existing blue tree in vancouver bc; konstantin dimopoulos via kplu.org

• Get ready to see some blue trees next month, in Westlake Park and along the Burke-Gilman Trail. The tree-painting art project is part of a public awareness campaign about global deforestation.
• The first big tunnel digging machine finally broke through at the Capitol Hill light-rail station site, hours too late to make the late TV news.
• Microsoft tries the self-deprecating “we’ve learned from our past mistakes” funny commercial schtick, and it doesn’t even seem awkward or forced at all.
• At least 40 percent of all post-traumatic stress disorder patients at Joint Base Lewis-McChord found their diagnoses later “reversed.” That means they were declared not PTSD-stricken after all, and therefore eligible to be sent right back into combat duty.
• Couldn’t happen to nicer guys: A Goldman Sachs affiliate may be about to default on 11 Seattle and Bellevue office buildings, which the firm bought for nearly $1 billion five years ago.
• Sara Robinson at AlterNet blames “conservative bullying” for making America into “a broken, dysfunctional family.”
• Sixty years ago this week, the first live event billed as a “rock n’ roll concert” ended in riots on the streets of Cleveland. The reason: The ticket printers accidentally printed tickets to two different shows as if they were the same show on the same date.
• A handy rule-O-thumb: Any previously unheard-of singer performing mechanical rote versions of black musical styles from 20 years or more ago is probably white.
• As Danny Westneat insists “art is no excuse” for Mike Daisey to make stuff up about Chinese tech-gadget factories, blogger “La Bohrer” concludes that the late beloved fiction author David Foster Wallace also stretched the facts in at least a couple of his “nonfiction” essays.

early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

• The demise of the (print) Encyclopedia Britannica has led the Best Week Ever site to recall the books’ still famous 1990s TV commercials. The site doesn’t mention it, but the spots were created by comedy/commercials genius Stan Freberg and star his son Donavan (he later ran a porn site, but now photographs actors’ and wannabe actors’ portfolio shots).
• What if they gave a shopping mall and nobody came?
• Goldy reminds you that you can’t support essential public services like education from state sales taxes (and little else) anymore.
• Ex-Seattleite Mike Daisey’s monologue show rallying against the labor practices of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors? It turns out to have been full of distortions and “dramatic license.”
• Nobody’s actually trying to move the Portland TrailBlazers to Seattle. Some guy at the Weekly simply thinks it would be a good idea.
• A self proclaimed Libertarian (you know, the dudes who think the oil companies and Wall Street don’t have enough power) says we must protect porn’s right to exist, because the next industry to be cracked down on would be advertising.
• Robert Reich reminds you that America’s “moral rot” isn’t gays and abortion, but rather “the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.”

washington beer blog via seattlepi.com

First, thanks to the more than 50 people who crowded Roy St. Coffee and Tea for the History Cafe presentation on old Seattle restaurant menus Thursday evening. And thanks to my fellow panelists Hanna Raskin and Taylor Bowie for making it easy for me. Each of them had so many insights about the old restaurants, their menu designs, their food items, and their respective places in cultural history, that I didn’t have to say much.

• Seattle’s newest microbrewery has a gimmick. It puts out its pilsner in old fashioned steel cans that need a can opener. The company’s appropriate name: Churchkey Can Company.
• Annie Lowrey at Slate has the strange tale of a true “computer hacker” in the old, non-criminal definition of the term. He was a programming genius who supplied his innovations to, and supported the goals of, the open-source software movement. Before he abruptly and completely withdrew from public life.
• At least half the traffic on the Internet isn’t supplied by human computer users, but by automated spambots, information-stealing “scrapers,” and search engines.
• America’s most progressive-leaning broadcaster (or at least the outfit with that reputation) has just hired a union-buster consulting firm.
• Branding consultants Susan Lee and Jenny Laing claim the Occupy movement represents a great new opportunity to sell stuff.
• “The world’s most annoying song,” according to one Jason Richards, is not “Paradise City.” I see no reason to believe anything this Richards person says.

