A Random Assortment

~ Fear the vest! (On Rick Santorum's sweater vest) (via Francisco)

~ Some TSE inspired listening via Terry Teachout. Because we all know that I would jump off a bridge if TSE told me to.

~ This article challenges ethical reasons for not eating meat (which I'm pretty wary of). It also contains a fascinating fact:

"Mice are far more sentient than we thought. They sing complex, personalised love songs to each other that get more complex over time."

~ Hopkins sent me this article. I was super confused why at first (the title is, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible," not really something that you need to convince me about). And then I saw the name of the author. And then I found it far more interesting, although incredibly choppy (let's blame that on the editor). Especially Robinson's argument that Christianity parallels literary realism:

"Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too."

(picture--I had some of these chocolates in California, and they were amazing)