From the New York Daily News:

Man wakes up during his own autopsy

Someone on the WELL pointed us to this terrific post from April on the blog Pandagon.

How not to be an asshole: a guide for men

In the recent discussion about Kathy Sierra and Markos’ febrile and clueless response to her, I see there are some kind, helpful men who are taking pains to make sure emotion doesn’t run rampant in the discussion, that unfair accusations of misogyny or characterizations of harassment statistics get spread in an understandable emotional response to a few very upsetting instances of harassment by piglike men who fall far outside the norm. Surely, these men reason, we mustn’t let these nasty experiences color our judgment of the actual events involved. Surely it helps no one to make wild and baseless charges without looking, in uber-dispassionate detachment, at the actual statistics and methodology and margin of error of the studies that show women get harassed more than men. Come, let us reason together calmly, they say. References to Salem and the McMartin pre-school and such come unbidden to their lips.

I’m a big fan of dispassionate, rational, fact-based discussion of the issues myself, and it is in that spirit that I offer, to my brethren who’ve taken it upon themselves to be a shining light of dispassion on this topic, these fraternal words of guidance:

Shut the fuck up.

The conclusion:

In short, if you’re interested in quibbling with the data or suggesting alternate interpretations of what Kos really meant when he called Kathy Sierra a lying “crying blogger,” and your goal is not to be a flaming asshole, shut the fuck up.

And when you shut the fuck up, two magical things happen:

1) You’re no longer actively contributing to the very problem you’re discussing;
2) It’s easier to listen to what the women are actually saying.

From the description of an ice cream float on the current dessert menu at Carrow’s:

Cool it down with two scoops of real vanilla ice cream and one of these old fashioned flavors: Root Beer, Orange Cream, or Caramel Macchiato

Takes you back, doesn’t it? Ah, those good old days of our childhood, when we’d clutch in our little hands that shiny new nickel we got from Grampa, take the horse-drawn trolley down to the soda fountain on Main Street, and ask the man behind the counter for a caramel macchiato.

Headline of the day from salon.com:

Robber Disguised As Tree Hits N.H. Bank

From News 14 Carolina:

Dead birds flocking to west Charlotte

From a Reuters story in the New York Times a week or so ago:

She had her hymen re-sewn, technically making her a virgin again.

Um, no. Technically is precisely the sense in which it does no such thing.

Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she’s amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you’re not in touch very much anymore.

More.

Michael Savage was heard on his radio show yesterday ranting that if the Democrats had been in charge of this country in the 1940s, we’d all be speaking German today.

From the Northwest Florida Daily News:

Molested goat case stymied by contaminated DNA sample

A semen sample obtained with a rape kit from a dead goat found in Mossy Head will not lead to an arrest at this time.

Oh my. One headine, one sentence, already way too much information.

From the Lodi News-Sentinel:

A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.