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A canyon on Mars would stretch from L.A to NYC if it was on earth. (with cool pic)

Frank Leahy: The 7-11-ification of Politics In America.

And the same thing has happened to American politics. The same two chains -- Republicans and Democrats -- are the only two stores in town. There¹s no longer a place to have a conversation about what matters in America. All the real conversations have been relegated to the far back corner, if you can even find them at all.

And what makes it worse is that the two parties aren¹t really interested in conversations, they¹re only interested in messages. Why are there no major newspapers or other media outlets that will present anything but the message of the day? Why is there no way in America to talk about the corporatification of America? No way to ask why health care isn¹t a right instead of a privilege? No way to suggest that maybe locking up people for using drugs might not be the best use of our money or their talents? No way to wonder why teachers are paid less than prison guards, or to do anything about it? No, all the conversations are full of the same empty calories that you buy at the local village shop. There is no place for meat and vegetables in the national conversation.

Mark Frauenfelder: Personally, I think flip-flopping is a sign of intelligence and shows a willingness to learn. But since the Republicans think flip-flopping is worse than torturing people or invading countries that don't pose a threat, here are President Bush's top ten flip flops.

President Bush: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."(May 29, 2003)

President Bush: "I recognize we didn't find the stockpiles [of weapons] we all thought were there." (Sept. 9, 2004)

Link

John Stewart For Debate Moderator Part II. I am going to take this a step further. John Stewart as Debate Committee Chair. He decides what rules apply. The candidates aren't allowed any say. Via AMERICABlog, the latest daily show transcript:

JON STEWART: Well Stephen, what do you think is going to happen now at CBS News?

STEPHEN COLBERT, Daily Show Senior Media Correspondent: Jon, there's got to be some accountability. Dan Rather is the head, the commander in chief if you will of his organization. He's someone in the ultimate position of power who made a harmful decision based upon questionable evidence. Then, to make things worse, he stubbornly refused to admit his mistake, choosing instead to stay the course and essentially occupy this story for too long. This man has got to go!

STEWART: Uh ... we're talking about Dan Rather...?

COLBERT: Yes Jon, Dan Rather. CBS is in chaos, it's unsafe, riven by internal rivalries. If you ask me, respected, reputable outsiders need to be brought in to help the rebuilding effort.

STEWART: ... at CBS News?

COLBERT: Yeah, at CBS news! What possible other unrelated situation could my words be equally applicable to?! Now people need to be held accountable. The commander in chief, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser -- everyone at CBS News needs to go! Jon, I can tell you, Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.

STEWART: Walter Cronkite is still alive.

COLBERT: Not according to my sources ... at CBS News.

Ya know what. Forget the whole debate thing. I want Jon Stewart to be head of my new organization, the National Organization against Broadcasting Stupidity (NO BS.) Before you are allowed to practice the craft of journalism you have to be approved by Jon Stewart and his crack team of fake news experts. If you think being objective means when one guy says something awful, you have to report something equally awful from the other guy, no license. If you rush a story to print or broadcast, without fact checking the hell out of it, because some scumbag at another rag is gonna beat you to it, you get suspended for two weeks and have to give your next two scoops to the competition. If you buy into the language as framed by some politician, you have to put 5$ in the obsenity jar. If you run ads as news, without fact checking them as you report them, you get fed to lions. More rules to come. NO BS will be starting local chapters soon. Be ready. [Change for America -]

Stewart is one of the top 10 political reporters named by the Columbia school of Journalism. Damn straight. It is a topsy-turvy world when satire tells you more aout politics than the news. Or perhaps not so weird, given the state of today's news organizations.

Onion: "Freshly unearthed public documents, ranging from newspapers to cabinet-meeting minutes, seem to indicate large gaps in George W. Bush's service as president."

If you ever need to reach me, don’t bother trying at 10pm (CST, Mon-Thu) because I am likely watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I am obsessed with that show not only because the entire cast is incredibly funny, but also because Jon Stewart is so well informed and quick on his feet. He did a great job talking tonight (Tue) with Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition and chair of the Southeast region Bush-Cheney campaign. It was an interesting glimpse into what it would be like to have Jon Stewart take part in a presidential debate. I am not referring to the laughs we would get out of it, but the witty and sharp comments that would keep everybody on their toes. Even Al Gore, in his NYTimes op-ed today about debating George Bush, quotes Stewart. Bummer that Bush likely won’t go on TDS, it would be interesting to watch him interact with Jon Stewart. But as someone from the Bush campaign who recently visited the show commented: why would Bush bother showing up on TDS?

