American culinary specialty: the hot pocket
Comedian Jim Gaffigan explores a distinctly American food: the "Hot Pocket." It's a two-minute video:
Israel invokes golden rule regarding organ donors
I like the new law passed by Israel regarding organ donation. If you want to receive one, you'd better be willing to give one up, as explained by the AP:
Israel is launching a potentially trailblazing experiment in organ donation: Sign a donor card, and you and your family move up in line for a transplant if one is needed.The new law is the first of its kind in the world . . .
The victim is the Pope
Who is the real victim of all of that sexual abuse inflicted by Catholic Church clergy upon German children? The Church claims that the Pope is the victim. Andrew Sullivan disagrees:
[I]t is the reputation of the church and the Pope they care about first, not the welfare of children. In today's developments, the entire question of whether celibacy might have something to do with the stunted sexual and emotional development of priests (you think?) - let alone whether the repression and oppression of homosexuality contributes to psychological damage - has been ruled out of bounds of legitimate discussion by the Vatican.According to Sullivan, the Church strategy is to "blame others before taking responsibility," a strategy that it used so incredibly unsuccessfully in the United States.
Why politicians like to keep “terrorism” vaguely defined
Why don't politicians clearly define the word "terrorism," the alleged principle on which they allegedly based so much national policy? As he does so often on so many topics, Glenn Greenwald hits the mark:
[T]he word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State -- Terrorism -- is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word. It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user's own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify . . . The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.
How unique are you?
How unique are you? Or, rather, how unique is your name? I have a rather unusual name. I was wondering whether any other person has my first and last name. I visited a site called "White Pages" and found out that there seems to be only one other person in the United States who shares both my first and last name. There are more than 9,000 people with a first name spelled "Erich." If you'd like to find out how unique (or common) your name is, as well as the states where your namesake(s) live, visit White Pages and click on the "Name Facts" link (located over the field for "City, State or Zip." Hint: If you leave that field black, you'll retrieve information for the entire United States. If you enter a state in that box, you see only information for that state. I found out that there are at least 870 people in the U.S. named "George Washington." There seems to be only one person named "Barack Obama." There are more than 20,000 people named "John Smith." There are more than 500,000 people with the last name of "Martin." There is one person in the U.S. with the first name "Sardine." More than 90 people have a first name of "Music." More than 700,000 people have the first name of "Jose." The most popular male and female names in the U.S. are "John" and "Mary." The site indicates that it gets its information from a variety of sources:
This is what it sounds like: information that's available to the public. It includes addresses, street names, cities, states and ZIP codes. Other examples of publicly available information include published phone directories and information published on the Internet, such as publicly available social network profiles.