every martyr in this jungle

A list, because I haven't been able to congeal a complex thought in weeks. Does heat work like that? It's already been 111 degrees here, which is enough to melt stone, so possibly.

Can you die from lack of sleep? | Slate
Theoretically, yes, from hypothermia (?!) or the bacteria in your gut leaking into the rest of your body because your immune system can't keep them in check, among other fates.

Does Wal-Mart make you skinny? | The Daily Beast
In a statistically significant way, apparently, by being a source of inexpensive fresh produce. Having a Wal-Mart in a community is equivalent to a 6.5 rise in annual income, which I find fascinating.

NBC saves 'Chuck' | Airlock Alpha
YESSSSS. I love that little show.

'Galactica' set to drain your checkbook | The Indianapolis Star
I really can't justify spending $250 on things I already own, but those extras sound AMAZING.

Over the Wall | The New York Times
Christoph Niemann's work is always simple, like each entry was co-written and designed by his young sons, poignant and smart.

School canteen opens as restaurant to avoid closure | The Mirror
Neat!

Banker rescues family of ducks | KOMO News
<3!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy | Slate

The online world has its own kind of reality, somewhere between private and public. Typing "orgy" into a search engine is less than doing. But it's more than thinking.

Merits (or lack thereof) of the lawsuit that spawned this article aside, I think with something as vague ("know it when I see it" shouldn't even be a legal term) as obscenity that requires a community yardstick, this is an ingenious tactic. Gaging community standards by Internet searches, while neither scientific nor necessarily representative, is certainly more reliable than asking its members' opinions on an issue. And if my fair trial depended on whether my neighbor would admit to watching, say, group sex videos, I may as well save the entire legal system the trouble and plead guilty.

Taking a step back from incarceration, taboos are broken when your neighbor is doing it too - that's what Google Trends reveals. There are plenty of things I enjoy that very few people know about, but the chance of ever discussing them with our perfect stranger neighbors is less than zero - not because they're illegal, but because it's simply not done. There's a reason we don't live in glass houses. But thanks to Trends, we don't have to. The feeling of going online and finding a community of people who think like you is exhilarating - now we (and our perhaps not-so-square neighbors!) can be assured those people exist where we live. What could we de-stigmatize next?

Less than a week ago, I had a litany of very good reasons why Brandon doesn't need an iPhone. But now, I'm having trouble remembering them. Um, help? ... Maybe?

Slate's review of Noise is the first I've heard of the new Tim Robbins flick about a Manhattanite who becomes obsessed with ridding the city of car alarms and faulty doorbells through vigilanteism with a baseball bat. I can sympathize on an abstract level - being able to sleep through the boys playing Rock Band four feet from the foot of my bed renders most other noise scenarios equally meaningless. I do, however, believe in jamming cell phones in classrooms and mandatory ring tone changes every two weeks if you work in an office with no vibrate-only policy, so there is a whole other world of noise pollution I lament.

Anyway, it's a real world story I wanted to write after this incident, but couldn't get the editors' support on it. It didn't help that the couple did not want to speak to me, likely on the advice of counsel, but I had more responses to that short story than most feature pieces. People hate noise, compounded by the fact that unlike lobbying their city council for a signal or stop sign at a dangerous intersection, they feel there is no recourse for loud cars. The police, when they do come out because often they don't bother, saying the offenders likely will have left by the time they arrive, either tell them to move along or give them a warning. Now, I understand being roused from sleep can lead to demands of capital punishment, but a "move along, sir" is hardly an acceptable compromise, too many nights of which allegedly led Mr. Hyde (no pun intended, but oh, the irony) to point a shotgun at his tormentors.

We're surrounded by noise all the time - ambulances, police sirens, iPods, children, cell phones, car alarms, muzack, elevator dings (can you tell the Ramee Garden has made me bitter?), car horns, air conditioners, radios, TVs, construction, etc. But how many of those very things can we live without? Granted, some of the ones we can't change, we can move away from - quiet streets, suburbs, cooler climates. God knows the world needs farmers, but moving to a spit of land in Idaho shouldn't have to be the solution. The movie, and Mr. Hyde, have a point, although a pair of noise-canceling headphones may do wonders for both?

Gene therapy takes a step forward | USA Today

For the first time, doctors have used gene therapy to restore vision in patients with a rare and usually incurable form of blindness, researchers announced Sunday.

They use viruses to alter DNA! Makes you wonder what else can be cured.

Smugglers and friends help Chinese connect with Apple's iPhone | International Herald Tribune

These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been pondering: Why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe?

I think the article was supposed to make me feel sorry for Apple and its business plan that has been proven useless for years with mass media. Mostly though, if the official source isn't providing what you want, well, that source kind of brought the consequences on itself, no?

A Florida woman was jet skiing down the Suwannee River (yes, that river) on Thursday when a fish jumped out of the water, knocking her unconscious, lacerating her spleen and shearing off four fingers.

This is the fish. Eep. However, helpfully, the boyfriend provided a sense of SCALE.

I may never sleep again.

A lot of sucky things happened to me professionally this week, so instead, have some of the good stuff that helped balance it out.

The Washington Post got more than 350 entries for a Peep (yes, the marshmallow birds) diorama contest. See the best.

Some enterprising journalist put master violinist Joshua Bell in a subway station as a social experiment. Personally, I'm always late for work, but love the violin, so it could've gone either way.

Pets do silly things, and their owners caption them even more hilariously.

Speaking of animals, have a British cat who commutes to a fish and chips shop.

On Dancing With the Stars, Joey did the tango to a remix of the Star Wars theme. My HEART, people.

Playing Scrabble against someone who's ranked 160 points higher than me, being at least 50 points behind for the entire game, and then pulling it out in the last three turns and beating him BY ONE POINT. Nothing like it.

There's something that weighs heavily on my heart. Rick Sanchez was the co-anchor of the Fox News affiliate in South Florida, which is all we watched in my house when I was growing up. Anyway, he was always a little bit goofy, liked oddball stories and made the cheesiest jokes. But it seems even South Florida got too small for him and he has somehow become a correspondent for CNN. Reading his Wikipedia entry was a fascinating exercise, since I had no idea he'd become a respectable journalist along the way instead of staying the oddball anchor who tried to charm you through the camera. Now he reads everyone's news, though thankfully, he still volunteers to be Tased and go down in a sinking car occasionally. Keep the faith, Rick.

I had heard rumors, but this morning National Guardsmen dressed in fatigues and armed with semiautomatic assault rifles were stationed in most major national airports. The news anchor spoke of feelings of "security" and "gratitude" among the flying public - personally, I am aghast that the world has come to hail armed troops in its civilian enclaves.