Stuffed animals turned inside out. Fabulous.

I'm pretty sure my family needs a Wii.

Via my buddy at Bookninja, a found book inscriptions site. I cringe at the thought of some of my efforts showing up there.

This just bathes me in tranquility and glee.

We're halfway through the eligibility year, and I haven't done this yet. Not once. And they don't run it in August. Time to get on the stick.

The Mariners have won 12 of 15 going into the All-Star break. Ichiro is grooving on the team chemistry. And a blog's open letter helped convince their young phenom to make an adjustment that garnered him a two-hit shutout.

Could be an interesting second half.

Tags: document dump

The cover of today's New Orleans Times-Picayune special section on the coming hurricane season is a pretty striking map.

Closer to home, the schedules for this summer's Bryant Park movie series and Prospect Park Bandshell concerts are out. Yay!

Here's an excellent cartoon about Jesus.

And an excellent series of cartoons about a horrible, horrible man.

This is my favorite MST3K interstitial. I'm the wind, baby.

Forty percent of three-month-olds watch teevee regularly. (The article was written from a press release, which doesn't define "regularly," and I haven't yet dug up a writeup of the study that does.)

If you want to know everything there is to know about The World Market for Wristwatches, Pocket Watches, Stopwatches, and Other Watches with Cases Made of Precious Metal or Metal Clad with Precious Metal, I hope you're ready to pay.

A defense, if one were needed, of Seattle's preternaturally dreamy centerfielder.

Tags: document dump

A fabulous project: photograph one New York City kid under the age of thirteen from every single country on earth. (148 countries down, 46 to go.)

Preschoolers answer the question, "What happens to people when they get old?"

I've been holding forth in this comments thread over at Feministe.

A state appeals court rules that a rape suspect abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy in his saliva and the DNA therein when "he expectorated on to a public street and did not retrieve the fluid."

An unexpectedly compelling defense of Budweiser beer.

This may be my favorite SNL ad of all time.

Every time I look at this string bikini for newborns, my head explodes.

Tags: document dump

A tool that tells you the ratio of the use of the word "he" to that of the word "she" on any site. (This blog is 82% "she.")

Good news from New Orleans --- the city's population is up 14% since last July, with the biggest influx in the hardest-hit neighborhoods.

A professor's account of his experience with banning laptops from the college classroom. It wasn't an issue the last time I taught, but this is the approach I intend to take the next time it is.

A list of solecisms from the Economist's style manual.

A short entry from an Iraqi blog that I've linked to before. This post discusses one small way in which post-invasion sectarianism has made ordinary life in Baghdad impossible.

A new poll finds that 69% of Americans say the government should "guarantee food and shelter for all."

An interview with New Yorker business writer Ken Auletta, in which he describes the meticulous process he uses for conducting research and organizing his notes.

A study suggests that altruistic people show distinctive patterns of brain activity.

Tags: document dump