A little over a month ago, I made a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to the U.S. Navy for a copy of a very obscure DVD produced by the Naval Education and Training Command about the Seabourn Spirit incident in 2005. Given the recent renewed public interest in Somali piracy, it seemed like the video was something worth trying to get. Alas, the Navy doesn’t want to part with the “USS Gonzales / USS Capt. St. George Somali Pirate Incident” case study.
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It’s easy enough to understand why some people spend huge sums of money on wristwatches - aside from vices like vanity, avarice, and ego, there’s the whole “fine timepiece” marketing mystique, where watches are equated with jewelry, rather than treated as a functional piece of clothing, or a functional accessory, like a belt.

The manufacturers of “fine timepieces” tout a huge variety of snake-oil claims to promote their wares’ superiority and prices; one of the most common examples is timekeeping accuracy. The funny thing they don’t tell you, though, is that quartz watches - i.e. “electronic” watches - are all, for all practical purposes, about equally accurate. (We’re talking variations in single-digit parts per million, here.)
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More random goodness, short-attention-span style:

Was Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah poisoned? “Diplomatic sources” in Lebanon say yes - but Hezbollah says no… Sort of;

Get a look inside the IDF’s K9 unit, Oketz;
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On the surface, it seems like the (U.S.) postal service hasn’t changed much over the years: rates have gone up, the old scary jeeps have mostly been replaced by minivans, and there are all kinds of nifty services they didn’t used to offer, but otherwise, it’s been business as usual. Right? Well… yes and no. There have been changes - but some of those that affect the postal service are more widespread social effects.
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I recently stumbled across two interesting photos from last month’s RNC arrests that I thought were interesting - in part because they cast a certain amount of doubt on some of the claims of the “RNC Welcoming Committee” and their lawyers, but also because they should help silence - at least a little bit - some of the anarchists’ supporters, who have taken the whole “photos or it didn’t happen” joke rather too seriously.
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