Unqualified Offerings

Those not into the weight loss thing may enjoy A heavy girl’s guide to success, by Kerry Daniels.
This week’s title change simply acknowledges what everyone else undoubtedly decided weeks ago – there’s nothing “imitation” about this regular feature any more. Of course, I just checked and there’s nothing weekly either – despite clear memories of [...]

Everyone complains about the scene at the beginning of Daredevil where defense attorney Matt Murdock is “prosecuting” a rape case. By everyone, I mean Franklin Harris. Probably others, too, but I haven’t been obsessive about reading the reviews.
The problem vanishes, though, if you assume that the rape trial is a civil case Murdock is bringing [...]

More from PC World’s twentieth anniversary issue.
“Americans spent an average of 157 hours (6.5 days) using the Internet at home in 2002.”
157 hours a year??? Some of you are not holding up your end.
Internet sales taxes creep closer.
Step One, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, is near completion. In itself, that wouldn’t compel retailer compliance because [...]

PC World also reproduces the first known unsolicited commercial e-mail. “Early Internet users say that a marketing rep at Digital Equipment Corporation sent the first unsolicited commercial e-mail on May 1, 1978. The message invited all 594 people with Arpanet accounts to product demonstrations. This is one innovator who’s probably happy to go unremembered: Only [...]

For PC World’s twentieth anniversary, the magazine assigned writer Scott Spanbauer to go computer-free for twenty days. The experiment resulted in a somewhat predictible article (computer-free life has good points! Bad points too!) but what struck me was the passage on what happened when he checked his e-mail for the first time in 21 days:

The [...]

Apparently the Bush Administration has finally succeeded in buying Turkey’s cooperation in the conquest of Iraq. Cost we know about, $6 billion in direct aid “with the idea that this financing could be leveraged into an additional $20 billion in loans from international institutions.

The haggling also reached into such details as to which side should [...]

The conservative and generally pro-war Capitol Hill Blue reports White House advisors looking for a “way out” of war with Iraq:

Some strategists within the Bush Administration are urging the President to look for an “exit strategy” on Iraq, warning the tough stance on war with the Arab country has left the country in a “no [...]

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is shocked, shocked to discover that French politicians act in . . . French interests:

So France in recent decades has chosen to express its power negatively — by opposing actions that it believes are not in France’s interest.

and

The United States has been the principal target of French negativism, but it [...]

The Institute for Justice has opened a North Carolina chapter. First target: that state government’s policy of giving its citizens money to wealthy out-of-state movie studios:

The IJ-NC represents Raleigh small businessman Edward Jones and the Wake County Taxpayers’ Association in the lawsuit.
“As a small businessman who built a company, pays taxes and provides jobs to [...]

This San Francisco Chronicle profile of new NEA head Dana Gioia is, all in all, not so bad. It gets off to a very rocky start, implying that Gioia was still in the corporate world at the time of his nomination and talking about what it might mean if Gioia is confirmed. (The Chronicle piece [...]