Snowclones are a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context.

Chronologal snowclones. From An X doth not a Y make (A swallow doth not a summer make, 400 B.C.) to im in ur X, Y-ing your Z (im in ur base, killing ur d00dz, 2007).

Happy fourth.

Chess-related deaths

Gregor MacGregor (1786 – 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and colonizer who fought in the South American struggle for independence. Upon his return to England in 1820, he claimed to be cazique of Poyais. Poyais was a fictional Central American country that MacGregor had invented which, with his help, drew investors and eventually colonists.

9 Cool Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Wikipedia. Fun list.

Fantastic article by danah boyd. (The discussion at Britannica Blog gets sidetracked early. There's much more light and less heat in boyd's comment section - scroll down).

The contest to kill 100 people using a sword was an incident that occurred in China during the Nanking Massacre.

Lewis Black on Wikipedia and Conservapedia

Greg F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), an American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, has been quoted in more than 100 articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a person on the street rather than a newsmaker or expert).

Here's the transcript of the first-ever debate between candidates for the Wikimedia board. It was chatroom-style; hopefully there'll be a voice debate sometime.

Wikimedia board elections start on Thursday, and Kelly Martin is profiling all the candidates. Martin is a reliable firebrand: her writing is always entertaining but frequently off-the-mark. It's also way more compelling than the Foundation's dry-as-PBS self-coverage.

Sèra: "According to these very conservative figures WMF delivers as much as 350 million euro in raw labor per year. THIS is our influence on reality. The simple fact that we can invest in culture much more than any government/company on earth can...That's why we all ARE wmf shareholders and we all have the full right to make questions and get answers, whenever just a leaf moves.

In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles.

Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson , as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

See also: Lake Wobegon effect

List of oldest continuously inhabited cities My favorite: Crocodilopolis

Deep-fried Mars Bar. Surprisingly detailed.

Longest articles on Wikipedia. Also known as: The Museum of Misguided Merges.

The most familiar examples of states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases; the most common state of matter in the universe is plasma. Less familiar states of matter include: quark-gluon plasma, Bose-Einstein condensates, strange matter, and superfluids.

List of states of matter.

The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849 has some element of mystery to it. The circumstances behind his being found semi-conscious in a Baltimore gutter are uncertain, as are his final days leading up to his death; some questions even exist surrounding his burial.

The Poe Toaster is the unofficial nickname given to a mysterious figure who pays an annual tribute to American author Edgar Allan Poe by visiting the author's original grave marker on his birthday. The unexplained tradition began in 1949 and has occurred on the author's birthday (January 19) of every year since