‘FAIRLY’ IDIOT-PROOF? Which is more characteristically American–that a Texas company could invent an ordinary rifle that mimics a machine gun or that America’s incomparable legal minds could find a loophole in existing anti-machine-gun laws to permit it to be manufactured and sold? The Slide Fire company’s weapon can spray bullets “like a fire hose” from a legal, semi-automatic … [Read more...] about Busy Superheroes and Deaf Jam and Boring Surgery
JULY
Epic Campaign Fail and Chinese Chicken and Mayonnaise Enemas
HOME SWEET HOME “With its neatly cut lawns and luscious tropical vegetation,” wrote a BBC News reporter in July, Miracle Village, Fla., is an “idyllic rural community” of 200 residents–about half of whom are registered sex offenders, attracted to the settlement near Lake Okeechobee because laws and ordinances elsewhere in Florida harshly restrict where they can live (e.g., not … [Read more...] about Epic Campaign Fail and Chinese Chicken and Mayonnaise Enemas
Clean Toilet Happiness and Macaque Punishment and The Reality Of Sharknado
HAPPINESS IS A CLEAN TOILET Beginning in 2011, about three dozen people in Tokyo have been meeting every Sunday morning at 6am on a mission to scrub down, one by one, the city’s grungiest public restrooms. “By 7:30,” according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed an outing in August, the team had left behind a “gleaming public toilet, looking as good as the day it was … [Read more...] about Clean Toilet Happiness and Macaque Punishment and The Reality Of Sharknado
Loco Parentis and Sticker Shock and Our Litigious Society
LOCO PARENTIS First-time mother Amy Webb proudly notates dozens of data points about her child each day and obsessively tracks their detailed progression by computer on spreadsheets, according to the provocative first-person account she wrote for Slate.com in July. In categories ranging from ordinary vital signs, to the kid’s progress in sound-making, to dietary reactions, to … [Read more...] about Loco Parentis and Sticker Shock and Our Litigious Society
Great Art and Queen Of The Night and Rules Shall Set Us Free
QUEEN OF THE NIGHT The conflicted double life of Israeli Orthodox Jew Shadar Hadar, 34, might be as formidable to manage as that of an international spy. Though deeply and defiantly religious, he typically around midnight “trades his knitted white yarmulke” for a “wavy blond wig and pink velvet dress” and takes the stage as a nascent drag queen, according to an August … [Read more...] about Great Art and Queen Of The Night and Rules Shall Set Us Free