Bill Poser at Language Log agrees with me: Greek, not Latin, ought to have been spoken in The Passion. (Cited by Prentiss Riddle in a comment at languagehat.)

Did anyone mark the occasion when Tom Lehrer’s joke about Mozart reached a certain age?

How Ben Franklin taught himself to write better

Brad Edmonds: I Still Owe the Military Nothing

Truman bombed Japan because the Japanese demanded as their only condition of surrender that the emperor remain emperor. They continued to demand this after both bombings, so Truman just gave in. The bombings were for nothing. And with no retaliation for Truman or the US to fear, Truman still stopped, and gave the Japanese what they wanted. They didn’t even have rifles.

2025: The link is dead, but here is another. And that piece seems to be a sequel to this one.

Clayton Cramer reminds us that almanac is an Arabic word. Aha!

Cato: How FDR’s New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People. (Yet another link from Rational Review News Digest)

Russell Whitaker (Survival Arts) reports:

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight. On the same day that a hobb[yi]st at Kill Devil Hills was trying unsuccessfully to replicate that flight, the real news of the day went mostly unnoticed:

Today, a significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company’s private, non-government effort.