Links for 2009-11-24

"I keep trying to figure out what this song is really trying to say in its subtext -- but no, I'm pretty sure it's actually about two muskrats courting. I know I said this a few songs ago, but WHY? Why did we need a song about two muskrats on a date? And even more importantly, why were Captain & Tennille the third artists to record the song? Originally titled "Mukstrat Candlelight" -- and let's just pause a second to think about the meeting where the artistic merits of this title were debated -- the song was written and recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey in 1972, then covered by America in 1973 and C&T in 1976. The America version peaked at #67, but C&T made it all the way here to #4. Why?"

"Rather than feeling let down by the Tevatron, let us instead try and get excited about the chance that there is something going on at lower mass: in fact, the Tevatron is seeing a definite excess of events in Higgs searches geared towards a low Higgs mass: for 115 GeV, there is a just less than 2-sigma upward fluctuation of the data! Is this the first scent of Higgs we get to smell after the LEP2 1.7-sigma result of eight years ago ?"

"Don't get me wrong, I love writing books, and wouldn't want to stop doing it. You'll have to take this MacBook from my cold dead hands. But the medium of writing is a curious one, and there are some parts about the process which I really dislike."

"So cooking is definitely a science, drawing on chemistry and physics and basic biology/anatomy among other fields, not to mention engineering to come up with innovative preparation techniques. It's become so much of a science, in fact, that the University of Copenhagen is currently advertising for a professorial appointment in culinary chemistry, part of an ongoing effort to establish molecular gastronomy as a serious field of scientific study."

"Saying that U2's rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2's slide towards impending crisis.

"Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music," said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. "We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.""

"Just months after its release, Noveller has become a cultural touchstone, despite countless jibes from critics who claim it has broken no new literary ground and oversimplifies the narrative form. Those who Novel on a daily basis claim to love the challenge of the utility's 140-page minimum, and popular Novellists such as TheRealJayDeeSalinger, no_i_am_not_thomas_pynchon, and aplusk soon boasted hundreds of thousands of followers.

"It makes me wonder how I ever kept track of my friends and their symbolic prose examinations of universal human experiences before this," user Joyce Carol Oates said. "I'm like, did we really ever actually go to libraries? Weird, right?""

What do Thanksgiving pictures through the ages have in common?