"Katherine Howard: A very short history (506 words), of a very short queen (four feet, eight inches) who had a very short reign (18 months)" by Julie Keitges at Exquisite Corpse.

Poem-of-the-Day (yeah right) Dept.:

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester's "Satire against reason and mankind," archived at eMule.com.

There's a t-shirt you can buy these days that asks the question: "Who would Jesus bomb?" Probably bumper-stickers too. But with a slight turn of phrase David Batstone asks "Who Would Jesus Torture?" At Sojourners.

The pragmatic reasoning against torture--that it doesn't work, doesn't yield much, if any, useful information--is fairly obvious (see the interview with former Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, who speaks from experience). Here's some of the moral (specifically Christian in this case) and ethical reasoning against it.

The March of Progress Dept.:

"Soldiers obeying odours" by Barry Fox at NewScientist concerns a coded-scent-expelling collar for soldiers, invented by researchers at the University of Southern California.

What's immediately, obviously scary and disturbing about this is the fact that the invention is, well, a collar--something for use on a dog, an animal. Not a human being.

Ok. So soldiers already wear "dog-tags." But that's an expression describing what are still essentially name-tags, used for identification and tracking purposes . . . not to induce or impose obedience.

"The failure of the drug war is so spectacular that irrational motives must be driving it."

From Salim Muwakkil's commentary "Give Me Cognitive Liberty" at In These Times.

"Former U.S. Army Interrogator Describes the Harsh Techniques He Used in Iraq, Detainee Abuse by Marines and Navy Seals and Why 'Torture is the Worst Possible Thing We Could Do'" is an interview conducted by Amy Goodman of former U.S. Army interrogator Specialist Tony Lagouranis at Democracy Now!.

"The dominant culture of technology and big business and big government is not the important lasting culture of our civilization," Ferlinghetti said. "The important culture of our civilization is the literary and artistic and intellectual culture. That's the mainstream, and I'm proud to be part of that."

"The Beat goes on: Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped give voice to an enduring movement" at the L.A. Times' website. (That headline made me think I was about to read some kind of obituary, but to the contrary Ferlinghetti at 86 is still alive and kicking.)