Laura Miller is okay in my book. After considerable accolades from the blogosphere, Miller’s reviewed Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y in Salon.

New Yorker: “[Rich Little] promised to use mostly political material, though, along these lines: ‘They said we’re going to send jets to Israel this year, but what the hell would they do with a bunch of football players?’ Iraq jokes, however, are out. ‘I do have a funny line on that,’ he said, and he began to imitate the current President: ‘George W. Bush here. I tell you, I’m between I-raq and a hard place.'”

Matthew Tiffany may very well believe in the semiotic advantages of chickens, but I assure Mr. Tiffany that when this site undergoes its long neglected redesign, he may very well be outweirded. You have been warned, dear readers.

Scientific American: “Researchers at Dartmouth College may have the answer. They found that a default network of regions in the brain’s cortex—a grouping known to be active when the mind is completely unoccupied—is firing away as a person is engaged in routine activities. Malia Mason, now a postdoctoral researcher of neurocognition at Harvard Medical School, trained subjects in verbal and spatial memory tasks that after four days of continual repetition became quite banal—perfect conditions for thinking about something unassociated with the work at hand. In fact, subjects reported more daydreaming when performing the rehearsed sequences rather then when the tasks were tweaked slightly to introduce a novel stimulus requiring a bit more focus.”