Apparently the use of cell phones, like everything else it seems (except khat), leads to reduced sperm counts in men.

Meanwhile, I can’t tell if Amber Taylor is upset that these inanimate objects are sexist in their effects or just interested in obtaining an inexpensive form of contraception.

According to this story in the New Zealand Herald, the terrorist menace may have a new weapon: booby-trapped beer coolers!

Security officials have warned of a possible new weapon in the terrorist arsenal - booby-trapped beer coolers.

Law-enforcement officials in the United States have been warned to be alert for the enticing bombs.

The warning was sent to 18,000 law-enforcement groups by the FBI last week, Time magazine reported.

Is nothing sacred to those barbarians?

I was puzzling today over the semantics of the term “laundry.”

When clothes are on your body, they are not laundry. But when you toss them into a pile, basket, or hamper, and they are waiting to be washed, they become laundry. They are laundry while they are being washed, dried, and folded.

But when you put them away, into a closet or drawer, they cease to be laundry.

I, along with a couple of friends from the Memphis Strategy Board Games Community, have started a new boardgaming blog, Settling Catan.

So far, we’ve got a repeat of a Signifying Nothing post by me, reviewing Princes of Florence, and a review of Die Macher, a game of German electoral politics.

Expect more game reviews, thoughts on game strategy, and musings on what makes a good board game in the near future!

Alex Knapp more-or-less sums up my reaction to the Supremes’ ruling on the Guantanamo detainees and José Padilla. More, of course, at Volokh. And, there’s archived Signifying Nothing Gitmo coverage here.

Incidentally, both Alex and Von approvingly quote from Antonin Scalia’s dissent. (Mind you, the most immediate impact of this case on my life is now I have to shoehorn it into two-thirds of my courses in the fall.)

All it seems to do here is rain… I feel like I accidentally moved back to England or something. This also means the jackasses at Home Depot have rescheduled the installation for the trim around my front door (never mind that they are doing the work indoors), meaning another few days of me staring at bare doorframe in the living room.

If that weren’t annoying enough, the good folks at a certain Oxford bar (who otherwise have given me good service in the past, hence my lack of interest in casting aspersions on them publicly) managed to lose my debit card Friday night while they were holding it to secure my tab. One might suspect that the universe was conspiring against one’s efforts to have a social life, if one were the paranoid type. (One also drank a little too much beer and has been regretting it for the past two days.)

On the other hand, I do have a spiffy custom cap (well, actually a tam), gown, and hood on the way in plenty of time for the fall convocation, so there’s that at least.

Matt Stinson has a list of Gmail deficiencies. There are a few more I’d add:

• No (obvious) way to search or filter on arbitrary headers, à la procmail.
• No way to mark messages as “to” you (e.g. with ») that are addressed to other addresses than your Gmail account (useful if you’re using a procmail recipe to Bcc all your incoming mail to Gmail).
• No way to automatically Bcc all your outgoing mail elsewhere.
• Nonexistent handling of mailing list headers (Mail-Followup-To, etc.). Ideally, Gmail should automatically create tags based on X-Mailing-List.

Still, it’s managing to win over this devoted mutt user quite quickly.

Riddle me this, Batman:

I think it’s a safe bet that somebody is wrong.

Contra the quoted individual, I’d like to extend my best wishes to our Canadian friends and allies as they go to the polls today to choose a new parliament (and almost certainly a new government).

More thoughts from Peaktalk, Colby Cosh, and Collin May, all of whom are rooting for a Conservative victory. Unlike certain other American pundits of similar girth, I will not be weighing in on this matter, as it is strictly an internal affair for Canadians to decide for themselves, except to express the view that the GOP might be a more attractive option at the ballot box (for me, at least) if they reflected the more vigorous attitude toward federalism and libertarianism expressed by their ideological counterparts on the other side of the 49th parallel.