Gaze into your Internet box and behold the miscellany of oddities collected for you today:

Here’s a little piece of mine (“estimated reading time 2:51”) that had its start here at IHE, as so many things have. I’ve tried it in various forms: A poem that never went, a list in McSweeney’s Books’ Mountain Man Dance Moves, and now creative nonfiction at Opium Magazine’s website. (Is somebody tracking the rise of Opium and the rest of its founder’s empire, including the multinational reading-games called Literary Death Matches?)

A new interview with me has been posted at ForeWord Reviews.

My acquaintance Crazy Larry, who quit his job as a mid-level IT manager at a prestigious private university to return to his first love, acting, once just missed being cast as Abraham Lincoln. Another time he nearly got a voiceover gig in a Lincoln documentary. He watches this sort of thing avidly. I like the guy with the mole.

My dear sister, whose birthday it was yesterday, sent my kids a gift of a link to this website, knowing they’re as interested in the sea as their former-diver dad. Watch to the end; the octopus is amazing.

One part of the thorny issue of underqualified admissions at the University of Illinois will soon be resolved, the governor said a little while after this article was posted today: President White will resign from the University of Illinois. White, who was trained as an ethicist, says, “Ethical issues never come with a neon sign that says, ‘Attention President White’…This has been a difficult experience, a powerful learning experience, and I will write about it.”

Finally, take a glance at the horrific name of the children’s drink shown here. I think advertising majors need to take a couple of poetry classes in the course of their degrees, so they understand connotation when branding products. Evidently the pregnant-looking Mr. Kool-Aid is about to give birth to something, but whatever it is I'm not letting my kids have it. Maybe the Medical School could use it for training.