The summary is misleading; the act will probably pass on Tuesday, and the provisions will be restored. It's depressing how completely dishonest this story is.

Dark refers to not interacting with the electromagnetic force, i.e. not producing or reflecting light/radiation. We "see" dark matter through its gravitational influence.

Yep, you've hit it on the head: the fashion world heavily depends on hyperspecific brands. A parent company may own an immense number of outlet identities that aim to cater to a specific submarket. Hot Topic is a good parent company for ThinkGeek because their model is already built around faddish, meme-driven trends (as you said), but the two target audiences have little enough overlap that this will be a substantial diversification to their marketing reach.

It's exhaustingly parodical—and entirely targeted at those who are sick of the book. Jasper Fforde has been hailed as a suitable compatriot to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Judging by covers, etc.

Your post is based on nothing but stereotypes.

Extending on this, there is at least one book where time travel is invented following the discovery of a recipe for unscrambling eggs.

Humans today have a quite high level of plastic in their blood, which, according to studies of fish, strongly reduces fertility. (for reference, see Plastic Planet).

It actually does not. You can even get faster performance with garbage collection.

Imagine a hot Universe at an early time (which may be very large, even infinite). Photons are suddenly released and go in all directions.
The Universe expands (meaning the distance between everything increases). The photons are still traveling through the Universe.
At any point in time you can observe photons arriving at your position, and they are as old as their origin is away in light-distance (well, space expanded in the meantime, that makes it a bit harder to imagine).
So, you can observe the background at any time, from all directions. It gives you access to the space where the photons where released, called a "last scattering surface". As time goes by, the photons have to be older and their distance larger, to arrive now.

Actually, the cosmic background is going everywhere.

...well, maybe they weren't happy with the specifics of the Nationalist-Socialist platform. (I bet it was the anti-smoking mindset.) It's not quite as if neo-Nazis have a monopoly on profound racism, or even a monopoly on holocaust denial. Sometimes it's just desirable for the sake of some local variety of nationalism to pretend the Jews weren't as abused during World War 2 as they actually were.

...But it's okay, because he actually died years ago; no one has bothered to check because he continues to emit information.

Vigorous!

Maybe unlimited storage of email text?

Sounds like you don't understand time dilation. When you approach a black hole, time does not go at a different rate for you. It does however go at a different speed compared to an observer at a large distance (that's why time is *relative*). For them, all objects falling towards a black hole actually seem to pile up near the event horizon (but gravitational redshift and time dilation make the radiation gradually unobservable). For the person falling in, nothing changes, they just fall through.

To summarize, time never slows down, it may only slow down in one place compared to another place. You did not specify two places so your statement does not make any sense.