* Miriam's vision of a grammarian's Hollywood had me cracking up. It really is the subjunctive mood that ends up being the handsome stranger in the story, isn't it?
* US National Debt Clock. You shouldn't, of course, take the precise numbers too seriously; they are estimations. But even taking them by the ballpark one gets a picture.
* A humorous parody of a recent press release put out by the Discovery Institute.
* Ruth Franklin asks why Emma Bovary is so maligned and misunderstood. I can answer that: because she is entirely malignable and not so much misunderstood as understood and set, falsely, at a distance.
* Jason Pitzl-Waters discusses the question, "why are the faith lives of candidates up for debate?" There are several others answering the same question; most of them are not especially interesting, although Rabbi Hirschfield suggests it shows a sense in which Marx's old line about the opiate of the people was perhaps right, and Valerie Elverton Dixie tries to imagine the negative ads that would run if Jesus were trying for office.
* The same receptors that in your tongue detect bitter tastes are found in your lungs. They're not set up to send information about taste to the brain, but they still have their reactions to bitter compounds, and there's evidence that this can be used to open air passages for sufferers of asthma.
* Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things (ht)
