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21 February 2022
[cannonball] Is This the End of the Cannonball Run? … How Covid-19 killed the Cannonball Run. ‘The following March, the world shut down, and the nation’s empty highways looked enticing to potential Cannonballers. Bolian said the record was broken 12 times during the early months of the pandemic. “It was just an unimaginable set of circumstances,” he says.’
1 February 2013
[guns] The Onion: AR-15 Assault Rifle Beginning To Worry It May Never Get To Kill Innocent Person

The Colt-manufactured assault rifle confirmed that, given the administration’s intention to advance gun control measures designed to curb the nation’s ready access to deadly firearms such as itself, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the weapon will ever have the opportunity to act on its long-held desire to brutally execute even a single innocent person.

“Ever since I came off the assembly line, I’ve dreamed of being used to annihilate dozens of frantic people in a deadly rampage; it’s what I was made to do,” the semiautomatic rifle said from its display stand at Richmond-area gun retailer Pete’s Munitions. “But if the government clamps down on sales of guns like me, then I can pretty much kiss that dream goodbye. And, I have to say, the idea of that happening is massively disappointing for me.”

8 May 2011
[nyc] The Terminal: The Roughest Bar In New York City … a brief and fascinating look with video … ‘I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.’
14 June 2010
[nyc] Uncovering the Secrets Beneath the Surface of the New York Harbor … great article looking at some of the weird things lurking underwater in New York Harbor …

“In the East River, at about 16th Street, there’s one of those old dining-room tables, the kind with a Formica top and the grooved metal bands around the edge,” says Speregen. “It’s standing upright, totally free and clear. It makes me want to go down there with teacups and set it up.”

2 July 2007
[crime] Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder — Wired Article on Hans Reiser and the disappearance of his Wife … ‘For the past two decades, he has struggled to create a different method of organizing data. His approach, known as ReiserFS, is a file system unlike any other. Rather than assign data a fixed location on a hard drive, it uses algorithms to frequently reposition information, including the code that makes up the file system itself. It elegantly maximizes storage space, but it can also complicate data recovery when a computer crashes. If the algorithms are corrupted, the file system will be unable to locate its own position. All the data it organizes disappears into an indistinguishable mass of 0s and 1s. The contents of that hard drive will be irretrievably lost. In Reiser’s case, a critical piece of data — the location of Nina Reiser — has gone missing…’
14 June 2007
[usa] Judge Who Seeks Millions for Lost Pants Has His (Emotional) Day in Court‘Before trial began yesterday in the case of the D.C. judge who sued his neighborhood dry cleaners after they lost his pants, the most extraordinary fact was Roy Pearson’s demand for $65 million in damages. That was before Pearson, an administrative law judge, broke down while testifying about the emotional pain of having the cleaners give him the wrong pants. It was before an 89-year-old woman in a wheelchair told of being chased out of the cleaners by an angry owner. And it was before she compared the owners of Custom Cleaners in open court to Nazis. “I knew it: It’s all my fault,” said the reporter from German television who was sitting next to me.’ [via kottke]
4 June 2007
[books] Sci-fi writers join war on Terror‘”We’re well-qualified nuts,” says Jerry Pournelle, co-author of the best sellers Footfall and Lucifer’s Hammer and dozens of other books. […] During a coffee break at the conference, Walker, Bear and Andrews started talking about the government’s bomb-sniffing dogs. Within minutes, they had conjured up a doggie brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up.’
27 February 2007
[media] Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Past 40 Years — from the American Society of Magazine Editors …

some of the greatest covers of the last 40 years

2 January 2007
[unabom] Unabomber’s Secret Code Cracked‘Schneier described the code as so complicated that “it would not surprise me if this was the most complex cipher the FBI has seen since World War II.” Schneier said with that code, Kaczynski could certainly be successful in keeping information away from the authorities. But Kaczynski succeeded only up to a point. Agents discovered the first of many clues to solving the puzzle in one of Kaczynski’s notebooks, on a page labeled, “Unscrambling Sequence.”‘ [via Wired’s Monkey Bites]
8 December 2006
[iraq] Steve Bell: I Will Leave Forn Policy to the Grown Ups.
25 September 2006
[comics] Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. — incredibly, this is a real shop in NYC which is a front for a Children’s Writing Center‘We can help with your Nemesis Problem.’
13 September 2006
[crime] What it’s like to be a Homicide Detective in Chicago — from the Best of Craigslist‘Murder is a brutal, ugly thing. 80 or 90 percent of the time it involves narcotics or alcohol in one way or another. Crime scenes can be physically revolting when you first start working murders. Decomposed bodies will always be revolting. One particular murder has given me a life long aversion to eating ribs.’
7 September 2006
[911] Unity — Zefrank on 9/11. ‘With no particular thought in my head I started crying…’
1 June 2006
[comics] The Beast that will not Die — Peter Bagge on the War on Drugs …

panels from a peter bagge comic about america's war on drugs...

25 January 2006
[politics] The Guardian Asks: Why is the US so obsessed with Cuba?‘Psychologists might argue that the real reason for America’s pathological irritation is Castro’s refusal to go quietly. He laughed off the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, stirred things up during the missile crisis in 1962, and welcomed the Pope with open arms in 1998. To the sound of grinding teeth across the Straits of Florida, he has attempted to play down the fall of the Soviet Union and a 44-year-long trade embargo with the US as mere flesh wounds. He is, in short, a one-man blow to their pride.’
15 January 2006
[books] Burning Down the Sixties — oldish interview with James Ellroy. On Oliver Stone’s JFK: …

‘That movie is electrifying for the first 45 minutes because it hints at Cuba. It never hints at the mob, and it’s too bad, because it is the mob. You know, it’s the mob-renegades-CIA-crazy-Cuban-exiles nexus, and anything else is horse shit. I would believe the single-gunman theory before I would believe the military-industrial complex theory. It’s preposterous. “Gentlemen, I’ll give you your damn war.” Ha! War this! [points to his crotch]’

5 December 2005
[politics] CIA Sabotage Manual — used in Central America in the 1980’s – reminiscent of Jack Chick. [via jzw]

image of cia instruction manual

6 February 2005
[comics] The Sinister Ducks — a flash animation of the song by Alan Moore … ‘What are they doing at night in the park? Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack! Think of them waddling about in the dark. Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack! Sneering and whispering and stealing your cars, Reading pornography, smoking cigars. Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!’ [Previously: March of the Sinister Ducks – MP3 Download]
8 January 2003
[comics] Eyewitness in Gaza — Observer review of Joe Sacco‘s Palestine … ‘Approaching such daunting topics with a disreputable and supposedly juvenile medium may seem futile, even absurd, yet Sacco’s greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted contradiction, oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting.’ [Buy Palestine: UK | US]
17 July 2002
[film] Chronicle of a Death Foretold — Greil Marcus on the Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer and the Kennedy Assasinations … Frankenheimer: ‘I can see Bobby’s face on a big television monitor in the ballroom and I can see his back for real. As I stood there a figure went by me and it was as if there was electricity coming out of his body. I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. Of course it was Sirhan Sirhan.’