In what year was your first name most popular? What percentage of people had it? I just killed an hour playing with this thing.

"NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available[...] [...]But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious." It'll be interesting to see how this thing fleshes itself out.

The Japanese government is publishing a manual encouraging Japanese to return to using "polite" forms of expression. [Telegraph article.] For background, here's the Wikipedia article on polite forms in Japanese.

The city of Krakow is seeing a huge revival of Jewish culture. Thing is, there isn't a Jew to be found.

Turkmenbashi has nothing on Kim Jong Il, who has just started a campaign against that most bourgeois of enemies to Workers' Paradise: long-haired dudes. Be sure you check out the slide presentation.

You may be a spammer and not even know it.

The FDA has approved a study to investigate whether the drug Ecstacy has the power to alleviate the anxiety related to death in terminally ill patients. [Washington Post subscription.][Bugmenot: infoshop@infoshop.org ; infoshop]

Guy spazzes out on "The Price is Right" I guess it's a put on, but it's funny nevertheless.

Calling Inspector Clouseau! French airport security put 150 grams of explosives in a passenger's bag to see if the dog could find it. He did. But I guess while they were all congradulating themselves, petting the dog and giving him treats, the bag gets away and no one know where it is. Good doggie!

The Best Paper Airplane in the World. It's don't know enough about the field to vouchsafe this claim, but I did build one--it took about 10 minutes--and it did fly. Not too straight, but it did. Probably need about 10 tries to perfect.

Virtual walking in Europe. This is in response to the great California Coastline Project thread a couple of posts down: Pages Jaunes has a really fun feature in which you can take a virtual stroll in any number of European cities. [Flash] more inside

Happy Birthday Monkeyfilter! Well, it's been a year since the great Monkeyfilter experiment was undertaken. What began as a refuge for Metafilter lockouts has evolved into its own beast, with its own personality and its own personalities. We don't have a birthday cake, so let's indulge in a little self-congratulation and the smugness it entails. While we're at it, let's take a moment to thank our fearless leader and Alpha monkey.

Garrison Keillor thinks that born-again Christians should not be allowed to vote. Feels their real citizenship is in heaven.

The groundswell of discontent following the Bush re-election is spawning some strange ideas, and one of them is spelled s-e-c-e-s-s-i-o-n. Growing up in the South, I was accustomed to idle talk about such matters, but this one sounds like some people are mad as hell, and they're not going to take it any more. Of course it'll never happen, but you gotta admit, "The Republic of California" does have a nice ring. See here. [LA Times, reg. required. Bugmenot: dvdgmlwsk, 77junic] While you're at it, clicky here, and here.

Extremely abbreviated crash course on the pitfalls of urban warfare. [flash]

Yasser Arafat: "clinically dead"? Anybody know the difference between being "clinically dead" as opposed to "regular dead"?

So how did that letter writing campaign affect the election turnout in Clark County, Ohio? We'll remember this monkey filter post about the Guardian's tongue in cheek attempt to make European voices heard in this presidential election. Well the final tally turned out to be 51% for Bush and 49% for Kerry. Check out the map of Ohio. Clark County is in the south western quadrant of the state; it's one of two which are colored white.

The language of Molière in danger, France strikes back. They want French to become the official language of EU law. The claim is that it is more precise. [Telegraph article. Bugmenot account: name, "marketing@telegraph.co.uk", password: "password" ]

Bush relatives for Kerry. Bush kin are bailing out on him. I don't see the resemblance myself, but any support is good.

An unusual letter from the Vatican says that Kerry has already excommunicated himself because of his opposition to anti-abortion legislation.