• Ten candy bars you'll never eat, including the Chicken Dinner Bar, the Vegetable Sandwich Bar and the Zep Candy Bar, which crashed along with zeppelin futures and the Hindenberg.
• "Lately I've been surprisingly elevated by a new life of Goethe, that magnificent fellow at the center of German literature if not German consciousness itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived what is commonly called a charmed life." Probably not very interesting to those outside of the Jacques Barzun set, but I loved it.
• The Japanese look to an unlikely savior in the war against global warming: the Hawaiian shirt.
• The Graffiti Project at Kelburn Castle has started. They're just slathering paint everywhere.
• "The tulip craze that hit Holland in the seventeenth century is arguably the most famous financial bubble in all of history. According to the popular account of what happened, prices for tulips began to go through the roof in 1636 as word spread that wealthy people were willing to pay huge sums of money for tulips. Soon the general population joined in the speculative fervor, many people using their life savings in order to buy bulbs, believing they could resell them at windfall profits. At the height of the mania, a single bulb cost as much as a mansion. But eventually reality set in. In 1637 panic selling commenced as people realized they were never going to make a return on their investments, and the price of bulbs crashed, losing over 90% of their value. Many people were financially ruined." Of course, it never happened.
• Texas State University just can't seem to find a non-controversial place to let exposed corpses rot.
