Three interesting articles about Muslims. These two cover the same incident. This one is a list of general observations.

Triticale not only knows how to cook, but links to an interesting article about the rise in violence in society. For a while I've noticed that Al Franken's strange behavior is a symptom of something bigger. This article has a good theory, that needs closer looking at.

UPDATE Let me explain that Al Franken comment. Amazon brags that it has an exclusive video to promote Franken's book The Truth (with jokes). "[Amazon tries] to keep things civil in our customer review section, but Al Franken, who apparently trained at the Saturday Night Live school of conflict mediation, didn't get the message in his exclusive video" which shows him beating up a conservative, apparently because Franken can't beat him with logic alone.

I know, "it's just a joke." But why is it funny? That's my main point. And, yes, Franken later got very physical with a heckler, and claimed he only attacked the 63-year-old in the name of "free speech." Yes, really. I'm not saying Franken is the problem. I am saying that Franken is a symptom of a bigger problem.

While I don't know TJIC personally, I'll be a good blog reader and link to his newly renamed SmartFlix business. Because some day, and that day may never come, ...

Jayden loves animals. We go to the NC Zoo and aquariums whenever we get a chance. He gets thrilled to see the birds and fish at the pet shops. We own an aquarium stand my great Uncle made. We were using it as a TV stand for a long while. We recently bought a TV stand and now have a tank for our aquarium stand. We bought a few small fish from Wal-Mart first to test out the waters. Things were going well so we bought some more small fish. We went to a pet store in Greensboro that had a huge selection of fish. They even had Nemo. Nemo was $24. We are new at this so I'm not going to get a $24 fish to kill. We looked around and found these pretty little yellow fish. I found the sales associate who must have been a high school student. We asked him if they were aggressive fish and he said," No, they are too small". So we bought four of them and went home. After we put them in the tank I noticed the biggest one chasing all the other fish and snipping at them. I was worried at first but as the week went by things seemed to settle down. This past weekend we needed to buy a replacement filter so we stopped by a local pet shop. We looked at the fish and I notice the same yellow fish there, african cichlids, and they were labeled aggressive. So I ask a sales associate if I need to worry and he said "they are very aggressive" and then pointed to a tank and said, "they grow to be that big". The fish he showed me were a half foot long and they grow bigger than that! They eat up all the little fish and require a larger tank than our little ten gallon tank. We bought some snails and they started biting them too. Snails can't fend for themselves. So luckily the local petshop bought our fish and gave us some credits to use there.

Some information on african cichlids can be found here.
Some good photos are found here. The lemon yellow photos are like the ones we had.