Here’s a great tidbit from McSweeney’s: Foot­notes, End­notes, and Par­en­thet­i­cals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis. My favorite:

3 Who, although a gifted aca­d­e­mic, is still a douche.

Full marks for honesty.

Via Kottke.

Photo found in Google Earth:

One of my favorite parts of having a web­site sta­tis­tics soft­ware for this site like Mint, is that I get to see all of the weird searches that people do. For instance, I can see that ear­lier today, some­body came to this page on my site by search­ing for “1997 st. pauli girl poster”. Noth­ing weird about that. The funny part though is the that the domain of the person search­ing ends in usdoj.gov. It appears as though the US Depart­ment of Jus­tice is inter­ested in one par­tic­u­lar St. Pauli Girl.

(KJ: Give me a better photo of this)

I was watch­ing Bill Moyers Jour­nal the other night and was intrigued by the final thought of the show. Moyers was dis­cussing addi­tional 200 bil­lion dol­lars that the pres­i­dent now says he needs for Iraq. He had an inter­est­ing story to tell about this:

All of which reminds me of the famous French nat­u­ral­ist, Henri Fabre, who was intrigued by a species of worms, known as pro­ces­sional cater­pil­lars, because they march single file in long unbro­ken lines. One day he came upon a line of them in the forest. He gath­ered them up, put them around the rim of a flower pot, and then started them walk­ing. Round and round they went, like a tiny merry-​go-​round, hour after hour. They kept going for days and even though food was near at hand, they never strayed from their well-​worn path. In the end, every one of them starved to death on end end­less march to nowhere. See tran­script of episode

On a side note, I’m not sure what the appro­pri­ate lit­er­ary com­par­i­son of this is. Is it an anal­ogy, metaphor, alle­gory or fable?