Quickies–Things You Might Have Missed

• Why are feet washing ashore in Canada?
• This is most selfless, sweetest thing I’ve read in quite a while 
• Good news for children of parents in civil unions
• I just had to link this quote: “After a decade of commercialisation most GM crops are used for animal feed, not food; they do not yield more than conventional crops; and GM drought and salt-tolerant crops remain a PR promise rather than reality. We now need a radical shift towards sustainable farming systems that genuinely benefit local farmers communities and the environment worldwide.”
• More Asimov reflected in reality: is this the first step toward Trantor?
• We just got over a writer’s strike; now an actor’s strike?  Forget TV–go read a book or something. 
• On Obama: Hank Sheinkopf, president of Sheinkopf Communications and an adviser to Bill Clinton in 1996, warns that such a split “is anything but impossible.” While he gives Obama a slight edge in the general election “because he doesn’t have George Bush riding with him,” he predicts that “Obama’s going to get big votes for a Democrat in the Southern states, but not enough to win any new electoral votes. So it’s a distinct possibility that he could lose the entire South, split the Midwest” and end up not as president but rather as the second coming of Al Gore. When asked the odds of this playing out, he offers “50-50.”