Free Republic

A book of short stories titled “Forty Minutes Late” has been returned to a San Francisco library -- 100 years late. ... Johnson’s great grandmother had checked it out from the city’s old Fillmore branch in 1917. She passed away a week before the due date, and the Fillmore branch is no longer around. Johnson found the 1909 book, by F. Hopkinson Smith, in an old steamer trunk in 1996. He assumed the library wouldn’t want it back, but a recently announced “fine forgiveness program” that runs through Feb. 14 inspired him to return it.

A dwarf took his fiancee to a restaurant for a romantic meal and was handed a children's colouring book and crayons by a waitress. James Lusted, 26, who is 3ft 7ins, was on a date at a Harvester Inn in Cardiff with his fiancee, Chloe Roberts, who is 5ft 7ins, when the waitress picked up two menus, the crayons and a colouring book. It was only when the waitress heard James's deep voice that she realised her mistake, and didn't serve the couple for the rest of evening. But Mr Lusted and his bride-to-be, 20, who are from Colwyn Bay,...

Best of Ads, Worst of Ads In Pitching Products This Past Year, Gorilla Worked, but Guerrilla Didn't By SUZANNE VRANICA December 27, 2007; Page B1 Green is the new black. Madison Avenue tried to curry favor with consumers this year by coloring products and brands with an environmental tint. A long list of companies such as General Electric Co., Chevron Corp. and Home Depot Inc. all jumped on the eco-friendly bandwagon. One Toyota Motor Corp. ad featured a Prius being created from straw, twigs and other natural elements. The gasoline-electric hybrid car is built up and then fades back into...

Post-modern Postmortem On January 10, 1963, A. S. Herlong, a Democrat congressman from Florida read a strange list, known as the “Current Communist Goals,” into the Congressional Record. Originally lifted from a book called The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen, the list seemed at the time to be an alarmist sequence of unattainable military, political, and cultural threats posed by international communism against the free world. Most intriguing among these are the cultural goals: • Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and...