Continuing with my theme of weird coincidences involving famous murders and specific days in mid-August, today was a bad day for serial killers, and thus a good day for everyone else: Charles Manson was arrested on August 16, 1969, and Ted Bundy was arrested the same day six years later on suspicion of burglary. (Unfortunately, he later escaped and wasn't fully reined in until 1978.) Whether Manson can really be considered a serial killer is another matter; in some ways, he was more like a mass... READ ON

"Jesse Helms is back! And this time he's black." Believe it or not, that's not some deranged Daily Kossian message board rant; it's a campaign slogan. And the candidate who embraced it -- Vernon Robinson, the Republican challenger in North Carolina's 13th District, has released a campaign ad so wildly reactionary that it's hard to believe a bona fide congressional candidate could release something like that and not be run out to the political wilderness and whacked. Anyway, Vern's foray into... READ ON

And you thought NASA had trouble defining its mission: Check out these old posters from China's space agency. The country clearly wanted to spread something throughout the universe, but whether that was Communism or fluffy flowery panda-happiness, we don't... READ ON

I was in Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago, and my friend, who's in the picture, told me about this great piece of graffiti a la Banksy that just cried out to be photographed. (My husband says it's Brooklyn's Flat Stanley.) It's actually a piece of waterproofed paper or some similar material, rather than spray-paint on the wall. I'm glad I got the pic when I did -- we walked by 24 hours later and it had been vandalized. Close-up after the... READ ON