fun fact: United Nuclear was founded and is run by Bob Lazar, the guy that supposedly worked at Area 51, reverse-engineering alien spacecraft (among TONS of other hilarious claims). he also went around proclaiming that he was a student at MIT and California Institute of Technology...except neither school have any records that he was ever even enrolled at either place.

United Nuclear as a company has also gotten into trouble a couple times, for selling things they weren't supposed to be selling.

ah, Sam Adams...our most overrated mediocre beer.

"bass", not "base". sorry to be nitpicky, but as a musician that spelling error always drives me nuts.

and as an aside, stereos this loud are a major health hazard to anyone in the car. they damage hearing and can cause all sorts of physical problems (not the least of which is potentially affecting your heartrate).

also: nobody else wants to hear a muffled stereo from half a mile away!

i'm too lazy to find a more reliable source right now, but to quote Wikipedia: "Zucchini, like all squash, has its ancestry in the Americas. However, the varieties of squash typically called "zucchini" were developed in Italy, many generations after their introduction from the "New World"." "zucchini" as a word most likely existed before the word "courgette" (which is, in fact, only used in about four or five countries, mostly current or former British empire counties, and France).

in other words..."neener neener, zucchini wins!" :)

in all seriousness though, i friggin' LOVE zucchini and my grandparents just gave me a 3lb monster! i had to cut it in half and share with my mom, cos there's NO WAY i'd be able to eat the thing. i also made the mistake of telling them "you can give me more if you have them",...i'm now awaiting the influx of more little green squashes than i can possibly use. (the upside is that they're also saving the squash blossoms for me to cook with, which are delicious!)

one of my fave zucchini recipes is for breakfast: fry up some bacon, then remove bacon from pan. remove all but 1 or 2 tablespoons of bacon fat, return pan to heat and add a bunch of sliced zucchini. turn heat down to low heat and partially cover pan, cooking for about 20 minutes (until zucchini is soft and almost translucent. it will shrink a LOT!) while the zucchini is cooking, roughly chop the cooked bacon. once the zucchini is almost done cooking, add the bacon back to the pan, stir and taste. add pepper and salt (although i find that there's usually almost enough salt from the bacon, so i add very little...maybe a pinch or two). place bacon/zucchini on plate and proceed to consume.

if you're a little more health-conscious, you can skip the bacon and instead cook the zucchini in 1-2 teaspoons of vegetable oil, and once it's a couple minutes from being done, crack 2 or 3 eggs into the pan and continue to stir...you'll basically end up with scrambled eggs and zucchini mixed together.

both are easy breakfast recipes and taste awesome! just be careful not to season with salt until the very end (especially with the bacon), because they're terrible if they're over-salted.

according to the rest of the article, only half of it was actually eaten. what a monumentally ridiculous waste of food, all to break a stupid world record that has zero redeeming qualities.

"It's important to remain aware of these cultural remnants, rather than bury them." so true. sweeping them under the rug like they didn't happen isn't doing future generations any favors. i used to collect Nazi memorabilia (primarily patches and pins), although when my ex left several years back, they "mysteriously disappeared" despite the fact that i never paraded them around and certainly held no ideological connection to them. my collection was focused mostly on uniforms.

there are a lot of things that most true collectors will avoid, especially things related directly to the extermination camps. that stuff is considered too sensitive and, quite frankly, too creepy and really belongs more in museums and holocaust memorials. the little militaria shop that i used get most of my stuff from generally refused to buy/trade in anything that could be linked directly to a concentration camp. one time, the owner told me a story about how a guy came in and offered to sell him an empty Zyklon B cannister. he wasn't sure if it was authentic (probably not), but he said he didn't care and proceeded to chew the guy a new one for five minutes before telling him in no uncertain terms to get out of his store and that he wasn't welcome back.

in fact, that store owner would get the occasional neo-Nazis in the store, and he would refuse to sell them anything German. i happened to be in his store once when a couple skinhead-types came in. after a short conversation with them, he said, "oh, you can look around all you want, but i'm not selling you anything". a couple days later someone broke out his front window and after that, he kept the front door locked and would only let in known customers.

@Jim: that's kinda what i was wondering. since passports are now required to enter Canada from the US, does that cause problems or is it "exempt" because it's indoors and therefore harder to just hop over into Canada? i mean, i know it's kind of trivial, but it still raises interesting legal questions.

