There is a wonderful conformity between the vegetation of ſome plants, and the arrival of certain birds of paſſage. [Carl] Linnaeus obſerves that the wood anemone blows in Sweden on the arrival of the ſwallow; and the marſh mary-gold, Caltha, when the cuckoo ſings.

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

Glenn Beck: Do you know what happened last week in Russia? One of their biggest stars on television said that homosexuals should be put into the ovens alive. I didn't think you could make the Holocaust worse, but he's like, Why the gas chamber? That seems a little too humane. Let's put them alive in the ovens. I said on the air this week, I will stand with GLAAD. I will stand with anybody who will stand up and say that's crazy. That's dangerous. That's hetero-fascism. That's what that is.

But by and large, a majority of Sanduskians never read any newspaper other than the local journal and I am convinced that they get a far more colored view of national news than they did when the city had competing dailies.