Lotto Winner Comes Forward After Divorce

Right here.

It's not quite like it sounds at first - the ol' lady did know about it, they were already separated, and she divorced him after she was informed.

That's not to say his heart was pure. He'd heard that another man had tried a stunt like this a few years before and the judge had really reamed him for it.

Whittaker sighed

National Review has turned 50, and NRO will be posting items from its archives in celebration throughout the year.

And look here - we have a contemporary review of "Atlas Shrugged" by no less than Whittaker Chambers.

Then as now the book was controversial. IMO everyone ought to read it once just to see what the fuss is about.

Vote for the best medical weblog

At EchoJournal.org

There are some terrific candidates, but my choice is Medpundit.

That jacket is really you...

I mean, it's really you...

Fancy a partially alive jacket, possibly grown out of your own skin? In reality, it may not be that far away.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket in an effort to create "victimless leather." Hoping to highlight the possibility of wearing leather without killing an animal, the duo is presently focused on growing living tissue into a leather-like material and having it mature in the form of a miniature, stitchless, coat-like shape.

Read the rest here.

What's next? I suppose they can use penile skin to make telescopes. Or maybe they could give it acne and use it for self-regenerating bubble wrap. Chia-Pets could grow real hair. Any other suggestions?

Be first on your block...

...to own your own guillotine.

Via Gizmodo

Lennie Briscoe has nothing to say

E! Online News - "Law & Order" Star Orbach Dead

Be my guinea pig

I haven't tried any of the following vendors, but I'll write about them anyway.

First there's Hometown Favorites. The concept sounds interesting - the proprietor distributes hard-to-find or regional candies, groceries and other nonperishable products.

Or how about SimplyBovine? ("Everything Cows!") I found them while looking for a distributor for "Cow Pies". They also sell, among other things, cow g-strings.

Which reminds me, Valentine's Day is coming! So be sure to place your order with Despair.com for their "BitterSweets" today. Now available in two types - "Dejected" (which includes a reference to blogging!) and "Dysfunctional". (or if you should somehow have a positive attitude, EHarmony offers gift certificates).

Enough for now. Now go stimulate the economy!

No thanks, I won't be having any

Ever since I was a kid I've been hearing references to "eggs in your beer" as if it were the ultimate in unreasonable demands. Where it came from I have no clue. I'm guessing it's a Kraut thing, although the first people I recall hearing it from were Irish. Or maybe it's Midwestern.

Go ahead - look it up: Google Search: "eggs in your beer". Or if you're into regionalisms, check out this.

Of course self-respecting bars have to have some pickled eggs or maybe pig's feet. Occasionally there were free salty snacks to encourage beer consumption (although freeloading in bars can be hazardous to your health), but some people I knew didn't leave this to chance - they put salt directly in their beer lest they should be sated before they ran out of money.

I don't know how common this is, but I knew a guy down south who'd get a bottle of Coke (that's a "coke-cola", Yankee!), dump a small bag of salted peanuts into it, and then drink the mess. Maybe it was about freeing up a hand, or gustatory considerations, and I know it's all going to the same place anyway, but it just wasn't my thing.

I shouldn't talk - I've always been a mad scientist in the kitchen. When I was a kid I had to mix whatever condiments happened to be around and try to eat the results. Or else there were Pixy Stix or Lik-em-Aid to be mixed with Kool-Aid or the occasional soft drink. (And I learned from it too. Later on in chemistry classes when they started discussing solubility I suddenly knew why I never could get the chocolate or Peanut Butter Cups to dissolve in the drink concoctions I made.). This means I'm creative with oddball ingredients, but please, don't ever make shrimp stroganoff (I was down to frozen noodles, frozen shrimp, golden mushroom soup and sour cream. Thaw shrimp. Cook noodles. Mix ingredients. Season to taste. Retch. Throw out and resolve never to repeat).

Now is your chance to share recipes for favorite oddball concoctions.

For better or for worse but not forebearance

It's not too newsworthy to say that professional athletes are a horny lot. Here's a bit of a history.

But not every player's wife takes this infidelity lying down. Consider Anna Benson, a model/ex-stripper voted "baseball's hottest wife". Her husband, Kris Benson of the Mets, is under notice - on Howard Stern's show she said that if she caught him cheating she would do everybody on his whole team, including coaches, groundskeepers, and bat boys.

This immediately set Eric Raymond's keen analytical mind to work:

Somehere, a coalition of the most unattractive no-hopers in the Mets organization — probably organized by some dude with a beer gut, bad breath, and a bread-dough complexion who harbors a long-simmering lust for the wench — is now organizing a pool with which to engage the foxiest hookers in the Big Apple to waylay her husband. What a pitch! Throw $50 in the kitty and “Baseball’s Hottest Wife” will bang you too!

In other news, Mets merchandise sales tripled...

Admittedly Ms. Benson is sending somewhat of a mixed message about fidelity, but consider this:

When Kris had Tommy John surgery, he couldn’t move his arms for a week. Every time he went to the bathroom, I had to help him. Plus, he couldn’t hold down his pain medication. We were flying home from the hospital and we had to squeeze into the plane’s bathroom together so I could stick suppositories up his ass to keep him from throwing up.

Sounds like true love to me.

Birth of a slander?

Via the dynamic Newmark duo (mom and daughter), Powerline notes how the WaPo reported an increase in the number of students eligibility for Pell Grants as a cut.

Happy birthday to...

Arthur H. Ehrat of Virden, Ill, who invented the breakaway basketball rim. He's 80 years old.

Merry Christmas!

Chiefs 31, Raiders 30.

That's what the obituaries are for

It seems that "insurgents want their stories told". Yeah, and they also want to kill people for attempting to have elections. Does the Associated Press support that too?

