As you can see it's a little bit hectic this week. A few links:

* I've got another review in the Indy this week, this one about an upcoming fiction anthology on bad breakups.

* Five things you didn't know about District 9.

The District 9 alien homes were actually shot in a recently evacuated area of impoverished housing. The homes you see the aliens getting evicted from were homes that humans had recently been kicked out of, for real.

* The latest hints from the White House suggest that they have finally realized that Republicans are not negotiating in good faith and that Democrats will have to go it alone. This, combined with the fervor over the no-public-option trial balloon and the subsequent back-peddling, are good reason for optimism. Here's one way it might happen.

* 'Whole Foods under financial pressure.'

* Quentin Tarantino, Socrates in a dive bar.

'Why Chicks Cry': an exhaustive look at sexism and romance comics from the 1950s and '60s. Via MeFi.

Thursday Night Links 2.

* Nate Silver crunches some more numbers, this time on the environmental indifference point.



* Neoconservatives against American soccer. More from Matt Yglesias.

* When will the MSM force Obama to take responsibility for what he did to Mark Sanford's marriage?

* On a more serious note, Larval Subjects has a nice rant on a subject I touched on earlier, namely the ugliness of the media's silly obsession with the details of Mark Sanford's love life and in particular Olbermann's insufferable behavior on his show last night.

* AmericaBlog has an idea for some political hardball: bring the DOMA repeal up for a vote this week.

* Neo-Whorfianism: How does language shape the way we think? Via MeFi.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

One of my favorite obscure writers is about to become a lost less obscure; Wells Tower's first collection of short stories is coming out after a too-long wait. I've taught Towers's Viking-flavored story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" a few times and I appreciate it more each time I read it. Knowing nothing about the circumstances of its writing beyond its original publication date (2002), I see it as one of the great fictional commentaries on the psychic state of post-9/11 America. The ending, still, just kills me.

Purist that I am, I'll quote the original version here behind a [+/-], which I think is better than the book's slightly modified version. But don't read it until you've read the whole thing, or unless you're existentially certain you never will.

Where had the good times gone? I didn't know, but when Pila and me had our little twins and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, but you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sound of men rowing toward your home.

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.

Monday links.

* I have only the deepest feeling of solidarity for the members of my generational cohort who are struggling with student debt. And I'm not saying my hurt feelings should form the basis for national policy. But I have to confess that on a purely emotive level I will be pretty royally pissed if this whole "forgive student debt" movement somehow manages to get off the ground. I'm very conflicted about it: forgiving student debt would help a whole lot of people, including close friends and family, and would really cost me nothing but regret. I am not incognizant of my privilege or my luck, nor I am unhappy with where my choices have taken me—but on a basic, visceral level, I'd feel cheated, and I know I wouldn't be alone.

* And speaking of other people's poor life choices: WTFSalon?

* Grouches of the world, unite.



* Identical Twins Escape Death Penalty With "Evil Twin Defense." I'm 95% certain this is just viral marketing for the Arrested Development movie.

* How to survive a B-movie.

* How much would it cost to build the Death Star? (last two via Gravity Lens)

* And your world in charts: this recession isn't like the others.

I Wish I Were the Moon is a lovely microgame in the mold of I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors said to be inspired by the Italo Calvino story "The Distance to the Moon." Here's a walkthrough if you find you can't crack the last ending. Via Backwards City of all places.

Everybody and their mother is gushing over this profile of a young Barack and Michelle Obama in The New Yorker. I am no different.

xkcd nails every teenage nerd's dating strategy. Rest in peace, Gerry 1992-99.

One day in the summer of 1971, my parents held hands, closed their eyes and jumped out of their conventional marriage into something strange and new. I was 9 years old at the time, and we were camping at Betsy Lake in the High Unitas Wilderness with another family of five. We were halfway into the camping trip when the six of us kids realized our parents had mixed and matched: My father was in the tent with their mother, and their father was in the tent with my mother.

Laird Harrison at Salon has an interesting article about life inside a polyamorous group marriage.

“Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”

Using the Eliot Spitzer story as his hook, Philip Weiss takes on love, marriage, cheating, and divorce in New York Magazine, against wise counsel: You can go against it in life, but don’t speak against it. The article has a lot of anecdotes masquerading as data, but I was struck by details such as this one:

Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by.

Of course it rather quickly descends into an if only... if only... dream of free-love sextopia, but these things always do.

Via MeFi.

Mildred Loving of the world's most perfectly named court case, Loving v. Virginia, has died.

If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know "it's only rock and roll"...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, "Phantom" Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin', pants droppin', earth shockin', hard rockin', booty shakin', love makin', heart breakin', soul cryin'... and, yes, death defyin' legendary E Street Band.

The front page of brucespringsteen.net has Bruce's obituary for Phantom Dan Federici.

Science Wednesday:

* Love makes teenagers act insane.

* Science fiction stories are occasionally inaccurate.

* Scientists have discovered that dust takes on some properties of living organisms in space.

* Abolish the SAT? It may sound like a pretty good idea until you notice who wrote the article and who published it.

Sometimes love is easy, sometimes it is hard, and sometimes a spurned man throws acid in his lady's face—and she marries him anyway.