I did not vote for Sarah Palin in the November election, and had I been a resident of South Carolina, I wouldn’t have supported Mark Sanford. But I find their failings and, in the case of Sanford, sins more palatable than the behavior of the pundits who are having so much fun at their expense. —“In Defense of Palin and Sanford,” Stanley Fish, The New York Times
EU lifts ban on bendy cucumbers;
3D printouts of ultrasounds (via);
co-ed roommates at Univ. of Chicago
Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington’s adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain—it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time—and I think this is my key point—absolutely familiar to me. —“Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood,” Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books
A New Zealand man who claimed he was raped by a wombat and that the experience left him speaking with an Australian accent has been found guilty of wasting police time… Wombats are native to Australia and are not found in New Zealand. —“Man said ‘wombat rape’ led to accent change,” Nick Squires, The Telegraph