William M. Hartnett

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Hartnett completists will recall that the previous phrase in this series was “to be sure.” Surprisingly, given my vast influence in the linguistic community, “to be sure” remains in frequent use by newspaper and magazine writers in search of just the right combination of words to signal to readers that the story they’re reading is [...]

> A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket (NYT)
From the things about which I’ve dedicated an inexplicable amount of brain power wondering department: Why don’t grocery stores use a single-line checkout system like those at banks and airport check-in counters? Turns out a Whole Foods store in Manhattan does just that, and, [...]

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Neighborhood of the week is The Meadows at Martin Downs in Palm City.
DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (16.5 MB, 14 pages)

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It figures that Desktop Tower Defense would be upgraded less than a week before we move into the new house. I have loads of packing left yet, but all I want to do now is figure out whether the new Ink Tower is worth messing around with. (No, apparently.)
My instant evaluation: The new Dark Creeps [...]

I’ve always been amazed and entertained by some of the search strings that lead people to my web site, and I’ve lately noticed a few particularly interesting Google referrals based on questions. Clearly, the people of the world seek my wisdom on topics of great importance, so I will now provide answers to some of [...]

Item 1: One Tom Cruise equals 14.17484673447 spider monkeys, to be more precise. This is but one of many amusing but unsubstantiated, totally spurious conversions you can make between two arbitrary and unrelated units of weight or height using weirdconverter.com. Please don’t release this into the wilds of your own newsroom, as some well-intentioned reporter [...]

Not to mention boxes and bubbles. I’m so out of touch with popular culture that the first time I saw the term “donks” was this weekend in The New York Times Magazine. See, now this is exactly the sort of thing that makes me appreciate the NYT Magazine so much, though that hardly mitigates the [...]

I don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but this page about Google’s solar panel project shows how much power the thousands of panels on the roof of the company’s headquarters have produced in the past 24 hours. (Currently enough for 56,525 hours of flat-screen TV viewing, which seems right up my alley.) Now [...]