After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• Good News Dept.: It looks like the Volunteer Park Conservatory is a lot closer to being fiscally preserved than was implied in previous reports.
• The Husky men’s basketball team had to settle for playing in the NIT, despite winning its conference’s regular season title. But that wasn’t as demeaning as the team’s ultra-lousy attendance at its first round NIT game.
• Whatever patina of respectability the megabanks had is peeling off in the late-winter rains. There’s the blistering breakup letter by the ex Goldman Sachs exec. And there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more blistering exposé of BankAmericrap as “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.” And yet Megan McArdle at the Atlantic insists what we really need is a “massive deregulation” of banking. What?
• Meanwhile, here’s another good-riddance letter by a techie who left Google for Microsoft, claiming the former had devolved from “an innovation factory” into just another “advertising company.”
• The copyright police have convinced U.K. authorities to ship a Brit college kid to the U.S. for prosecution, all for the supposedly heinous crime of running a TV-episodes linking site.
• Some Catholic bishops in Missouri have decided the best way to respond to continued exposés of child-abusing priests is to mount vicious legal attacks against the exposers.
• To end this batch on an upbeat note, here are four illustration books and a comic-strip collection based on classic literature.

stephen crowe via brainpickings.org

Learn how we and our immediate forebearers ate!

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks) at Broadway and E. Roy on curvaceous Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

Be there or be yesterday’s “fresh sheet.”

• The World Trade Organization (remember them?) sez Boeing gets unfair subsidies from the U.S. gov’t.
• Are an ad agency’s “homeless hotspots” at the SXSW music festival really more demeaning than the Seattle company that  still calls itself “Bumvertising“?
• No, Michael Medved. We’re not secretly jealous of Rush Limbaugh and his awesome power. We’re disgusted by his puerile stupidity, bullying, and bigotry (and yours too).
• The Oregonian won’t run the Doonesbury comics about the GOP’s war against women. A local cartoonist responds by depicting the paper’s readers choosing to “abort” their subscriptions.
• Is there really something particular about the training of soldiers at Lewis-McChord that’s led to these dreadful stories about abuses of power in the Afghan field? Or is it just a coincidence, based on the fact that the base has grown so big, with so many troops transferring in and out of it?
• One of the 1980 American hostages in Iran would rather not see history repeat itself thank you.
• Blogger/editor Maria Popova believes websites should formally adopt a “curator’s code” identifying direct and indirect links via special unicode symbols.

esquire.com

Welcome to daylight savings time. Welcome to the “light” half of the year. Welcome to the little piece of manmade trickery that tells us the worst of the cold, dark time is over. Even though it sure didn’t look or feel like it today.

• Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” department ran a survey asking readers’ “most life changing burger joint.” The winner: our own Dick’s, by a mile. (Also note the beautiful Dennis Hopper-esque photo topping the story.)
• Danny Westneat notes that the Republican state senate coup-mongers’ state budget cuts essential services even more brutally than the competing Democratic house budget. Westneat concludes that this totally destroys the longstanding Republican meme that all you need for a balanced budget is to get rid of some vaguely defined “waste.”
• KOMO headline: “Car slams into dentist office, driver extricated.” It may take you a second to realize that’s not “extracted.”
• The Huskies, despite their regular season prowess, are not in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney. The only NW team in it is Gonzaga.
• More and more advertisers desert right-wing hate radio. Not just Limbaugh but the whole bigoted, bullying gaggle. Will the whole genre collapse under the weight of its own need for continued extremeness? (And remember, this is the only audience today’s Republican Party gives a damn about.)
• The next time some techno-pundit tells you that every organization (from the news media to local government) must become more like whatever’s the social media darling of the week, just remember the example of Twitter. A very famous name. A very popular site. A very pathetic business.
• Jean “Mobius” Giraud R.I.P.: The king of “clear line” Euro comix art seamlessly blended slick, sophisticated senses of draftsmanship and composition with classic fanboy adventure genre subjects (Sergio Leone-esque cowboys, space opera, sword and sorcery, erotica, even proto-steampunk). He also cofounded Metal Hurlant, the way-influential magazine known here as Heavy Metal. Too bad most U.S. media obits of Giraud only wanted to discuss the Hollywood movies he’d consulted on or which were “inspired” by his work (typical myopia).

