Frequent man.under.stress contributor and former book reviewer, “chilly,” or in the preferred Taoist nomenclature, “chi-li,” began podcasting interviews with friends and acquaintances, the unsung celebrity of the everyman sort of thing, some time ago. Well now he’s expanded the service into a full blown blog, complete with the continuing series of podcasts, PLUS, psychedelic arcana, […]

Have you heard the latest counter-intuitive myth buster? A hybrid automobile will expend more energy, from conception to retirement, than a Hummer. This is apparently for several reasons, the most important being the extra energy costs for the design and development of the new technology found in hybrids, and shorter lifespans the cars are assumed […]

Here’s a spam that made it through gmail spam filter. No horny linkage or anything just the following text:
up. Lets get on!
I am so dreadfully hungry, groaned Bilbo, who was suddenly aware that he had not had a meal since the night before the night before last.
LOTR spam, I love it! If you think […]

Atlanta’s own Criminal Records is mentioned in the NYT piece on struggling independent record stores.
Some independent owners are resisting the demographic challenges. Eric Levin, 36, who owns three Criminal Records stores in Atlanta and oversees a trade group called the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, representing 30 shops nationally, said that businesses losing […]

Yet another example of a government agency blatantly misrepresenting the truth with scare science. Jacob Sullum on the Surgeon General’s recent second hand smoke report:
As the report itself makes clear, there is no evidence that brief, transient exposure to secondhand smoke has any effect on your chance of developing heart disease or lung […]

We don’t usually discuss sports on man::under::stress, but what indeed was the true meaning of Zidane’s ferocious head butt? The incident has caused outrage with goody-goody “hooray team!” types, but mostly just piqued the curiosity of anyone with a television set worldwide. What did it? Was it nipple-tweak retaliation? Were racial slurs emitted on […]

If you upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.3 save yourself some time and immediately install this plugin to fix a number of bugs in 2.0.3. Or just don’t install 2.0.3. Pretty weak release.

Just another wonderful example of your government hard at work redistributing wealth, this time to “farmers” who don’t actually farm, or have anything to do with “farming.”
Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to […]

This gets me all geek in the knees:
A new brand of music maestro is turning programming into performance, eschewing turntables for a compiler and a mind for syntax structure. “Livecoding” practitioners improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before […]

McDonald’s, refuge for the weary traveler?
Indeed, despite its vaunted reputation as a juggernaut of American culture, McDonald’s has come to function as an ecumenical refuge for travelers of all stripes. This is not because McDonald’s creates an American sense of place and culture, but because it creates a smoothly standardized absence of place […]