• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — who is anti-immigration and has cut public education funding — tweeted this yesterday: “It’s hard to believe that it has been 505 years since the first settlers arrived at Jamestown.”
• We owe a debt of gratitude to the folks at Consumer Reports for testing and evaluating the many, many products that claim to repel mosquitoes. They literally have skin in the game here:
Their top picks are two products without DEET — the nasty poison that works against mosquitoes, but isn’t very good for us. The all-natural crunchy plant-extract products, alas, didn’t really do much. And, sorry, but neither does Avon’s Skin So Soft.
As always, your best bet if you’ll be sitting outside in one place is to get a big ol’ fan. Don’t worry if it blows out your citronella candles. Mosquitoes don’t care about citronella, but they won’t fly into the headwind created by a simple fan even on a low setting.
• RIP William Zinsser, who taught so many of us to write weller.
• Scientists for the Dawn Mission now say that the mysterious bright spots on the asteroid Ceres are “due to the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice.”
That doesn’t mean my theory of crashed alien spaceships is wrong — just that those alien spaceships might be made out of ice.
• A big Hasselhoffian thumbs-up for the endless Tumblr “Congrats, you have an all-male panel!”
See earlier: “A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase Out All-Male Panels at [Church] Conferences” and “A scientist sets an example for the church.”
• Congratulations to Bill Lindsey and his husband Steve on their anniversary! It’s hard to believe it’s been 505 years since they got married last spring.
• Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is channeling his inner Sketch Erickson. Sketch was the fundie anti-rock “evangelist” I remember with an absurd fondness for his obsessive ability to trace all social ills back to the Satanic birth of rock and roll in the person of “Elvis. Aron. Presley.” For old Sketch, it was always about the danger of “race music” corrupting our wholesome [white] Christian youth, and talking about Elvis was his way of saying that without sounding quite as explicitly racist. O’Reilly slightly updates the same shtick by talking about “the rap industry” instead.
Somehow, O’Reilly’s contention that “the rap industry” is responsible for the decline of white American Christianity makes me want to play this:
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