• The next time you watch a lecture on television, observe closely when the speaker takes a sip from his or her water bottle.  Invariably, the person will start screwing the cap back onto the bottle before he or she has even finished swallowing.  Are people afraid that the contents will evaporate or be spilled?  Or are they worried about things falling out of the sky (or maybe their hair) and into their drink?  You don’t see such compulsive behavior when a glass of water is involved.  This is such an automatic and universal response, you have to wonder where it comes from.

• Every time a U.S. city or county government goes bankrupt (most recently, Detroit), one hears the usual Tea Party refrain, “If government were run like a business, this wouldn’t happen.”  Of course.  When businesses are run like businesses, what happens is Enron (bankrupt in 2001), Worldcom (2002), NHL Buffalo Sabres (2003), Trump Hotels (2004), Delta Airlines (2005), Silicon Graphics (2006), American Home Mortgage (2007), Lehman Brothers (2008), Chrysler (2009), Blockbuster (2010), American Airlines (2011), and Eastman Kodak (2012).  There have been 30 municipal bankruptcies since 2001, out of roughly 39,000 municipalities in the United States — a rate of 1 bankruptcy per year for every 17,000 cities, counties and townships.  For comparison, 40,075 businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2012 alone, out of some 5.7 million business entities, a rate of 1 bankruptcy for every 143 businesses.  The Tea Party places the blame for this on labor unions and government interference, never on poor management decisions or reckless activity.

• For a nostalgic reminder of what the web once was, look no further than this website by a music lightshow outfit.  The site has every animation and effect that was possible (tasteful or not) in the HTML 1.0 days.  Quaintly enough, the site also belongs to a web ring, a group of like-themed sites who agreed to link to each other, a faint promise of eye-traffic in those pre-Google years.

• One of the early-web sites that I hope does not disappear is this collection of analyses of all the Beatles songs by musicologist Alan W. Pollack.  Mr. Pollack wrote his essays over a 12-year period from 1989 to 2000.  I like them because (a) I am a Beatles enthusiast and (b) Mr. Pollack is very analytical and (c) I am also analytical but have no background in music theory.  So I find Mr. Pollack’s deconstructions both entertaining and educational.  There may have been rock composers as deserving as the Beatles of such exhaustive analysis, but please go ahead and name one.

• The image at right was taken by Scott Stewart, staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, to illustrate its March 18, 2013 story on how the federal budget sequester is affecting housing for low-income families in Illinois.  One of Mr. Stewart’s specialties is fire photography, as seen in this video collage.

On May 30 of this year, the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff in order to “evolve with our digitally savvy customers” as the Sun-Times put it.  The shot at left, by Sun-Times reporter Sam Charles, accompanied its July 20 article on the recent deadly shootings in the Chicago area.  Are you savvy enough to notice a difference in photo quality?  I thought so.