The Most Beautiful Hairbrush in the World.  This article gushing over a hairbrush might seem a little overblown – but only if you’ve never used a Mason Pearson hairbrush.

My parents still own and use the one that I remember from when I was little; they bought an extra in London in 1998 for an exorbitant sum, and that one is still going.  They also bought a mini one for me on that trip, which lasted until a couple of years ago, when I snapped the handle.  I had no qualms about paying 85-odd dollars for a replacement, because these brushes are made to last.  As McDonough points out, “If I calculated the cost per use of the Mason Pearson, it could actually be construed as a bargain.”  Like her, I carry my Mason Pearson with me everywhere, and it would be the thing I missed the most if my bag was stolen.

Hamlet (Facebook news feed edition).  “Hamlet became a fan of daggers.”

New York Times is still covering the Writers' Strike on the front page

Spotted today at newyorktimes.com: prominent coverage of the Hollywood Writers’ Strike… over five months after it finished.  I’m glad that the NYT can tell me how the strike will affect my favourite shows!

Are you Popular? The Family Life Institute of the University of Oklahoma tells it like it is to the youth of 1947.  Their hot tips?  Be clean, polite, and give a girl plenty of notice before a date so she has time to do her hair and nails.

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Monkey from Mars.

At the height of UFO hysteria then sweeping the nation, two young barbers and a butcher took a dead monkey in 1953, lopped off its tail and applied a liberal dose of hair remover and some green coloring to the carcass.

Then they left the primate on an isolated road north of Atlanta in the pre-dawn hours of July 8, 1953, burning a circle into the pavement with a blowtorch before a police officer came around the curve in his patrol car.

Out-of-context eating.  Extends the “is it ok to eat on public transport” debate into other areas; the post itself is hilarious, but the really cringe-worthy stuff comes in the comments, starting with this one: “I once saw someone open a microwave popcorn bag for their child during Mass.”

This tenuously comes under the category of inappropriate eating/feeding: a woman breastfeeding her baby in a lecture at uni.  She couldn’t have been five minutes late for the class?

I’m quickly discovering that Wordle is an excellent procrastination device.  Here’s another one created with a West Wing script – this time the last episode of season 1, What Kind Of Day Has It Been.

Wordle is lots of fun!  Because I’m probably the only one who would ever be interested in word art created from my essays, here’s one I made with the script of the West Wing episode ‘Two Cathedrals‘ (click to embiggen).

Senate Votes to Privatize its Failing Restaurants.  Apparently the Senate Restaurants have only turned a profit in seven of of their 44 years in business.  “In the past 10 years, only 20 new items have been added to the Senate menus.”  They only just got sushi!

I swear, the Longworth Cafeteria was one of the highlights of my time working on Capitol Hill (on the House side) earlier in the year.  The choices!  The International Food counter!  The cheap cheap prices!  And all the containers were biodegradable.  I got a packed lunch once on the Senate side, at a briefing, and it was terrible.  A packed lunch at a briefing on the House side was something to celebrate – a huge roll, little container of pasta salad (with fetta and pesto!), cookie (the oatmeal and raisin ones were incredible), an apple, packet of chips… so good.

So disturbing, in so many ways.