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ISSN: 1525-898X
Observations by and for the vaguely disenchanted by Kevin G. Barkes

 

Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video, raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.

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network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...

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Anniversary

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Requiem for a fictional Scotsman

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Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!

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Elegy to a Mostly Maine Coon

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It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day

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A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City

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Da Burg Annat

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I Have Issues

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Yeah, yeah, I'm inspired

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At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh

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He knows if yinz is a jagoff

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Please support KGB Report by making your amazon.com purchases through our affiliate link:
 

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dcl dialogue online!

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no. we're not that kgb.

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KGB, CIA linked

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The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!

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Americans United for Separation of Church and State

"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution

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Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000

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Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000

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miscellany

Hard to describe.

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"a breezy writing style and a cool mix of tidbits"

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Our riveting and morally compelling...

Privacy statement

One of  51,847 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.

	kgbreport.com Web

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(July 2000 and earlier)

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Saturday, October 08, 2005
posted by KGB at 7:59 AM (permalink)

May the pants be with you...

You can do this with just about any movie... but Star Wars appears to be the most popular.

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Friday, October 07, 2005
posted by KGB at 9:02 AM (permalink)

It's that time again...

The 2005 Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded:

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY: James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers."

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

CHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?

BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

NUTRITION: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).

FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eotvos University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."

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Thursday, October 06, 2005
posted by KGB at 8:39 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

We know you have your choice of bankrupt airlines, and we thank you for choosing United.
-United Airlines captain on a domestic flight

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Wednesday, October 05, 2005
posted by KGB at 6:49 AM (permalink)

TV News from Borowitz

Elsewhere, NBC announced today that it would begin broadcasting a new spin-off of its hit Law and Order series entitled Law and Order: Special Tom DeLay Unit.
-Andy Borowitz

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posted by KGB at 6:38 AM (permalink)

Joke of the day

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, gives President Bush his daily briefing. He concludes by reporting, "Yesterday, three Brazilian soldiers were killed in combat."

"My God!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"

His staff is stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

(Thanks to Marc McCune)

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Tuesday, October 04, 2005
posted by KGB at 9:05 PM (permalink)

It's officially autumn

The October 5, 2005 National Temperature Index has dropped below 700°, to 694°. The last day the NTI was below 700° was May 11.

In fall of 2004, the NTI didn't dip below 700° until October 13. May 14 was the last sub-700° of the spring.

In 2003, "NTI Fall" began on October 15. "NTI Spring" ended on May 9.

Those of you who are savvy interpreters the NTI know what this means. Don't say you haven't been warned.

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posted by KGB at 12:06 AM (permalink)

Understanding FEMA

Jon Stewart referenced this chart on The Daily Show last week, noting that it's on FEMA's official web site. Honest to God, it is.

Follow along with me... first there's a disaster, which results in a response, then recovery, mitigation, risk reduction, prevention- and, as we learned following Katrina, preparedness, which leads back to... disaster!

"God doesn't send hurricanes to punish people. He sends FEMA."
-Jay Leno

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Monday, October 03, 2005
posted by KGB at 4:26 PM (permalink)

Influenza strains jumps from horses to dogs.

An established form of equine influenza virus seems to have crossed species and is infecting dogs around the country.

Calling the jump from horses to dogs "a very rare event of considerable scientific interest," researchers downplayed speculation that the influenza could now jump to humans. While dogs live more intimately with people than horses do, the H3N8 strain has been found in horses for over 40 years without ever causing a documented human case.

Since this is new virus, the canine population has no natural immunity. Veterinary researchers are working on a vaccine.

A transcript of a Center for Disease Control press conference covering the topic is available here. From the horse's mouth, if you'll forgive the reference.

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posted by KGB at 8:31 AM (permalink)

More on why we're doomed...

Confessions of an Engineering Washout
By Douglas Kern

I am an engineering washout. I left a chemical engineering major in shame and disgust to pursue the softer pleasures of a liberal arts education. No, do not pity me, gentle reader; do not assuage your horror and dismay at my degradation by flinging a filthy quarter into my shiny tin cup. Instead, hear my story, and learn why the United States lacks engineers...
https://www.techcentralstation.com/092105B.html

(Thanks to Rafal M. Sulejman)

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Copyright © 1987-2024 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.  
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse. Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however. I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993, and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...