Excellent mini-gallery of monster decals from the '60s.

"The Alien" is a short story that appeared in a 1958 issue of Adam.

Freeman Dyson on religion: "Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls. Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species." (From Cliff Pickover's Encyclopedia of the Bible)

Paul Tough is a former editor at Harpers. He also co-published a great zine, called Paris in the 20s, which consisted entirely of clippings of strange reporting from the New York Times. I met Paul when he came to the Wired offices to talk about possibly working for an ill-fated spin-off magazine. We had lunch together and I thought he was very nice and funny. Now he has a new daily site, called Open Letters, "a new magazine of first-person writing in the form of personal correspondence." He writes that he came up with the idea for the site from the way he worked at Harper's: "One editors' trick I started using a while ago is to ask a thwarted writer to start off by writing me a letter on the topic. What comes out is often much more fluid, funny, on-topic, and well-structured than a formal magazine article."

New NetBaby games.

More carnival autobiography.

"I was in a Hey Rube in Lincoln, Illinois, once. It was one of the toughest battles I ever seen. The town boys was coalminers and same of the toughest customers I ever seen. We strung out in a circle around our stuff and stood 'em off with "laying out pins" and whacked 'em with "side-poles", finally giving 'em the run, but they sure could take it. Another Hey Rube in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was started by a gang of students from the University of Michigan, for no good reason at all except perhaps they thought it was funny. It cost the circus I was with more than $35,000 in lawsuits and damage to equipment. In a Hey Rube, most of the lawsuits that follow is usually by some innocent bystander who gets hurt in the scramble."

Chapter from 1933 carnival autobiography, Hey Rube.

64-year-old Down East Bob's response to the end of The Hobo Times.

Excellent archive of retro product packaging and display graphics. (From Xplane xblog)

Good short bio of Yellow Kid Weil, the world's greatest con artist.