What fun! The Covers Project uses a database of cover songs to create chains of cover songs. (GirlHacker)

I wish I were clever enough to write spoofs like The Kizombe Correspondence. (from acb)

The Lord of the Rings: The Novelization

My readers may not know that I occasionally visit bookstores. At one such establishment this week, I heard a customer say, “I’ll wait a year and a half to read LotR if I have to, because I’m not going to buy it with the movie cover!”

Later: more Novelization

At age 18 or so I wrote a scene (opening an otherwise unconceived story) set in the distant future, in which one of the characters was a tiger-striped human. Now . . . Look halfway down this page: Human genetics: Dual identities (Nature, 29 Apr 2002).

2008: The article has vanished. Oh well. It was about mosaicism, and included a picture of a human, apparently the product of two fused embryos, with striped skin.

SatireWire

In a troubling sign that investigators may be getting bored with their success smuggling guns and knives onto airplanes, the U.S. Department of Transportation today disclosed that its agents have recently cleared airport security checkpoints with an M1 tank, a beluga whale, and a fully active South American volcano.

Thanks to JWB for the link.

Two years ago today Sasha Chislenko, perhaps my brightest friend, bailed out of life.
( . . more . . )

Learned Hand, 1942

This much I think I do know – that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsiblity by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.