Advanced chivalries include rising from your seat when a lady stands to powder her nose, slightly raising your hat in greeting on the street, and dueling to the death when someone insults her honor.

I've often suggested over lunch at work that we should bring back dueling. The trick is to make it formalized so it doesn't have to be deadly. Weapons should be limited to dull edged or capped-point weapons that require long and constant hours of practice to master. The results of duels would be published widely and Vegas would run a line on celebrity matches. Duels would only be allowed for personal insults, eliminating political or ambition motivated challenges. Declining or forfeiting a challenge would result in a strict fines and bans from public areas and buildings. Carrying a weapon on display would never be allowed. Official badges/ribbons would be worn by those who want to advertise their record. Maybe our sociopath violence can be directed into these formal dawn or midnight meetings. The winner pays the judges and is responsible for caring for an injured opponent. Fencing is aerobic, repeating moves over and over until so they become muscle memory. It'll keep us fit. Fencing leagues would allow people to sharpen their skills and have social gatherings, once again the winners would be responsible for paying for the refreshments at matches. I've faced women fencers and would never be so silly as to suggest they wouldn't be the very best duelists. Politeness backed by the threat of personal defeat at the point of a stranger's weapon would no longer be disingenuous or a provided mindlessly. I'm out of shape, my foil is rusty, but I'll see you at dawn if you don't mean it when you tell me to "have a nice day."

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 13, 2002 09:39 PM

Local five-piece Alert New London opens the show.

It'll be fun. A free beer for every moon farmer that shows up and spots me. Good luck.

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 13, 2002 05:43 PM

It is a lot of criticism all in one place. Some of my favorite bloggers are right there on the front page. If I was a decent writer, I would have signed up too.

My only problem with the site? Why isn't Geetee my all time favorite book and music critic not there?

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 13, 2002 05:19 PM

Having read his new book, How to Dunk a Doughnut, which provides scientific answers to some of life's more interesting conundrums, there's no telling what Fisher may be up to behind his closed door. He may have lashed himself to a boulder, still trying to prove to himself why a long-handled screwdriver appears to be easier to use than a short-handled one. He could be about to decapitate the next innocent who opens his door with a misfired boomerang as he investigates further the best way to throw one. But worse, much worse, would be if he were indulging in further research relating to the final chapter -- the physics of sex.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 02:52 PM

Professor Noble told me that the test I'd heard about sounded like an urban myth. She regularly tested her students at the end of the semester by asking them to identify wine in black glasses, she said. But what they were trying to name was the varietal, not the color. For a couple of years, she kept track of wrong answers, and she found that perhaps five to ten per cent of them were not simply the wrong varietal but a wrong varietal that was also the wrong color. Conceivably, it occurred to me, that test could have been embellished over the years to become the Davis test I'd heard about, although five or ten per cent amounted to a lot fewer wrong answers than I would have expected. Then Professor Noble told me that in the tests she gave her students they were, of course, reaching their conclusions by smell alone.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 12:44 PM

French anti-fraud investigators hope genetic tracing will become an alternative to current, decidedly unscientific, ways of detecting fraud. Today, authorities rely on rigorous inspection of wine inventories and close monitoring of accounting books, not science.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 12:13 PM

Spam upsets us - and by [Scelson's] own reckoning every mailout he sends irritates 99.9% of recipients. It also has a significant monetary cost that far exceeds the few thousand dollars he may make from the process. Think about the cost of all that filtering software, the time spent by admins, or even just add up the 'few seconds' we millions spend deleting such email each and every day. Let's do the sums purely on a personal 'just delete it' basis:

99.9% of 80 million = 79,920,000
79,920,000 seconds = 22,200 hours
Minimum wage in United States = $5.15/hour
Minimum cost of deleted emails = $114,330
Maximum income for Scelson @ $1 per lead = $80,000

So, even assuming that we're all earning the minimum wage, Scelson costs the economy more than he earns.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 11:37 AM

F to Canada Customs for persisting in holding up shipments to Little Sisters and other gay and lesbian bookstores, despite the Supreme Court's warning to cease and desist in targeting these stores.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 11:03 AM

"When they sent me to Japan two years ago, they were going to set up a big office, blah, blah, blah - then three months ago they pulled back," said Raffaela Scaglietta, who came to write for Corriere. Speaking the day before she left on a free-lance reporting trip to China, she added: "Now they say they have a person who is doing articles on China and Japan - from Milan."

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 10:54 AM

"Could it be we have stumbled upon an ancient primate form of hallucinogens?'' Hoffman said.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 10:50 AM

"By participating in the lobby process, you're effectively giving money to the political system," Back says. "It's effectively a favor-trading system where the politician wins and the geek loses...You're better of spending time writing code and influencing Internet protocols to work towards making the politicians irrelevant in the future."

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 10:20 AM

"By resolutely retaining the ban, the BBC is discriminating against the non-religious, and thus giving the impression of promoting religion as the one source of ethics. We call on the Governors to end this ban."

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 09:36 AM

Something like that has to be more than coincidence, we protest. What are the odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbelievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that with a large enough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. ''The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens,'' explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who has spent his career collecting and studying examples of coincidence. Given that there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, ''280 times a day, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur.''

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 09:06 AM

"I have no intention of permitting sensationalist lies and distortions creep into the [biography] film, as is so often the case with Hollywood productions."

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 03:50 AM

...the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said it was "concerned" about Rogers' programming broadcast across its community channels in Southern Ontario last winter detailing how the company's Internet subscribers could make the transition from the ailing At Home Corp. network to the Rogers network. The TV spots included two 60-second messages from John Tory, president and chief executive officer of subsidiary Rogers Cable Inc.

Posted by GeeTee at August 13, 2002 03:44 AM