oops, s/Verizon/CenturyLink/ -- Verizon is the company that provides me with the cell phone that insists on racking up data charges even when I'm not using it, CenturyLink is the company that provides me with DSL that slows down predictably when the masses return home from work.

You don't live up the hollow from me, do you? Because your description fits my situation to a T, apart from my nominal 6 mbps speed. The rural DSL supplier in these parts, Verizon, did take some action in response to a well-publicized community meeting of residents in another part of my county who lobbied a year ago to get DSL extended to their neck of the woods. I think one of the county supervisors attended, and it seems that Verizon decided that it was in their public-relations interest to make a commitment to providing service, which they did in fact implement fairly quickly. In the meantime, Verizon has told me that the notorious evening slowdowns are the result of known "bandwidth exhaustion", which is supposed to be fixed Sometime Soon, for the usual values of "soon". Whether getting all the neighbors together to hold a bandwidth exhaustion protest would do any good is an open question.

It has long been known that Mark Twain dictated part of his novel The American Claimant onto Edison cylinders. It was an experiment that he never repeated. Strangely, for someone whose manner of speaking was celebrated and often described during his lifetime, no one else ever thought to record him for posterity.

The American Claimant cylinders have long since gone missing. Keep your eye out for them in antique shops or your relatives' attics—if found, they would be worth who knows how many thousands or millions of dollars on the open market.

As some who wrangles XML on a daily basis, my first thought was the oXygen XML software program (http://www.oxygenxml.com/). Which I have in fact been using since one of the earliest releases.

I'm guessing you don't live in a rural community.

"Big government" aka the local post office in my central Virginia hamlet consists of a 400 square foot post office built by sectioning off the local country store. Along with the country store, it's the primary place to go to learn or pass along news, or to meet your neighbors. Of course it's kind of insane from a purely economic standpoint to maintain it, with a full-time postmistress, when there is a medium-sized PO five miles away in the next big town and a full-service PO a dozen miles away. But when that branch closes, and I suppose it will, it will mean one less point of human contact for folks around here, and some not insignificant additional burdens for people without a lot of money or with health problems for whom a trip to retrieve a package at a distance is not trivial.

Let's see... do Virginia rednecks whose great-great-grandaddies undoubtedly fought for the Confederacy count as owning third-world mentalities? Because I'm in a rural service club in central VA that puts up a Nativity scene every year, and granted a couple of years ago when someone stole the baby Jesus doll and replaced it with a bottle of beer it was a Corona beer, but I'd still bet pretty good money that it was a Morris or a Shiflett who did it rather than a Gonzales or a Gomez...

Absolutely. This is far and away my biggest gripe with recent-model cars. It's not just absolute size of the rear window, it's the slant and curving of the rear styling that cuts down on visibility.

Nothing new under the sun. This dates me, but when I was in high school the local branch of the John Birch Society advertised an upcoming presentation called "Pot, Rock, and Revolution" that was going to expose how the jungle beat of rock & roll stimulates primitive brain responses and was part of a Communist plot to turn the youth of America into zombies. They seriously cited the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" as propaganda piece, clueless to its status as a parody of "Back in the USA", etc. So a group of long-haired kids went to the meeting, attracting nervous stares but surprisingly little outright hostility, and amazed the crowd by noting that several of us had straight-A grades despite a life-long diet of rock music.

The Australian researcher quoted in the story was co-author of a paper involving forensic use of C-14 dating of wines published in 2004:

U. Zoppi, Z. Skopec, J. Skopec, G. Jones, D. Fink, Q. Hua, G. Jacobsen, C. Tuniz, A. Williams, Forensic applications of 14C bomb-pulse dating, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, Volumes 223-224, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, August 2004, Pages 770-775, ISSN 0168-583X, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.143.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F/2/b2a003d44396872bd06d5c80443167cd)

and I'm nearly certain I saw published research in the 1990s using C-14 dating to establish wine adulteration, but as it's 3:40 in the morning insomniac me is not going to run down the reference