"It was then that Delirium noticed that she had absentmindedly transformed herself into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny, multicolored fish." — Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
So here’s a tip for first-time writers: when submitting a story, don’t include a rejection letter from the last place that had a look at it. I’ve received submissions addressed to the wrong publication — mostly by e-mail, and probably because they were sending it to many places simultaneously, even though most of us specifically say not to — but nothing like this has happened to me.
Joshua Schachter suggests that URL shorteners are maybe not such a good thing. They’re all over Twitter — by necessity, given the 140-character limit — where I suspect they’ve been a huge boon to spammers. [via]
Here are a couple of neat tools: Chow.com’s Know Your Pasta guide (PDF) [via] and Flipping Typical, a little web app that displays text in whichever fonts — of those it can detect — installed on your computer. [via]
Do you get the sense that the Senate Democrats are just toying with Arlen Specter at this point? Sure, we’ll let you re-join our party — heck, even Joe the Plumber is leaving the Republicans these days — but we’re gonna make you sit at the kids’ table for awhile. [via]
And finally, one less mystery for Doctor Who to solve: we may have found a cure for the recently widespread honey bee colony collapse. [via]