Tupac is still upper-class

1. Got a stalker? Carry a stealth pepper spray cellphone!
   
   
2. Here's another reason to be terrified of birds: you can get eye cancer from them. Not that psittacosis was a fun disease to start with, but this is really icky.
   
   
3. William & Mary College has posted a delightfully contorted letter defining their reasons for keeping their team nickname "Tribe". As Veronica Geng once said, I love the sound of anxiety being rationalized. (via Bobby Isosceles). Personally I'd settle for a ban on "tribal tattoos" and a good caning for anyone who uses the word as a noun, as in "the dude had a tribal on his arm". What the fuck is a "tribal"? Which tribe? Cherokee? The Jews? BOO-Yaa?
   
   
4. Not only do I dislike the principles behind the Amy Foundation Writing Awards, I really really really wish they wouldn't use "disciple" as a verb.
   
   
5. I don't much care to hear that our nuclear bombers are getting an "unsatisfactory" on their report cards.
   
   
6. Wow, I can date a WHAT? (Thanks, exploding aardvark!)
   
   
7. So, we, like, dumped a bunch of chemical weapons? In the ocean? Until 1972 or so? And they're totally, like coming up on shore now? (Thanks again, vark!)
   
   
8. Local alert: does anyone else know this Italian market/deli in Tustin? I just read a good review of it on the interweb and I like me some Italian sandwich.

Eagerly awaited preorder: The Book of Imaginary Beings

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges, Peter Sis (Illustrator), Andrew Hurley (translator).

Borges is one of my favorite writers. Hyperintelligent, funny, bizarre, fantastic without being self-indulgent, cryptic without being annoying, calm. civilized, and an obsessive craftsman of words. I want to learn Argentine Spanish just to read him in the original, sometimes.

This work is a compendium of 116 imaginary beings from myths and stories, some well-known and others deeply obscure, some from traditions and others from more recent authors. It's almost literally magical to me. If you don't have the cash or the interest to buy it, there's a nicely done web interpretation of the book. A sample: The Eater of the Dead.

From Flickr's "It's All Wrong" photo pool

The original poster's caption reads:

The sad thing about this photos is not the grotesque tattoos but the fact that the guy was so drunk when he fell asleep that he placed his beer can upside down causing the contents to spill away and thus depriving him of a ready breakfast.

From It's All Wrong, which is spotty but occasionally very good.