One of my favorite examples of Internet snark goes back at least a decade. Amazingly, the page continues to exist today. (I was going to say “thrive,” but that’s an overstatement, because it doesn’t do anything but sit there. To coin a phrase: It do what it do.)

The page is ostensibly a real physics experiment by a college student who was fed up with BS experiments performed with substandard equipment that yielded BS results. (As someone who had his share of college chemistry labs, I can relate. College chemistry lab results are a crock of BS.) (Read more…)

So I’m 16 years old, and I’m in the basement of Bernie’s house. Bernie’s parents have a lot of money, and their basement is a cornucopia of entertainment for high school students who are bored. We haven’t had our driver’s licenses very long, but there’s only so much driving around you can do. (Read more…)

A gunman earlier today opened fire in a shooting massacre at Virginia Tech and killed at least 32 people, in the deadliest tragedy of its kind in the history of the United States.

Let the search for the “cause” begin, as well as the search for solutions to “prevent” future tragedies of this sort. Depending on who the gunman turns out to be, I’m sure the word “Columbine” will be mentioned many, many times in the days and weeks to come. (Read more…)

I can’t stand Nancy Grace.

That she has a program and can stay on the air suggests to me that this country doesn’t believe in due process; it believes in snap judgments and stringing people up. Either that, or there are a lot of people who tune in because they either find Extreme Umbrage compelling to watch, or want to feel it themselves in watching this annoying harridan squawk. (Read more…)

Can we all just agree that the anti-smoking organization Truth is a smug, self-important group that isn’t necessary to anybody? It seems to me they’re more interested in patting themselves on the back for their brilliantly conceived and executed messages of irony than anything else.

Who knows — maybe I’m wrong and they’re respected, expert lobbyists who do great, groundbreaking work in Washington to lead the effort to crack down on Big Tobacco. But if their lobbying effort is anything like their television campaigns, most of Washington probably views them as the annoying college freshman who has spent a semester on campus and comes back home for semester break to inform the rest of the family of all the worldly things they’ve learned and how wrong Mom and Dad are about everything. (Read more…)

When I registered IDWID.com and ItDoWhatItDo.com back in October, it literally was for the reason: “Because I can.” That and it only cost $9 per domain. You can see the whole story in the IDWID history. (Read more…)

Those damn crazy Trekkies are at it again, making it harder for us more balanced Trekkies to show our faces. (Read more…)

Okay, so DNA testing has confirmed that Larry Birkhead is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, CNN is reporting. Whoop-de-friggin’-do. Can this story please die now? Can we resume our lame and tabloid-free existences already? (Read more…)

In case you didn’t hear, the season premiere of “The Sopranos” aired Sunday on HBO. I’m not sure how you couldn’t have heard, since the media isn’t going to let you forget about the final season of the endlessly hyped series.

“The Sopranos” is a great show. That’s beside the point. My point here is to ask why this season of “The Sopranos” is being called “Season Six, Part II.” (Read more…)

This season of “24″ started strongly, with a first half-dozen shows that were fairly gripping: all-too-realistic suicide bus bombings, America under siege and bordering on full-scale mayhem, talk of harsh crackdowns on specifically targeted segments of the population … and then that nuclear bomb went of in an L.A. suburb. The show had my attention.

But where can a counterterrorism series writer go after a nuke blows up? This season has gradually become a wandering mess in search of purpose and direction, with less-than-satisfying characterization and a plot arc that barely resembles an arc and seems more like a random smattering of events chasing around this season’s MacGuffin, the Remaining Suitcase Nukes. The writers are throwing a ton of material at us and hoping something sticks. Some of it has worked; a lot of it hasn’t. (Read more…)