Some funny things I found...

Or rather, just interesting. First, the finalists for the annual "bad first sentence in a fake novel" competition! My favorite is the winner in the "Detective" novel category:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't.

Next up, an article to make my peacenicky side really happy: Humans aren't innately coded for war! Violence is not inevitable. My favorite quote:

The first clear-cut evidence of violence against groups as opposed to individuals appears about 14,000 years ago, he says. The evidence takes the form of mass graves of skeletons with crushed skulls, hack marks and projectile points embedded in them; rock art in Australia, Europe and elsewhere depicting battles with spears, clubs and bows and arrows; and settlements clearly fortified for protection against attacks (see "The birth of war").

War emerged when humans shifted from a nomadic existence to a settled one and was commonly tied to agriculture, Ferguson says. "With a vested interest in their lands, food stores and especially rich fishing sites, people could no longer walk away from trouble." What's more, with settlement came the production of surplus crops and the acquisition of precious and symbolic objects through trade. All of a sudden, people had far more to lose, and to fight over, than their hunter-gatherer forebears.

And finally, why on earth is the WSJ starting up an arts and culture section? The timing makes no sense to me. But, they have their reasons. Apparently business-centric papers are just as awful at making money as the NYT. So the WSJ is looking to poach some more general-interest readers. Good luck? Maybe? A quote:

“The Journal is making a very smart decision by focusing on New York,” said Pia Catton, the former culture editor of The New York Sun, which the chattering classes were known to praise for the sophisticated alternative it provided to The Times. “There is so much going on in New York, and it sets the tone for the rest of the country.”

(Ms. Catton herself has recently moved to Washington, D.C., to become an editor at Politico.)

“The Times has gone wrong by covering arts nationally and casting the net so wide that they aren’t focused on New York anymore,” she said.

Times culture editor Sam Sifton, reached for comment, would only say: “We’re extremely proud of our culture coverage and confident it can stand up to competition.”