1. The Beautiful Young Man is as awesome as he is handsome. He covered my Room in the Inn shift earlier tonight, since I was too snuffly and drained to make the trip. He probably updated the Inn's outdated television setup while he was there, too.

2. The ever-affectionate doggie.

3. Hot water + honey + whisky.

---

The Penny Experiment is seeking artists. The gist: create a postcard-sized piece of art featuring a penny and a number assigned to you by the project organizer. Donate it to the project, which will in turn sell it and donate 100% of the proceeds to a food bank.

[The guy organizing the project is also the dude who blogs about Hello Kitty Hell, which I happened to look at tonight in the course of rooting around for information on Herman Van Rompuy, who is the new president of the European Union -- and has a blog at which he posts haiku as well as quotes from Rilke and other poets. There are translations of six of the haiku on Adriaan Jan's Twitter (dated November 20).

...The connection between Hello Kitty and haiku, you ask? You actually have to ask?

...Oh, and courtesy of some bored (or catwaxing) Dutch creatives, there's already a Haiku Herman hack. Lordie.]