After my link-rich and almost coherent posting yesterday on a single topic, I am drained. For the nonce, I must remove to my recamier and napping blanket. Here are topics which may interest. Or not. I'm too spent to care.
1) Hat tip: Arts & Letters daily. What interests me about this New Yorker review of A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close: Night in Times Past is not that he took 20 years to write it, though that does make me feel better about my own literary output. What fascinated me was that citing references to first and second sleeps, Ekirch asserts, "until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness.” The author references Plutarch to John Locke as evidence of this long-accepted truth, and he also restates a study showing broken sleep developing among people deprived of artificial light. The biological state of the body during this mid-might wakefulness may have been conducive to certain kinds of reflection. So, if you're like me and often experience, long after bedtime, an awakening with inspirations and the compulsion to haunt your own home before returning to sleep, this might explain the phenomenon.
2) I don't have problems with psychics for "entertainment purposes only." For example, here's a link to Ian Rowland, whom I've never seen but I've heard is amazing. He's entertaining, mystifiying, funny and admits his prodigous talent in "mind-reading" represents hard-learned skills in psychology and the fundamentals of magic. I did Tarot card readings at my high school carnival to raise money for the Spanish Club. Bow down to the coolness, really.
Even if I'm skeptical whether most self-professed psychics could sense a reuben sandwich without standing in a deli, people delight in thrill rides, horror movies, and dipping their toes into the paranormal waters. However, they can tend to submerse themselves dangerously when under stress and painful trauma. Here's a Townhall article by John Stossel about psychics, some charging exorbitant fees, clamoring to aid a desperate woman whose sister disappeared. I can only hope there's a special subterranean circle for those who defraud the grieving.
3) You only tolerated the other items to get to this one, didn't you? Well, tits then. Bearded Tits, Long-tailed Tits, Marsh Tits, Sombre Tits, Willow Tits, Crested Tits, Coal Tits, and Blue Tits. Yesterday, Instapundit referenced a blog that caught Reuters mislabeling a nature photo as a blue hummingbird in India, a creature more mythical than the Phoenix. But following nested links, I further discovered in Silflay Hraka's blog, Adventures in Journalism , this older revelation of a sadly misjudged Great Tit.
Boy, the search strings from eleven year-olds are going to drive the traffic today. HA!
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