The mission statement of Chicago’s Urban Prep:

The mission of Urban Prep is to provide a comprehensive, high-quality college preparatory education to young men that results in graduates succeeding in college.

This mission is a direct response to the urgent need to reverse abysmal graduation and college completion rates among young men in urban centers, particularly African-American males. Urban Prep’s tailored curriculum is based on the developmental stages and learning styles of boys as well as the unique challenges facing urban youth. The Urban Prep motto is “We Believe.” We believe that our students will shatter negative stereotypes and defy low expectations. We believe that our students can be prepared for and will succeed in college. We believe in the long-lasting impact community support and positive role models can have on our students’ lives. In short, we believe in our students’ futures. At Urban Prep, we believe.

Note: “boys.” Not girls. At the moment, female presence is considered a distraction.

Urban Prep’s first graduating class: 107. Number accepted by a four-year college: 107.

This is not a hyper-selective school, either: students are chosen by lottery from the pool of applicants.

So what’s the trick? No excuses accepted for anything:

Each new freshman starting school gets his own wristwatch to keep track of time.

“Kids would be late and say they didn’t know what time it was,” [founder Tim] King said. “Part of our creed reads [that] we make no excuses, so we wanted to remove that excuse.”

Nor do you get to leave early. Classes run 8:30 am to 4:30 pm — just like a real work day. And students dress like it’s a real work day, too:

The young men at the academy wear suit jackets and ties as signs of respect.

“It distinguishes us. We stand out in the crowd,” said student Jerry Hinds. “Freshman year, maybe, people had problems with it at first. But after a while, you see the bigger picture. … These uniforms show that, oh, he’s wearing a tie; oh, he wants to do something with himself.”

More like this, please. And soon.

The Daily Beast has decided for some reason to rank the 57 largest metro areas on the basis of sheer craziness, and the OKC comes in at a relatively non-drooling 39th, just behind (of course) Dallas.

Criteria: psychiatrists per capita (we ranked 29th), stress (25th), eccentricity (20th), and drinking (55th). Even Salt Lake City outdrinks us. Nashville imbibes the least, which explains absolutely nothing about country music; Milwaukee, Austin and Las Vegas tied for heaviest drinking, which presumably doesn’t need explanation at all, though contrary to popular belief, not everyone in Wisconsin is a lush.

Memphis sports the highest stress level, says the Beast; San Francisco the largest number of shrinks; New Orleans (duh) the highest level of eccentricity.

(Title courtesy of George G. Papoon.)

The tourists, they love the ruins. They’ll turn out with their cameras, night or day, rain or shine; that’s the main reason they went to Athens. Or to Rome. Or to, um, Detroit?

Detroit has a vast supply of decayed and vacant buildings, many of them architectural treasures. Even if [the Michigan Central Depot] is somehow restored, it will be one of only a handful saved, while so many others will languish for some time. Many, like the Lafayette Building, may become so damaged that they have to be torn down.

What if instead of spending a huge amount of money to try to save one building, the city found a little bit of money to do basic maintenance to preserve the structural integrity of many buildings — and create a safe path through parts of them that tourists could walk through similar to how ancient ruins are displayed in Europe. Heck, don’t even clean the buildings up. That saves money and makes them even more impressive to visitors. This could preserve more structures for the long haul, and create a tourist attraction. The structures can always [be] renovated later when demand warrants.

Actually, the tourists are already coming whether it is authorized or not. Thirty folks a day at MCD is pretty impressive. Imaging putting a string of these sites together — probably including many of the same ones we’ve seen photographed before — and allowing tours. And of course marketing the heck out of it.

I know this mindset better than I probably should admit: the first time I visisted Cleveland, I threaded through some back streets to get a look at an abandoned steel mill. (Two years would elapse before I bothered to drop in at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.)

And when you get right down to it, I’d rather see buildings in some degree of disrepair than an array of shiny new parking lots, as is the practice in some cities I could name.

Last week, Princeton held a conference called “Too Cute: American Style and the New Asian Cool,” and Virginia Postrel was on hand to explain the differences between being cute and being glamorous. (Postrel, after all, runs a Web site called “Deep Glamour,” and wrote an excellent book on a related subject: The Substance of Style.) The differences, far from being thoroughly inchoate, as I might have thought, are apparently not particularly difficult to quantify:

Do not, however, peg your future happiness to finding someone with the perfect blend thereof:

The two rarely coexist, since they entail contradictory qualities. Mix them, and the cuteness tends to win out, canceling out the glamour altogether or producing something disturbing or comical.

