Yours for a starbuck

What is the world coming to when the only place to buy a CD in the mall is Starbucks?

I was out driving early on sunday morning (around 10.30am), and ran into a sequence of traffic jams created by churches letting out. They even had local police directing traffic to allow worshippers to cross the road. I've not seen such a thing before, but I suppose it must happen every week.

Why is it that whenever you read a news story about someone being in posession of a bomb making manual, it turns out to be the anarchist cookbook? In this case, it's most likely not even the real anarchist cookbook, but one of the many textfiles of that name that have been floating around the protointernet since the dawn of time. I remember when I was a teenager getting hold of some cookbook or other along with a hundred other files. Fairly silly, knockabout stuff from what I can remember. Hopelessly antiquated (even for the 90s) information on how to make a brown box (phor phone phreaking, of course), a version of the now thoroughly discredited banana psychadelics myth, and a couple of suggestions on making explosives that are more likely to get yourself blown up than to cause any noticeable infrastructure damage (or at least, cause less havoc than the average Mooninite). This rather helpful page and this FAQ tell you more than you'll ever need to know on the subject, and just how useless the book and its knock-offs would be to anyone actually planning any malfeasance.

It's just a little disturbing that posession of a book -- especially one so clearly detached from reality as this one -- is being used as evidence of ill intent, as it is by the good ol' FBI. Good thing I no longer have a copy else maybe I'd be in danger. Good thing too, that if you so wish, some idle internet searching will find you all manner of dubious information on lock picking, hallucinogenic fruit, and how to blow yourself up by mistake using common household objects. Wikicookbook, anyone?