By popular demand: Clara’s “bad face” costume for Halloween. Here she is with Mara, the purple princess.

Michelle Goldberg’s longish piece in Salon is the most thoughtful reaction to the whole Red State-Blue State divide that I’ve seen yet: If at first you don’t secede. Honestly, I’m a bit irritated by the recent flood of gratuitous fuck-yous and pathetic disavowals; both seem divisive and unproductive

The onslaught of comment spam on my Movable Type blog finally made me scream uncle: I switched to WordPress this weekend. MT is an amazingly flexible tool, but it is slow, slow, slow, and it’s not set up well to deal with comment spam. It takes several minutes just to delete a single comment–and the

State-by-state election returns make the U.S. look like a deeply divided country–red Republicans in the South and middle; blue Democrats on the coasts. (The division is eerily reminiscent of the division between free and slave states before the Civil War–how long the shadows of that ugly history are

Indian farmers have discovered that spraying their fields with Coca-Cola may be as effective as–and lots cheaper than–spraying with pesticides. An Indian agronomist says: “I think Coke has found its right use. Farmers have traditionally used sugary solutions to attract red ants to feed on insect lar

Get ready to meet the next big innovation in mobile communications technology: the hinge. The Sierra Wireless Voq Professional phone is a rather ordinary-looking, somewhat bulky handset with a traditional 12-button keypad. Flip back the keypad and you reveal a miniscule QWERTY keyboard concealed ins

Research in Motion turned the corporate world on its ear with the first BlackBerry pagers, which gave middle managers the power to hound subordinates 24/7, no matter where in the world the expense account took them. Later, RIM grafted mobile phone capabilities onto its pagers, producing functional —

Remember the John Woo movie Face/Off, where John Travolta and Nicholas Cage trade faces? Well, it isn’t science fiction any more.

Jacques Derrida is dead. The Telegraph has an intelligent and balanced review of his life and work. Derrida’s work had a huge influence on my college education, and it was always clear to me that his own writing was far more precise — and humane — than that of his American imitators. I am sorry […]

Patrick Costello has put up the whole text of his book, The How and The Tao of the Old-Time Banjo, under a Creative Commons license. Patrick is a generous, down-to-earth, iconoclastic teacher of banjo and I am really looking forward to reading his book. You can also order a printed copy here.

There are 11 different ways you can misspell “pedal to the metal,” all of which use legitimate words that Word won’t flag as misspelled: {pedal, petal, peddle} to the {metal, mettle, medal, meddle} = 12 permutations, only one of which is correct.