All about me

Finally, someone with the courage to ask the bold question: "Lincoln had one. So did Uncle Sam. Why don't politicians today grow beards?"

Young people not eager to get their licenses and start driving? It's practically un-American:

Young Americans are eschewing cars for alternative transport, leaving carmakers to wonder if this is a recession-induced trend or a permanent shift in habits.

Something for the kind-of-creepy-but-kind-of-cool-too file:

An Indiana monument company is taking gravestones out of the stone-age and giving them a high tech feature.

We all knew landlines were on the way out, but it looks like their demise might come even quicker than we realized:

This article is recommended for any of my fellow science fiction fans. Lately I've been rereading some of my favorite Robert Heinlein stuff from when I was much younger. One thing you notice right away -- since "the future" he was writing in the 1940s and 1950s has mostly come and gone by now -- is how wrong he got many things. But that doesn't make his novels any less interesting. Furthermoere:

Well, bless my soul:

I like the clever play on words in this headline -- Fanfare for the Comma Man -- and the article is pretty interesting, too. The writer, a university of Delaware English professor, correctly notes that the use of punctuation evolves over time and that often what's used is a matter of personal preference as much as the rules of grammar. The evolution has been speeded up considerably by -- well, you know what:

See, folks, I was born nice, so just shut your nasty mouths, OK?

This is just too fiendish to contemplate:

There is no snooze button. If you unplug it, a battery takes over. As wake-up time approaches, you cannot reset the alarm time.

It could be the world's most exasperating alarm clock.

How depressing might your average newspaper journalist find this piece? Here's a clue: It's titled "When Losers Write History," which is adapted from a chapter in the book, "Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done To Fix It."