I console myself with the thought that someday (ten years from now, actually) Zooey Deschanel will be 40.

Why college professors despair, Chapter XCVI:

Okay, so in a question about the definition of Darcy’s Law (which governs water movement in saturated systems) on an exam, I had as one of the false choices, “In situations where there is both pride and prejudice.”

Someone actually chose that as their choice. I do not know whether to laugh or to cry.

I’m laughing, though it’s because (1) I was hoping she’d do something like that and (2) I’m not the one who had to take the exam.

The everlasting Phelps explains how to tell the difference between those two generations younger than my own:

Gen X knows that Fight Club is a comedy, and the Millennials think that it is a documentary.

Other than that, I’m not going to talk about it.

Did I miss something? Mark Steyn seems almost as perplexed as I:

[Y]ou’d have thought that an education system that teaches schoolgirls how to perform oral sex wouldn’t also have to schedule time to teach them how to consume a hot dog safely. Multi-tasking, people!

[Insert "relish" reference here]

Herewith, two fascinating (to me, anyway) posts connected, not to each other particularly, but to Nineteen Eighty-Four. First, a memory from Tam:

In my sophomore year in high school I had one picture hanging in my locker. It was a black & white, postcard-sized photo of a skinny English guy behind a mic. Not Simon Le Bon or Sting, but an author. With that archness that comes so naturally to high school students, I’d completed the picture by scrawling in the corner “All the best in the new year, Eric. XXOO.” Hardly anybody got it.

Second, a safe-word suggestion for the, um, sexually exuberant from Bitchy Jones:

Here’s what’s fun. Just tell him, just make it clear, that from now on there is only one effective safe word. And it is this: Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!

(This latter link might annoy your filters at work. With thanks to Zeeke42.)

Hey, this works for me:

If you ever have trouble getting interested in the same bland crop of Oscar winners and nominees we seem to get every year, just imagine all the film titles prepended with “Tyler Perry’s” to spice things up. Tyler Perry’s The English Patient. Tyler Perry’s Shakespeare In Love. Tyler Perry’s The Hurt Locker. Seems to work every time.

I might draw the line at Tyler Perry’s Being John Malkovich, though.

Apologies are unnecessary, says Miriam:

Why not just keep mum? If I had his net worth, I would find myself an island and hang out there, with my private yacht parked outside the gate alongside the private jet in case I wanted to travel.

Tiger Woods doesn’t owe me anything. He doesn’t have to confess his sins. If he chooses to spend his time off with beautiful blondes with long legs and limited intelligence, that’s between him and his wife.

I mean, if the man’s going to perform an act of contrition, it needs to be addressed, not to the general public, but to Someone of higher authority.

Marko now has five typewriters in good working order, and guess where he keeps them?

Those all live in Analog City, the office on the other end of the house where the WiFi won’t reach, and the only computer (Apple eMac) is only for transcription duties and doesn’t even have a wireless network card fitted. I use them for different things as the mood strikes, mostly short stories. The single-purpose typewriter is a help when it comes to priming the creative pump because — like the fountain pen — it can only be used for creating new material, not research or other distracting business. I’ve come to believe that the biggest drain on productivity is writing with (or near) a device that can connect to the Internet.

Having gone off on far too many tangents in an effort to produce something that probably wasn’t all that creative to begin with — well, I still have one typewriter. Then again, purists will argue that it doesn’t count because (1) it has a spell-checker, even though I toggle it off, and (2) it has a correction ribbon, which took me three years to learn how to install properly.

But I must concede Marko’s point: the best ideas I get, I get when I’m away from the screen.

Jason Boyett does his first audiobook, and inadvertently discovers a Great Truth:

Never, ever write a book that includes long names like Zoroastrianism or Mictlantecuhtli if you plan to read it aloud some day. One of my chapters uses Zoroastrianism and Zoroaster about half a dozen times apiece. My goodness, this was a big mistake. Eventually I just started saying “Zorizzle” and “Z-dog” as replacement words. My apologies, Zondervan.

