Well, to varying degrees.

Setting goals:

Got the above on Boing Boing.  Go to Boing Boing to get the credit & link to creator.

Spicy soda?  This company is making soda with chili and wasabi.

Go to The Awl to get the link.

Amazon says that for every 100 physical books they sell, they sell 180 eBooks.  And without giving away any numbers, they also say that since the iPad came out, the Kindle is selling at a faster pace.

When I was a teenager, I devoured “underground comix.  R. Crumb was (and remains) my favorite but my #2 was Gilbert Shelton and his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (and the Fat Freddy’s Cat spin-off).  According to Never Get Out of the Boat, someone is scanning the old comix and putting them online.  Funny stuff, or at least it was funny when I was much younger and much higher.

And now a serious one – The Washington Post series on Top Secret America – “A hidden world, growing beyond control.”  I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing but what I’ve read so far is fucking scary shit.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

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