Via Belmont Club.

To a 12 year old girl about her future

She's a hormone-addled adolescent just like her mother was not so long ago. I don't see much of her because I'm on the road so much, and it's not clear that it would make much difference if I were around. But what I want her to do is take life seriously long enough to make some plans for her life.

Say what? - she's 12, for crying out loud! Yep, and in 5 years she'll be getting out of high school, and in 10 she might well be out of college. And anywhere along the line she could even have kids of her own. And it wouldn't surprise me to find that none of this had ever crossed her mind.

Well, que sera, sera my eye. She can start influencing her future deliberately right now. It's not too early, and in some extreme cases it's actually too late.

So how do I get her started? Beats me. For lack of anything better I'm thinking of starting with a letter or speech like what follows:

Merry Christmas, kiddo. This may look like the lamest gift you've ever received, but give it a chance. Pay attention and maybe it can help you get something a lot better for yourself - a well-lived life.

Yes, you're only 12. And in 5 years you'll be 17 and ready to get out of HS. In 10 you might be graduating from college. In 15 you'll be older than your mother was when she had you. This may seem like an eternity to you now, but ask any adult and they can tell you that it seems that the older you get the faster the time seems to go.

You've had a chance to observe your mother's life up close. It hasn't always been easy. You might have decided that you want to live your life differently. And you can.

How? The first step is to have some goals. When in doubt, aim high.

Let's start with some examples to come up in the next 5 years. Would you like to be valedictorian? Date the school hunk? Start on the basketball team? Be head cheerleader? Be homecoming queen? Get admitted to your favorite college with scholarships? Get a car? Get a good after-school/summer job? Learn to play guitar? More ideas of your own? All of the above? Fine - for most of those, if you can dream it you can do it. If you get started.

Now let's look 10 years down the road. By then you could be starting on a good career, going to graduate school to be a doctor/lawyer/professor/whatever, raising a family with a good guy you met in college.... Or you could be stranded in a small town with two kids to raise and a husband who makes a lousy living, drinks and abuses you. All of that builds on what happens in the next 5 years.

Now say you have some goals. But they seem big - where do you start? The same way you eat an elephant - one bite at a time. Break them down. Here's an example.

I hear you were cut from the basketball team. OK, so was Michael Jordan in his freshman year in HS. Do you want to go out again next year and show them they were wrong? What can you do to make sure you make it then?

Well, I don't know how to help you get taller. But you can get stronger and get more stamina by exercising and eating right, and that will help you with a lot more than basketball. You can build skills by playing a lot, shooting hoops, practicing dribbling, going to camps, etc. It's up to you.

One goal you might have picked is "to be the most popular girl". Please think again. If it happens that's fine, but ask me or any of your older relatives how much time they've spent with their HS or college friends in the last few years. And ask anyone who's been to a HS reunion what has happened to the "standings". Peer pressure can seem overwhelming, but there's nothing cool about being busted for underage possession or drugs, or sleeping around, or staying out all night when you have responsibilities, etc.

Alright, enough for now. The idea is that the future is coming whether you're ready or not. So why not be ready?

Suggestions?

Are they sure it's a mistake?

Duty, honor, yeah, yeah. Far be it from me to be a faithless elector if I had the opportunity.

But really, having to vote for John F. Kerry? Who even archpartisans like Kos are dumping on nowadays?

I'd think of something.

When is a Contract Not a Contract?

Ask XRLQ, who holds forth here about contract law and US Cellular's attempt to screw Spoons.

Would you like a dose of french fries with that?

French fries! Heavens, between the carbs and the grease they'll kill you! Pass the fish and those good ol' omega-3s.

Not so fast. I haven't heard much about it lately, but back in the late 60's/early 70's we heard incessantly about mercury pollution in our fish. Whether related or not, a trip down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago might well suggest that something was wrong - dead fish were always washing up on the beaches by the millions. Yecch.

It so happens that the mercury is still out there in high enough concentrations to get you under the right circumstances. People porking out on certain fish, usually in the name of health, are coming down with symptoms of mercury poisoning, and there are govt advisories on consumption of certain types of fish.

Here Glenn Reynolds notes Ukrainian candidate Yushchenko's dioxin poisoning and links to this, which suggests that use of "fake fat" (olestra), can help him clean the dioxins from his body and thus recover. Incidentally, the same thing might work for other bugbears such as DDT and PCBs.

Biochemical processes are very complicated, but in essence the above works because the substances are fat-soluble. They accumulate in your fat, and in turn they can be absorbed in other fats like olestra. Olestra does not remain in the body, any fat-soluble substances like the above it absorbs in its passage will leave the body with it.

And it so happens that the form of mercury that you get from the fish is fat-soluble. So maybe olestra could help clean out excess mercury too.

Now if only it made good french fries...

Thank heaven for little girls

Right here

The Answer?

Is something missing from your life. Perhaps what you need may be found in the Matriarchal Church.

It's not too well publicized IMO - I found it while looking for current information about the woman who turns out to be its founder, the one and only Kellie Everts.

That name might be vaguely familiar to late thirtysomethings. In her words, "I strip for God". Obviously we are dealing with a woman with a unique perspective.

Her website claims accomplishments many and significant. For those of you who'd prefer not to find yourself on a website entitled kinky-kellie.com, she also claims to be the "foundress of female bodybuilding" and to have taken part in ending the Cold War.

What could be wrong with an organization with such a charismatic leader? Do you feel the call?

Nearly 8 years in prison without a trial

Should I be hearing about stuff like this from a conservative like Phyllis Schlafly? Where are the lefties?

Or do you have to shoot and kill policemen before you get their blessing?