It could be worse. Zoroaster proclaimed Ahura Mazda to be the Lord of Wisdom, and Ahura Mazda had 101 names, an array well short of that once posited by Arthur C. Clarke, but still a lot to read.

It takes one of Oprah’s minions to come up with a rebranding this obvious:

Procrastinators may have a habit of putting off important work. They may not ever get to projects or leave projects half finished. Importantly, when they do complete projects, the quality might be mediocre as a result of their lack of engagement or inability to work well under pressure.

What [my client] presented was something qualitatively different: a clear sense of deadlines, confidence that the work would be complete on time, certainty that the work would be of superior quality and the ability to subconsciously process important ideas while doing other — often recreational — activities.

I realized I was looking at a strength, one I called “incubator.”

Well, no, you’re actually looking at a subset of procrastinators and trying to promote them beyond their pay grade. I do this myself:

Project due in two weeks? I’ll tell you it can’t be done for three and make both of us believe it, and then finish on day nine.

Nor am I alone in this:

I’m still calling myself a procrastinator. Why? Because it’s more acceptable to be self-deprecating and doesn’t overly inflate expectations. Calling yourself an incubator, however, is tainted with arrogance. And you sound like a supermarket rotisserie chicken stand.

Besides, you’re assuming that we need the eggs.

Someone sent this to Physics Geek, and I admit, it stings a little:

A group of 40 year old buddies discuss and discuss where they should meet for dinner.

Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen restaurant because the waitresses there have low cut blouses and nice breasts.

10 years later, at 50 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because the food there is very good and the wine selection is good also.

10 years later at 60 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because they can eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant is smoke free.

10 years later, at 70 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because the restaurant is wheel chair accessible and they even have an elevator.

10 years later, at 80 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed that they should meet at the Gausthof zum Lowen because that would be a great idea because they have never been there before.

I certainly haven’t been here.

I’ve never lived in New York City, and if word gets around that I purloined this theory from Sonic Charmer, they’ll probably set up barriers along the West Side Highway on the off-chance that I might show up:

The one saving grace … is a healthy network of easy services that all the businesspeople spending too much money to live too densely end up supporting: food delivery from any restaurant, relatively cheap taxis, dry cleaning, etc. Indeed these things are often cited by visiting/newcomer businesspeople as reasons why New York is so great (as compared with, say, London). Yes, you can get a relatively cheap taxi… on the other hand, the unseen part of the equation is that you pay some of the highest city+state taxes anywhere to support social services for the giant fraction of the city (the cab driver and his family, e.g.) that is on food stamps, housing assistance and other forms of welfare. In other words part of the friendly business climate in New York is that the city has set up, essentially, a citywide subsidy for the servant population. This is “convenient” for all the bigshot businessmen, but the result is yet more need for inflation and escalation of profits that must pay for it all. Hence, another factor driving hard work.

The long-term equilibrium seems to be a super-bifurcated society of extremely rich guys and extremely poor guys living side by side in equally-squalid, cramped conditions, the poor guy begrudgingly delivering a $50 box of General’s chicken to the rich guy’s office every day, and the rich guy telling himself how good he has it.

Which General, we may never know: General Tso is probably out, General Grant is busy answering the phone — “Grant’s Tomb, Grant speaking” — and General Zod would demand way more than $50 a box.

And I figure while “cramped” is a given, “squalid” is a variable.

But that was then. The ferry ‘cross the Mersey immortalized by Gerry and the Pacemakers won’t take any passengers these days, because it’s taking on water and sinking into the Thames.

The Royal Iris, built in 1950 and retired in 1991, was towed away from Merseyside, and after plans to refurbish the vessel in Cardiff failed, wound up a decade later abandoned in the Thames. Gerry Marsden, his heart torn in every way, said:

It is such a shame, but every year there are reports of it getting more and more dilapidated and every year we all try to do something to save it but to no avail.

The Merseyside Maritime Museum hopes to salvage artifacts from the Royal Iris before it disappears entirely, but it seems unlikely the ferry itself can be saved.

Meanwhile, there are still ferries crossing the Mersey: a new Royal Iris of Mersey, and the Royal Daffodil. No new songs, though.

