Why did Franklin want to make the turkey the national bird? There has been a massive coverup by historians, extending over 200 years and perpetrated in the name of some wrongheaded notion of morality, or of keeping our founding demigods safely sexless. The fact is that Franklin married a turkey and fathered eleven part-poultry children. The mixed-species children were known collectively as Franklin’s poultroons….
– James Donnelly

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image via The Arrow

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Duly quoted (Thanksgiving edition)

I studied comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where this picture was taken in 1930. It shows the Ingenues, “an all-girls band and vaudeville act,” serenading milk cows as part of an experiment to see if they would produce more milk (the cows, I mean).

I admit I like cheese, but I’m still not fond of cows, which are a grotesque example of genetic engineering, far removed from anything found in nature. They trample and destroy vegetation along streamsides. They ruin hiking trails by planting thistles and weads, not to mention cowpies. Cow farts and belches are depleting the ozone layer.

Wisconsin calls itself “the dairy state,” and an anagram for “Wisconsin” is “sin in cows.” Man, this takes me back.

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Photo by the aptly named Angus B. McVicar, from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s photostream.

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Photo Wednesday: Bringing it all back home

In the beginning all was sunbeams and roses for this young Turkish couple. But then things started to go bad, and get worse, and finally they separated. A flurry of e-mail incriminations followed, and finally Ramazan in frustration complained to Emine, “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments.”

Unfortunately, Emine’s cellphone didn’t have available the dotless i character that was needed to properly read Ramazan’s s_‘k_‘s_‘nca(run out of arguments); instead, she read the word in his message as sikisince, forming the sentence “You change the topic every time they fuck you.”

And that’s the message Emine showed to her father, who immediately called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. When Ramazan hurried over to apologize, he met an entire family armed with sharpened knives. Ramazan was seriously wounded, but he struck back, killing Emine; later, he committed suicide in jail.

See, typography matters.

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via Gizmodo
(image borrowed from this page)

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Better dot those i’s and cross those t’s!

Or does art just happen to resemble death?

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Novelist, Murderer?

Orwellian Evening Standard article on surveillance cameras around Orwell’s home via exploding aardvark

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Orwell Saw the Writing on the Wall

Not much sign of it in this Newsweek poll. Among its findings:

• Nearly half of all Americans believe that evolution is not well supported by evidence and is not widely accepted within the scientific community (despite numerous expressions of scientific support from Nobel Prize winners, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Science, the American Geological Institute, and many others)
• The same percentage (and nearly three-quarters of evangelical protestants) believe God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years (in other words, they were created more recently than many known human artifacts — I mean, even freaking Fox News acknowledges that).

To accommodate this kind of information I’ve added the a new blog category called “sigh.”

Where (and How) Evolution is Taught in the U.S.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Are We Evolving?