farrago, hotchpotch,olio,omnium-gatherum

i'm not a fan of Dan Brown, and this is one of the funniest reviews of some Dan Brown crap i've read in quite a while:  "The Heroic Absurdity of Dan Brown:  The Less His Talent, The More Amazing His Achievement" by Clive James.

 

Interesting little piece at Harper's:  "On Suicide" by Clancy Martin.

 

Something important is happening in California....i've not seen or heard about it on corporate news.  click here and get your ass informed.

 

you really should keep a journal!!

 

Brief gallery of Walker Evans 1930's photographs. 

 

for those assy emo types that insist that they have to "find" themselves, here's a graphic from kepler.nasa.gov to help them (hint:  they will find they are in the vicinity of the tiny, yellow smudge in the scenter of the gun-site symbol:

 

 

 

Ed Yong has a piece in Nature about some newly discovered giant viruses named Pandoraviruses because they look like amphorae. 

 

even snails sometimes have the urge to decorate and embellish!  click the link to see even more elaborately examples of

shells from Xenophorid snails.

 

 

Distributive Conjugal Transfer in Mycobacteria Generates Progeny with Meiotic-Like Genome-Wide Mosaicism, Allowing Mapping of a Mating Identity Locus.