supervillain.wordpress.com

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

kirkland reporter

• Hendrix fetish art objects are, by definition, creepy. Here’s one that’s even creepier than most. It’s a sculpture of the musician shaking hands with former local DJ (and current rehab-center spokesman) Pat O’Day. It’s being auctioned off, having been seized from O’Day’s son to help settle a lawsuit involving the son’s onetime Kirkland jewelry store. That store closed suddenly in ’03. Several customers then claimed they’d consigned jewelry to Jerry O’Day that was neither returned nor paid for.
• The Kalakala’s current would-be rescuer says the drive to restore the streamlined ferry has busted him and rendered him homeless.
• The Husky men’s basketball squad’s predestined appointment w/destiny was done in by the First Brother-in-Law.
• One pundit’s prediction for the ’12 Mariners? Not as dreadful as last year.
• Facebook: Bringing people together. Including one local man’s two (simultaneous, unknowing) wives.
• One fifth of the Port of Seattle’s container traffic is moving to Tacoma.
• George Monbiot describes Ayn Rand’s worldview (i.e., what the Ron Paulies and even many Tea Partiers aspire toward) as “the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed.” Speaking of which….
• Yes, there really is a Republican war against birth control. And yes, there really is no floor of utter sleaze beneath which today’s Republicans will not descend. (They’d advocate the return of slavery and poll taxes if they thought it would “test well among the base.”)
• Could one of America’s worst housing markets really be roaring back to life?
• The battle over e-book pricing heads (potentially) to the courts, as the Feds prepare to sue Apple and five of the Big Six U.S. publishers. The allegation: by letting publishers set retail e-book prices, Apple and the publishers conspired to keep said prices up.
• A Facebook zillionaire named Chris Hughes has bought The New Republic. Result: the usual inaccurate media descriptions of the opinion magazine as a “liberal bastion” and “influential in progressive circles.” TNR ceased to be liberal before Hughes was born. In recent decades it has (heart)ed Joe Leiberman, the Iraq War, and just about everything Reagan and the Bushes ever did. Hughes, who’s worked on Obama’s ’08 campaign, just might bring TNR back to what people who’ve never read it think it still is.
• For Intl. Women’s Day, the Guardian profiled a new addition to Forbes‘ list of world billionaires—a woman who’d earned her fortune (she didn’t just inherit it). She’s the inventor of Spanx undies.
• Said billionaires’ list includes eight (male) Washingtonians. You already know about Gates, Allen, Ballmer, Schultz, Bezos, and McCaw. The other two are the founders of Oakley sunglasses (who moved to the San Juans from Calif.) and video-game maker Valve Corp. In total, Forbes counts 1,226 billionaires, up from 140 in ’87. The 1% just keep getting 1%-er.

inventorspot.com

• Whatever happened to GAK and Floam?
• Here’s a potential first: a headline starting with the word “Shit,” on a KOMO-owned website! (The article in question is by a woman, questioning the marketing strategy of a vodka “for women.”)
• The liquor privatization initiative’s supporters vowed that the cheesy storefront liquor stores seen in other states won’t come here. Actually they might, depending on who bids to take over the current state Liquor Stores, which will each be auctioned off separately.
• Sorry, local lefties: Dennis Kucinich isn’t moving here.
• Before the Republicans hijacked the state Senate, they claimed to be in favor of fully funding K-12 education. Now, not so much.
• A Ph.D tackles the issue of “Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill.”
• An Internet meme has been going around this week, a video pleading for donations to a campaign against a notorious African warlord. Now it’s turning out the video’s makers aren’t all that morally pure themselves.
• “Respectable” DC pundits (you know, the kind who promote “bipartisan cooperation,” defined as caving to every Republican ploy) try to defend Limbaugh, very awkwardly.
• It isn’t just movie and music file sharing that’s caught the ire of the global copyright police. They’re also cracking down on folks sharing expensive textbooks and research journals.

