My favorite Bloggess posts are are almost always the ones that involve Victor: It Kind of Feels Like a Hollow Victory.

Wow, now THAT is standing behind your product!

Texas Armoring Corporation (TAC), was tired of customers asking if his company’s bullet-resistant glass in its armored cars actually resisted bullets. So the CEO asked his employee to shoot at him with an AK-47.

In celebration of Girl Scout cookies' imminent arrival, a chart. I am thinking perhaps they forgot to include my own Samoas consumption, surely it is enough to edge out Thin Mints?

Great color (!) photographs of life in NYC in the 40s. I find when I think about the past I picture it in black-and-white or otherwise not-like-it-is-now, so I love being jarred out of that thinking.

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?. "There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students' senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union."

The Long Autumn of Roger Federer. "He’s still good enough to win any tournament he enters, but he’s always surrounded by that vague sadness, the result of his no longer being free from time. He’s become something like the world’s leading practitioner of mortality as a tactical position."

Brodie Smith’s Frisbee Trick Shots.

In Defense of Distraction. "I keep returning to the parable of Einstein and Lennon—the great historical geniuses hypothetically ruined by modern distraction. What made both men’s achievements so groundbreaking, though, was that they did something modern technology is getting increasingly better at allowing us to do: They very powerfully linked and synthesized things that had previously been unlinked—Newtonian gravity and particle physics, rock and blues and folk and doo-wop and bubblegum pop and psychedelia." Good, thoughtful piece on a subject that’s been getting a lot of ink.

The Knuckle trailer makes me want to see it:

About that Failed Stimulus…. You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a Fact by Richard Dawkins. Nobody can give a good evolution rant like Dawkins.

The Devil and John Holmes. I knew he was a porn star, but somehow missed the mass murder ties.