Sorry for yesterday’s outage. I’m a lamentably tardy bill-payer, but steps have been taken so that it won’t happen again.

You haven’t seen puppets until you’ve seen Folkmanis puppets. If you’re not going to make your own artisan puppets, these are really the way to go. I really do think that there is some deep-down monkey brain connection to puppets. It’s amazing how quickly you can get someone to talk to or react to a puppet, even if they know how one works.

I’ve seen news about John Gottman‘s Relationship Research Institute for a while now. This week’s This American Life is about marriage, and includes a lengthy segment where he talks about his research into what makes happy couples different from unhappy couples. Once the stream is available, I hope somebody remembers to put a link to it here. It is, as Ira points out, very difficult to hear the discussions of and about happy couples without reflecting on one’s own relationships.

Artoyz products look really cool, but the site is taxing my French vocab. They’re expensive for toys, but cheap for art.

The Food Guide Pyramid is a good starting place for healthy eating, but the US Pyramid does not reflect other possible healthy eating patterns. Another flaw with many healthy diet outlines is the problem of confusing serving sizes, an issue which the Fillipinos have sidestepped nicely.

One of these days, the Elgin Marbles are probably going to be gone from the British Museum, but it’s seemed like that for a long time now. Everything old is new again.

A fridge for off-the-grid, or even for when you need a littler fridge than is available. I wonder if it works in humid places? Commentary on BoingBoing points out some Quaker and Amish predecessors.

I looked up two words today:
Modal: a sort of fabric which I had never heard of before I bought my new shirt and
Spinel: I got a reproduction of a ring that’s in the Museum of London. The ring originally set with a spinel, mine is set with a garnet.

FP urges you to skank away your troubles!

In 1999, there was some momentum to call a Kuiper-Belt object a Kuiper-Belt object, but sentiment prevailed. Not even a compromise was accepted. At least one renegade flouted the IAU’s ruling.
Now, the discovery of Sedna, beyond even the Kuiper Belt, again highlights the silliness of calling Pluto a planet, and gives us another chance to use consistent criteria for determining planet status.