To spice things up a bit this Thursday, I will be watching the presidential debate with a group of students in Northwestern’s Communications Residential College where my colleague David Zarefsky, an expert in argumentation and Presidential rhetoric, will lead a discussion about the debates right after.

The La Terre Vue de Ciel website is a collection of extraordinary aerial photographs, most of them taken at relatively...

Now you can get everything from lunchboxes to coffee mugs with the image of St. Clinton.

Cory Doctorow: Bill O'Reilly interviewed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show and called Daily Show watchers a bunch of "stoned slackers." It turns out that Stewart's audience is better-educated and better-informed that O'Reilly Factor viewers (surprise, surprise!).

Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch "The O'Reilly Factor," according to Nielsen Media Research...

Comedy Central also touted a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which said young viewers of "The Daily Show" were more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't.

Link

WOnderful. The FBI had messages from al Queda sources before 9-11 that said that zero-hour was Sept. 11 and that the match is about to begiin. But they apparently did not have enough translators to read this until days after the attack. Perhaps if someone had been shaking the trees, some of this would have fallen out. When Clinton did tis, the Millennium plot was discovered. After reading the report in August that Bin Laden was determined to attack in the US, why was nothing done. How about the fact that the Army released 7 highly-trained Arabic linguists from its elite Defense Language Institute because they were gay. See sexual orientation is more important than national security. When the government has a critical shortage Arabic translators, we shitcanned them. 37 of them have been released over the last two years. So they clean out pools instead of working to help our national security. The same idiots who are afraid of gay marriage may also have helped harm our national security due to their idiotic prejudices. Perhaps if we had had enough translators in 2001, we would not be where we are today. Perhaps if we had another 37 or more, we would find the next attack. But then, that would take an administration that would do whatever it took to fight terrorism, even use gay translators, even anger some in its base. Not gonna happen in this administration. It appears they would rather have another attack than use homosexuals. At a time where the need is critical, where we have a demonstrated instance where the lack of translators failed us, why in the world would this Administration waste the training and usefulness of all these translators? Why are we not using EVERY single body we can to fight the war on terrorism? The only thing that pops to my mind, given this Administration's action in many areas (i.e. protection of ports) is that they really do ot want the war on terrorism to go away. Fear makes winning elections so much easier. Every fascist regime in history has known this.

David Pescovitz: A new scientific study reveals that (shocker!) a nation's economic fortitude is not as tied to the well-being of its citizens as previous believed. The results of the study--prepared by researchers at the University of Illinois and University of Pennsylvania--appeared in the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

"It has been assumed that money increases well-being and, although money can be measured with exactitude, it is an inexact surrogate to the actual well-being of a nation. In a 1985 survey, respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Maasai of East Africa were almost equally satisfied and ranked relatively high in well-being. The Maasai are a traditional herding people who have no electricity or running water and live in huts made of dung. It follows, that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness that they are so often linked to."

Instead, the authors propose that a population's "engagement, purpose and meaning, optimism and trust, and positive and negative emotions in specific areas such as work life and social relationships" should be considered when measuring the strength of a nation. Link

Human Intelligence is a good site from Indiana University that looks at historical influences and current controversies surrounding the study of intelligence. Find out more about topics such as "the Mozart Effect", the theory of multiple intelligences, and the influence of birth order on intelligence, and then browse the brains behind the history of inquiry into human intellect.

Red states feed at the trough. We have already discussed it at length, but you can... [Daily Kos]

Nice to see that the 'liberal' states provide most of the federal money that the 'conservative' states take. Just think, if we all were red states there would be no money for anyone from the federal government. That would sure be nice, right? You red states just be glad there are still so many rich, blue states to give you a fedearl teat to suck at.

Conscious kills the unconscious knowledge?.

A comment at the AOK discussion list turned up an interesting quote in a review of Friends in Low Places by Dr. James AR Willis, posted on his own website.
Welcome to Dr James A R Willis

The author quotes a wonderful piece of research which found that people are half as good at remembering a face in a photograph, if they've tried to describe it when they first see it. If we only trust our innate and wordless ability to remember a face, we are twice as likely to remember it: a metaphor for general practice. Doctors are being constrained not to rely on their hard-won experience, knowledge and skill, their unarticulated sense of what needs to be done. But instead always to use their conscious brain function to work out a solution. Thus quite possibly reducing their effectiveness by half.

