This seems like a really sensible idea and one that should catch on here as well as in Scandinavia. Wouldn't it be great not to keep a supply of stamps (the right-denomination ones at that) around for those few occasions you'd miss them? I suppose I'd miss the commemorative stamps I think are designed well or good looking, but I manage to misplace most of the ones I like anyway.

Mercedes Benz shares another beautiful visualization of left versus right brain characteristics. via Gizmodo.

The more interesting part, I thought, involved the president's linkage of governmental action with moral responsibility, and his explanation for why the first is necessary to fully implement the second.

"There's only so much a church can do to help all the families in need, all those who need help making a mortgage payment or avoiding foreclosure, or making sure their child can go to college," Obama said. "There's only so much that a nonprofit can do to help a community rebuild in the wake of disaster. There's only so much the private sector will do to help folks who are desperately sick get the care that they need. "And that's why I continue to believe that in a caring and in a just society, government must have a role to play; that our values, our love and our charity must find expression not just in our families, not just in our places of work and our places of worship, but also in our government and in our politics."

Obama's remarks resonated because I've been bristling recently at conservatives' dual hijacking: morality and the Constitution as the domain of small-government conservatives.

I'd like them back.

At the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus says what I wish I could have.

Produce

by Debra Allberry

Walking Distance) -->

No mountains or ocean, but we had orchards
in northwestern Ohio, roadside stands
telling what time of summer: strawberries,
corn, apples---and festivals to parade
the crops, a Cherry Queen, a Sauerkraut Dance.
Somebody would block off a street in town,
put up beer tents and a tilt-a-whirl.

Our first jobs were picking berries.
We'd ride out early in the back of a pickup---
kids my age, and migrants, and old men
we called bums in sour flannel shirts
smash-stained with blueberries, blackberries,
raspberries. Every fall we'd see them
stumbling along the tracks, leaving town.

Vacationland, the signs said, from here to Lake Erie.
When relatives drove up we took them to see
The Blue Hole, a fenced-in bottomless pit
of water we paid to toss pennies into---

or Prehistoric Forest, where, issued machine guns,
we rode a toy train among life-sized replicas
of brontosaurus and triceratops.

In winter the beanfield behind our house
would freeze over, and I would skate across it
alone late evenings, sometimes tripping
over stubble frozen above the ice.
In spring the fields turned up arrowheads, bones.
Those slow-pacing glaciers left it clean and flat here,
scraping away or pushing underground what was before them.

From The Writer's Almanac. A nice piece, and especially nice if you're from Ohio and can really feel these places and this lyric resonating.