The UK government has released a lot of UFO related files. These real X-files makes for some very interesting reading regardless of being a true believer or not. The files have a lot of letter from people writing (with annoyingly poor grammar and spelling) and drawings (see images below) about their close encounters, abductions and concerns. You can all find it at the National Archives.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship
with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country
has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of
800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it
would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my
replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you
may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation
movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the
funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds
in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under
surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a
reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the
funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund
account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to
wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission
for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond
with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to
protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson

The original ad has been deleted, but it was preserved in all its digital glory by the sandmonkey.

Looking for a Husband Immediately - 24 (Cairo, Egypt)

It is a long story but I'll try to keep it short: back in February I
was raped and now I am 7 months pregnant. I was hoping to find a
Western man (European / American), to marry me immediately, before I
deliver, and take me and my coming son under his wing, in other words
to be an official father of my son.
I am financially capable of supporting my own son, all I want is a loving, warm and secure home for him to grow up in.

I am 24 years old, brunette, petite, 5 feet tall, long black
straight hair and dark brown Arabian eyes, college graduate, I also
speak 3 languages fluently.
My father was Lebanese and my mother is half Spanish half Turkish,
I was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt but with a western, very
open-minded mentality (and that is why I wish to marry a western man).

The man I am looking for has to meet the following requirements:

1) To be currently living in Cairo, Egypt.
2) To accept to start all the marriage procedures instantly (of course after we meet and make sure we like each other)
3) To accept to convert to Islam as the Egyptian law does not
approve of the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man (you can
still practice your initial religion though, like I said I'm very
open-minded, you don't have to pray or fast, I personally don't, all
you have to do is just obtain that piece of paper that says you
converted)
4) To be between the age of 30-40
5) To be understanding
6) To have no mental or physical illnesses.

If you are interested please reply as soon as possible. No weird replies please.

Although the shelf in the picture is a bit ugly, I like the concept and it can be easily made. No need for bookends. From idealist.

Wordle is a great java app for creating word clouds out of pieces of texts, Atom/RSS feeds and delicious users' tags. As with tag clouds, the sizes of words denotes their frequency in the text. For a very interesting use of Wordle I recommend checking out Lisa Spiro's Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole and Chocolate, where she shows Wordle's potential as a tool for literary criticism.

I took the tool to task by creating a word cloud out of the first chapter of Karl Marx's Capital Vol. 1. After a trial run I changed all occurrences of 'values' and 'forms' into the singular, and 'commodity' and 'coat' into plural before creating the cloud as shown below. It might not come as a surprise that the first chapter is titled Commodities, and that the chapter is all about the what and why of commodities and value and how this relates to labour. Form occurs a lot in the chapter, and Marx uses this word a lot to capture the inherent transformations that occur to the categories (process/relation is a better word to describe dialectical categories as categories are ontologically static and isolated) of value, commodities and labour (all of which are dialectically inner-related). Linen and coats are used throughout the chapter as examples. The important part on commodity fetishism is invisible in the cloud, but then again this is not surprising as the secret of the fetish is revealed in the foregoing analysis of value, commodities and labour.

I just started going through Capital again (it is a book that can't be read, but studied) and I found the word cloud quite helpful as a tool to remind me what that first chapter is all about, and I will most definitively create word clouds out of the subsequent chapters and the entire book.

Found through Cribcandy...

Election shwag like these are made for every US prez election, but they always crack me up.

Images from here, here and here.

Edison Hate Future by Warren Ellis. Got this through from his weirdly entertaining twitter feed.