“In German, or in English, I know how to count down,” said Tom Lehrer in his Wernher von Braun voice, “and I’m learning Chinese.”

The good Doctor perhaps should consider Smitty’s advice as an alternative:

[I]f I wasn’t using my spare language time learning German, I’d focus on Spanish. Among that blessings the country enjoys today is the English language. It’s as important to the country as the opposable thumb to the flesh. But it was born after Hastings, when Norman French ran roughshod over Anglo-Saxon.

I predict, by the power of the rectal pluck, that in another 400 years or so the slow merger of English and Spanish shall be shown to have been an overall win.

By then, of course, we’ll have adopted just as many words in lolcat. (“¿Puedo tener una hamburguesa con queso?” just seems too formal.)

“Publish or perish” used to be, I am given to understand, a directive given to university faculty: you did the papers, or you’d never work on this tenure track again, Bunkie. Now it seems to have filtered down to the students. Dani Shapiro writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Today’s young writers don’t peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller — and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”

I suspect that the ones who really want to write — as distinguished from those who really want to have written, which is not the same thing — are passing up the creative writing programs and the festivals and the conferences and are spending their time staring down a blank piece of paper until the words start to flow.

(Via Little Miss Attila, who asks: “[S]ince when has any artist been entitled to get along without a day job?”)

A man’s gotta do, we are told, what a man’s gotta do, which demonstrates, I suppose, that you can’t keep a good tautology down.

Over at Cobb’s, Maxambit has come to the conclusion that this is what a man’s gotta do:

(1) A man’s first duty is to strengthen his own mind, so he may recognize how institutions and cultures compete to control it and then defend himself.

(2) A man’s second duty is to strive to accumulate sufficient wealth so he and his loved ones will have the resources they’ll need to live freely in the U.S., unencumbered by enslaving debts, discomforting relationships, or unrewarding labor.

(3) A man’s third duty is to do no harm to others who are within his sphere of influence.

I think I am on reasonably-firm ground in saying that most of us will not be equally successful at all three — which does not excuse us from continuing to work at them.

The first time I saw this, it set off my Misandry Alert: “Is this sexist or what?”

After a second look, I’m not so sure. I mean, if that young fellow is being oppressed, he certainly seems to be enjoying himself. Although we can’t tell for sure what’s going on outside the frame, I think it’s a safe bet that she’s not actually standing on his head. And it’s not like he’s looking up her skirt, either.

Compared to the general run of fashion advertising, this is a bright spot, says the intrepid correspondent for ShoeBlog:

I am weary of the pouting, leggy girl, wearing nothing more than lingerie, heels and a come hither look, sitting or laying on a sofa/chair, with soft focus. Virtually every shoe, handbag, fragrance, lingerie, and cosmetic advertisement features at least three of these components. Snore.

The shoe, incidentally, is from Giuseppe Zanotti’s Spring 2010 collection. I have a basic philosophical disagreement with stuff like this — boots, to me, imply protection, utterly contradicted by the open toe — but it does seem to satisfy one of my criteria for interesting footwear, which is “Can I imagine someone wearing this to XO, assuming XO were still open?” (Snarkists who question my urban-hipster credentials, and that should include all of you, are directed here.)

From left to right: Abigail Adams (John Adams, 2008, played by Laura Linney), and Joan Berkman (The Squid and the Whale, 2005, played by Laura Linney).

The thinking man’s sex symbol? How would I know?

Anyway, happy mumbleth birthday to Laura Linney.

Because some kind soul was asking for it, Marko explains the Writer’s Bump:

The Writer’s Bump is a little callus on the middle finger of the writing hand of someone who writes with a pen a lot. As people have largely switched to computers for composition, the Writer’s Bump has gradually been replaced by new professional trademarks: the Writer’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and the Writer’s Extra Thirty Pounds From Sitting On One’s Ass Near A Fridge All Day Long.

I must point out here that my desk and my fridge are more or less in opposite corners of the house. Then again, no one’s likely to accuse me of being a writer, either.

