Free Republic

Sixty-three percent of Americans questioned in a Gallup survey conducted in October and released this month said they believe having a gun in their house makes it a safer place to be. “A record-high percentage in U.S. say guns makes homes safer,” said Gallup in its analysis of the survey. The organization has polled on this issue in five surveys going back to 1993 (although the question in the 1993 survey was somewhat different than in later surveys). Gallup also reported on how eleven different demographic groups responded to the question. Among all of these except one—Democrats—a majority said this...

Engineer Andre Filiatrault expects a major earthquake in Buffalo on Tuesday morning — a temblor as powerful as the 1994 Northridge earthquake that caused $40 billion in damage ... ...Filiatrault and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo plan to subject an entire house to a magnitude-6.7 earthquake Tuesday for a systematic assessment of how a typical wooden suburban home holds up ... Built to California construction code, the 40-ton building is the largest wooden structure ever tested in a simulated earthquake, the engineers said. ... The sudden swaying and vibrations will simulate the intensities...

Home safety: The jarring truth BY DAVE BARRY Feb.6, 2005 (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Feb. 18,1990.) Today's Practical Homemaker Topic is: Useful Cooking Tips and Hints. Cooking is one of the major cultural achievements, along with golf, that separate human beings from animals. Animals don't cook. When they encounter something that might be food, they just snork it down. My editor's dog, Clementine, once ate aquarium gravel without even heating it up. Some scientists believe that ants might cook. The reasoning here is that if you look at the kinds of culinary treasures that worker...