He’s back in the news, folks. After a recent spate of badly written books, (perhaps the world’s most famous living) novelist Salman Rushdie is once again in the center of controversy after Britain awarded him a knighthood on Saturday, June 16th. Once again, Iran is at the helm of the controversy, being one of the first countries to publicly announce that Britain’s honoring “one of the most hated men in the Islamic world” is a clear insult to Islam. And once again, the conflict is centered around Satanic Verses.

The situation, of course, . . .

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This is old news, but new to me, and it really freaks me out. A teenager in Cloquet, MN, is on trial for dousing elderly nursing home residents with ice water.

To reiterate: this kid and 2-3 of his firends took pitchers of ice water and poured them on old people’s heads. Like four different times since last summer.

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

According to a criminal complaint, the Cloquet teenager told police he found it so funny when he dumped a pitcher of ice water on a 90-year-old nursing home resident in . . .

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My camera-phone takes pictures on par with grainy photos of UFOs or the black speck of the Loch Ness Monster, but if you look closely, that is actual weed on the back stairway of our office-building.

The pot smell came back today with a vengeance, and again we tracked it down to the back stairway. We just missed them — the smoke lingered in the air, cigarette butts lay on the floor, and on one step, a spilled bag of weed.

When we came back, our boss told us he’d caught them — . . .

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My voter-registration card arrived yesterday.  So, looks like I’m legal for Election Day.

A couple weeks ago, Duodecad posted a link to a study by researchers at Princeton that demonstrated how easy it is to rig an electronic voting machine, and get away with it.

Here’s an update with some old news, via BoingBoing.net this week: former Yang Enterprises computer programmer Clint Curtis says that, in 2000, Rep. Tom Feeney (R) asked him to do just that — fix voting machines to spit out 51-49 splits in your favor.

Watch video of Curtis’ . . .

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