Now that insurance is supposed to cover mental-health disorders to essentially the same extent as it does other ailments, Megan McArdle has some doubts about the whole thing:

I am very sympathetic to the plight of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of the people who will tap the benefits are not severely ill people who need intensive care; they’re people who are unhappy. Unhappiness is not a condition for which psychotherapy, or antidepressants, have been shown to be very effective. (Severe clinical depression, yes. But contrary to the belief of people who felt awfully down the time their boyfriend left them, these two conditions are not the same thing.) Since the moderately unhappy and dissatisfied are much more prevalent than those with serious disorders, that’s most of what we’ll be paying for: someone to listen to complaints. That’s what Senators are supposed to be for.

On a more serious note, I feel like we could have achieved the laudable goal of ensuring that serious mental illnesses are not left untreated (at least, in cases where the patient wants to get treatment), without guaranteeing cheaper psychotherapy for America’s ennui-laden affluent classes. Of course, then we’d have to recognize the fact that this stuff has to be paid for, rather than pretending that benefits can somehow be magically generated for free with just a wave of the regulatory pen.

Laden with ennui as I am, I’m not anywhere near affluent, and I struggle with something that is more than mere unhappiness but perhaps less than clinical depression. (I know from clinical depression: I had it through most of the 1980s. It broke up two households, including one with only one person living in it, and landed me in the Home for the Bewildered for a month and a half.)

Treatment for this particular inchoate ailment consists of one tranq and ¾ to one full sleeping tablet, daily. Estimated costs before insurance: $1,000 a year. This will buy — what, five, maybe six sessions on the couch with Dr Sturmunddrang?

And besides, since when do Senators listen to complaints?

“Why,” asks the Hyacinth Girl, “do people insist on writing ridiculous sex scenes?”

I picked up my yearly copy of Cosmo this weekend — I love Anna Faris — and paged through what seemed to be acres of cheesy sex advice and attempted bawdy talk. First of all, girls don’t do sex talk well. We tend to giggle and shy away from the proper names of things. Anyway, the back pages are reserved for excerpts of romance novels, and being unfamiliar with that particular genre, I had to read it. I don’t understand how women read those things without laughing. All that talk of “his length” and “member” and “ravishing her” is just terrible. I’ve read good sex scenes and that ain’t it. I know that if I could only swallow (ha! ha! “swallow” — I’m a 16 year old boy at heart when it comes to these things) my pride, I could make a lot of money writing that crap.

Bad sex scenes, however, are hardly confined to the romance-novel genre. Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), a memoir of a fictional SS officer, contains this howler:

Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody.

It gets worse after that. The Literary Review was pleased, or at least amused, to present its seventeenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for this very passage. The list of previous winners suggests that mere romances don’t stand a chance against the furiously-awful concoctions of ostensibly “literary” fiction.

(For your further dining and dancing pleasure: An arbitrary list of the 25 Sexiest Novels, from 2006. I expect Steve Lackmeyer to have a coronary any moment now.)

Still, I wonder if Ol’ Remus has me pegged here:

Unless you are a scuba diver or a hunting guide, the wrist watch itself is less an item of utility than a piece of jewelry, akin to a gold-nibbed fountain pen and hand-laid paper when a laptop is near at hand.

But men will have their jewelry, be it an antique roadster, or a classic Winchester or a rangefinder Leica. Yes, we’re gadgeteers, and we’re irretrievably results-oriented, but results may be achieved in many ways. The roadster will get you where you’re going, the Winchester will get your game and the Leica will get the photograph. It’s not the what so much as the how. We can make assumptions about a man by, say, whether he has one fine leather chair or the dreaded matched set finished in naugahyde vinyl. Naugahyde is easier to clean, resists abrasion better, and doesn’t involve trading in the skins of animals. Either will keep his butt off the floor, but then, so does his toilet seat. The naugahyde man will wear a quartz watch, perhaps with “functions” like a light-up back or a tiny calculator. Every year or so he’ll take it to the mall where a minimum wage clerk will install a new battery for him.

Here’s where it gets weird. The living-room stuff is decent-quality cloth, but still ultimately cloth; the chair from which I do the computer stuff — and, for that matter, the seats in my car — are actually leather. (I assume that for cost-accounting purposes, there are non-leather portions that are not engaged in actual butt contact.) Then again, how often do I have to sit in the living room? (Or live in the sitting room?)

As for my watch, it’s one of those crummy 1980s digitals that Douglas Adams would have deplored. I do, however, know how to change its battery. And it just occurs to me: my car has an analog clock, and so does the room where the computer is.

