Pouring hot liquids or metals, such as lead or gold, into the mouth of a victim was a practice used on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, by the Romans and the Spanish.

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Good to know.

NCBI ROFL: Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst.

So far I’ve heard nothing out of Washington which says to me that the White House has a plan for addressing long-term structural problems in terms of unemployment, capital flows, and interest rates. A lot of these problems have been around for many years, and most of them have been diagnosed sharply at one point or another by Larry Summers. So it’s not like Washington is oblivious to what’s going on. But we’re at the limits of what monetary policy is able to achieve, and the nation cannot afford to repeat the monster hit to the US fisc which we’ve seen over the past couple of years.

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A very pessimistic view from Felix Salmon.

Felix Salmon  » Blog Archive  » A global problem with no solution | Blogs |

The Diversity of Sesame Street »

My friend Charlton (a professor at NYU who specializes in race) has a nice piece about the diversity of Sesame Street:

Beyond being in sync with the racial realities of young children who have not yet been corrupted by their parents’ color-bound politics, Sesame Street modeled the kind of racial idealism we should continually strive for. In Sesame Street’s diverse neighborhood, characters always asked questions about why someone looked or acted differently than they did. Their questions were never returned with a north-directed middle finger or someone screaming, “ignorant!” The character was glad to answer the question and tell others about him or herself. I remember Oscar frequently being asked why he was green. Not complaining any more than usual, he was happy to point out that he’s not really green, but that he once took a dip in a muddy marsh and hadn’t taken a bath since.

Via: The Diversity of Sesame Street // NoahBrier.com

This afternoon, the small, family-owned pretzel company, Synders of Hanover, Penn., said it was scuttling its plans to acquire crosstown snack food maker Utz Quality Foods Inc. because it didn’t want to bare the cost of an escalating inquiry in into the deal by the Federal Trade Commission. According to Utz, the FTC had made a second request for information about its business.

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Whoa whoa, this is big news. I had no idea that Snyders was considering acquiring Utz. I don’t know how I feel about that. As a pretzel aficionado, Utz makes a better pretzel than Snyders. But Snyders has national distribution and Utz is only regional. So many things to think about. This is big news.

Protecting the Public from a Pretzel Monopoly - Deal Journal - WSJ

The phrase tweet-up infuriates me.

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— Phew. Glad I got that off my chest.