…but I can now state from experience that a mosquito bite on the eyelid is quite annoying.

Also, unrelated, never run an application that’s located on an NFS file server at the other end of an OpenVPN tunnel. That hurts, too.

Obviously, he’s headed off to meet up with the Cat Planet Cuties…

Then again, with a name like Alan Shepard, perhaps he’d be more interested in Jens…

[Updated with a static image after I discovered that Life Magazine has removed it from their archives. Pity, since you could buy a nice print from them.]

From the Denver Post:

A Colorado teen is recovering from serious burns he suffered when the fireworks he was attempting to mix in a coffee grinder exploded. ... the teen had read online about how larger fireworks could be made from smaller ones

Perhaps he should have stuck to online tutorials about how to smoke at home without getting busted?

I cannot improve on the original headline. All I can do is imagine the tens of thousands of Certified Organic head explosions around the world.

In a move that will surprise no one but the California Legislature, the $200 million dollars that California expected to get out of Amazon will instead give the state precisely $0 to waste. As they’ve done every other time a state has redefined “nexus”, Amazon has ended their Affiliate program in California, effective immediately. Brown signed it, and Amazon sent out the termination notices.

With luck, this will leave the latest phony-baloney budget enough out of balance that the legislature will continue to go without pay.

You know, if people came out and said, “legalize marijuana so we can get high”, I’d likely vote for that. The social impact of their drug of choice compares favorably with tobacco and alcohol, and I’ve yet to hear a pro-prohibitionist argument that’s sturdier than tissue paper. I find the smell vile, even worse than stale cigarette smoke, but I also can’t stand thick perfume or strong BO, which are at least as common in public places today.

But don’t try to bullshit me. Yes, there are medicinal applications for marijuana and THC, but when I drive down the highway in San Jose and see a billboard advertising medical marijuana evaluations at sj420.com, it’s about as “medical” as a prescription for Lucky Strikes and Coors.

[ditto last year’s trip to Las Vegas, where the billboard was for DrReefer.com]

Unless there’s a whole helluva lot missing from this story, there are a lot of people who need to be fined, fired, and jailed:

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans.

An early-morning no-knock raid by heavily-armed federal agents, over student loans. And they locked three children in the back of a patrol car while they spent hours searching the house for a woman who wasn’t there. What exactly were they looking for, a secret stash of hundred-dollar bills they could seize to pay off the loans? What were they afraid he’d flush if they executed a normal search warrant at a normal hour, his checkbook?

[Update: and the additional explanation, as provided by the actual search warrant, is that they believed the woman who didn’t live there had fraudulently filed student-loan paperwork, possibly in volume. The kitchen-sink list of items they wanted to be able to seize (and the judge’s refusal to allow them to go fishing for unrelated crimes) suggests that it would have been impossible for someone to destroy it all during a normal search, so there’s no excuse at all for an armed raid. One or two feds, with a local officer for support, could have politely knocked and executed a normal search.]

If an actual house passes you on the highway, you're driving too slow.