News You Can Bruise for 2004 June 14

Mon Jun 14 2004 10:18 PST: Leonard's obsessions collide (collude?) with Gambling on Voting, a comparative analysis of the security standards applied to slot machines and voting machines. Who will win?

I believe it was Shaw who said: "The voting machine pays nobody except him that designs it. Nevertheless, a passion for voting is common, though a passion for designing voting machines is unknown."

From Vice Squad, which mostly deals with vices that do not overlap with my obsessions.

(1) Mon Jun 14 2004 17:46 PST About half of my dreams are like that: My new filtered-through Kris Checkerboard Nightmare is probably the best one you'll get from my tenure as co-author. Caution: contains swearing. Interestingly enough, for once I wrote it without any swearing and Kris made it blue. I mean, he turned Chex into Adam here.

"Hmmm... refreshingly cool!" has been my mental catchphrase for a while now, but for some reason it never turns out to actually be refreshingly cool.

(1) Mon Jun 14 2004 20:16 PST: I was looking for biology geek recipes that mentioned the scientific names of the ingredients. I didn't find any, but I did find Cicada Recipe (which has, rather redundantly, both "How To Eat Cicadas" and "How To Prevent Tree Damage By Cicadas") and the Cicada-Licious cookbook (PDF), which says:

Eating bugs sounds disgusting? If you have ever eaten a crawfish, lobster, crab or shrimp then you have already eaten members of the class Arthropoda, of which insects are a part. So there.