Big Picture.

The Big Picture blog is always good, but this is an especially good collection of pictures from Afghanistan.

Happy 40th birthday, Very Hungry Caterpillar!

Eric Carle's web site.

Newsweek:

Carle was born in 1929 in Syracuse, N.Y., to immigrant parents from Germany. He remembers his first six years fondly: Mickey Mouse and Flash Gordon, family camping trips, the big windows in his kindergarten class. When he was 6, his mother got homesick and the family moved back to Stuttgart. They lived in a big, four-story house with many of his relatives. "My grandmother had nine sisters," Carle says. "I had an interesting, wacky family. They're all liars but wonderful storytellers." Carle had trouble adjusting to his new country. His first-grade teacher still haunts, especially because Carle once picked up a ringing phone, and the teacher lashed his palms with a bamboo switch in front of the class. "I was this free American kid," Carle says, "but I was careful after that."

When World War II broke out, Carle's father was drafted by the Germans and his family was engulfed in the chaos of war.

And Google is using a special logo today, too.

Happy 50th birthday, Little People!

A little more here.

Training with Type 1.

One cycling coach's perspective.

Quick! Quick! Before the backlash.

Kutiman. A new audiovisual medium, I think. (Pitchfork has liked him for almost a week more than a year now, so you better hurry and click through before the scorn and derision begin to heap up.)

Duck and Cover! (1951)

Arcade classic, explained.

Pac-Man Dossier.

Why I miss Maryland in spring.

Man, it gets nice early in the DC area. Two doors down from my parents' house, there's another two-year-old Benji, whose mother kindly offered the use of his sand table and jungle gym while we're visiting.

One child pushing the other on the swings -- loop closed. It was at this point I decided I was no longer needed and went back to Nana and Poppa's for a cup of tea. I'm sure they're fine.

[Sorry for the formatting problems. Dang Macs!]

Bookish.

Moral Relativism, by Steven Lukes. Maybe for others, but didn't work for me.

In Xanadu: A Quest, by William Dalrymple. Brilliant travel writing. The quest is to retrace the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan's Xanadu. As between the competing schools of travel writing - genial companion (Fermor, Bryson) vs misanthropic depressive (Theroux) - Dalrymple generally shades toward the latter, but that's not criticism. There are very funny moments, and a great finish. Highly recommended. This is what's left of Xanadu now; the little blue squiggle across the bottom there (zoom out a bit) is, in fact, Alph, the sacred river.

Musical stylings.

A medley of "Baa baa black sheep" and "Pittsburgh's going to the super bowl":