But mightn't someone so convinced of their guilt that they're sweaty-handed with fear be slightly better off in heated-metal trials due to the Leidenfrost effect?

Gotta stop watching "Mythbusters" marathons...

If people hadn't tried to push the envelope of McCain-Feingold past the point of all sense, prompting the Supreme Court to strike down it and its precursor rather than accept unconstitutional implications, then we wouldn't be in this position. So what do the liberals do when their reductio ad absurdum arguments backfire? Protest with more reductio ad absurdum. Never learn....

The recycling idea that's really "so simple it's genious" (sic) is to take a concept marketed to basement crafters for four decades, apply eco-spin and a pretentious name, and ask 15 bucks for something the said basement crafters wouldn't put in their yard sale because they'd feel silly asking 10 cents for it.

Oh, and as to the name : I suppose it's supposed to evoke brotherhood and such, but to me BottleHood sounds like a thug armed with a broken-off bottle in his fist.

Armadillos are burrowing creatures that have bad eyesight but good sense of smell, so I guess this just seemed to it like a type of tunnel it had to negotiate. But that was amazing footage. Almost as astonishing as when the Mythbusters tested the old proverb of "a bull in a china shop."

"And per se" did NOT precede any letter which was also a word in the alphabet. Per se = "by itself", so "and per se and" means "&, as an isolated character, means the word and". So it would go "a per se a", "i per se I", etc.

The terminology's gotten murky. In the books pretty much any story that ends in loss of reproductive abilities via applied stupidity gets labeled with "Darwin Award", whereas the website seems still to insist on the same story being only a "Darwin Award Nominee" unless it actually gets voted to receive that year's Darwin Award. So according to the books, many females have gotten the award before this; according to the website, none have -- not even the female to whom you refer.

Wow, made it to comment 7 before the lazy and predictable political joke. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

"AIDS is a problem; say thanks to the Catholic church for going around saying contraception is a sin."

Oh yes, because the Catholic Church has such an unchallenged stranglehold over all of Africa?

Because religious scruples would be the only reason a guy wouldn't want to use a condom?

Apply a bit of common sense before you start spewing your ridiculous opinion.

Check the article again -- Nutt DOES want some mild intoxicating effects, just not full-blown drunkenness and hangovers. Also it says that ideally the new product would be tasteless.

I remember listening to a books-on-tape version of "Postern of Fate" (the last novel she wrote) and thinking that it clearly showed either some kind of mental slippage or a desperate attempt to wring more word-count out of the plot, 'cause the meandering and repetitions were driving me nuts!

You want to talk about painting on books, how about fore edge painting? Amazing antique artwork painted on the papers' edges, seen only when the all the pages are splayed out a bit and disappearing when it's closed and squared up. That would be worth an entry, and more interesting than this lumpy cartoonish mural.

Evilbeagle, even the Grimms rewrote Grimm's Fairy Tales -- a lot of those evil stepmothers were actually evil mothers in the original collected stories.

Well, Police's "Don't stand so close to me" does have those lines:

"It's no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov."

I'd call it literary allusion rather than inspiration, but bonus points on roping in an author's name, right? And Sting's "Moon over Bourbon Street" gets its juice from Interview with a Vampire.

As to Lord of the Rings, I'd bet you can form a list on that by itself. Been trashing old cassettes and noted that Styx had a song titled that.

The beauty of these kind of calculations is that there's such a myriad of variables involved that, depending what you choose to count and how you choose to count it, you can get any result you want. And if you're proven wrong, change the label or redefine the terms. But if anyone questions, call it "settled science"!

I'm reminded of the short story "Hinterlands" by William Gibson; the succession of explorers did come back (to a space station) with plenty of patent-worthy info but almost always insane or DOA by suicide... and as one of the handlers says "Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go."

Still. Even knowing that you will find people like that, I'm ill at ease to think of public policy built on the one-way-ticket idea, entrenched in the concept of the disposable human. And don't counter with "that what war's all about": it's one thing to say you might not come home, or even probably not, another to say you WILL not, even to a volunteer. So instead of a suicide bomber's lure of a virgin-laden paradise, you offer academic glory and screen-time? Because it's going to take a few missions at least until things are sorted out enough to the point that life expectancy is "shortened by a little bit" as in this gentleman's softening statement. And they won't be pretty.