Good point - I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that technicality about the origin of Costco.

Costco itself said that the company started under the name Price Club (I suppose that's what happens if two corporation merge - the older corporation becomes the origin story).

The success of Price Club spawned over two dozens imitators - of which, Costco (founded in 1983) was one. In fact, Costco (the 1983 version) cofounder Jim Sinegal actually worked under Sol Price.

You're absolutely right about Issaquah, Washington. I've corrected the article to reflect this.

The solution, of course, is to change the name of the school.

This is strangely appropriate for the post!

This is my favorite comment of the day!

My wife complained that Sam's Club smells like car tires - and she's right! For whatever reason, our local Sam's Club put their car tire department right in the front of the store. The smell of car tires welcomes you to Sam's Club, I suppose.

This comment would win number 2 spot in the whole wide Interweb!

I think that Myspace ice cream melted away from our consciousness a looong time ago!

That's institutional bureaucracy for ya (though plenty of bloggers would've been happy had Google just left its RSS reader alone for the next twelve years instead of sunsetting it.)

Actually, Yahoo's traffic just came in higher than Google's (even without the Tumblr acquisition)

Yes, that's why I refuse to buy a $20,000 TV too. :) Oh wait, I don't have $20,000 to splurge on a TV!

Isn't there an effort to define the kg by using Planck's constant?

That's one of the theories of why Le Grand K lost that 50 microgram.

Thanks Eddie - I appreciate it.

I couldn't find any reference to the effect of dumping all those nasty chemical weapons in the Oder River at the end of World War II, but it's probably safe to assume that at least for a while, that river was toxic.

The river outlets to the Baltic Sea, which has a volume of 21,700 cubic km - that's a mass of 2.17 x 10^13 metric ton. So 12,000 ton of tabun was a drop in the bucket (0.0000000000055%).