+1 extramedium's post!

the fact is, the majority of cyclists don't use tire liners because A) they can actually cause more pinch-flats than punctures they reduce because they tend to move around inbetween the tire and tube, and B) they negatively contribute to weight and rolling resistance. while i think the seatbelt hack is clever and would work, it's going to be even heavier than commercially available rim strips (and therefore cause even more rolling resistance). in reality, the cons of the seatbelt hack really outweigh the pros (literally).

i'd also agree with extramedium that getting a heavier-duty tire that is marketed as more puncture-resistant and has thicker sidewalls is a much better solution. i'd also add that sealant designed for innertubes generally doesn't work and makes patching a tube almost impossible (it keeps the patch glue from adhering). stuff like SLIME isn't a great solution and is generally not worth the time, money or mess (keep in mind i'm not talking about sealant for tubeless tires, which has other properties and is necessary for the tubeless system to work).

i think the best option (if you still use tubes) is to just carry an extra tube and patch kit with you. patch kits are only about $2, and an extra tube is only a couple dollars more than that. depending on the ride and how much time i have, i'll either spend the five minutes or so to patch my tube on the trail, or i'll just swap out the tube for a new one (and unless it's a huge tear, i'll keep the old tube and patch it when i get home. a properly patched tube works just as good as a brand new one and there's no reason to throw it out).

clinton robert labombard : airless (solid) tires and tubes don't work and there's a reason you never see them for sale at bike shops. they were basically a marketing scam when they were invented and it's a wonder anyone still bothers to even make them. they're super-heavy, they provide NO pneumatic "bounce" (which is necessary for shock absorption and to keep your rim from getting bent and mangled) and they dry out and fall apart pretty quickly.

here's a great article on all things bicycle tire and tube related (and even a section on airless tires towards the bottom): http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tires.html

after careful consideration, Freddy Krueger realised his initial attempt at purchasing cutlery would produce less than satisfactory results.

Schroedinger's Cat: Wanted Dead And/Or Alive / Ladies Fit / Med

i agree that cyclists need to pay attention and be defensive. i also agree that we should wear highly visible clothing. and there certainly are some cyclists who ride like jerks that give the majority of us a bad name.

but we're talking specifically about bike lanes here, which are usually between the parking lane and moving traffic. while cyclists need to try to be aware of people in parked cars (since they may open their door), in most jurisdictions it's the legal obligation of the occupants of the parked car to check and make sure they're not about to open the door on a cyclist. the cyclist is riding in a lane that they are allowed to be riding in and thus have the "right of way" in this situation, so to speak. people need to understand that a cyclist riding at even "slow" speeds of 10 or 20mph have been killed after being doored (yes, even when wearing a helmet. a helmet is a safety measure, but it's definitely not a guarantee and doesn't protect the rider from neck, back or other potentially life-threatening injuries. just like having airbags in a car is no guarantee that you'll survive a crash).

and as much as jerkus cyclists anger a lot of people (including other cyclists), it still doesn't give anyone in a car the right to cause them seriously bodily injury. unlike a metal-enclosed car, the only "protective buffer" cyclists have is our skin and everyone knows skin makes pretty crappy padding.

as a little kid, my great-grandmother showed me that you could apply a little mud to a splinter or bee stinger and as the mud dried (and subsequently shrank), it would draw the splinter or stinger out. toothpaste works too.

but yeah, as an adult, screw that waiting around stuff...i'm going at it with tweezers or a pocket knife!

interesting idea. but drivers can also take two seconds to look and make sure they're not about to door a cyclist before getting out of their car.

@CassandraDD : you only have to read a few paragraphs into that "study" to show that it's unreliable and not based on science. and i quote (emphasis mine):

"Information for this report was gathered through MEDIA ACCOUNTS that were available at the time of the attack or found THROUGH INTERNET ARCHIVES...."

it's pretty easy to make up statistics when you're cherry-picking your information and throwing around irrelevant "facts" to make a point. not only that, but Dogsbite.org (as well as several other websites with suspiciously similar names) is an anti-pitbull group, plain and simple. they have a very direct agenda and disregard REAL, scientific data in favor of anecdotal reports and haphazardly gathered data. not only that, but tracking a species with such a widespread population (such as dogs) is problematic at best: which is why the CDC stopped tracking dog-bite data over TEN YEARS AGO.

i urge you to read reports and data by someone who has actually STUDIED the issue, instead of giving in to media fear-mongering.

http://nationalcanineresearchcouncil.com/ncrc-research/

and don't ever forget that the media is in it for the "juicy stories", because that's what sells!

i've always been fascinated by miniatures, especially functioning ones (i still want to tackle a miniature firing canon one of these days!) having owned several "real life" examples these firearms myself, his attention to detail is beyond impressive and if he hadn't included matchsticks to show the scale of his model, i wouldn't have guessed how tiny they were!

