Midday links.

* MTV cut down a rainforest to film a series of the world's most trivial show, Road Rules/Real Word Challenge.

* Will the collapse of the financial markets delay professorial retirements and thereby destroy my chances of tenured employment? Phil Gramm will pay for this.

* The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with Sesame Street in a desperate bid to completely evacuate its last shred of credibility. Godspeed.

* The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

* That one was a joke, but the NEH has announced grants of $25,000 for the development of multidisciplinary courses on the "Enduring Questions."

* Toronto may ban the coffee cup, or else tax it into oblivion.

* 'Showdown or Shutdown at the Star-Ledger.' Who mourns for Northern New Jersey's finest journalistic institution?

* A brief history of the Cylons.

Teasers for the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica at Ain't It Cool News and io9.

Via Boing Boing, how to spot a Cylon.

Do they ask questions about classified subjects?

Do they seem unusually strong, smart or self-assured?

Do they say God instead of Gods?

Have you seen them before, but you know it's not the same person?

Do you see them hanging around secured or restricted areas?

Do they seem to hear music that no one else can hear?

Do they seem unusually fearless, as if death has no meaning for them?

Do they exhibit sociopathic behavior around other humans, especially defenseless children?

Are they unusually adept, almost empathic, with machines?

Does their spine glow red when they get... excited?