ποτ πουρί

In honor of the coming likely collapse of the Greek economy, we have put our "potpourri" title through the mighty Bing translator to give us the Greek word. Folks with a little knowledge of the Greek alphabet will probably notice that the translation is as much transliteration as anything else, as Bing claims "potpourri" in Greek is "pot pouri."

-- Hello! We're the movie industry, and we really don't have any ideas anymore!

-- Dark matter is the name for the mysterious substance that probably makes up most of the solid material in the universe. It's used to explain why galaxies that spin fast enough to fly apart don't, and why the universe expands at the rate it does. But to date it has only been theorized and never detected, so other theories might explain the universe we observe. Including one that says we just don't understand gravity properly. I fully admit I don't understand gravity properly, but I'm not willing to take the blame for there being no dark matter. So I'm rejecting that theory out of hand.

-- Every time a baseball highlight shows a pitcher after some batter has turned his throwing mistake into a fan souvenir, I get the feeling the pitcher, standing around and holding the new ball, would have no problem in a rule change that didn't require the batter to touch all three bases.

-- There are four kinds of introversion. Well, there may be five, but we don't want to talk about it.

-- Found at Real Clear Science, Peter Ellerton writes about why people lose arguments. He suggests it has to do with allowing your opponent to frame the issue away from the point you want to make, or with falling for rhetorical tricks that leave you with no ammo in your fight. He doesn't list that one of the reasons "Why You Will Lose Your Argument," as the headline says, is that you are wrong. But he's not alone in leaving out that possibility.

-- This writer at Wired suggests that it's NBC's fault that the show Hannibal, which features the cannibalistic serial killer made famous by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs as its lead character, had low ratings and was canceled. On the one hand, if that's true, I'm pretty sure I should send them a gift for making modern television slightly less of a pure cesspool of venomous ordure than it was before the cancellation. On the other hand, NBC bought and aired the show in the first place, so perhaps the proper response is that given to the dog when it learns to crap on the paper: Congratulations for meeting the bare minimum requirements for living indoors among civilized people.