We don't fish, but if we did . . .

If the Reveres fished, they'd put up a sign that says, "Gone fishin'". But we don't fish, so that wouldn't be true. By now everyone probably knows the Reveres are at the beach, allegedly on vacation. Since only one Revere writes at a time, I will use the first person here (it's easier), but I am speaking for the non-person composite that goes under the name revere/Revere. And the first thing "I" want to say is that the internet is eating me alive. Thanks to its magic I can now be connected to work 24/7. And I am. It's making me crazy (crazier?). It has to stop.

I suffered through a couple of years of blogging dial-up (torture) and then one year with a WiFi connection I was free-loading off some other unit but which only worked half the time and kept dropping me. I was often reduced to sitting balancing on the railing of the deck and hoping the connection wouldn't crap out just as I was posting or emailing. I'd had enough of that. This year, when we booked the place, I told Mrs. R. it had to have a high speed internet connection, an amenity now much more common. She said I'd be sorry. We've been married 37 years. She's almost always right. And she was right this time, too. It's like being a drug addict and working in a pharmacy.

So the reveres/Reveres/I/he/she/it/they are going on a sort of blog hiatus. Is EM going dark? No. You don't think we could go cold turkey, do you? We may post now and then on something if it seems urgent (although we are going to try not to read the flu news obsessively) and will probably still do some new Freethinker Sermonettes. But for at least the rest of our alleged vacation (until after Labor Day) we are going to be satisfied to reconnect you with our blog sins of the past, usually with a little intro or comment to entice you to click. We didn't pick these things at random but tried to find items that would be of current interest or just were interesting to us. We are including some heavy flu science. We've had a lot of people come here because of swine flu that haven't seen these posts, and even if you have, we think you'll be interested in them again. There will be lots of other stuff, too. You'll just have to wait and see each day. Quite a few of them will be from the old site when we were on blogger.com (the first year and half or so), before we moved to Scienceblogs in June 2006. Feel free to comment and talk amongst yourselves. But we are going to try not to get involved if we can help it (note the qualifier). So if you ask questions it's unlikely they will be answered by us.

We'll start today with an oldie but goodie from December 2005 that deals with the perennial question: "Why righties screw better than lefties". You have wondered about that, haven't you? Now you'll know the scientific answer.