This give a more accurate portrayal of the value of the "unconscious competence" pane of Johari's Window (the other windows being unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, and conscious competence). When a person knows their work so well, they don't need to articulate how they know it. This blurb suggests that in some cases, asking someone to explain their thinking actually reduces the value of their unconscious knowledge by forcing them to consider how it is they know something.

[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

'Unconscious incompetence' is such a great phrase.

Daniel Akst contributes yet another in a seemingly endless series of articles reminding American workers that they should “stop whining”, since they are far better off than were their forebears during the Great Depression.

What is striking about this genre is that the choice of the Depression is not an accident. You have to go back that far to get a comparison that gives a clear-cut, unqualified and substantial improvement in the pay and conditions of US workers across the board. Real hourly wages for men with high school education are now around the levels prevailing in the 1950s¹. Since it’s difficult to make comparisons with the war decade of the 1940s, it’s necessary to go back to the 1930s to get a clear-cut improvement.

Xeni Jardin: New additions to a previously-Boinged online gallery featuring brilliantly modernized versions of old propaganda posters. You can buy the retweaked graphics on sporty messenger bags, t-shirts, coffee cups, and -- well by golly, even a thong or two. Link (Thanks, Squiddo)

NY Times: Deal in Congress to Keep Tax Cuts, Widening Deficit. Putting aside efforts to control the federal deficit before the elections, Republican and Democratic leaders agreed Wednesday to extend $145 billion worth of tax cuts sought by President Bush without trying to pay for them.

The irresponsibility of these folks boggles the imagination. We know the Republicans have long since abandoned any sense of seriousness on this issue, but to see the Democrats -- who were the party of fiscal responsibility in the 1990s -- go the same way is disheartening. It's not a tax cut. It's just a delayed tax increase. For our kids.

You know that a magazine that publishes sentences like this must be good: "In our centripetal culture, memes tend to move from the periphery to the centre, in an endless churn, propelled by our quest for novelty perhaps, or maybe the territorializations of the capitalist machines en route to their schizophrenic singularity." And they have a blog with a feed and everything! [mefi]

A Wonkette operative alerts us to Jon Stewart's appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor," and opines "if Kerry's campaign was run by Jon Stewart, Kerry would be ten points ahead." We're pretty sure they tried to get him, actually. Our correspondent...

This "Gravity" lamp from one of our favorite design houses Front is a concept design that detects when you enter and exit a room, perking up straight and shining brightly upon your arrival, and slowly drooping down to slumber when after you leave. This is appealing not only because it gives the lamp a sense of personality - albeit a sycophantic one centered around its need for its master's approval - but because it takes us one step closer to the real future we all crave, where each night we retire to our own personal version of Pee Wee's Playhouse.

Read - Gravity [FunFurde]

CRAZIEST = 311 points Scrabble can seriously affect your mental health. [Flash]

Neal Stephenson's sprawling, intricate "System of the World" caps a vast trilogy of historical and philosophical splendors.

A Wonkette operative alerts us to Jon Stewart's appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor," and opines "if Kerry's campaign was run by Jon Stewart, Kerry would be ten points ahead." We're pretty sure they tried to get him, actually. Our correspondent...

 

Alton Brown's Periodic Table of Essential Elements.

Speaking of Alton Brown, here's a rather unusual chili recipe: Pressure Cooker Chili.

Mark Frauenfelder: This looks like an interesting problem. Lloyd Borrett writes:

Take up the challenge of "Petals Around the Rose". Also read what happened when Bill Gates was introduced to Petals Around the Rose in June 1977. How he tackled this brain teaser is an interesting insight into the man at the helm of Microsoft.

Link

 

Bill Moyers is getting set for retirement, and he gave the speech of his life last week. Forgive me for quoting this huge passage:

One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. ... How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index?

That’s what I said — the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series that have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors, who, earlier this year, completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush’s armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.

It's not coincidence that Bush's education initiative was called "No Child Left Behind."

According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its "biblical lands;" when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers "will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow."

I’m not making this up.

They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released "to slay the third part of men.’ ... A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there’s a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels.

One estimate puts these people at about 15 percent of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of George W. Bush’s base support. ... No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling "Onward Christian Soldiers." He knows how many votes he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture Index now stands at 144 — just one point below the critical threshold at which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind.

