ducksanddrakes

Are there Ghostbusters among the curatorial staff at the Art Institute of Chicago?  The museum’s resident ghost meets its match in an enterprising employee: “Behind a large screen, out of the public’s eye, he installed an easel, on which he placed a Japanese woodblock print of Shoki, the Demon Queller …”

The importance of being furnished: Cathy Whitlock visits the High Point, North Carolina Furniture Market, learning that if we’re lucky, red may be the new beige.

Radio host Peter Sagal meets a nice young woman, who likes to listen to his comedy show while running embalming machines on Saturday afternoons: “Sometimes, they’re so loud, I have to turn them off so I make sure I don’t miss anything …”

Ben Tippett sends a dispatch from the cutting edge of physics: “It is our opinion that all of Superman’s recognized powers can be unied if His power is the ability to manipulate, from atomic to kilometer length scales, the inertia of His own and any matter with which He is in contact …”

At The Philosopher’s Magazine, film writer Daniel Shaw levels with us: “I do wish I could be Hannibal (at least for a day), wielding such complete power over others and over myself. But I never for a second found myself wanting to be young Hannibal …”

At Psychology Today, Scott Barry Kaufman defends nice guys against Tucker Max, whose be-a-bad-boy strategy seems remarkably effective – “It appears that [Max] is in fact correct.  That is, if you conceptualize winning as racking up a lot of different sexual partners. If your personal definition of winning is finding a high-quality long-term mate and making the relationship work, then research does show there are advantages to being conscientiousness and agreeable …”  Whatever, Poindexter.

Want to know a little more about the strange things done in the midnight son by the men who moil for gold?  I thought so.  Check out Robert Service’s comic horror “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” recited with appropriate ooze and shudder (hat tip: Jeff Sypeck).

And finally, at The Boston Globe, James Burnett explores the controversial history of a modern institution: “The census bureau, of course, doesn’t want to scare people. It wants to count them …”

But it’s the counting that scares me …