(BTW, a small spelling correction: the pistol is a "Makarov", not "Marakov").

another thing people need to realise is that distilling with grain alcohol can be pretty dangerous (aside from the legalities). if you're using something like a bunsen burner, you're asking for a pretty spectacular explosion or fire. my ex, when she was much younger (about 18, IIRC), almost burned her apartment building down when the grain alcohol vapors ignited. luckily nobody was in the room when it happened, but she said a couple of the walls were completely blackened. grain alcohol vapors are extremely volatile (a fact that i discovered on my own when i was younger and thought i could substitute Everclear for charcoal fluid to start a barbecue. i lost my eyebrows...and it didn't even work as a charcoal starter!) and NEVER EVER ingest or drink wormwood essential oil...it is EXTREMELY toxic and can put you in the ER with kidney or liver failure!!!

another thing about absinthe: the effects of wormwood have been GREATLY exaggerated over the years. you DON'T hallucinate, and i don't think it makes artistic endeavours any more fruitful. in fact, old absinthe recipes had very little wormwood, much less than people think. medically speaking, the effects of such small quantities of thujone are pretty negligible. plenty of the "original" recipes from the old distillers still exist, and wormwood wasn't the star of the show. the myth that absinthe caused hallucinations actually came from the governments that decided to ban the drink, because they thought that its drinkers tended to be "worse" drunks than those who drank wine and other spirits (again, at the time, absinthe probably had a higher alcohol content than most other drinks, but they failed to take that into account. also, they never bothered to see if the rumors about absinthe were true: they just took them as fact). the truth of the matter is that a great many famous artists who partook of the Green Fairy were just raging alcoholics, who just happened to prefer a drink that had a wickedly high alcohol content. combine that with a lack of scientific and medical knowledge at the time, add some some government propaganda and you've got a banned drink.

having said all that, "real" absinthe is slowly becoming available (legally) in the US again. the gov keeps the allowable levels of thujone low, but even the original i've had some of the "clandestine" imports over the years, but the current legal stuff is pretty decent overall. i do like Suisse Verte quite a bit, but for readily-available stuff, i think Lucid is surprisingly pretty good (and FAR better than any of that mouthwash-colored stuff from the Czech Republic! that stuff is HORRIBLE, and isn't even true absinthe). Lucid happens to have a comparable amount of wormwood as the old Pernod (the absinthe, not the pastis) had, for those that care. i personally don't care about thujone/wormwood levels and rarely pay attention to them.

so while i think the link does give a fairly accurate way to make your own absinthe (although i can't speak for its particular taste), i think it's far safer and easier to just spend the $60 on a bottle of Lucid here in the US. it's actually pretty good and is still a fairly cheap way to figure out whether you like absinthe or not (here's a hint: if you can't stand black licorice, you'll probably hate absinthe, although at least it doesn't have that "thick cough syrup" flavor that Jagermeister has). if you decide that you like it, you can try importing the REALLY good stuff from Europe, but be aware that it could potentially get confiscated at port and you could lose $100+ with nothing to show for it.

some things to look for in "good" absinthe: it's rarely "neon green". if the color looks like food coloring, it probably is (this is especially prevalent in Czech "absinthes", which are often BLUE!!!) if it looks like mouthwash, avoid it. true absinthe varies in color from a pearly white to a chlorophyl-green color, depending on the recipe. floating herbs are unnecessary and generally don't taste good, either. also, true absinthe preparation NEVER includes a burning spoon of sugar! that's also a weird Czech thing that only makes their so-called absinthe taste even worse that it already does. the proper method of preparing an absinthe drink is to put a certain amount of absinthe in a glass (absinthe glasses usually have a line marked for this), then dripping or slowly pouring ice-water over a sugarcube held in a slotted spoon above the drink. it's usually 3-5 parts ice water to 1 part absinthe: i usually prefer 3 parts water to 1 part absinthe, unless it's really strong, otherwise it's just too watered down for my taste. it's a little more ritualistic than it needs to be, and often i'll just pour ice water over the sugarcube just slow enough to allow the sugarcube to melt into the liquid. i've also done the same thing with just plain white sugar in a regular teaspoon, held at a slight angle to allow the sugar-water to drain into the glass of absinthe. it's fun to have absinthe spoons and glasses, but certainly not necessarily.

one more thing: i don't know how much absinthe used to cost during the Belle Epoch, but it's certainly not cheap anymore! unless you're wealthy, don't plan on drinking it more than occasionally. and don't plan on drinking more than two or three glasses at a time, unless you want a really wicked hangover the next day!