podpolia

Glen Matlock is no longer interested in swearing on TV. This doesn’t particularly suprise me — people mellow out as they get older, and the Sex Pistols weren’t really as scandalous (at least by today’s standards) as they are commonly made out to be. Sid Vicious (who replaced Matlock) was considerably more wild than Matlock himself, but really had very little to do with the actual music of the band other than getting media attention (I’ve read stories about the other members of the band rigging Sid’s bass so that it couldn’t be heard, and having Matlock play backstage instead). Not only that, but some of the things they said then now seem odd for such a wild band — including the song “Bodies” that’s about the nasty side of abortion.
That brings me to a pet peeve of mine: Rock For Life. Yes, I’m against abortion in all but a very few cases, but I rather suspect that Rock For Life is not overly interested in listing non-Christian bands. Their designation of particular bands as “pro-abortion” is sometimes shaky as well. There was an incident a few years back that illustrated this point quite clearly:
Rock For Life organized a protest about a singer (Aimee Mann) that was scheduled to perform at Messiah College. The local RFL organization (at the encouragement of the national organization) protested this show, only to find out that the singer herself had apparently never expressed an opinion on abortion, and had only made the list because she had contributed a song to a compilation sponsored by a feminist group who was using the proceeds “to help prevent violence against women at health clinics.” This had been six years previously. The media blitz by RFL about it, and the subsequent chagrin caused by widespread media coverage of the local RFL being opposed to a singer for something completely unrelated to what they were saying strained relations between the local chapter and the national. I know someone who was in the local chapter at the time, and they considered the entire thing to be a mess, and regarded it as being the national organization’s fault for getting them involved without fully explaining the situation, and overall just making them look bad.
Well, that was long and involved, but I just sent an email to RFL asking that the Sex Pistols be put on their “pro-life” bands list. We’ll see what (if any) response I get from them.

Well, in looking through my site statistics, I found that someone had reached this page by looking for “how many ripples on a dime.” Having been moderately interested in coins for a while (and I still am, to some extent), I thought I was in a good position to answer this one, although the chances of the same person coming back to look again are infinitesimally small (yes, I had to look that word up to know how to spell it properly).
The ridges around the edges of the dime, quarter, and half-dollar are know as ‘reeding’ or ‘milling.’ According to PBS’s website, there are 118 separate ridges on the dime. It took a little more work to find the information on the quarter, but according to this site, the number is only one more than the dime, with 119.
The next trivia questions from this would be, “Who bothered to count all of them? And what is it about human beings that makes us ask such weird questions?”
I don’t have answers to either question.

Every once in a while, stories like this one appear in the news. And nobody ever seems to know how something like this can happen…