The Straight Dope: There goes the judge: How do we get rid of whacked-out judges? - "Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft, who served on the court from 1921 to 1930, "really lost his grip" at the end, according to Louis Brandeis. Frank Murphy (1940-1949) was hooked on sleeping pills, hospitalized several times, and thought to be regularly securing illegal drugs. William O. Douglas (1939-1975), had a stroke toward the end of his career, could no longer follow arguments, and spoke in non sequiturs; the other justices reputedly set up an informal arrangement to nullify or ignore his vote. Even after his eventual resignation, he continued showing up at the court building, evidently believing he was still on the payroll. Thurgood Marshall (1967-1991) became disengaged in the 1980s, spending afternoons watching TV and letting his clerks do his work. A 1990 TV interview left some wondering if he'd lost it, and he retired the next year. Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1972-2005) for years took strong medication for back pain that caused him to slur his speech. Hospitalized in 1981, he had hallucinations and other withdrawal symptoms and tried to escape in his pj's. In 2004 he announced he had thyroid cancer but continued to serve as chief justice even though he was clearly not strong enough physically or mentally. The other justices knew he couldn't read the materials but continued to pretend he was participating."

Beliefwatch: Challenging the Existence of God - "The Blasphemy Challenge is a joint project of filmmaker Brian Flemming, director of the antireligion documentary "The God Who Wasn't There," and Brian Sapient, cofounder of the atheist Web site RationalResponders.com. Their intent was to encourage atheists to come forward and put their souls on the line, showing others that you don't have to be afraid of God. The particular form of the challenge was chosen because, by one interpretation, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, a part of the Christian Trinity, is the only sin that can never be forgiven. And once something you've said gets posted on YouTube, as any number of celebrities can attest, you never live it down."

Goodbye, Mr. Keating - "The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional. It is not that I want to privilege some form of literary dilettantism as a substitute for professionalism. I simply want to demonstrate that the reasons most people get into English are different from the motives that will make them successful in graduate school and in professional life beyond that. They must, ultimately, purge themselves of the romantic motives that drew them to English in the first place -- or pretend to do so. If you want to be a literary professional, you must say goodbye to Mr. Keating."

99-cent pricing hooks shoppers - "Only $9.99? I'll take it! But at $10, fuhgedaboutit! And that, researchers say, explains why so many goods and services have prices ending in .99"

Muslim women enjoying special swimsuits - ""We want to be modest, but we also want to be fashionable," said Shereen Sabet, who last year founded Splashgear, an online swimwear store for Muslim women based in Huntington Beach."
Bah, how unseemly.

Recipes for regenerating limbs - "Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers — and someday, even limbs — with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel. There’s the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back, after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves."
Ooh, pig powder.

My balls - Wikipedia - "The fate of the world rests on one man's shoulders. Or, to put it more exactly, it rests on his balls. In a freak sealing accident the Queen of Terror is sealed into Satou Kohta's balls, thus preventing her from reigning destruction onto the world. However, a lesser devil, Elyse, has been sent up to Earth to release the Queen at all costs. The only way to do so is to make Kohta ejaculate, and Elyse only has 30 days to do it. The battle for mankind has begun, in Kohta's pants."
Damn Japs.

Stressed-out lawyer, 27, dies in late-night fall at Tate Modern - "The death of the Oxford-educated lawyer, the only child of the World Cup football referee George Courtney, has highlighted concerns about the stress suffered by City workers as bonuses reach record highs... As a £55,000-a-year junior, he would frequently have been called on to work 16-hour days, seven days a week, for weeks on end to keep up with the firm’s relentless flow of multi-billion-pound deals."