via Strategy Page.

BBC article on Antonio Baron, the last survivor of the Spanish Civil War's Durutti Column. After the Civil War, he spent five years in a German concentration camp and then founded an anarchist community in rural Bolivia, where he lives today.

It takes a lot of programming savvy to make a Wordpress blog look this crummy.

The Wikipedia page for users facing imminent banning. Some fun reading in the discussions.

He was mean, cheap, petty and unloved. He was the ugliest kind of bigot and a stain on America. Anybody who says different is a liar.

The Guardian on high American fuel prices.

In effect, America is becoming larger again. That will lead to a more localised economy. To many environmentalists that is a blessing, not a curse. They point out that cheap fuel for industrial transport has meant the average packaged salad has travelled 1,500 miles before it gets to a supermarket shelf."

Also:

In effect, suburbs will become the new inner cities, even as once-abandoned American downtowns are undergoing a remarkable renaissance. Even malls, the ultimate symbol of American life since the war, are undergoing a crisis as consumers start to stay away.

Also, see this BBC piece on small towns and fuel prices:

But if you cannot move from your small town there is a risk that you will become very bitter and turn to religion and guns and public transport. Except that there isn't any public transport.

Only a few years ago I covered the ending of the rural Greyhound bus service in parts of Texas - I wonder if it'll be back?

Maryland has no natural lakes. The White House has 132 rooms. Wisconsin produces more cranberries than any other state. And other Facts about the USA.

Generates a fake name for any gender/nationality combination you chose; also gives you a homepage url, a free disposable email address, and fake social security and Mastercard numbers. Allegedly has legitimate uses, but feel free to play Jason Bourne.

Visit Big Huge Labs Writer and you're presented with an old fashioned MSDos
wordprocessor screen in green and black. Type some stuff. Hit Ctrl-S
to save, Ctrl-N to create a new document. Saved documents are listed
at the bottom of your screen. Download, print, or blog your documents,
or change the colors and spacing in the "Prefs" tab. Its about as
close to Mac OSX TextEdit or Windows Notepad as you're going to get.
Two downsides: the screen is always going to look pretty ugly if
you're not familiar with Old Skool MSDos text editing, and the web app
relies on cookies to store your documents. You can register a username
pretty easily, though, and that provides a bit of insurance against
wiped cookies. My account stored some documents through a year of
inactivity. Its not Google Docs or Zoho Writer, but Big Huge Labs
Writer loads pretty fast and does a good basic job of writing and
storing simple documents. The interface may even have a bit of a cult
interest for you, if you're over the age of 40.

From the name, you'd thing Gnip
is part of the Free Software Foundation's Gnu Project. You'd be wrong. I know they're running
out of cutesy Web 2.0 names, but I still find this a little
misleading.