In Brief: Call Your Mom Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• The holiday known as Mothers' Day was begun as a campaign for peace by the mothers of war veterans. So, please, this is a general message to everyone in the world -- please don't stop doing what your mother told you to do just because you grew up. Be kind to all the kids, even the ones who annoy you, and don't fight with anyone on the playground. Share your sandwich with the kid who forgot his lunch, and if you're a big kid, watch out for the little ones. [Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe]


• Now that you mention it, that famous bust of Nefertiti really does not look all that much like other Egyptian art of the same supposed period. [BBC News]


• Hee hee hee. "Mainstream Media At It Again, Bloggers Report." [The Onion]


• Finally, another country is taking some of the heat for immigration status nightmares for traveling artists, formerly an all-American problem. [The Guardian]


• Far be it from me to tell people how to spend their free time, but imagine if all those people who learned Klingon -- writing dictionaries, translating Hamlet into it, and so on -- had spent all that effort learning a real foreign language, like Arabic or Chinese, that could actually be useful. [Slate]


• Pope Benedict XVI is visiting Jordan. [Whispers in the Loggia]


• Van Gogh's famous ear-severing incident may not have been a self-mutilation. German art historians have floated a still widely disputed theory that Van Gogh lost his ear when Gauguin, a skilled fencer, intentionally or accidentally cut off his friend's ear during their last argument. [The Guardian]