More bad news for publishing, but it seems to me that when one door closes, someone opens a window.

Pirate Party MEP proposes ‘Internet Bill of Rights’

The most merciful thing in the world

Perhaps the most famous of H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling SciFi stories, The Call of Cthulhu (full text here) hooks you from the first line:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Ron Paul legislation to audit the Fed goes to the House floor (finally)

“… and I had played with magic.”

This is a passage from Norman Mailer’s third novel, The Deer Park. It takes place after Sergius’s first liaison with the beautiful actress Lulu in Desert D’Or, Hollywood’s secluded party resort:

“With the dawn spreading out from me until it seemed to touch the Yacht Club with its light, I began to think of those mornings when I was out on a flight which started in the darkness of the hangars, the syrup of coffee on my tongue, the blast of my plane flaring two long fires into the night. We would take off an hour before dawn, and when morning came to meet us five miles high in the air with the night clouds warmed by a gold and silver light, I used to believe I could control the changes of the sky by a sway of my body as it was swelled by the power of the plane, and I had played with magic. For it was magic to fly an airplane; it was a gimmick and a drug. We knew that no matter what happened on ground, no matter how little or confusing we ourselves could be, there would always come those hours when we were alone in formation and on top of life, and so the magic was in the flight and the flight made us very cool, you know? and there was nothing which could happen once we were down which could not be fixed when the night went into the west and we ganged after it on our wings.

I had been careful to forget all of this, I had liked it too much, and it had not been easy to think that I would probably never have any magic again; but on this dawn with the taste of Lulu still teasing me, I knew that I could have something else, and I could be sad for those airplanes I deserted because there was something to take their place.”

Ruper Murdoch: Journalism and Freedom More on the future of journalism and the news industry from murdoch himself.

Palin Goes Birther and what does “left” really mean in American politics, anyways?

Island holds reconciliation for eating missionary to lift curse

Should this man be able to fly on a plane? “Excuse me, sir? You need to sit in the middle so the airplane doesn’t lean to one side. Thank you so much,” said the flight attendant.