* One of the world's most elusive, dangerous, and astoundingly successful serial criminals, the Phantom of Heilbronn, may not exist at all, but may instead be a defective series of cotton swabs that contaminated evidence in more than 40 different German crime scenes over 15 years. The Phantom seems to have been quite literally that: an evidential phantom.
* It's no secret that I like Finnish music. If this were a perfect world, we'd all use Latin for thinking, Greek for praying, English for trading, Spanish for loving, Gaelic for storytelling, and Finnish for singing. Here are some excellent Finnish music YouTube finds; the first group is women's voices and the second men's.
Johanna Kurkela, Häävalssi
Johanna Kurkela, Kauriinsilmät
Jippu, Metsäkukkia
Juha Tapio, Kaksi puuta
Ville Valo, Kun Minä Kotoani Läksin
Kari Tapio, Mun sydämeni tänne jää
* Diana Wynne Jones discusses her medieval influences and mocks, rightly, large portions of the fantasy market.
* Kenny Pearce discusses good and bad apologetics.
* Will Huysman pointed out to me that St. Francis de Sales's The Catholic Controversy is online. This is one of the classics of the Counter-Reformation, growing out of a tract campaign that addressed many of the pro-Reformation arguments that were common in France in the late 16th century. Neither those arguments nor Francis de Sales's responses to them always map very closely to the current Catholic-Protestant zones of controversy, as one might expect from the sheer number of important things that had not yet happened (the Synod of Dort, for instance); but there is still much of interest in the work.
