Miscellaneous

Spritz This might be the most exciting thing I've seen on the Internet in five years: Spritz reading [http://www.spritzinc.com/#]. By breaking down reading materials into one word at a time, the software allows you to read 500+ words a minute with virtually no practice or

A new study on unemployment shows that it is now harder to get a job at Wal-Mart than to get accepted at Harvard. Of course, it's a lot easier if your dad went to Wal-Mart.

If you like goofy humor (the last thirty seconds isn't very funny, but the first part cracked me up):

H.I.F. And people wonder why I resent girls' athletics . . . and the federal government: "The U.S Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has forced a school in Michigan to tear down a brand-new set of bleachers for its boys' varsity baseball team because

H.I.F. 10 Total Tyrants From The History Of Rock And Roll [http://listverse.com/2014/03/28/10-total-tyrants-from-the-history-of-rock-n-roll/] . Sample: "In his desire for control, [Colonel Tom Parker] acted against Elvis's interests. For example, Parker (who was secretly Dutch) feared being barred reentry to the States

Gardening Update What's a gardening nerd to do? I plant a lot of sweet peppers. It's the only food that almost everyone in my family enjoys, plus they thrive in self-watering containers. Because I have an army of both (family members and self-watering containers), I had

A Random Passage "We lose ourselves in crowds, yet a terrible fear of anonymity haunts many Americans: we want to be known, remembered, thought of, and except in the tawdriest sense this is only possible in small communities and networks of families. Those cut off from such possibilities are

I've been going to the Chicago Weather Center Blog [http://blog.chicagoweathercenter.com/page/2/] more in order to get long-term weather predictions. It hasn't provided any lately, but it did post these two pictures of the same stretch of land in the Chicago area. Can

A husband takes his wife to a disco. There's a guy on the dance floor. living it large, break dancing, moon walking, back flips, the works. The wife turns to her husband and says, "See that guy? 25 years ago he proposed to me and I turned

BYCU You want to get the best deals at the grocery store? Be different. Here's an excerpt from an article about "data mining" [http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm] that shows how men with small children are manipulated cruelly: