"I saw a woman and her single under-three-ounce liquid-or-gel container turned away from a security checkpoint because she had neglected to buy it its own quart-sized baggie."

I was luckier last spring. I attempted to pass through security with my shampoo in a pint size baggie. The security guy gave me a dirty look, but they were kind enough to have a supply of quart size baggies for miscreants like myself. Good thing, you wouldn't want a terrorist armed with a pint size baggie.

Let's all not tell the terrorists about costume stores.

"Bush can blame himself for Iran's reaction"

Indeed. Classical bully behavior pattern. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the Axis of Evil. Iraq has no nukes and presents no threat, so say they do and invade them and act like a hero when they fail to defend themselves. North Korea, on the other hand with actual nukes; bluster, but back down without even trying their strength. What lesson could Iran possibly learn from this? Disarm? You kidding?

A dog living with children under 14? The horror! How many times have we seen pictures of dogs and children "playing" together, with the look of pure terror and horror so clear on the face of the dog, as he/she is forced to "fetch" or "Play tug of war", when what he/she really wants is to lie on the floor while his/her adult owner watches TV! Have some compassion!

If you don't take care of this kind of crap and just hide it under the rug, of course it comes back later, and always at the worst time.

Aside from the ability to search archives (and not end up an article in the weird news after you are found dead under an avalanche of decades old newspapers) online newspapers are pretty much useless. For the kind of content where you want to see what people are talking about over the water cooler, they're largely superseded by blogs, digg, salon, etc. But for just recreational reading, they can't match the paper version for both convenience (can't stuff one section of the online sunday times in my back pocket and read it while in line at the DMV) or for just randomness. Same as with encyclopedia/dictionaries; I don't think I've ever looked something up in a paper encyclopedia or dictionary when I didn't stumble upon something completely unrelatied which was interesting. The ability to look something up online and NOT find out anything random is a step backwards.

Katee Sackhoff.

If a person is pretty sure that something controversial is NOT torture, then they would logically be willing to give it a try, to make sure. I mean, I am pretty sure eating a chocolate bar is not torture, and I am willing to put my conviction to the test and eat a chocolate bar to make sure.

If you really think waterboarding is nothing more than mild discomfort, why wouldn't you be willing to undergo it, so that your experience would allow our nation to benefit from its use?

"Not to mention the fact that it's only been used a whopping total of THREE TIMES under the Bush administration, the last time being in 2003!"

So why exactly do we need to defend its use?

"It's not bad, and besides, I didn't do it."

Personally I resent getting tarred with the behavior of the worst tiny fraction of my generation. For every George Bush Jr., there are a dozen of us eking out a precarious living teaching or volunteering in the inner city or doing medical research or just holding up our end of the covenant of civilization with the hope that we will therefore be allowed to cling to the planet for another few years.

OK, well that certainly positions you as an authority figure whose analyses I definitely want to hear.

"Genetically modified food products involve introducing antibiotic resistance genes into the crop"

Umm... no? Unless I miss my guess it usually involves introducing resistance to the herbicide Roundup, and/or introducing the genes for the bacterial insecticide BT; I can't imagine why there would be any reason to introduce genes for antibiotic resistance in a plant.

"resistant to methicillin, but can be treated with sulfa drugs, vancomycin, clindamycin, and tetracycline"

The problem is that bacteria are able to acquire multiple antibiotic resistances, sometimes through just a single mutation; a corollary of this is that once you've selected a population resistant to one antibiotic, it's correspondingly easier for them to acquire resistance to the other antibiotics you use on them in the future. "CA-MRSA [community acquired] has a greater spectrum of antimicrobial susceptibility, including to sulfa drugs, tetracyclines, and clindamycin. HA-MRSA [hospital acquired] is resistant even to these antibiotics and often is susceptible only to vancomycin." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus

I find the hot air driers OK for drying hands, but I'm not going to stick my face under them after I've given it a quick refresh during a long car trip.

By coincidence, the day after seeing a commercial for "airblade" I saw them in a new jersey turnpike rest stop. it's like those super air blowers that dry cars in a carwash, they really peel the water off. But there's only a little channel big enough for your hands, so drippy faced I leave.

"That the internal combustion engine was the most dangerous development of the 20th century ... In a way, that's kind of breathtaking."