Even this close to Christmas, you have to make time for a little hot rodding.

It cries out for a caption contest, doesn't it? The WSJ  (Google link here ) reports on a desperate need: Frustrated by the dearth...

Home of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Christian Quarter is both like and unlike the other quarters of the city.   The Jerusal...

The stone walls of Jerusalem were built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. The Zion Gate is near the room of the Last Suppe...

...as told by the tourist guidebooks in a hotel in Jerusalem. It's not wrong , but how mysterious that explanation must seem if you d...

An amusing poem from The Heretic's Mirror : Every Scylding in Heorot liked mead a lot, But Grendel the beast, roaring outside did not....

I like to work on tiny things. Here's a guy with an obsession that puts mine to shame, and on a huge scale, too.  He reminds me o...

You know you've arrived on the national progressive scene when your impassioned plea to be excused from final exams at Harvard Law Scho...

My friend's pianist son has finally started college, in the music department of our alma mater.  He's an intense and self-conscious ...

Perhaps inspired by the Williams-Sonoma catalogue rant, Cassandra sent me this mission statement from an artisanal attorney .  I think I...

Roman-era Mosaic from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I am still in Jerusalem.  Today I heard a Latin Mass sung in a stone church by...

Have you noticed that, ever since we got an Ebola Czar, the disease has practically disappeared from the news?  From the American news, anyw...

Beginning a roundup of Saturday Rocket Science links: Since the turn of the millennium, worldwide deaths from malaria have been cut almos...

It's not easy to tell what all these clowns are arguing about.  The gist seems to be that the leadership of both chambers of Congress, w...

Forget everything you've been reading about the unacceptable cost of avoiding a government shutdown.  The really big deal is the impact ...

Fun with cartography .

Admittedly this parlor trick wouldn't scale up well in the field of public transport, unless copper were available by the mountainful f...

NSFW, so I won't quote it here, but if you're as crudely immune to all notions of propriety as I am, you'll enjoy this .  I'...

The man who would become novelist Patrick O'Brian was born 100 years ago today.  The WSJ ran a short piece that perfectly captures the ...

Elizabeth Holmes , the world's youngest female self-made billionaire (at age 30), is the developer and majority owner of a $9 billion co...