Posts by matt

One of my favorite Olde Worlde reporters, Anne Hull (c.f.), has been a Pulitzer finalist six times, but not yet a winner. Now, the Washington City Paper is calling on the Pulitzer board to give Anne one of their rare “Special Awards” for her continually outstanding work.

A group of gay people mad about Australia’s ban on same-sex marriage are petitioning the UN to let them establish a sovereign gay nation. Love it.

Images of the N.Y. that might have been. This was apparently on Boing Boing and Kottke a month ago, but I missed it coming and going. (Via Things.)

According to the JuicyStudio readability calculator, you need 5.65 years of schooling to understand the posts on Snarkmarket. Our “Gunning Fog Index” score is a respectable 8.99, which puts us right smack at the reading level of most popular novels.

NYTimes.com has a score of 6.7, while the WaPo’s holding steady at 7.81. Not even the previously linked Valve post and its comments reached the current Snarkmarket score, topping out at 8.71.

The other blog I write for has a GF Index of 7.44, slightly below Reader’s Digest. (Robin’s clearly wrecking the curve — it broke when I tried to feed it his other blog.) My senior college thesis has a GF Index of 15.47, at the lower range of the academic papers scale.

As Robin points out, Snarkmarket may have taken a slide toward the nerdy, given that our score for October 2004 (quite a prolific month for us) was 8.26. I imagine this post has not helped the trend.

Via Kevin Drum.

… Yahoo purchases TiVo? Could happen, sports fans.

I don’t like most Firefox themes. I find the default theme ugly and many of the user-generated ones cartoonish. But I’m always hunting for good ones. Today I found PimpZilla. Surprisingly clean and detailed, although it kind of clashes with the Windows XP colors.

Awesome. Robin has been saying for a while now that he’d love to have some sort of online hub for his local coffeehouse, so the hordes of laptoppers inside could communicate in digital space. Well, here you go.

It’s nice to see college a cappella get a little MeFi love.

I’ve got to strongly recommend the movie City of God, although I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it. (Ebert.) But there’s this: I kept a stiff upper lip all throughout the film. Afterwards, as I’m wont to do, I visited its IMDB trivia page. Then came the tears. That’s never happened to me before. (Watch the movie before you read the trivia.)

Are we seriously still talking about this? Pharmacists are licensed to cover a basic range of services, including providing emergency contraception. States should not license pharmacists who are unable for any reason to provide this range of services. They are welcome to develop an alternative licensing scheme for people who only sell drugs that promote the cult of life, or whatever. Just don’t call it pharmacy.