Lots of people loved president Obama’s speech calling for civility Wednesday night. It was a great speech. (Except the line about “jumping in rain puddles in heaven.”) And in that spirit, and because I think it’s good to note when people you often disagree with say something you do agree with, I very much like what David Brooks writes today: “The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.”

But not everyone is in that kind of mood. On his new song, “Burn,” the excellent and not-at-all-well-enough-known Atlanta rapper Killer Mike leans toward the rhetoric of Sarah Palin: “I know that you’re frustrated and you wanna kill shit/Stockpile your weapons ’cause that day just might come real quick.”

I don’t agree. Violence is never the answer. But, as its about the terrible 2009 incident when Oakland police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed unarmed 22-year-old Oscar Grant while he was pinned to the ground by another police officer, you can understand where the anger comes from. It’s a good song, with a beat constructed out of Funkadelic’s 1970 classic, “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks.”

Mike came up under Outkast the Dungeon Family collective, making a big splash with his song-stealing verse on the 2002 Grammy-winning single “The Whole World.”

He’s since split off and started his own label, Grind Time Records. And if the third installment of his I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind mixtape series, due in March, is anything like the first two, it will be terrific.

Here’s a really good interview Killer Mike did with Awl pal Sacha Jenkins a few years ago. Sacha’s magazine ego trip just launched a new website this week. It’s looking pretty excellent so far. You should check it out. (Disclosure, I used to work for ego trip — and much of what I know about rap, I learned from my former colleagues there.)

Amusing: “Nothing is more emblematic of modern Britain than pints of nut brown ale and random acts of savagery, especially against strangers who happen to have a distinguishing feature, such as a hat.”

I mean, come on: “Diners in China are overcoming their reservations by flocking to a new toilet-themed restaurant where business is booming. Customers at the Modern Toilet restaurant, in Kunming, Yunnan province, eat on seats converted from toilets. Urinals hang on the walls as decorations and signature dishes include ‘excrement ice cream’, ‘toilet bowl hot pot’ and ‘fried poo sticks.’”

Photo by Britt Selvitelle, from Flickr.

Local man makes $3850 in media licensing fees for video of rats crawling on man on subway. It’s a living!

Today designer and illustrator Frank Chimero decides that Boing Boing sucks now, in implied form, by way of an “oh-so-shocked” list of that site’s recent headlines. (“HOWTO make a motorcycle out of cigarette lighters”! “Insects made of human hair”!) Efficiency expert and consultant Merlin Mann chimes in: “I’m the last person to begrudge a talented person his success. But, it’s hard not to begrudge the deliberate perversion of that person’s talent in the service of gavaging a profitable but pathologically undemanding audience.” He closes with an editorial observation on Boing Boing: “Yuck.” He also makes the classic observation: “I haven’t deliberately visited the site in question in at least two years.” Ha! So you know, he just didn’t know that it had become oh so awful! Thank God he was informed! This kind of slagging-off is pretty normal for the life cycle of a website — someone cooler-than-thou has to do a drive-by dismissal, and then everyone can pile on, and we all get to feel very secure in our delicious special taste. (For the record, The Awl used to be so awesome, back in like May of 2009, and now, I mean, if you really look at it, oh my God, it’s just a crummy pile of blog posts.) Anyway, at least it’s nice to be reminded that the word “gavaging” is available for our use, particularly in the situation of expressing that an entire editorial product and its entire audience are now so far beneath you. Thank God there are other things to read that are still in their first few weeks of existence and therefore still unsullied by popularity and the natural following of their instincts over time! There’s probably like some really cool Tumblr about cats that’s not run by total sell-outs. (Also apparently I’m a web philistine, because my first thought is: who the hell wouldn’t want to learn how to make a motorcycle out of cigarette lighters?) Update: Ahem!

“Church officials believe that the Polish pope, who himself suffered from the condition, interceded for the miraculous cure of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a Frenchwoman in her late forties. She has said her illness inexplicably disappeared two months after John Paul II’s death, after she and her fellow nuns had prayed to him. Church-appointed doctors agreed that there was no medical explanation for the curing of the nun, although last year there were some doubts about the validity of the miracle. A Polish newspaper said that a doctor who scrutinised the nun’s case had concluded that she might have been suffering not from Parkinson’s, but from a nervous disorder from which temporary recovery is medically possible.”
 — Pope Benedict XVI has officially declared the first miracle attributed to his predecessor. They just need to find one more, and the late John Paull II will be beatified as a saint. Shouldn’t take too long. There’s magic everywhere in this bitch.

In case you’ve failed to keep up with the case of Cindy Mauro and Alini Brito — the two teachers in Brooklyn who were fired after allegedly doing sex to each other in an empty classroom — let our friends at Next Media Animation get you up to speed. Trivia buffs, take note: I am pretty sure this is the first use of the phrase “in flagrante delicto” in wacky Taiwanese animated news caption history.

To California: “Authorities stopping a suspected drunk driver near Hemet earlier this week found an unusual passenger riding shotgun: a goat.” Also: “The driver remained in the vehicle, while another man inside bolted down the street but fell.” Also: Actually, you know what? Just go read it yourself.

You can’t keep a massively disgusting snack down: The Scotch egg — a hardboiled egg wrapped in sausage, breaded and then deep-fried — is poised to recapture Britons’ discerning palates this year, reports the Sun. How soon before we see “Scotch eggings” join the rolls of that nation’s violent crimes? Also, ewww.

Everything about this photo is absolutely heartbreaking, but I think, in particular, the mix of sadness, concern and resolve on the face of Christina-Taylor Green’s father as he looks over at his son is in some strange way an affirmation of our ability to withstand even the most unfathomable tragedies. In an oddly uplifting way it reverses the liturgy — in the midst of death we are in life. For those of us who lapse too easily into cynicism or self-pity, it’s a powerful reminder that where there is sorrow there is also strength, and that’s something we need to consider more frequently.