Curious George: the future of Iraq. Inspired by this FPP about what's happened to Vietnam since the war there ended in the 1970s, I'm wondering what people think is going to happen in Iraq and more broadly in the Middle East in coming months and years. Go ahead. Make a prediction. Then we'll have record of just how prescient or not we really are.

Joseph "Le Petomane" Pujol, the Fartiste. A 19th century Frenchman with "a gift that...[made] him the toast of Paris and one of the most popular and successful performers of his generation." View a clip from a recent film about him here, and a short film about him from 1979 (starring Leonard Rossiter) here. more inside

When the gods drank urine. A Tibetan myth may help solve the riddle of soma, sacred drug of ancient India.

The beautification of the Democratic Party. Democrats seem to be fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates... Democratic operatives do not publicly say that they went out of their way this year to recruit candidates with a high hotness quotient. more inside

Daddy's girl. Millionaire Bruce McMahan loved his daughter so much, he married her. You can find documents (such as the results of a DNA test on a vibrator key to the case) and the daughter's videotaped deposition here.

Sid Motishead. On Huddersfield One. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE NOT JUST IN SIDS HEAD. Because, y'know, it's probably been awhile.

Humor under the Nazis.

Don Walser, RIP. If you've never heard Mr. Walser, you can find clips of the Austin country and western singer/yodeller (who frequently opened Butthole Surfers shows) here. Enjoy the great open range in the sky, Don.

Two views of Islam.

The New Naysayers. A look at the atheism of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. Plus, a nifty list of famous atheists, agnostics, and other skeptics.

WordHoard. A philological tool. The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech.

Celebrity worship. Is it programmed into your DNA? Is it addictive? Is it good for you -- especially if you're a teen? Is it a savage new religion? What's the psychology behind it? Is it a screwing up the academic world? Does it signify cultural decline and confusion?

9/11 commemorative coin. Lavishly clad in gleaming silver miraculously recovered from a bank vault found under tons of debris at Ground Zero! May well be among the most historically meaningful collectibles you will ever own!

"In Defense of Big Pharma"

Emotions and the brain. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux seeks a biological rather than psychological understanding of our emotions. He explores the differences between emotional memories (implicit--unconscious--memories) processed in pathways that take information into the amygdala, and memories of emotion (explicit--conscious--memories) processed at the level of the hippocampus and neocortex.

Citizen journalism vs. traditional journalism. "...the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up." Do you agree?

Being a loner reduces immunity and heart health. Which is too bad, given that, in the U.S. in any case, we've become a society of loners. (The article in the second link was expanded into a recent noteworthy book.) more inside

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD. Ay caramba, that's depressing.

Will global warming depopulate the "red states"? Interesting question, but the red states will be equally fried if California is any indication.

A Tank of Gas, a World of Trouble. "Pulitzer-winning correspondent Paul Salopek traced gas pumped at a suburban Chicago station to the fuel’s sources around the globe. In doing so, he reveals how our oil addiction binds us to some of the most hostile corners of the planet—and to a petroleum economy edging toward crisis."