By Donal on Thu, 07/14/2011 - 1:14pm | Arts & Entertainment
Last weekend, my daughter thrust Somerset Maugham's great novel at me and said, "You should read this, Dad." She does that a lot and I therefore always have a small stack of books to get through, but I did start reading Of Human Bondage, and I love it. But with all the hoopla about the final Potter film being released NOW! it does occur to me that Harry Potter and Philip Carey have more than a little in common.
The Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which he drafted and pushed through his state's legislature, declares that guns made in Montana, stamped "Made in Montana" and staying in-state aren't subject to federal regulations.
After the state enacted it, he announced plans to manufacture the Buckaroo, a miniature rifle that is based on an 1899 Winchester model and intended for children between ages five and 10. [Sheesh] Orders, at $200 apiece, poured in. Some came from lawmakers.
When I flew to Los Angeles for the 1999 AEC Systems show, in which vendors showed all the latest and greatest cad and other software products to architects, engineers and contractors, my high school buddy Jim picked me up at the airport in his EV-1. It was an impressive vehicle, very sleek and stylish compared to the EVs I had seen before or had imagined from Popular Mechanics covers.
It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching uranium.
Natanz technicians in white lab coats, gloves and blue booties were scurrying in and out of the “clean” cascade rooms, hauling out unwieldy centrifuges one by one, each sheathed in shiny silver cylindrical casings.
A little black cat lives in the crawl space under my house. Some weeks I see him every day, darting back into his burrow as I pull into the driveway. Then he'll disappear for weeks at a time, and just when I'm sure that he's found cushier digs, he comes back, like the cat in the old children's song. He's not much of a charmer—skinny, mangy, limping, and so feral that he bolts at the mere sight of people. But I can't help feeling sorry for him, so a few months ago I began leaving out cat food.
In a Gallup poll released today, Americans chose dilithium crystals as the top choice of fuel to run both cars and power plants, with 84% of Americans choosing the crystals over other options including nuclear, hydrogen, corn ethanol, shale gas, and photovoltaic solar panels.
[The founder of baseball's Sabermetrics, interviewed about his latest book: Popular Crime.]
You're speaking hypothetically, but I'm curious: What would have to happen in order to make you commit a murder? Can you picture a scenario where you kill someone?
For two centuries Americans have willingly and whole-heartedly embraced a modern life that technology has made possible. As a result, we have enjoyed the benefits of speed, efficiency, and access to an exhaustive supply of consumer products.
“THE ADVENT OF celebrity chefs and cooking-as-entertainment have influenced the way people eat in restaurants, and made chefs a lot more self-conscious,” says Mollie Katzen, the Berkeley, California-based author of the Moosewood Cookbook, who is something of a celebrity chef herself, having hosted cooking shows on television and sold more than six million cookbooks under 15 different titles. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good meal in a restaurant—I do.
Has the Supreme Court lost faith in the American court system? That is a strange question to ask about the justices who sit at the top of the country's judicial hierarchy. But in case after case in the just-completed term, the court, usually in 5-4 decisions with the conservatives in the majority, denied access to the courts.
The big money for Better Place lies in the monopoly it received from the state on building and operating charging stations.
The first electric cars in the Better Place system are due to arrive on Israel's roads in the next few days. The cars themselves are an electric version of the Renault Fluence: Instead of a gasoline engine, the car will be powered by a large battery. When the battery is used up, it will either be charged at a charging station or quickly replaced with a full battery at a special battery-swapping station.
As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt.
The Sand Hills of Nebraska are a unique Great Plains prairie ecosystem. The rolling dunes, rising to 300 feet, cover about a quarter of the state, and because the grasses and wildflowers there are adapted to wet, sandy soil, many grow nowhere else. Thousands of ponds and lakes dot the Sand Hills, nourishing the Ogallala Aquifer.
In simple terms, Mexican families are smaller than they had once been. The pool of likely migrants is shrinking. Despite the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, birth control efforts have pushed down the fertility rate to about 2 children per woman from 6.8 in 1970, according to government figures. So while Mexico added about one million new potential job seekers annually in the 1990s, since 2007 that figure has fallen to an average of 800,000, according to government birth records. By 2030, it is expected to drop to 300,000.
Was there a foreign government behind the 9/11 attacks? A decade later, Americans still haven’t been given the whole story, while a key 28-page section of Congress’s Joint Inquiry report remains censored.
