Slumberland

So, I haven’t really been around for a while. I decided I just needed to take a break. I haven’t been blogging or reading blogs, so if anything particularly newsworthy happened to any of you, I’m sorry, I probably missed it.

Nothing serious happened, really — I just wrote a paper, and when I was done, it was like my brain completely shut off for a couple of weeks as far as writing is concerned.

The paper in question is my final course paper in my MA program. So it’s a milestone. But I still have a thesis to write and a lot of red tape to get through, so don’t congratulate me yet!

A professor at WSU has put together Nuke Pop, an exploration of nuclear war themes in popular culture, from comic books to candy wrappers. Very interesting material.

While browsing through his site, I found another fascinating item — Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, a lengthy exploration of fiction about nuclear apocalypse. It includes a massive bibliography, too. I recommend it for any fans of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction.

Soup mix in a flavor that is, um, unfortunately named.

(I suppose it’s not fair to point this out in an obviously foreign package. But it’s too funny not to.)

Not to be all Slate on you today, but this is pretty darned funny — From Falsies to Polyurethane, a slide-show of patented breast augmentation inventions since 1858.

“An earlier beauty book titled The Ugly Girl Papers discouraged Irish maids from trying to develop their charges’ breasts by fondling them.”

Uh, yeah.

“The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks.”

It’s typically thought that such stereotypical “black names” are a negative in the job market, and that bearers of such names aren’t as successful in life as those with “white names.” Apparently, the data doesn’t quite back this up. It’s true that a “deShawn” will do worse than a “John”, but the studies seem to show that the name isn’t the cause.