Free Republic

With all of the hype about 3-D printed guns, I've noticed a surge in interest in constructing your own guns. Not just assembling, but also building a rifle from scratch. The growing interest appears to be centred on making a political statement rather than evading rules. A declaration that the signal cannot be stopped. With a renewed interest in this type of build, I wanted to compile a list of all the guns that can be made from 80 percent receivers. 3-D printing guns is cool, but they aren't particularly good or effective weapons. 3D printers are costly, and the...

In reality, the two are friends who have had some fun with each other on social media in the past. Two of the biggest sci-fi icons have finally come face-to-face. Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart met for equal parts intense and silly moments in a new commercial for Uber Eats. The (socially distanced) spot opens with the Star Wars and Star Trek actors having an intense standoff over the pronunciation of "tomato," which leads Hamill to say, "Stewart, so it's come to this." To which Stewart replies, "Careful Hamill, daddy's not here to save you" (a solid Vader reference). An...

A remarkable kitten who survived being born under the bonnet of a moving car on a 60 mile journey has been nursed back to health by two dogs. Tabby Kit is the sole survivor of five kittens found inside the engine of a van after their mother crawled under the bonnet to give birth. Unbeknown to the driver, the terrified pet had her kittens en route from Essex to London, and ran away after the 60-mile journey, leaving the kittens fighting to survive. Kit, who is now nine-weeks-old, was only discovered when his brother fell out onto the pavement in...

It's started. Rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Sometimes several times in a sentence. Very. Short. Staccato. Statements. As yet no use of "like" four or five times in a sentence, but occasionally once or twice. Meike, once the vocalisation of Laura Ashley prints and the only girl at her inner-London primary school who never dropped any consonant, let alone an aitch, is starting to speak with an American accent. Perhaps not quite an accent, yet, but the rhythm of her speech has changed in a decidedly US direction. The rest can't be far behind. We have been...

Oh those posh Brits. Those accents. That wit. "We've always had a cultural inferiority complex with regard to the Brits," Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg says, "that they speak correctly and we don't. We even say we 'use the queen's English.' And why should that matter to us?" Just such intellectual Anglophilia may be what's behind a virus that's infecting American media these days: Britspeak. We have become a nation of journalistic copycats, betraying perfectly good American idioms along the way.