Mind Games

Unrelated to anything, but still wonderful: the newest Improv Everywhere mission, in which they threw a wedding reception for a newly married couple they didn't even know. Some of their little surprises have been misguided (they once threw a birthday party for some random guy in a bar and it didn't really go well), but this is utterly enchanting. If reading about it and watching the video doesn't make you grin like an idiot, well, I don't even know how your brain works.

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Also unrelated to anything, but also wonderful: This Slate.com review of a book that postulates that the cooking of food spurred the evolution of humanity. The skeleton of the idea isn't novel--it's pretty clear that you can generally get more nutrition from cooked food than from raw--but it's the flesh that's amazing and thought-provoking: the author thinks that the ancestors of humans started cooking almost two million years ago, and that the ability to extract more nutrition from less food is what spurred the development of our big brains and everything that came from that evolutionary novelty. I probably have to read this book now (it's in my Amazon.ca cart), but I think the Slate review gives a pretty good overview.

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And in my usual line of interest, and also from Slate, this sentence from a review of the highly regarded new TV show "Nurse Jackie":

Then she jokes about her bad back and rattles the last pill bottle in her orange bottle.

Dr. Proofreader to the ER, stat!