Meet your new ocean.

Thursday!

* The First Rule of J-School Is You Don't Talk About J-School Debt.

* Nowhere in Manhattan. Hard to believe it is Manhattan. Via MeFi.

* Nnedi Okorafor has a nice guest post at Nebula on Africa and science fiction.

* The CEO of Whole Foods doesn't want us to have health care. OpenLeft doesn't want us to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Everyone at MetaFilter is mad at everyone.

* Top 10 Superhero Comics 2000-2009. I've read more of these than I would have expected, and can plug a bunch: All-Star Superman, Monster Society of Evil, New Frontier, Omega the Unknown, and Planetary are all worth reading in their own ways, as are some of the sillier Big Two offerings (I'll admit to being fond of Booster Gold). Y: The Last Man is good, too, but of course it doesn't really count. Via NeilAlien.

* Language and time. I found this interesting.

David Hauser and colleagues first showed that people with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them. You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it's now changed to Friday, then you're someone who thinks of themselves as moving through time, whilst if you think the meeting is now on Monday, then you're more passive, and you think about time passing you by.

I'm a Monday person for sure. I see can see why Ezra thinks it would be Friday, but it seems very unnatural to me to spatialize the week that way.

* And you can now tweet @Gliese581d.

Four more. Thanks to some Facebookers for the links.

* Exact date of Odysseus's return from Troy pinpointed. With this crucial question settled, no one need read The Odyssey ever again.

* How to write about Africa.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

* Congratulations to Morgan Ross, winner of the Harper's Ferry "Worst Love Poem" contest.

Your legs
undulate like two jellyfish tentacles,
moving freely in the ocean
that is your upper lip.

* A slave in Jefferson Davis's house was a Union spy. Great story. Dibs on the movie rights to this.

I have just a few Obama remainders from the last few days.

* First up, another edition of Veepwatch!, this one making a pretty strong claim for an Obama/Edwards ticket. I'm almost convinced—but the reality is that no one in an age of late-night comics is going to take the VP slot twice. The always-a-bridesmaid jokes write themselves, and as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail sagely reminds us in the comments to the Washington Montly post, Hunter S. Thompson was right when he said Americans hate voting for losers.

I really think we can believe Edwards when he says he doesn't want the job.

* VeepWatch! Jr.: The New York Review of Books reviews Jim Webb's A Time to Fight. Since I wrote about The Virginia Strategem earlier in the week I've been reminded that Virginia's Lt. Governor is a Republican, which all but takes Kaine out of the running and raises Webb's stock considerably, despite the unfortunate two-Senators aspect. Does anyone out there know what would happen if Webb steps down from the Senate to run for vice president? Does Kaine appoint, or is there a special election?

* Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services? The Shadow Cabinet grows...

* Speaking of kos, he's already made his first major self-inflicted wound of the general election season. Nearly made it 48 hours. Well done.

* Bob Dylan gushes over Barack Obama. So does George Lucas.

* Al Giordano at The Field gushes over the way Obama has already taken control of things at the DNC.

* And at TNR, the view from Africa.

We're in Wilmington tonight, on our way to South Carolina tomorrow to volunteer for the Obama campaign. So posting will be light all weekend. I wrote an article for the Indy this week on a new book about the African liberation movement, No Easy Victories—other than that I'll be back full-strength on Monday.

PS: This is utterly outrageous, and exactly what I was afraid might happen, though I thought it would take a little longer. (The Clintons must agree with this Kos diarist that Obama will have a big delegate take tomorrow.) The scorched-earth primary continues and continues...