I'm ready to retire

I got up this morning to the news of the Bankruptcy Bill that just breezed through the Senate.
It makes it harder, they said, for people to use Chapter Seven to skip out on their debts.
Just what we need, I thought. Yet another tool that institutions can use against individuals.

I was getting warmed up for a rant, when I started checking my feeds to see what's happening in the blog world. Because numerals appear before letters, 3Quarks Daily is at the top of my list. Once again, this is too good not to share.
I don't have time to read it myself - besides its PDF, which I'm not crazy about - but maybe somebody has the time. If I didn't have to work, I would read stuff like this all day long.

Late in 1919, in a squalid Paris studio strewn with wine bottles, Amedeo Modigliani painted a wistful portrait of his 21-year-old lover Jeanne Hébuterne. A few months later, on January 24, 1920, the impoverished artist died of tubercular meningitis at age 35. The following evening, Hébuterne, eight months' pregnant with their second child, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window.

During Modigliani's short and difficult life, the going rate for his elegant, oddly distorted paintings was less than $10, and takers were few. A landlord who confiscated some of his work in lieu of rent used the canvases to patch old mattresses. This past November an anonymous bidder at Sotheby's auction house in New York City paid $31.3 million for the Hébuterne portrait.

Abbas Raza has the best job in the world if he has time to find articles like this one from The Smithsonian.
And that's not all. There is lots more.