The Crockpot: A Weekly Link-Digest
- Here’s a pretty distraction: a time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy taken over South America’s Andes Mountains. As Kottke points out, it’s definitely worth watching through the last sequence.
- “When the rallies happened in Tahrir Square,” wrote an Egyptian army officer in his personal journal, recently written about by The Guardian, “we would all receive a large bonus.”
- Forget the Laundromat: these clothes need only sunshine to get clean.
- Mario Kart can save your life.
- We’ve been hearing a lot about the pointlessness of the Iowa caucus and its unsophisticated voters. One Iowa native blasts back. (Available in clean or saucy versions.)
- Why are movie theaters losing their charm? Roger Ebert posits a few of their problems. Price is one issue, of which he says: “No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.”
- A brief consideration of the meteoric rise of queer studies.
- “When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago,” writes Nicholas Carr, “he also gave us immovable text.” According to him, e-books make literature both editable and collaborative—what amounts to the most drastic change to the book in centuries—for better or worse.
- There is something intrinsically different between people who know one or a handful of languages and those that know eleven. Have you ever met a hyperpolyglot?
- How a 1930s photographer turned writers into literary celebrities.
- More red tape: As of the first of the year, New Hampshire girls under age 18 have to notify a parent or guardian at least 48 hours before they have an abortion.
- Bellingham Review’s first online issue is now available.
- Newt Gingrich’s mission is no longer seeking the Republican presidential nomination; it’s destroying Mitt Romney.
In a project called National Jukebox, the Library of Congress is making thousands of recordings from 1901 to 1925 available online. 
