The Son, an artist, will (I think) particularly like these works by Jason Nelson. I especially enjoyed Uncontrollable Semantics and Hermeticon. Via MetaFilter.

There's also this site. And more about Jason Nelson.

Which, of course, is where nuts belong. Read this pithy summary—it's the pull-string quote that summarizes DeLay.

A "pull-string quote" is what a friend and I used to characterize certain people: the statement they would make if you pulled the little string in their necks (after the dolls that had pull-strings to say "I love you" and the like).

UPDATE: Apparently Delay didn't state the pull-string quote

"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills."

in so many words, though the statement still works as a pull-string quote. Here's the longer statement and the context.

This you gotta see. (Title a reference to the fine Phil Harris song The Preacher and the Bear.)

People do not get enough vitamin D from sunshine during the winter months—and even during the summer months if they stay indoors and slather on sun block when out of doors. Yet vitamin D is vitally important as the LA Times reports: Read the rest of this entry »

I've been pondering that question for a while, after observing that comparisons to Nazis, Nazi Germany, and Hitler spring up in the most unexpected places. And it's not just the Right that seems to have Nazi Germany on its mind, but the Left as well.

I think I may have found a reason: Nazi Germany is an example of a civilized nation ruining its accepted norms—cultural, social, legal, and so on: all the norms that guide the interactions of daily life. As the norms changed, the institutions—governmental, educational, social, cultural, commercial—that rely on those norms changed as well. The process ended in a civil hell, a corrupt society that had totally lost its way. Read the rest of this entry »

Swiss Sophie is a Turkish Van who, like other Turks, has found employment in Switzerland, where she lives with a guy who’s both a student of economics and a fierce Go player. Here Sophie is playing with a mouse toy.

If you haven’t seen Bread and Chocolate, the wonderful 1973 Italian comedy about living and working in Switzerland, you definitely should see it. Now. (Netflix members go here.)