Just a slight clarification ... Otto Frank did not find the diary after the war. Rather, after the Franks were arrested , it was found by Miep Gies, an Austrian woman living in the Netherlands who helped hide the Frank family. Gies (still alive, aged 99) hid the diary after the war and then gave it to Anne's father, the only survivor of the group.

It's not a big distinction of course, but it helps defend against the Max Powers out there who claim the diary a fake initiated by Anne's father. If that were the case, ies and her husband had to be in on the "fraud" as well.

It's a stupid unneeded law. There are already BROADER laws on the books against "distracted driving" and "careless driving" which a cop can use to write up tickets for distracted phoning (or kid-slapping, french-fry eating or whatever). The cell phone law only exists because politicians can get some press coverage over sponsoring the legislation (usually crassly timing a press conference usually to take advantage of a tragedy). The law is just redundant and adds nothing other than sucking up resources. Your tax dollars at work.

Tempscire is dead on. I live in an historic house filled with lots of old style exposed bulb fixtures. These stupid compact fluorescent bulbs and the idiot politicians that keep trying to force them on us drive me nuts.

Like we need another reason for kooks to claim that they are somehow "sensitive" to it.... I would like to know what kind of frequency response the thing has -- as Sofar noted, radio waves of some frequency are (almost) everywhere on Earth. This thing oughta be vibrating like a marital aid plugged into a 220V outlet.

Sounds like a good followup to Global Warming hoax -- a good place to grab research cash and cripple economies.

That's pretty funny, but what is even funnier is that I've done teh same thing myself. My wife and I own a nearly 200 year old house. Over the years it was pretty well conserved, but in the 1960s a family of morons lived here who did some horrendously poor quality work. I've been gradually undoing their schlock... My efforts include replacing some cheap drywall with real lath and plaster (which I can do fairly well - it's not that hard and looks/performs a lot better). Fortunately, most of the house still has real plaster, so it's only a few places where these lazy hacks screwed up the walls. Anyhow, whenever I restore a wall, I leave inside it the current day's newspaper. Occasionally, I leave inside a note as well, threathening to HAUNT them forever if they re-replace my plaster with drywall again. :-)

What a retard. It's not like drug-sniffing dogs are anything new. I've seen them frequently used by customs agents on the U.S./ Canadian border, so you *KNOW* they must be typical on the southern border.

Just to be clear, yeah, you can damage a fuel pump by running it dry, but the damage is only going to happen if you (really stupidly) continue to try to start the car after it has stalled. The in-tank pumps rely on fuel running though them to keep them cool. If you keep trying to start an out-of-gas car, you keep the pump running and it eventually overheats, ensuing a tow and an expensive repair. If you just ran the car out of gas and admitted defeat after the car died, the pump would be fine. Key thought: admit defeat and go hike for gas rather than trying to get it restarted on a dry tank.

The varied auto manuafacturers all have their own idea of the optimum "empty reserve" (an actual automotive engineering term) for their particular customers. Personally, I'd like a tank gauge to read right on F when it is full and right on E just before it sputters and dies, with accurate linear reading in between. Unfortunately, the greater public is frankly rather dim and are easily fooled into thinking the car gets better fuel economy if it takes *forver* to move off "F" and then takes 100 miles to finally die after E has reached. As a result, automotive engineers deliberately calibrate the pump sender units to read high when fuel, low when empty, and varying slope in between. All cars do this, but the more a car exhibits such goofy inaccurate behaviour, the dumber the automaker thinks its customers are. Like I said, all cars are different, but no automaker delivers truly accurate gauges. If your model goes forever on E, they think idiots are the primary buyers.

Definitely a staged publicity shot, not a real wedding. No way the hot blonde is going to dress up in Star Trek duds to marry some dork.

Are the prisons all full?

Gibson8or has good commentary.

As a practical matter, generally diseases like that affect an entire species pretty uniformly. So while relying on a single cultivar like 'Cavendish' doesn't help, in truth, probably the whole species will be affected. What sometimes happens though, is that a rare individual plants *within* a species exhibit some degree of atypical resistance. When that happens, the resistant plant can be cloned (usually through age-old vegetative means such as cuttings) and then crossed with existing cultivars such as 'Cavendish' in the hope that a variety can be produced that has the good features of 'Cavendish' without the disease susceptibility.

This is a great plan, but it can take decades and decades... such has been the case with producing a American Chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight -- that was introduced in 1904 and has completely decimated the U.S. Chestnut forests.

While there have been some individual trees within the native chestnut species that exhibited some resistance, most of the effort on finding a blight-proof solution has been doing crosses with other species that are more resistant (but otherwise lamer trees). So they start off by crossing a blight-sensitive American Chestnust with a blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut ( a different species) and select the most resistant "children" (seedlings) and then backcross these with American chestnuts. The idea is that in the end you have a tree that is almost indistinguishable from an American Chestnut, but is blight-resistant. This can take 8 or more backcrosses & since chestnuts takes years to fruit (and have seeds) it can take a long long time.

It sounds like something must be needed for bananas. They'll need to cross seeded cultivars with other species that are more resistant, come up with something resistant and then get to work at developing a seedless cultivar thereafter. It will be a ot of work, but the banana market is huge, so they'll have the bucks to do it. Time is time, however...

The dude with the Olds Ciera (which, BTW, is NOT spelled "Sierra") looks pretty fruit.

I dunno... Maybe the airlines miles are a pain to redeem, but I've had good luck with some other schemes. Back when I worked for General Motors and was expected to buy GM cars, I also had a GM card on which I accumulated over $3000 in cash towards the purchase of a car. It wasn't any trouble redeeming it and I had non-GM friends who did the same thing.

I've got a Discover card now that also gives (a small percentage) cash back. I pay the card off every month and never carry a balance, so it's a $100 or so every year back. No trouble redeeming that, either.

I think it was a clever marketing gimic. And the Pringles themselves are pretty tasty.

I thought it rather silly some years ago when the decades in the marketplace the gov't forced them to change the name of the product from "potato chips" (actually it was "Pringles New-Fangled Potato Chips") to "potato crisps". It was ovious that some competitor had laid some green upon a congressman somewhere...

Too bad somebody didn't give a few of them knives. That would have been more fun to watch and would have cleaned out some of the debris from society.