I threw my ecosphere out when we moved, because both shrimp had died. It was a sad day, but it had lasted two years, with only occasional cleaning of the glass needed, though the water level had dropped by an inch or so. I must get a new one some day.
via Metafilter
Spring Break has quite a reputation for American students. There’s partying, drinking and, if they’re lucky, sex (or at least nudity). At least one company produces “Girls Gone Wild” videos of any flashing they can find. Determined not to be hindered in any way they have taken Panama City, Florida to court because the city’s anti-nudity laws could interfere with their filming plans.
“The ordinances violate the First Amendment because the defendants intend to arrest females engaged in acts of constitutionally protected expressive nudity in public places, as well as the plaintiffs should they take videos of them,”
‘Expressive nudity’, what a beautiful concept, and constitutionally protected too. Hey baby, bring a little of that expressive nudity on over to my house.
The Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s first legal brothel, was siezed by the IRS in 1999 after the manager and owners were convicted of fraud and racketeering. Now it has been passed on to the Bureau of Land Management who have to find some use for it. Sadly for sleaze historians, the buildings are in such a bad way they’ll have to be demolished.
“It would take too much money to rehabilitate the buildings because they’re of shoddy construction. They certainly didn’t pump their profits back into the buildings,”
Prince Charles visits a B&B. Meanwhile country landowners call for a VAT cut on rural holidays. The idea being that prices could be cut whilst making the same amount of money, and holidays becoming more popular. Now if everyone could just shut up about the hunting (on both sides) and come up with more stuff like this then we might be able to solve a few more rural problems.
I have a vision for a new breed of rural post office, making them distribution centres for more than just mail. Local farmers and butchers could drop off produce to be picked up or delivered with the mail. If there were an Eden valley style broadband network then the PO could become a hub for people without PCs. Then there’s the possibility of becoming a distribution centre for local small businesses, technical know how, etc., etc.
I’ve just returned to the office after a week off to find my inbox full of mails from the ‘Supportdesk IT Systems Support Bureau’, which is sort of like the NHS’s own spam generator. Amongst the mails- an invitation to a seminar on combining regular and holistic medicine and a flyer for a short session on injection technique.
Hopefully the text should now be of a sensible size, but I had to do a bit of fussing around with HTML to achieve it- the sort of thing I thought CSS put an end to. Haven’t checked it in Netscape, Opera or Mozilla yet though.