]

This unlucky man, Jody Lee Taylor, won $4.3 million dollars
in the Virginia Lottery. Unfortunately, "He had a weakness for drink and
drugs, they say." Now he’s lost his wife and his job, and he’s in the Henry
[...]