Recent Comments

1. 10 days ago on Kliban's Cats

   A bit of trivia: “qat” is on the official Scrabble word list, for its meaning as khat, a plant whose leaves are chewed as a recreational stimulant. Qats on qatnip would be scary!

2. 10 months ago on Non Sequitur

   A sweetie of mine won’t talk about “dialing” a phone unless it has that rotating round thing on it.

   And Justine Haupt developed an open-source rotary un-smartphone (“a cell**phone**. You know, for making **calls**”), and is/was taking preorders for the kit.

   >

3. 10 months ago on Non Sequitur

   I heard of a computer center back in Ye Olde Days, when the trash included the little round punchings from paper tape and the little rectangular punchings from punched cards. They looked like 0’s and 1’s, so it was a “bit bucket”!

4. 10 months ago on Non Sequitur

   On scrawled signatures, guilty as charged, even with pen and ink, even though I’m not a doctor. My signature is the last atrophied vestige of cursive writing, which I absolutely hated as a kid. (Maybe it’s so called because so many of us curse at it?)

5. about 1 year ago on Mike Luckovich

   When president-elect Trump announced that he would refuse to put his business interests in a blind trust as other presidents-elect, Democratic and Republican, have done, that put him on a collision course with both the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses of the Constitution – and the Electoral College, often “justified” as a last check against an “unfit demagogue” taking office, should have disqualified him.

   The Electoral College, created as a “compromise” to keep southern slaveholding states in the Union, disenfranchises people for having too many neighbors (a Wyomingite gets 3.7 times the presidential voting power of a Californian), and results in tens of millions of wasted votes that don’t help the voter’s candidate in their or any other state; votes that literally don’t count (27,439,074 wasted votes in 2016, 26,013,665 in 2020).

   It’s time for the undemocratic Electoral College to go.

   (The National Popular Vote interstate compact, on its way towards being joined by states with an EC majority, is a workaround that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. See >

6. about 1 year ago on Kliban's Cats

   More in the vein of ”Happy Mew Year!”

7. over 1 year ago on Michael Ramirez

   99% of the time Ramirez lives in far-right opposite land. Occasionally, as now, he sees reality.

   ”Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

8. over 1 year ago on Tim Campbell

   As the T-shirt says: ”I’d rather be an American than a Republican.”

9. over 1 year ago on Clay Jones

   Reminds me of the cartoon with a professor or teacher with a bold statement on the blackboard:

   ”*EVERYONE WHO CONFUSES CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION DIES.*”

   Also reminds me of an example in a class I took:

   A study of elementary school students showed a strong positive correlation between the lengths of their middle fingers and their mental age as measured on an IQ test. Does having long fingers make you smarter, or does being smart make your fingers grow longer, or what?

   [And it wasn’t something weird in the town’s water: the study would probably be very easily replicated at other elementary schools, anywhere in the world.]

   [And a tech note: GoComics automagically italicizes text surrounded by underscores, and bolds text surrounded by asterisks.]

10. over 1 year ago on Clay Jones

    But somehow he wouldn’t want to have those benefits as a slave himself!