A Census 2010 version would be interesting to see once the information became available. Aside from the obvious difficulty of narrowing people into 5 different categories, this is pretty much how I’ve experienced the Twin Cities.

• How a girl named Yomaira became Yehudit: “Yehudit Tamayo’s path to Judaism began when she was a ten-year-old Roman Catholic by the name of Yomaira.”
• Following their true paths: “The journey to one’s Jewish soul may have several bumps along the way, but those who choose Judaism for genuine reasons often find that they were on that path long before they themselves had the revelation that, at their core, they were already Jewish.”
• When I told my family I wanted to be Jewish: “I was 14 the first time I told my mother I wanted to be Jewish. She reeled her arm back like a baseball player (she is Dominican) and she smacked me across the face.”
• Tired of living in fear: “The issue is not who my mother is, but rather who I am. The question for all of us is – what have you done today? Are you a Jew by birth and an idol worshiper by practice? (Insert the name of your favorite idol, be it stone, drugs, money or physical pleasure.) Or are you a Jew by practice? By conversion, I am a Jew. By practice, I am a Jew.”

[Photograph of Synagogue Etz Haim (Tree of Life), circa 1700 in Izmir, Turkey & links via Aliza Hausman]

• Greg Palast on BP’s oil spill disaster/negligence: “Why didn’t the government do something to stop it? The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn’t needed.” (Yeah, that picture depicts the Deepwater Horizon exploding.)
• One of these days, I would like to grow mushrooms inside of a book.
• Open Yale Courses has RLST 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) available, with audio, video, and even class lecture transcripts. Even if you’re not religious, perhaps you will find the historical-critical aspects interesting. If you’ve done any research into the TaNaKh, a lot of it will be review — but the professor still manages to sprinkle in bits of information that I didn’t know already. It’s not on iTunes U due to copyright issues, which makes me wonder how many other open courses are out there which go unnoticed because it’s not picked up by iTunes.
• Anne Lamot on Mother’s Day: “Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path.”
• Eyeballing the site where the Times Square car bomber was held in NYC.

• Too Weird for The Wire: “Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves.”
• Capturing Somali pirates: first-person shooter view: “Watch as some Dutch marines board a container ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates. The footage is from a camera mounted on one of the marines’ helmets.”
• Double Blind: “This came clear to Kevin Fulton on the day his cover as an IRA man collapsed. It happened inside an IRA safe house in north Belfast, in 1994. Fulton sat facing a wall, blindfolded. Curtains shut out the pale light of winter. Bottles lay scattered on the floor, and the place stank of stale beer. An interrogator paced the room, his boots scuffing against the floor.”
• How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die: “He called himself Michael Finkel. Which happens to be my name. And he told everyone he met that he was a writer for The New York Times. Which happened to be my job.”
• Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden: “While feeding the West’s seemingly insatiable fascination with all things Tibetan, the murders and demonstrations have exposed a dark and troubling underside of a tradition often seen as a beacon of wisdom and compassion in a spiritually confused world.”
• The Passion of David Bazan: “‘People used to compare him to Jesus,’ says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. ‘But not so much anymore.’”
• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: No quotation, this is some weird and heavily awkward shit. Premise: Reverend Al Sharpton goes to Liberia to hold peace talks, brings a bunch of Nation of Islam dudes with him… and Tucker Carlson. Tucker (he of the bow-ties) is dubbed an honorary member of NOI by the end of the trip: Tucker X.
• Glenn Beck Inc: “With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: ‘I could give a flying crap about the political process.’ Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. ‘We’re an entertainment company,’ Beck says.”

Wendy’s represent! Arby’s sucks! (Also available in red, it’s nice to have options.)

Club sandwiches!

All right, what the hell? There’s letters upside down and even backwards! I kinda want it.

A Michigan hoodie with “Pink” on the hood. On the sleeves, it reads “Go blue.”

This Holocaust chic barbed wire Star of David is available in sweatshirt and reglan jersey!

A perfect gift for the man who has everything, except self-respect.

All of these items can be found on a site called Light in the Box.

Swimming in fountain across from Union Station; Washington, D.C.; by Marion Post Wolcott 1938

• Anxiety, depression and alcohol and drug dependency cases might be more than twice as high as researchers currently believe.
• An immigrant from China with mental illness has finally gotten out of detention in America
• The “M” word in health care: mental illness and health care reform

Whenever I pass some “black hebrews” on Nicollet Mall, I keep thinking of the MaNishtana post:

Please direct me to where it says “Behold, and thou shalt dress in a manner as if thou art the bastard offspring of a threesome between the Power Rangers, the Village People, and Lawrence of Arabia.”

An award-winning duck of some sort at the MN State Fair.

• Adults who were mildly depressed as teenagers are more likely to have major depression, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. However, researchers could not say if mild depression contributed to the development of major depression, or if the mild depression as a teen was an early phase of major depressive disorder.
• They have the thinnest skin, the shortest fuses and take the hardest knocks.
• “Despite all this help, there are days when I can’t get out of bed because I’m in a deep depression or didn’t sleep at all the night before. Sometimes I’m unable to do anything other than get my kids fed.”
• “I recognize that I’m hallucinating. I know this isn’t real, but maybe there’s some lessons I can gain.”

"Cavern carved by the sea in an ice wall," by Frank Hurley, circa 1911-1914

• Depression’s evolutionary roots: an adaptation, not a malfunction.
• The 2008 American College Health Association Survey found that 30% of college students said they had suffered from depression in the last 12 months
• In Florida, the State argues that gay people have higher rates of “domestic violence, psychiatric disorders and breakups” (none of which is true), and thus should not have the right to adopt a child.
• Ted Kennedy was instrumental to the passage of the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which he called “a major breakthrough for those with mental health needs.”
• Connection found between heart disease in women with no previous warning signs (such as high blood pressure) and hopelessness:
  “What we found is, those women who reported feeling hopeless about the future or their personal goals had more thickening in the neck arteries — more atherosclerosis — which is a predictor of stroke and subsequent heart attack,” Everson-Rose said in a telephone interview.