A story in the Christian Science Monitor about Chhewang Norphel, a seventy-something Indian man who builds artificial glaciers.

The idea is simple: Divert the unneeded autumn and winter runoff into a series of large, rock-lined holding ponds. As the days grow colder, the ponds freeze and interconnect into a growing glacier.

h/t Kottke

Just one entry from Oscar Wilde’s 1894 list of advice for successful young people, entitled “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”.

“Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us.”

Here’s how you know you’re in too deep: you find yourself nodding as Robert Coll earnestly compares Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder to Robert Mugabe:

I can hardly give up on the Redskins; but like many other oppressed peoples worldwide, I can at least fall back into exile and await regime change.

It’s a cold day in Iceland. The collapse of the krona, the country’s national currency, has led to the unthinkable: McDonald’s is pulling out.

To be fair, there are only three such establishments in the entire country. And they’ve only been there since 1993. But one can’t help but wonder if McDonald’s—paragon of globalization run amok!—has ever given up ground before.

First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other—a geological eyeblink. Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active. Or, to put it another way, what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.