Pun Salad

… "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!"

• Happy birthday to Robert Duvall, 80 years young today. Here's his IMDB page; not all the movies are good, but he's just about always one of the best things in them.

• Also we'll jump the gun a bit and wish a happy would-have-been-120th birthday to Zora Neale Hurston, born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891. John McWhorter notes her essential conservatism:
  Hurston would have understood that sense that black people are, in the end, individuals rather than the sum of an abstract "blackness," as she indicates here: "Suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit."

  I don't even have to look around a bit to know that every white man is not an Edison.

• The headline says "INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture" and that's not a lie. Check it out. (Via Granite Geek.)

• USS Enterprise Captain Relieved Of Command. Ah, yes. I remember that episode.

  (Sorry. Variants of that minor joke are all over the web, but I couldn't resist.)