Eye browse

1. The story of two Americans trying to restore a Chinese village with an eye on history.

2. Why does a two-headed snake remind you of the BJP?

3. You’ve seen Federer’s between-the-legs winner — now check out this collection of great shots, tennis and otherwise. Oh, and:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg9i3loKWEE&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEhVqvi7V2w&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1]

4. 2008 GOP primary candidate and 2012 hopeful Mike Huckabee, a one time bass guitarist, channels ‘anger’ in a riff on the media. Incidentally, is a rant on fact-checking, on Fox News, oxymoronic or just plain moronic?

5. The workings of the creative process, courtesy the Doing Jalsa blog.

6. Two Mafia-themed books I recently read were Selwyn Raab’s Five Families and Mischa Glenny’s McMafia. On that note, here’s a TED talk by Glenny on organized crime.

7. Are Freemasons nothing more than a social networking outfit — a bricks and mortar precursor to the Facebooks of the digital world, say, or is it a body with unplumbed power and pervading menace? With pre-release hysteria building for Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol [A Crossword outlet in Bandra had this man-high pile of dummy copies of the book on display the other day — which is far better display than the bookstore has given some genuinely high quality authors], National Geographic examines a few Freemason myths.

Oh, and while on Dan Brown, Nilanjana Roy [blog, Twitter] in a recent mail passed along this link: The Globe and Mail’s books blog raps Brown on the knuckles for shoddy writing, and suggests — with examples — that he could do with the services of a decent editor.

Nice idea. Bad execution — IMHO the edit doesn’t improve the original; at some points, it arguably makes it worse.

8. Government officials in Nepal have been asked to go on a nationwide goat-hunt. Here’s why. [Acclaimed Hindu spokesman Rajan Zed said… oh, never mind].

9. A new ‘study’ has found that it is size, not skill in foreplay, that floats a woman’s boat. See this is the thing that bugs men: just when you think you’ve gotten the funda cracked, they change the goal posts! And that’s a whole checkbook’s worth of ‘tuition fees’ and countless hours of practice in how to be a new-age man, all gone down the drain. [Link courtesy Vivek Shenoy on Twitter]

More, as and when.