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The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.

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It’s your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots.

Here’s only one of many on the site:

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A CIA report released by a congressional lawmaker could reopen the controversy about the 2001 shootdown of an American missionary plane mistakenly identified as a drug smuggler flying over Peru’s Amazon region.

The CIA withheld reports about the incident from the National Security Council, Justice Department and Congress, according to excerpts of an inspector general’s report released by the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

The agency’s Office of General Counsel had also advised CIA managers to avoid producing written reports about what happened “to avoid both criminal charges against Agency officers and civil liability.”

“Within hours, CIA officers began to characterize the shootdown as a one-time mistake in an otherwise well-run program,” the report says. “In fact, this was not the case.”

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A day after Nominet decided to sue one of its own directors, a senior civil servant warned that the domain industry must be better behaved to avoid government intervention.

Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform official David Hendon was speaking on Wednesday at the not-for-profit’s annual registrars’ meeting, where recent infighting over the future of the .uk registry took top billing. He said Nominet and the domain industry need to take more heed of the government agenda on phishing, spam and “bad content”.

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Now, no one is in favour of phishing and spam, but what on earth does this bureaucrat mean by “bad content”?

We don’t have to look far. Hazel Blears, a career politician who is currently Communities Secretary, recently made noises about shutting down blogs she doesn’t like. She particular doesn’t like the blog of Guido Fawkes. It’s not surprising she doesn’t like that blog because he has broken many stories that have been very embarrassing to the government. This is what she said:

Unless and until political blogging ‘adds value’ to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and pessimism.

Now, the thing is that Guido is a new and disparate voice. It’s just that he’s not the sort of new and disparate voice that Blears and the other aparatchiks in the government like. She only wants ones authorised by her.

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SNL comic Tina Fey and Sen. John McCain on cover of LIFE 10-15-2004.

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The fleecing knows no end.

Take a look at GM’s 8.375 percent bond due in July 2033, and feast your eyes on the new world of American capitalism. Yesterday’s price, at about 15 cents on the dollar, tells you the market believes GM will last long enough to make a little less than two years’ worth of interest payments.

Were it not for the chance of a government bailout, in lieu of an imminent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the bonds would trade for much less. And there lies the truth about what America’s capital markets have become: a rigged game.

You can see it all over. Nobody who knows anything about General Electric Co. actually believes it’s a AAA credit. And yet the raters at Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s continue to give GE their highest mark. Meanwhile, the company just landed government insurance for as much as $139 billion of debt for its lending arm, GE Capital Corp., which also is rated AAA. If GE were really that strong, it wouldn’t need the help.

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Think back to the price of that GM bond. It doesn’t imply that a government bailout would be enough to let the automaker continue as a going concern until its bonds mature. What the market understands is that GM will collapse long before then, no matter how much taxpayer money it gets now.

In Congress, lawmakers may be fancying a $25 billion bailout for the auto industry. Yet even if they earmarked all that money just for GM, which has $59 billion more liabilities than assets, it wouldn’t make the company solvent.

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As you know, Mormons have a practice of converting dead people from other religions into Mormons through a practice known as posthumous baptism. Ordinarily, this might just seem a silly act of disrespect towards the individual’s personal beliefs and convictions.

However, the Mormons have made an overt effort to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims. That is not merely silly and disrespectful, that is superfluously offensive. An agreement between Jews and Mormons limited the practice thirteen years ago. But the Mormons returned to the practice recently.

Well, then of course, many of us rightly took offense for the heavy Mormon influence during the Prop 8 vote in California. Well, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I am converting dead Mormons into homosexuals.

My first Conversion is Joseph Smith.

I have no idea how Tina Fey is going to top this…

Palin has now officially made the phrase “jump the shark” obsolete. From now on, it’s “pardoned the turkey”.

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Gosh. Poor old George Bush. He’s having a rough time, isn’t he? He has the worst presidential approval ratings in US history. Under his stalwart leadership, the country has taken an economic, social and emotional nosedive. His own party attempts to distance themselves from him on a daily basis. And to top it all off, can you believe that nobody wants to buy his memoirs? To add insult to injury, publishers are courting his wife with fervour, each clamouring for the opportunity to bid on her memoirs. It has to burn at least a little, right?

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Several parliamentary parties are considering creating legislation that would spare all children from circumcision – not just girls

A proposal to ban circumcision for boys may be on its way to parliament after intense discussions by MPs over the past week, reports Kristeligt Dagblad newspaper.

Although circumcision of girls was outlawed in response to the practice being common among immigrants from some Muslim countries, boys may still be circumcised if a certified physician is present.

Jewish traditions calls for the circumcision of newborn boys, and many Muslims and Christians support the practice as well. But both the Ethics Council and the National Council for Children have recently criticised the practice, stating that a boy should be able to decide for himself if he wants the procedure performed when he reaches the age of 15 – the legal age in Denmark for a child to have sole jurisdiction over his own body.

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Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer’s books.

The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.

Polish archaeologist Jerzy Gassowski told a news conference that forensic facial reconstruction of the skull that his team found in 2005 buried in a Roman Catholic Cathedral in Frombork, Poland, bears striking resemblance to existing portraits of Copernicus.

The sun is the center of the universe? Where do reporters get their education these days? Copernicus is probably spinning in his… oh, wait.