Vol. XXX · No. 303
Today’s Forecast
Overcast with scattered rants. Strong opinions by afternoon.
Late Edition
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From the Editor’s Desk
RandomStringOfWords.com
a space for sharing ideas, reflections, and the occasional strong opinion. If you're here, you're probably curious about something I've built, said, or am working on. Either way, I'm glad you found your way here.
More about the editorThe Front Page
Health
For my entire life, I've been told to eat my vegetables. Except there's one small problem nobody mentions: the plant doesn't want you to eat it. A rabbit can run and a porcupine carries its own roofing nails, but a lettuce plant is bolted to the ground, so plants went with chemical warfare. Kidney beans that poison you raw, cassava that can release cyanide,...
About Me
Some people take personality quizzes. I asked an AI to name my spirit animal, based on everything I've ever ranted about, and it said wolverine: aggressively independent, chronically irritated, impossible to intimidate and physically incapable of leaving well enough alone. Then it made me a picture. I'd argue, but I'd need about 2,400 words to do it, and that would just prove the point....
Political
Somewhere along the way, being a patriot came to mean picking a political team, buying the right bumper sticker and defending whatever ridiculous thing your...
Science
Somewhere along the way, one of the most important substances in modern civilization got reduced to a children's-book explanation: oil is dead dinosaurs. It isn't....
Money
Every so often the flat-tax argument comes around again: pick a number and everybody pays the same percentage. Compared with the Rube Goldberg machine we...
Photography
Every time a new phone comes out, somebody starts waving the megapixel count around like a ruler in a locker room. I'm eyeing the 48-megapixel...
Health
I have primary hyperaldosteronism, which means my body hangs onto sodium whether I want it to or not. Trying to understand my own endocrine plumbing...
Conspiracy Theory
Everybody remembers the Twin Towers. Far fewer people remember that several hours later a third skyscraper came down, one no airplane ever touched. Building 7...
About Me
Some people can sit on a couch for six hours and feel like they had a perfectly acceptable day. I get about twenty minutes before...
Conspiracy Theory
Most JFK theories eventually wander into red string on a corkboard, which makes the whole subject easy to dismiss. This one doesn't need any of...
About Me
Apparently the standard for whether something happened in the Army isn't your military medical records, the dates of treatment, or the fact that the Army...
Political
'Common sense gun control' is the polite name for making the law harder on the people who already obey it, while the criminal keeps getting...