Category: Today’s Report

Turns out that Google is behind that NORAD Santa Tracker site. Explains how NORAD could scale up to deliver all that data for one night of the year. NY Times: Bread of Life, Baked in Rhode Island. How one small family-run company ended up with 80% of the communion wafer market.

Slate: Lie Down Singing. An appreciation for Rise Up Singing as a lullaby / family songbook. Slate: Bethlehem Does Broadway. “The fierce competition and high cost of children’s Christmas pageants.”

Strange Maps: West Virginia Hot Dog Map. Apparently Slaw Dogs are some sort of West Virginia specialty. I’ve been around folks from West Virginia my whole life and this is the first I’ve ever heard of such a thing. Slate: The Man Who Told A Christmas Story. An appreciation of Jean Shepherd by Donald Fagen…

Dapperstache: The Periodic Table of Awesoments. Ned: While this table’s contents reminded me very much of you, linking to this does not mean that I endorse any of the listed items! I’ve been watching videos from the TED conference while I eat my lunch. Here are some excellent ones: Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?…

Gever Tully: 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. Here’s Gever’s blog. Related: Free Range Kids

WaPo: Kids Fuse Legos and Robotics at Competition. This is the organization that’s running this: The FIRST LEGO League. The challenge this year is “Climate Connections” and the tasks this year all center around this. The FLL is the grade-school (up to age 14) version of the FIRST Robotics League (ages 14-18). Here’s what appears…

Volokh: Super funny response to a crazy court ruling. Time: Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High. Later, there was a bunch of backtracking on this story, such as whether there ever really was a “pact” or if there was some sort of agreement what it actually was about.

WSJ: Groom More Nerds. Read the comments, too. Nobody bitter there at all…

Cleveland Foodie: About the new restaurant Luxe over at 65th/Detroit area. Cleveland Foodie: There’s some good recipes in this one, including Lolita’s beets. Ruhlman: On mayonnaise.