I fought vacation and the vacation won

We’re still on vacation, having lots of fun. So much, in fact, that my plans to keep posting regularly—well, as you can doubtless deduce from the lack of any posts in four days, the plan had some flaws. Not that I’m complaining (details and photos of fun—all G-rated, don’t worry—to follow).
So anyway, here’s one article I meant to post sooner, covering various odds and ends
Ronald Reagan’s stories were often fact-free. But his claims of a welfare queen who drove a Cadillac and collected more than $100,000 a year in welfare were true. She was a white woman, Linda Taylor, and her tale is an amazing read.
•Cable companies keep adding channels but our viewing isn’t increasing.
•You may have heard of Phineas Gage, a 19th century man who suffered a brain injury that transformed his personality. It turns out the truth is much more complicated and uncertain.
•In the one episode of Cosmos that I caught a while back, Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes a passing reference to Bishop Ussher, infamous for having calculated the creation of the world at 4004 BC. Tyson held Ussher up (or so it seemed to me) as a typical example of misguided prescientific thinking about the world. As the late Stephen Jay Gould has written, there’s more to Ussher than that. In the first place, he wasn’t trying to calculate the exact date of creation, he was trying to write the history of the human race—which in his worldview was only six days short of the history of the world. Not only that, but calculating the date was extremely complicated due to the complexities of the Old Testament’s history. One of the things I like about Gould is that he’s willing to put thinkers such as Ussher into the context of their own worldview.
•Conservative bloggers and pundits proclaim the Hobby Lobby decision is a victory for religion, hard-working business owners and people who hate women who like sex.
•A black student-body president mocks her white classmates as stereotypical preppies. Hilarity does not ensue, at least not as far as the white students are concerned.
•MIT is working on a ring that can translate non-braille texts for the blind.
•The porn company Malibu’s new tactic in pursuing alleged copyright-violating pirates: Ask them about their porn viewing habits, even if it’s not pirated or produced by the company.
•Novelist Saul Bellow’s son Adam complains there are no programs for funding conservative literary magazines, fellowships and start-ups, only for mainstream writers. Won’t wealthy conservatives open their wallets and support conservative art that can’t make it in the free market? I suppose it comes as no surprise that Bellow is involved in at least one such project.