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As drought-prone areas experience some of the driest seasons on record ever, both the Southern and Northern hemispheres have witnessed some of the worst wildfires in years in 2009. This weekend a massive wildfire was knocking at Los Angeles’ gates, but California, the Northwest and even Alaska have been getting lit all summer, as have [...]

We’ve been planning to buy a car for years now, but every time we’re about to pick a make and model we get really freaked out by what seems the much more important decision: what kind of license plate to get. Every state has dozens, and even then one could easily travel to a neighboring [...]

Even though the national diet is dominated by such healthy staples as hamburgers, hot dogs and the ever-lengthening sub-sandwich-gyro-hero-whathaveyou, smaller areas have some incredibly specific and gross-sounding local foods. Like Hawaii’s spam Musubi, seen at right, or Western Alaska’s Akutaq, an ice cream-like food made from whipped fat, berries, sugar and meat. Read all about [...]

Yesterday a bill proposed by Virginia’s Democratic Governor Tim Kaine to require background checks for the sale of guns at gun shows in the traditionally Republican state was rejected. The day before another of Kaine’s laws was repealed, this one seeking to prohibit individuals carrying concealed firearms into establishments selling alcohol. Needless to say, we’re [...]

While we’re still vague on what President-elect Barack Obama’s WPA (Works Projects/Progress Administration) will end up doing, we sure like the images conjured by these evocations of FDR’s sweeping set of reforms to keep artists and construction workers busy during the Great Depression. In anticipation of great state-sponsored (and therefore more or less propagandist) visual [...]

Those mainstream mediators at TIME have released their annual list of lists, and among the most fascinating is their hierarchy of time-capsule buzzwords. Their Top 10 Buzzwords listicle goes like so:

1. Change: The all-pervasive shorthand for Barack Obama’s campaign, uses of “change” in 2008 automatically assumed a time of hardship and a vague, knee-jerk optimism, [...]

Continuing on the turkey theme from this morning’s icy post, the icy Alaskan queen Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey on camera today, only to chitchat about nothing while it was unceremoniously slaughtered in the background:

Understandably, people with feelings like Change.org’s animal rights blogger Stephanie Ernst are horrified by the video’s apparent disregard for animal suffering, [...]