Also from the Drexel PG blog, a link to a loaded game site, Sporcle. I’m proud to say I could not name all of the U.S. Presidents, and the ones I couldn’t remember are the ones no one else could either, except Chester Arthur. I knew him, and most people don’t apparently. Others people couldn’t name are Pierce, Buchanan, McKinley, um, Taylor . . . Harding . . . Here’s the test, so you play yourself.

The ad reads: “Are you sick and tired of cleaning up after your lazy, good-for-nothing family?” Try murder. It can be easy, even for a woman.

All these years I thought I was going gray. Turns out I’m a peroxide blonde.

Which just goes to show that one of my Viking friends was right when he said, “I’m not getting grayer. I’m getting blonder.”

And here’s a story about a woman in New Zealand, an amputee, who got the Weta special effects people (the folks behind all the neat stuff in “The Lord of the Rings”) to make her a prosthetic mermaid’s tail.

Part of me thinks that’s a little creepy. But most of me thinks it’s pretty neat.

What bothers me is that the tail the technician is shown sculpting in the pictures doesn’t appear to be the same tail the woman is wearing in the photos. Perhaps there were alpha and beta versions. Or perhaps they’re making them available to the general market.

Tips on both stories: Fox News.

Humanities departments are among the hardest hit. In this post, Joel Mark comments:

The recession is not what is hitting the humanities departments of most of our major universities. Intellectual poverty and dishonesty are what is hitting them, in the name of such ideologies as postmodernism, neo-Marxism, socialism, political correctness, multi-culturalism and sheer selfish and immature anger (especially in the arts).

I love the humanities and have taught for several years in the humanities department of a university in California. The best place to study and learn about what we call the humanities today, however, is often as far away as possible from a major modern university.

If humanities departments in universities do suffer, that constitutes our best hope for a future rise in our actual learning in the real ‘humanities’ far from the angry ivory towers. So, I am optimistic.