According to RaptureMe.com, the index is now 151. Fasten your seat belts.

Scenarios, anyone? A Europe-based columnist's provocative look at international affairs. Post your comments on the GBN website. GBN Global Perspectives Gwynne Dyer _______________________ The Poisoned Chalice        As the opinion polls move steadily in favour of President George W. Bush and the likelihood of a John Kerry presidency recedes, Democrats in the United States can take solace in two facts.  If their man is not in the White House for the next four years, then they will not end up carrying the blame for the almost inevitable US defeat in Iraq -- and they will not have to preside over the biggest financial crisis to hit the United States since the Great Depression.        "The US dollar is going the way that [the British pound] went as it lost its place as the world's reserve currency," said Jim Rogers, the Wall Street wizard who in 1973 co-founded the Quantum Fund, one of the first and most successful hedge funds, in a recent interview.  "I suspect there will be exchange controls in the US in the foreseeable future....Whoever is elected president is going to have serious problems in 2005-06.  We Americans are going to suffer."  Why?        If Mr Kerry won, this would be the third time in a row that an incoming Democratic president inherited a gigantic budget deficit from his Republican predecessor.  Jimmy Carter took over a budget deficit of almost four percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1976 and halved it in four years. Bill Clinton was handed a budget deficit amounting to six percent of GDP in 1992 and turned it into a 1.5 percent surplus in eight years. Mr Kerry would inherit a five percent deficit from Mr Bush, about par for the course -- but for the first time he would also be burdened with a huge current account (trade) deficit.        When Jimmy Carter was president, US trade with the rest of the world was more or less in balance, which made it relatively easy for him to address the budget deficit.  America's trade balance went deep into the red during the Reagan years, but by the time Bill Clinton came into office it had recovered dramatically and so he, too, could fix the budget deficit without having to worry about a big trade deficit.  But in the last Clinton years the current account plunged into deep deficit, and it's now even worse.        It's the combination of the two deficits that is potentially lethal.  The United States got away with running a big trade deficit for most of the past twenty years because foreigners, mostly in Asia and Europe, kept on investing in the US, and that huge inflow of foreign capital largely covered the deficit.  They invested in the US not because it was the world's fastest-growing economy (it wasn't), but mainly because the US dollar was seen as the safest currency, the world's "reserve currency" in which other countries settle their debts even with each other.        That was then; this is now.  The inflow of foreign capital is dwindling, the current account deficit is up to half a trillion dollars a year -- and the budget deficit, thanks to the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, is also up to half a trillion dollars a year.  Neither Mr Bush nor Mr Kerry even discusses the issue, and the value of the US dollar has been drifting steadily down for a year and a half now.        Foreigners have seen the value of their US investments effectively cut by 20 percent because of that fall in the dollar, and they are getting nervous.  Foreigner investors hold about $8 trillion in US securities, and everybody realises that a concerted move to bail out of them would trigger a collapse of the dollar and the destruction of their investments.  On the other hand, everybody also knows that the first investors to get out will save most of their money, and the laggards will lose most of theirs.  It is a highly unstable situation.        A far-sighted Democratic strategist might therefore conclude that this is the wrong year to win the presidency. Democrats don't want the blame for an impending economic crisis that is mostly due to the Bush tax cuts -- and since their chosen candidate has no strategy for pulling out of Iraq, why not let the Republicans collect the blame for that debacle, too?        There is going to be a smash; it's too late to avoid it; let the other lot stay in the driver's seat for now.  We'll win next time, and stay in power for a generation.  But there is no sign that anybody in the Democratic Party is making such a calculation: they are genuinely committed to fighting Bush.        At the least, that will lend authenticity to their defeat, and win them credit for next time. And if John Kerry should win, thanks to some wild card we have not yet seen, it may be rough on the Democratic party but it wouldn't necessarily be bad for the United States or the world.        Though Mr Kerry now vows to "stay the course" in Iraq, he is likelier than the crew around Mr Bush to accept reality and pull American troops out before too much damage is done.  And if economic disaster strikes the United States in the next four years, as it well may, he is less likely than Mr Bush to devote all his energy to shifting the blame for it onto foreigners. _______________________________________ Gwynne Dyer, Ph.D., is a London-based independent journalist and GBN Network member whose articles are published in 45 countries.For more on Gwynne Dyer, please read his GBN interview http://www.gbn.com/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=475 Discuss this and other Gwynne Dyer columns by going to the Global Perspectives archive on the GBN website, clicking on the column, and then clicking on "Discuss." http://www.gbn.com/ColumnListDisplayServlet.srv?col=11 The Global Perspectives series is intended to challenge and provoke the thinking of GBN members. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of GBN or its members. We welcome suggestions of other writers and columnists whose ideas we might share. _____________________________

 

* Have Colleagues, Will Subscribe * The Global Perspectives series is a proprietary service for current GBN members. Please feel free to share these columns with any co-workers who you think might be interested.  

