Email: "Corporation to run for Congress; Americans drinking more and cheaper liquor"
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• A corporation has declared it will run for Congress in Maryland's 8th Congressional District.





The corporation, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, will be running in the Republican primary, and with, the New York Times notes, a twinge of irony. Hey, at least we'd transparently know who backs them financially.





Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.





You can watch Murray Hill's campaign video over at the Times' Web site.





• The economy may be impacting what we spend our money on, from eating out to attending live sporting events. But one thing it's not doing is limiting our consumption of alcohol, according to a new study released Tuesday.





In fact, the Great Recession caused Americans to actually drink more — and a bit cheaper — liquor last year.


While the value of all spirits sold was essentially flat at $18.7 billion in 2009, volume increased about 1.4% as consumers drank "value" brands of bourbon, vodka and tequila - largely at the expense of so-called high-end and super-premium marques, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.





• Since people of Old Testament times didn't have a Bible (at least as we know it today) to swear on, or take oaths with, they used — what else? — a penis. That's right.





From a review of "The Uncensored Bible:"





In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang.





The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”—testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.





• British scientists are saying they have been able to communicate with a patient in a vegetative state for the last five years.





They used a new brain scanning technique to 'talk' to the 29 year old Belgian man who damaged his brain in a car accident and has been classified as being in a vegetative state.





The patient was able to communicate "yes" and "no" using just his thoughts during a research conducted by a team from Cambridge University.





The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.





Dr Adrian Owen, who led the team, said this is a rare case.





• A group of women have joined a pact to not buy any new clothes for a year. Time Magazine's money blog has an interview with several of them about the choice — what they call the Great American Apparel Diet.

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