No caption needed. Originally spotted at CuteOverload.com.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Gmail introduces sci-fi "offline mode" on same day Hotmail finally allows POP access
So how unbelievable is this quiet news? The same day that Google's Gmail introduces the science-fictiony "offline mode" to their service (so you can actually read and write emails even while disconnected), Microsoft's Hotmail FINALLY allows for POP3 access for the very first time, which as this linked article reminds us is just a mere eleven years after they first gained the ability. It's just one of the many basic services that Microsoft deliberately withheld from the free Hotmail in the '90s, to force people into paid accounts and purchased copies of Outlook; and it just highlights the 180-degree difference between them and a place like Google, a company that started with free POP access on day one and is now just a few years later to this science-fictiony level of features that Microsoft can only dream of. It's a whole new concept for doing business -- actually respecting your customers -- something places like Microsoft still haven't caught on to yet.

Just how many "mini-Madoffs" were running Ponzi schemes in the 2000s?
And just when you thought the news about the economy couldn't get any worse, it suddenly does: Turns out that Bernie Madoff wasn't the only high-profile financier who was secretly actually running a con-game during the 2000s to make it all work, that there have already so far been another half-dozen smaller-scale figures from around the country now caught doing the same thing, and maybe hundreds more to still be caught. Wow, when economists talk about how late-stage capitalism is essentially a shell game of buying and selling fraudulent little pieces of paper, who knew that so much of that would turn out to be the literal truth? And this is worse news than simply a bad economy, of course; it means that maybe up to half a trillion of our old '00s GNP was generated illegally, meaning we'll never get fully back to that level even if we completely turn the economy around. So congrats -- you just lived through the richest period of history the US will ever have. Wasn't it great?

Op/Ed: "Clueless Blago is providing us greatest PR nightmare of all time"
A nice op/ed over at "The Daily Beast" today, arguing what is becoming clearer by the day to so many of us: that Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is simply an out-and-out sociopath, unwilling to accept any advice from any person around him that smacks of practicality, digging himself in so much deeper with each day that it's now approached the level of a cartoon. First he refused to plea-bargain when clearly guilty, so all his lawyers quit; so now he won't even show up to the impeachment trial, and has instead been on a high-profile television PR campaign; but he keeps making insanely embarrassing gaffes while on-air -- comparing himself to Gandhi, defending his wife's cursing by saying "she was just picking it up off me" like a child would. And don't forget, he refuses to respond to the damning taped evidence being played during the trial this week, and instead calls the whole thing a "witch hunt" because he was "too good a governor." Will be a PR case study for years to come.

Holy crap, Yahoo has lost $300 million in last three months
For those paying attention, that's right around three million dollars a day, every single day for three months straight. How does a company even manage to lose three million dollars in a single day to begin with, much less do so for 90 days in a row? How does that even happen? It boggles my mind sometimes, how a single corporation can manage to blow through that much money that quickly.

Republican Congressman to Limbaugh: "Please shut the f-ck up now"
Yet more proof of just how close the Republican Party is to a complete and total breakup: Bushist talk-show host Rush Limbaugh earlier this week accused Obama of being more scared of him than of impotent GOP Congress members; this prompted GOP Congressman Phil Gingrey to respond essentially with, "Of course Obama has been reacting to you more, you muck-raking paleocon nutjob." Basically we're seeing the splitting of the Republicans into two unequal groups: a much larger number of just plain normal citizens who happen to be conservative, and then a much smaller group of Bush-era backwards Evangelical racist talk-show-worshipping nutjobs, who unfortunately are much louder than the larger group, more willing to play dirty tricks, and more willing to spend insane amounts of money to get their way. That's why the groups seem evenly matched, despite the vast difference in actual number of people; and that in a nutshell is why their party is in such a mess these days.

Insiders: "Almost 100-percent likely that a radical will win RNC election"
The Republican National Committee's convention has finally started, with their elections coming in just two days; I've been following the race closely here, in that I think if the GOP picks another radical conservative to head things up, it's almost a foregone conclusion that their party will collapse over the next eight years, becoming only a regionally important group and essentially turning the nation into a one-party system (liberal Democrats versus conservative Democrats, versus a series of small regional parties scattered across the country, like exactly what happened in the US between 1812 and 1860). And guess what? Insiders at the convention are predicting that this is exactly what's going to happen; they will most likely pick an existing committee member, for example, knocking out the two moderate black candidates, while the general mood seems to be that they lost in '08 because of Bush's bailout, and that they need to get more conservative than they already were. Sheesh.

Have your own interesting link you'd like to share? Post it to the CCLAPocracy, the center's new community-driven microblog. Membership is free!