Fascinating article on itches and the need to scratch. I heard an interview with the author on NPR last night.

Annals of Medicine: The Itch: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

CNN.com

“Arrogance in this campaign will be perhaps more loaded than it would be in other campaigns,” he said. “They’re trying to say … ‘He’s not one of you.’ “

I guess I’m not the only one who hears the word “uppity” when people like Rove say that Obama is arrogant.

From KXAN.com

There have been high temperatures of 100 degrees or hotter for 17 days, and 16 days of record-breaking temperatures.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Amazing photos of the flooding in Iowa. The recovery process for this is going to be long and painful.

More classic Carlin:

• Part one
• Part two