 

The Italian spoken by many New Yorkers or New Jerseyans makes Italian teachers, the purists who love the language just as Dante wrote it, wince.

Posted by Smoky Joe, JD in Defense of Freedom The Guardian: Since 9/11, America has used its victimhood to demand a monopoly on the right to feel and to inflict pain. You got a problem with that?...

Nearly all American universities have experienced tremendous growth in administrative staff in the last 30 years.  At most schools the ratio of admins to faculty has doubled. As this trend continues necessarily tuition prices continue to outpace inflation.  Within our lifetimes it is likely that the cost of a college degree will exceed the cost of a twin-engine business jet airplane (in the 1950s four years of tuition cost about the same as a new Chevrolet).

If colleges cannot get by without adding more labor per student why not do as for-profit corporations do and add that labor in China or India?  As noted in a December 1, 2003 entry, MIT has had great success outsourcing OpenCourseware programming and editing to India.  Think about all the jobs at a typical university that are done primarily via phone and email.  Obviously the entire IT department could be in India.  Why not the registrar?  How about most of the coordinating and tracking functions of the alumni office?

American labor is wonderful but it is a luxury that most American families can't afford.

Business idea for the young readers:  Start a university "back-office" service bureau in India or China.  The folks who've done this for Wall Street have been very successful (New Yorker magazine did a great article this summer on Office Tiger, started by two Princeton alums).  Most university administrations lack the initiative to manage staff overseas (or do anything innovative, actually) but they would all appreciate the potential cost savings.  So they'll need a contractor to do it all for them.

As Republican Senators criticize Bush on the mess in Iraq, TopDog04 is going back to the beginning: "Bush's misguided focus on Iraq helped Bin Laden get away." He has a detailed timeline of events to make his case.

Cory Doctorow: Great (if over-long) Philip K Dick essay on the nature of reality and science fiction:

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down

Link (Thanks, Condour!)

A wiki, in case you haven't heard of such a thing, is a piece of software (usually web-based, but not necessarily) designed to  allow people to collaboratively add, edit and delete content. Some notable features that separate a wiki from a plain old content management system are:

• Automatic linking. If an entry titled "Accordion" is in the wiki, any occurence of the word "accordion" in any entry in the wiki will be automatically linked to the "Accordion" entry.
  
  
• Complete histories of every change. Wikis keep track of every change made to them and make it possible to "undo" changes. Coupled with a community, this feature helps to ensure the integrity of the wiki and protects it from malicious acts while still maintaining openness.

The best-known wiki at the moment is Wikipedia, an incredibly useful encyclopedia which boasts over 350,000 articles. If you're looking for information, say a quick overview of the Treaty of Westphalia or Maimonides, it's a good wiki to consult.

---

But what if you want to know how to win a kinfe fight? Or in a less lethal vein, how to fight and not get your ass kicked? Or even less lethally, how to win a hot dog eating contest? You know, useful stuff? Then you want to consult Everything2. It's not quite a wiki -- where wikis present articles as a whole, you append your own two cents to Everything2's articles rather than edit them.

Oh yes, you'll find boooooring articles like a rather detailed summary of the Count of Flanders and a discussion of MP3 sound quality, but you'll also find:

• A guide to clubbing (nightclubbing, not seal clubbing)
• What not to be caught saying when the room suddenly goes quiet
  
• What it feels like to be dissed by a five year-old
• What to do should you find yourself lost in Boston (me, I'd probably call Wendy or perhaps Skadz for help)
• "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Think I'll go eat worms..."
• How to summon Mothra!

You know, useful stuff.

70 things you may or may not know about Leonard Cohen (a nice accompaniment to this mefi thread of yore) [via]

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,etc.

Scroll down to read about the hand-made noodles as well. (Comment on this)