WP: Questing Beast

"The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant (Barking Beast), is a monster from Arthurian legend. It is the subject of quests undertaken by famous knights such as King Pellinore, Sir Palamedes, and Sir Percival."

Monkey down

Ran across this comic, combining the recent political goings-on with the late monkey attack.   Good for a laugh.

Oops.

An excellent hour of radio from Radiolab.   Several stories around the theme of unintended consequences.   From the episode description:

You come up with a great idea. You devise a plan. You control for every imaginable variable. And once everything’s in place, the train hops your carefully laid tracks. In this episode, one psychologist's zeal to safeguard national security may have created a terrorist, while one community's efforts to protect an endangered bird had deadly consequences. And against all odds, a toxic lake spawns new life.

Link...

Cognitive Surplus

A devastating infographic comparing TV-watching time to the time it took to build one of the most useful things ever made.

Satire & the Bible

An interview with Douglas Wilson:

GH: Still, many Christians think that satire is inherently risky. How can it glorify God?

DW: By lampooning that which does not glorify God. Paul says knowledge puffs up, and when something is puffed up, what you need is a good, sharp pin. When someone applies the pinprick to the balloon of self-important knowledge, the balloon explodes! That glorifies God because the puffed-up knowledge was in defiance of God.

Full interview transcript...

WP: Chiefess Kapiolani

"High Chiefess Kapi'olani (c. 1781–1841) was an important member of the Hawaiian nobility at the time of the founding of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the arrival of Christian missionaries. One of the first Hawaiians to read and write and sponsor a church, she made a dramatic display of her new faith which made her the subject of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson."