Sometime during my freshman year of college (I'm dating myself but this was 2003), I was home visiting my parents for a weekend and I heard part of a song on the radio. I think the station was WUIN ["The Penguin"] or a cultural predecessor to WUIN and it was before the time when you could easily find station playlists online. Anyway, I hear this acoustic-type song with female vocals and the words "Oh, my baby". A few months later I emailed the station to see if they knew what I was talking about and they offered a song that fit the description but wasn't really what I was looking for. That song was "Right in Time" by Lucinda Williams and she became one of my favorite artists ever.So I still thought about that other song periodically but now it's the end of 2011. I share a lab with another woman, and we take turns picking out radio stations or podcasts to listen to at work. Sometimes we listen to the Yahoo! Radio coffee house mix. A couple weeks ago, I heard "Come to Jesus" by Mindy Smith playing and IT WAS THAT SONG. I haven't really listened to commercial radio since high school except for that one summer where I worked in a greenhouse and I listened to [100.7 The River], so apparently I missed the moderate success of Mindy Smith. But yeah, I've experienced a rare kind of resolution and I keep thinking about Little Pete and how he never found that band again.

So, in its effort to completely eliminate abortion (and even some popular forms of birth control), Mississippi has its citizens voting on an amendment to define legal personhood as beginning at conception.  Slate editor David Plotz responds with a rather interesting list of questions that would seem to follow from such a re-definition.  Some of my favorites: 1. If you are legal person at fertilization, does that mean you could drink at 20 years and three months? Could you drive at 15 and three months? Could you vote at age 17, and collect Social Security at 64? 3. Could you get a tax deduction for your dependent embryo? 5. Could you arrest women for smoking or drinking while pregnant? Could the state file a child abuse case against a mother who didn’t wear a seatbelt or otherwise endangered her fetus? 6. Would you be an American citizen if you were conceived in Mississippi but born elsewhere? Could there be “anchor babies” whose parents come to the United States, have sex, and then return home to Mexico for their baby’s birth? 8. What about freezing fertilized embryos? Would that be allowed? And why? If you’re freezing an embryo indefinitely, isn’t that effectively imprisoning it? We don’t freeze people. 11. If a woman eats food contaminated by Listeria and miscarries, could the agribusiness be prosecuted for murder? 13. How would it affect the census? Most all of these are actually genuine issues that could be legally raised if personhood was so re-defined.  Even if you are opposed to legal abortion, this strikes me as a solution that creates far more problems than it solves.   And, while this might pass Constitutional muster with Mississippi voters, I seriously doubt it would do so with the slightly higher Constitutional standards of the US Supreme Court (in part, for the intractable issues raised here by Plotz). Filed under: Politics

The largest collection of Rembrandt paintings from American collections ever.

Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That's why we will also be extending Reader's subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

Your subscriptions Your shared items Your friends Your likes Your starred items

Like always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To. We're looking forward to launching the new features very soon.

KING-5, a local news station in Seattle, Washington reports that a couple who also happen to be very much into RenFaire-style cosplay forced their daughter to fight the stepdad in a medieval-style duel as a form of punishment.

Investigators arrested the 16-year-old girl's stepfather, Fremon Seay, and her mother, Julie Seay, this weekend. According to police, the teen was forced her to dress in armor and fight Fremon Seay with a wooden sword for two hours. Police also said Seay punched and beat his stepdaughter with a tree branch prior to the duel. Investigators said she collapsed from exhaustion. The couple told officers they punished the teen for going to a party without their permission. Investigators learned the couple is part of a group of Renaissance enthusiasts, who recreate fights from the medieval era. Officers said the parents told them it was their right to discipline their child however they see fit. Photo, KING-TV: Fremon Seay talks to officials.

“The Original General Lee” by Paul Berthelot aka thedeetzes

Follow @drewtoothpaste and @nataliedee on Twitter or join the Married To The Sea Facebook Page.

A meeting of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission ended abruptly Thursday when a supporter of a couple whose nine deer were shot and killed by state wildlife staff last month tried to speak to the panel.

If you order lattes at Starbucks, here's a way to get them to for less while still getting the same drink.

WXYC says what you can do is instead of ordering a latte, order two shots of espresso. Take it and walk over to the condiment bar. Pour in your own milk. Boom! You just made a latte, and it cost you less. Excellent work. You are a genius. You should probably order a chocolate chip cookie to reward yourself for your frugality... no! You've just undone all your hard savvy frugal work! Oh well.

This reminds me of the Ghetto Big Mac....

For more tips, like how ordering a grande but asking they pour it in a venti cup will often mean you end up with more coffee for your dollar, check out the other tips at WKYC.

Top 10 Ways 2 Save at Starbucks [WKYC] (Thanks to David!)

If you've ever felt like you need to send off flares and sparklers in order to get a drink from the bar, bartender and bar culture author Rosie Schaap has some advice on things that will work to get served faster.

In her article in The New York Times Magazine, Schaap says knowing the following will help you get the bartender's attention:

• Make eye contact
• Don't wave your arms around
• Be respectful
• Say thank you, and please
• They're not strippers, waving cash in your hands won't get them to serve you faster
• If you have a chance to ask your bartender's name, do so, and introduce yourself

Just like the teacher at the head of the class who sees everything, the bartender knows what's going on in their bar at all times. If you're blocking access for the servers, elbowing people aside, or generally screaming and being obnoxious, they're going to take note and downgrade their service accordingly in order to encourage you to leave.

How Do You Get a Bartender's Attention? [NYTM] (Thanks to David!)

The fringe crazies at Westboro Church are going to protest Steve Jobs’ funeral for…well, for reasons I can’t possibly explain. As best I can tell, they believe this titan of capitalism should have done more to support their particular religious views. I don’t know. But, their tweet is delicious… Well. If you think Steve Jobs’ funeral is worthy of protest (!), shouldn’t you maybe not want to use his one of his products to announce it? I mean, according to them, he gave God no glory and taught sin. (!) And yet, they will use his greatest innovation to spread the word of their protest. Couldn’t they find a Droid phone for this? Write your own joke in the comments.

Briefly mentioned on BoingBoing back in 2007, The Unicorn Museum is a spot-on (and Biblically correct!) parody of the Creation Museum. This photoshopped billboard kind of makes me wish it were a real place.

Hopefully, this makes up for the bladder stone surgery.

Birth Control Means Health, Happiness, Perfect Children

Louis C.K.:

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To keep germs and grime from building up on your sponges, you can just snip a little hole in them and slip them on the faucet. Handy dandy!

The sponge will drip-dry and grunge won't build up, as it does when you lay it wet on the edge of the sink.

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker got the idea for it after seeing the Robert Audroué's circular sponge, which has a hole built into it for this express purpose. But why pay for a fancy sponge when you can do it yourself?

Another thing you can to do keep sponges clean is nuke them in the microwave for two minutes. A study published in the Journal of Environmental Health found that doing so kills 99% of all pathogens. Just make sure they're slightly moist when you put them in, to minimize the risk of fire.

Keep Sponges from Getting Grimy with One Cut [Lifehacker]

RELATED Microwaving Sponges Kills 99% Of Pathogens

October 11th Election Day is two weeks away, but many voters may not realize that they’re in new districts for the Wake Board of Education and Raleigh City Council races.

Raleigh is looking to improve the area of Capital Boulevard from downtown to Interstate 440.

Raleigh is looking to improve the area of Capital Boulevard from downtown to Interstate 440.