So do I value my wrist less than I value my keister? Reclining minds want to know.

Well, yeah, I suppose Tilda Swinton does somehow look something like Conan O’Brien.

Sometimes. Not here:

Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore premiered last weekend at Sundance; it’s due to be released this June.

(With thanks to Vulture and New York.)

Tom Lehrer on the New Math, many years ago:

In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing, rather than to get the right answer.

Which these days apparently demands cultural sensitivity:

Teacher Jill Brody’s class started learning about Mayan math in September, part of the school’s efforts to incorporate “ethno-mathematics” into some of its classes.

Ethno-mathematics links math with culture. Some educators say it can help kids feel more connected to the subject and better understand the why and how behind the skills they learn in school.

One such educator is Hank Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics:

In many schools, there’s too much emphasis on testing, Kepner said. Getting the right answer is important, but that’s too narrow. “Math isn’t just rote answers without understanding,” he said.

To which Roxeanne de Luca replies:

Kepner would do well to explain how students can have a deep understanding of math and still manage to get the wrong answers. He should also indulge us with an explanation of how the universal language of math is in need of a cultural context.

I’ll take a stab at it.

• Children from some cultures do not score as high on standardized math tests as children from some other cultures;
• This can only be due to cultural bias deep within those tests;
• And we can’t have the children becoming despondent over test scores that can’t possibly be their fault, can we?

What’s more, this principle is infinitely extensible; you can even cover foreign-language study with it.

Lynn performs the analysis:

There is a certain movie formula which I’m sure has a name already but since I don’t know what it is I’m going to give it the somewhat clumsy acronym WAGD, for We’re All Gonna Die. (To be more accurate it should be We’re Trapped and We’re All Gonna Die but that would make a really terrible acronym.) In a WAGD movie a group of people is trapped somewhere — in a boat, a submarine, a plane, a space ship, a snowed-in ski resort — and something or someone is killing people one by one. These deaths generally follow a certain pattern, with some variation. The first two people to die are clearly expendable. They’re red-shirts — characters we never have a chance to get emotionally attached to. The third person to die is the black guy. Yes, sorry, that’s always the way it is. He might not always be literally the third but soon after the clearly-expendables have been killed, the black guy is going to get it. (Exception: If the black guy is played by a big name star he might have a chance.) He isn’t counted as just another one of the clearly-expendables because he is usually allowed a little character development. He is a nice guy and may have a useful skill which the other characters will miss. Next, any number of “Oh No He Can’t Die” characters will die, including a woman if there is more than one woman in the group. Finally, the last person to be killed is the one guy we really want to see get it — the dangerously stupid guy.

You know, this could almost turn into a drinking game.

Cue Titus Turner, Little Willie John, or any number of bluesmen:

If I don’t love you, baby
Grits ain’t groceries
Eggs ain’t poultry
And Mona Lisa was a man

The last of these, evidently, is under consideration:

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous portrait in the world, but now some are speculating that the woman with the inscrutable smile may not be a woman after all. They are suggesting that the Mona Lisa may be a self-portrait, da Vinci in drag.

Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, is undertaking the investigation. They think the artist who died in 1519 is buried at a French castle and plan to dig up his skull. Using CSI-style technology, they want to rebuild da Vinci’s face. Will he resemble the mysterious Mona Lisa?

While they’re at it, why don’t they see if he has extra arms and legs? Sheesh. Pass the grits.

(Via Fark.)

Today’s prehistory lesson:

Human beings transitioned gradually from hunter-gatherers, or people who wandered around picking up whatever was laying around to eat and occasionally procuring their own food. This group is also sometimes called “teenagers.”

Although they’re not legally permitted, these days anyway, to do this:

Dr. [Patrick] McGovern says — somehow or another they had learned that grains, mixed with moisture, did something that made drinking the resulting product a whole lot more interesting than drinking plain water. (It also made all of the members of the opposite sex more attractive, which could be another reason for the population boom. Which means the concept known as “beer goggles” may have developed long before we had the terminology to describe it.) The demand for this product was such that people settled down to be able to grow enough grain to meet it, and voila! Civilization!

Ben Franklin was available for comment.