Motus Mentis

Time for more Shameless Filler.

First: reader JK sends us this sample of high culture, American Style. (Try not to be too depressed by the remark right at the very end.)

Second: an annoyingly persuasive optical illusion.

Third: why we seriously need to rethink Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Finally, I hear you grumble: why does it have to be Shameless Filler Night again?

Well, you thankless whelps, it’s because in order to earn a crust, your devoted host must spend the near-totality of his waking hours planted, as sessile as a barnacle, at a Formica desk in a five-foot-wide cubicle in a fluorescently lit office on the eighth floor of a tall black building in a huge city, typing inscrutable expressions from a curious symbolic language onto a glowing screen. In a bygone era he might have been a frontiersman, taming a brawny continent with naught but steel and sinew, but this is what Men have become. Which is what makes our final item so very sad.