Well, thanks to a heads-up from CNN food writer Kat Kinsman, I was spared the annual confusion that lasts for a couple of city blocks as you walk past person after person who has apparently been very sloppy with their application of mascara, or has been hit in the forehead by a thrown lump of coal. Today is Ash Wednesday, when Catholics wear ash on their foreheads in commemoration of the forty days of fasting that preceded his crucification. It's an act of repentance. READ MORE

13) No-frills paisleys READ MORE

Watching Hodgy Beats ride through the suburbs, shooting lasers from the crotch of his Starship Troopers spacesuit, hitting patty-cake-playing white girls and turning them into cats, makes it very, very difficult to believe that the Odd Future crew is not thinking beyond whatever controversy and "troll-gaze" labels people put on them. I think they're having fun; largely innocent fun. And making good art ("violator art," maybe, though my head starts to swim with the word salad of critical terminology.) But I do think it's art that says, or is at least trying to say something about the world we're living in. And even if that something is nothing more than "everyone should lighten up a little bit and listen to what we can do with words and beats, watch what we can do with popular-culture imagery"—we should. Tyler the Creator is a coke-sniffing centaur. Yes. I prefer to err in the direction of giving artists the benefit of the doubt. Ice-T once said, "Rap is funny. But if you don't know it's funny, it'll scare the shit out of you." I think that's still the point.

Happy President's Day. I hope you're not at work. But if you are, stop what you're doing and let Eric B. make you clap to this vintage clip of him and Rakim performing on "Yo! MTV Raps" in 1992.

The other morning I was walking my kid to school and we crossed Court Street in Brooklyn in front of a car that had an interestingly shaped air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. It was hanging at a slight angle behind the windshield, and so I looked at it for a good few seconds, in effort to confirm that it was what I thought it was. Sure enough: it was a cardboard air-freshener in the shape of fist with a raised middle finger. Like the giant foam hands they sell at sports games or Key West or wherever. READ MORE

"The more positive attitude toward intermarriage represents a sharp break from the recent past and parallels behavioral change: about 15 percent of new marriages across the country in 2010 were between spouses of different races or ethnicities, more than double the share in 1980. The researchers presented the acceptance of interracial marriage as 'the fading of a taboo.'” READ MORE

Part of me wishes that Jack White had stopped in the middle of his new single and broken into Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption," but this mellower, Dylan-and-Emmylou thing is working pretty good for him, too.

When I was in college, a guy I knew had a really bad day when, at the behest of two platonic girl friends, he drew a picture of where he thought the clitoris was located in relationship to the vagina. He drew it at the bottom. And the girls told everybody. First of all, I swear that I am not the guy in this story. Secondly, too bad Maybach Music Group singer Masspike Miles wasn't around back when we were in college, because he has apparently invented a device designed explicitly to locate hard-to-find features of the female anatomy. I would quote the lyrics to this song, which are actually far more embarrassing than not knowing where the clitoris is when you're in college. But I will just let you listen for yourself. Wait for the chorus, it's worth it. (Then, by all means, stop listening immediately. Although the beat is nice and luxurious and the video shows pretty pictures of Thailand.) Oh, warning: there is a brief appearance of a naked woman's nipple around the 2:00 mark.

"It’s a mammal with a long, rat-like snout, a rather high number of small incisors, closely spaced premolars with pointed cusps, and especially long, curved upper canines. Note that, unlike dogs, foxes and so on, it doesn’t have an obvious rhinarium (the area of dark, distinctly textured skin that surrounds the nostrils in such animals). These features all immediately screamed “opossum” to me. Partly this is because I’ve handled opossum skulls and am familiar with their surprisingly big upper canines and high number of incisors. Even the fur looks opossum-like (mammal carcasses typically slough fur after they’ve been decomposing in water for a while, and this explains the naked face). When you add all this to the fact that the Virginia opossum is a common, widespread mammal in California we have an obvious and uncontroversial identification." READ MORE

This new Madonna video, in which M.I.A. appears (and doesn't do much, along with Nicki Minaj), is not as good as M.I.A.'s new video, "Bad Girls." Considering this, and also the great video Jay-Z and Kanye West made for their song "Otis" last summer, it seems that the Bay Area hip-hop subculture known as "hyphy," which peaked four or five years ago, is having its most lasting cultural impact in the phenomena of the dangerous-looking car tricks known as "ghost riding."