If anything made it necessary for Robin to curb his allegiance to the now-deprecated Bloglines RSS reader, it’s this. GReader recognizes the immortal Contra cheat code.

Infocult flags a nice haunted house story posted in Craigslist’s rentals section.

I guest-posted over at my friend Margaret’s photoblog this morning.

At the end of that last session, I got to ask my question, which was sort of a continuation of the train of thought begun in this post.

So to sum up the session, five people from Newspaperland spent an hour in somewhat gross adulation of The Newspaper. They each began their remarks with an earnest tale of how they became swept up in the newspaper biz, and concluded by bemoaning the misfortunes that have befallen their beloved industry. And then, goaded on by the moderator, each panelist discoursed at length on such thrilling topics as “Why everyone should give money to a newspaper” and “Why reporters should get paid more.”

When we finally got to the question-and-answer part of the session, I asked, “What do we mean when we talk about ‘saving The Newspaper’?” A newspaper is actually a collection of rather disparate things, I pointed out. And I inferred from the panelists’ remarks that some of The Newspaper’s contents seem more urgent candidates for salvation than others.

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“What are some mindblowing scientific concepts (proven or hypothetical)?” asks a poster on Ask MeFi. Culled from among these answers is this gem, a quotation from Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet:

“I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me,of us,no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to be one with many. Some of these personal microscopic biota are dangerous to the me who is writing this sentence; they are held in check for now by the measures of the coordinated symphony of all the others, human cells and not, that make the conscious me possible. I love that when

Kevin Connolly was born without legs, a fact which causes some folks to stare. (He’s also hot, which can’t hurt.) He generally gets around on a skateboard, riding close to the street, from which vantage point he often draws stares from curious passers-by. One day, he started taking photos of the spectators. He ended up with 32,000 photos in all, which he’s edited into a collection he calls “The Rolling Exhibition.”

Things flags the website book530.com, where one can purchase hand-painted replicas of renowned oil paintings on the cheap. It’s one of many “art factories” in Dafen, China:

“We divide up the colors among us,” said Zeng, working his way briskly along a line of 10 identical contemporary-style paintings, applying a stripe of brown, while a teenage partner worked on the red. Surrounded by dozens more identical pieces at the sprawling Artlover factory, he explained: “By dividing up the work, contrasting colors stay clearest.”