• It’s not just for writers anymore. Now fashion models, even those doing runway work at high profile industry events, are being expected to work for free.
• Does anyone even know how many listeners Limbaugh really has?
• “Modern technology can save languages as well as destroy them.”
• Construction on the First Hill (and Capitol Hill and I.D.) Streetcar starts next month. Still no decision about extending the line up Broadway.
• Oil tankers just keep getting huger and huger. And they’re coming here, or dangerously close.

crosscut.com

• Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one of the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, the Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of which….
• The P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of which….
• Newspapers are losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
• The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she Tweeted® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
• Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
• Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but with no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
• Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
• Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
• Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
• Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
• The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
• We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
• A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
• What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
• Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“:

uw archives via businessinsider.com

All of you who are going to be outside in Seattle tomorrow (Sat. 3/3) should attend my nice little chat about Vanishing Seattle. It starts at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. Be there or be fool’s gold.

• Here’s a lovely interview with my fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski. Her play Emerald City, about (among other things) Seattle’s love/hate relationship with itself, opens next Friday (3/9) at the West of Lenin space in Fremont. In the interview, she mentions that the Stranger was, indeed, a totally commercial operation from the start:

The owners were business smart. Very smart. You will never go broke in Seattle making people think they’re in a special, exclusive club that is cooler than everyone else. That is money in the bank. The fear of being provincial and dull is so powerful, there.

• Republican legislative dirty tricks: they’re not just for other states anymore.
• Norm Dicks, a stalwart of Wash. state’s Congressional delegation, is retiring.
• It’s one thing for Amazon to coax favorable pricing terms from the mega corporate publishers. But when it got into an ebook pricing impasse with a small indie distributor, it attracted the ire of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an outfit with which one shouldn’t mess if one knows what’s good for one.
• Who else is refusing links to Amazon ebook sales pages? Apple iBooks, that’s who.
• Meanwhile, is Amazon ridiculously inflating the “before” prices of on-sale food products?
• As we’ve mentioned before, Shepard Fairey steals from street-level artists as well as corporate art. Here’s one artist who sued Fairey and won.
• Matt Taibbi notes that the late right-wing sleazeblogger Andrew Breitbart used to post private info about his ideological opponents online and threaten violence against them. In response for mentioning this, Breitbart fans posted private info about Taibbi online and threatened violence against him.
• Meanwhile, Jen Doll proclaims, “If Rush Limbaugh slut-shames you, you’re doing something right.”
• Truthout pundit Henry A. Giroux and Nation writer Dana Goldstein claim the “religious” right is against public education because it’s against people thinking for themselves.
• Robert Reich would like to remind you that increased “productivity,” per se, doesn’t necessarily add jobs. It often means cutting jobs.
• “More U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in 2010.”
• I just found out last year that there are serious grownup My Little Pony fans. I’m not sure if the Amazon customer-reviewers of this spinoff DVD are among them.

storebrandsdecisions.com

• The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a handy dandy map showing the retailers who’ve applied to sell hard liquor as soon as the state liquor stores close. They include Safeway, Kroger’s QFC and Fred Meyer, Walgreens, Target, Albertsons, and of course Costco. Indie stores that have applied include Pete’s Wines on Fairview, Full Throttle Bottles in Georgetown, Ralph’s in Belltown, Pioneer Square Market, Madison Market Co-op, Wine World in Wallingford, and Viet Wah in the International District. Bartell’s, PCC, Whole Foods, Rite Aid, and Trader Joe’s have not applied, at least not yet.
• We must say goodbye to David Ishii, who owned a leading Pioneer Square bookstore for some 30 years.
• Finally! Some Dems in the state Legislature are suing to overturn the “supermajority” requirement for any tax reform bills.
• Higher parking rates in greater downtown: could they actually be increasing business at local merchants?
• A wholesale donut bakery in Georgetown was found with flies, rat poop, and snail near the food products. (Doubles the nutritional value.)
• Andrew Breitbart RIP: The far-right blogger, speaker, and all around bully died of an apparent sudden heart attack. How does one humanely grieve a man who did the exact opposite to others?
• Playboy wants to run a nightclub on Richard Branson’s proposed private tourist space station. Because nothing says gentlemanly posh quite like being stuck in a steel tube which may or may not feature artificial gravity.