A BoingBoing reader was (perhaps inadvertantly) directed to this part of a Florida TV station’s website while looking for Jesus (or at least the Jesus of Tru Value). I can’t figure out how one would normally get to this slideshow cavalcade of Florida misery/human interest, since every time I go up a level in the file system, it looks distincly both broken supposed to be password protected. This search is not helped by the standard TV website clutter and bright screaming headlines.

Prize to you if you can find where to get this horrorshow every day.

In a lovely exhibition of Ukiyo-e prints is a hint on the technique of flying:
“The subject of the print is Kume the Immortal, a renowned recluse who mastered the power to travel through the air at will. The sight of a young woman baring her legs while washing clothes caused Kume to lose his concentration and fall from the sky.”
also
“In a deified form, [Kitano’s] spirit is said to have flown to China to learn Zen, paying for his lessons with a sprig of flowering plum.”

Point #1: you must must must read Alice, I Think and Miss Smithers by Susan Juby. They are milk-thru-nose funny. They are two of the three teen books I read for my work this year that I would recommend with great enthusiasm to non-teens as well. (The third is The Canning Season.)
Point #2: Alice, the protagoniste in the aforementioned two books, is an awful lot like me at her age. Though my mom (who also liked the books) is charitable enough to say that she didn’t think so.
Point #3: Juby has an anecdote from her own life on her web site that makes me think that she and I might not be too terribly dissimilar, too.

A loyal reader, late of Iceland, recommended the book Making the Best of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook. One of the tips the book contains is to keep grains by for sprouting for when “live foods” are at a premium in your circumstances. In the significantly older book (from 1866), The Market Assistant, comes the much more tasty-sounding tip: growing mustard greens! From page 338:
“Mustard. The leaves of the young, white, broad-leaved kind is best for a mixed salad, or to boil with meat as greens. It may be had at any time in a few days, bu being sown in a box and kept in a warm place.”

For those of you wishing you still had secret clearance, Defensetech, the blog of defense news.

Union songs, from historical to new, from rousing to stupid!

note: One of the songs listed in the first source seems to have been rather unevenly copied. A more believable rendition is here. One might have to take this first archive with a grain of union salt.

So there are databases of unclaimed property in every state, and that property is everything from insurance payouts to bank accounts and more. I used to think that I could be a valiant info-warrior and find money for people, but mostly people (perhaps with good reason) think you are trying to scam them. Perhaps I will post information on how to find this money along with the names of the people, in case they google themselves.

The Greyhound bus service is eliminating a bunch of stops from its routes. For people without the option to drive, this bites. As more of the population ages past the point where driving is a good idea, I hope we’ll remember why public (rather than privatized, who can trim unprofitable services) transportation is worth the cost-balancing it does between the high and low volume stops.

But if I did need a new TV, I might shop around for one of these. I stumbled across these here, home of many interesting furnishing ideas.

The League of Women Voters is at it again: another handy tool for Washington voters.