The family that's owned The Washington Post for generations surprised the media world yesterday, announcing it would sell the newspaper to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. It'll be an interesting melding of Internet mogul and legacy newspaper (one which almost everyone seems pleased about), but I'm more partial to Bezos' investment in an enormous mountain clock that ticks once a year.

Post columnist Gene Weingarten—in a weird and rhetorically useful twist—in 1982 refused to run a story that would have shone light on a young Jeff Bezos' teenage accomplishments. Weingarten argued at the time the story was just pandering to his paper's owner. The circle of life moves us all.

Before former President George W. Bush was a fitness buff, he was famously abusive of his mortal shell. And maybe you can't outrun/bike that. Or perhaps he's just getting old. Either way, Bush required an angioplasty this morning.

Jury's out in the Boston trial of accused mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. At the moment I'm writing this, this Washington Post "story" is just one sentence that exactly parrots the headline. Thanks, Bezos.

The slow, inevitable march toward lonesome insanity has begun for NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity. Only now does the voyage become truly interesting—maybe even a bit literary?

The court-martial of an Army major accused of killing and wounding 26 people at Texas' Fort Hood began this morning, with defendant Nidal Hasan representing himself. "The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter," Hasan reportedly said in his opening statement. "Evidence will show I was on the wrong side of America's war and I later switched sides."

Here's the terrible, inevitable follow-up to a terrible, depressing story Denis featured on GMN last week.

Yemen may be the focus of an al-Qaeda attack US intelligence officials have been loudly anticipating for days, according to the Guardian.

A Pennsylvania man upset over "living conditions at his ramshackle, trash-filled property" opened fire at his township's monthly meeting Monday night, killing three people before being shot with his own gun.

Cherish your PERS, friends. Chicago's pension quagmire is crazy.

I hope everyone's finding the time to revel in their summers. I most certainly am not.

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"Computer, load up Celery Man, please."