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.