Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray63 [at] hotmail.com (Be patient, I don't check it often.)

Maybe there's something in the water. Awhile back I stumbled across a saying: "South Carolina: Too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum."

Stories like this one keep that saying alive:

South Carolina will no longer recognize U.S. currency as legal tender, if State Rep. Mike Pitts has his way.

Pitts, a fourth-term Republican from Laurens, introduced legislation earlier this month that would ban what he calls “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

If the bill were to become law, South Carolina would no longer accept or use anything other than silver and gold coins as a form of payment for any debt, meaning paper money would be out in the Palmetto State.

Labels: wingnuts

posted by Paul Murray at 9:12 PM | permanent link |

Random facts. This is a collection of unrelated facts that I've stumbled across in my recent reading:

• "The average American household with a DVD player now has a library of 70 DVDs, according to Adams Media Research." (NY Times)
• "[Sen. Edward] Kennedy was the first member of Congress to connect to the Internet and pioneered online discussions in usenet forums." (Sunlight Foundation via rc3.org)
• "Since 1975, [California] has led the nation in adopting tough energy standards for household appliances, homes and buildings. As a result, California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained flat for nearly three decades, while the rest of the country's power demand has grown 50%." (LA Times)
• "In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990. ... [On the other hand, newer, larger] TVs ... can draw more power in a year than some refrigerators now on the market." (NY Times)
• "Conceived just before the beginning of the design-by-committee era, Elwood Engel's magnum opus [the 1961 Lincoln Continental Sedan] was the last mass-produced automobile to be designed by a single man." (Hagerty Insurance PR)

(Photo credit: Morven)

Labels: random facts

posted by Paul Murray at 2:17 PM | permanent link |

"Death to all juice." Worth a look: The 50 Best Protest Signs of 2009. Some are just wrong, some are deliberately funny, and others are unintentionally funny. (Contains a bit of NSFW language.)

Labels: humor, protests

posted by Paul Murray at 11:33 PM | permanent link |