Under current law, people who drive SUVs can deduct $25,000 from their taxes after purchasing the vehicle. A new law proposed in the senate will increase that deduction to $100,000. So basically you can buy a hummer and write the whole thing off on your taxes. Meanwhile, the $2,000 deduction for driving a fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid vehicle is going to go away.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project counted 708 active hate groups in the United States in 2002. Really interesting map of the US gives an overview of where hate groups are located. Click on any state, say Indiana, to see where the hate groups are. And boy, check out South Carolina.
Download the Alexa toolbar: http://www.alexa.com/. (PC users only; there’s no Mac toolbar at this time. Dammit!) Then spend some time clicking around my site looking at all the stuff on it. This will boost my traffic ratings.
Update: Lori e-mailed me to tell me that Alexa is considered to be spyware. Technically, it’s not. Spyware are hidden programs that are installed without your knowledge to record information for ad purposes. Alexa isn’t hidden, and you have to download it if you want it. Alexa does record and keep statistics of every site you surf on, but it doesn’t keep individual identities in their database or track anything to you specifically. Rather, it uses the data to rank the most popular and most visited sites on the internet, which is why I want people to do this and surf my site. But read the documentation on their site for more information if you are concerned.
If you haven’t read the book, you should. It’s delicious. But short of that, catch the three-part mini-series on BBCAmerica, starting Friday, May 23rd at 10 p.m. I’m buying a new video tape just for the occasion. I have the DVD now.
“A lavish tale of life and lesbian love in 19th-century London. Nan Astley (Rachael Stirling) falls in love with captivating performer, Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes). They move to London and begin a romance, but Kitty has a terrible secret.”
Back in 1997 I had one of these hats that was blue mesh, with a blue bill, and I wore it around everywhere. After that, I had a pioneer seed corn one, and now I have a blue one with white mesh, and a brown one with yellow mesh. Just now, they’re coming into style. And of course, New Yorkers having finally caught on the trend, are starting the backlash against them. New Yorkers are so five minutes ago.
Oops. I hate it when I can’t remember where the thing is buried. The “buried treasure is cool” part of me really enjoyed this story.
This is one of those areas of graphic design that I always thought was really cool: antique seed packets. A while back I had an option to design a landscaping website for a friend (it didn’t work out) but this was one of my plans, to create a design like this. Another cool example of this is the art for the Squirrel Nut Zippers CD “Perennial Favorites.”
The seed packet site really makes me want to go put some more MiracleGro on my flowerbeds.
It’s been pointed out to me, and probably rightly so, that I write a lot about our Stupid President. Well yes. And I write a lot of mean things. Well yes. And the person pointing this out mentioned it not because she likes the Stupid President (she doesn’t) but because she was concerned about how upset I am all the time about the Stupid President. And I guess that’s true, so now I will only write about how Stupid the President is on Mondays. The rest of the time, I will write about my life, and other funny and interesting stuff. Because despite how Stupid the President is, life is still something to be enjoyed at least 6/7ths of the time. The other 1/7th of the time, you should all be mad at the Stupid President.
And so, here’s something funny: How to kill your computer and other electronics.
So I’m persuing the Indy Star website, because I just can’t bring myself to actually subscribe to the paper, and I ran across this little gem of an article. It’s about coffee mugs. The author of the article is comparison shopping coffee mugs. Indianapolis is an urban city of over a million people. We have a larger population than San Francisco. Check out their paper sometime. The Indy Star is lame. Lame, lame lame. Shut up about the mugs, dude. Just shut up. Jesus.
Apparently, demised of OPEC would greatly help line G. W. Bush’s wallet. Really. Tell me again why this guy is still in office?