winter

 Winter's here, but you wouldn't know it by the non-existent snow in Minneapolis. (I don't even wear a coat to work yet.) Anyway, I made this Winter Poetry application today. If I were really good, you'd be able to save your poems and send them to friends, but, well, that would take days and days of work, which I ain't got right now.

 Saddam Hussein is publishing his second romance novel. The first one doesn't appear to have been translated into English. Now, wouldn't this be the ultimate career-starter for a budding Arabic-English translator?

 This is the craziest story I've read in a long time. A 28-year-old Japanese woman mysteriously dies trying to find Fargo. (This may be the first and last time I get to link to the Bismarck Tribune.)

 In college, we devised our own rules for Scrabble, in which we gave points for words that were completely made up but should probably be words anyway. That reminds me of A Dictionary of Words, a blog where people post fake, imaginary, and invented words and definitions.

 Amazon.com buys Egghead.com (and the internet community strains to remember what Egghead.com did).

 Nice Year in Review from Shift.

 Michael Bloomberg paid $92.60 per vote.

 Music scribe Robert Christgau has a website.

 And finally, I had no idea that bin Laden is hiding in an MC Escher painting. (An aside: the Art Test tells me that if I were a painting, I'd be Escher's Lizards. Et vous?)