In an effort to forestall me ending up writing yet another dishwater dull diary datum, I have decided to share some links with you instead.

As content goes, it’s not a heck of a lot better, but at least it’s different.

First off, we have this adorable news story that is making the rounds because it has just the tiniest whiff of the magical to it.

A Swedish farmer lost her wedding ring sixteen years ago, and had completely given up on finding it. In fact, she had nearly forgotten about it.

But recently it turned up, and in the most unlikely of places : wrapped around a carrot from her garden.

That is where the magic comes in. Not in the plain facts of the story, those are easily explained by science. The family theorizes that the ring ended up going falling into the sink after being set aside while the farmer, Lena Paahlsson, did some Christmas baking.

It then got mixed in with table scraps and thrown into the compost heap. Compost heap becomes compost, gets put on the carrots-to-be, and sinks into the soil a bit. And a carrot grows right into it.

No, the magic doesn’t come from that. It comes from that one mind blowing moment when she saw the wedding ring she had almost completely forgotten wrapped around a carrot from her garden.

The sense of overwhelming awe and surprise must have been truly magical for her.

And to think, she nearly threw the carrot out for being too small!

Next up in clip world, we have this little gem. Warning, it’s a tad twitchy. And I highly recommend muting the obnoxious generic world music soundtrack.

What makes this video different from all the other time-lapse travel videos I have seen is the composition and editing. He made sure to get himself dead center in the frame of all sixty or so of the one second clips specifically so that he could edit them together into a visually striking montage like this one.

Admittedly, it’s also a little grating. The eye is not quite designed for a whole lot of highly visually different clips with a single unifying element to focus on despite the noise and at the rate of a clip a second. So it’s a bit of a workout for the ol’ corneas.

Still, it’s quite the artifact this guy has created, and it looks like he had a heck of a good time traveling the world, too, so I felt I just had to share his little memento with you.

If I were to travel the world, I would find a really ugly Christmas sweater and take pictures or clips of myself wearing it in the most incongruous places I could possibly find, just for the irony.

Like, wearing it at the Pyramids of Giza, in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, on a raft at deep sea, standing on the roof of some random factory somewhere in Japan, and so on.

And when possible, I would be holding a cup of eggnog and looking a little drunk while I gestured towards the camera with it in a lame “cheers to you, Mister Camera!” post.

Next up, here is a blast of a nasty story from the past : police in Japan have finally caught one of the last three remaining outlaw members of killer cult Aum Shinrikyu, the cult that carried out a sarin gas attack on a Japanese subway car, killing thirteen people at the behest of their leader, Shoko Asahara.

On a personal level, I find it to be brain tingling weirdness that I should happen to have this story come across the transom via Twitter to me today of all days, because it was only this morning that I thought about the whole Aum Shinrikyu incident for the first time in many, many years.

Funny how that happens, isn’t it?

I had been thinking about it because I was trying to remember when I first started seriously thinking about the pathology of cult leaders of all stripes, whether they lead some rec room cult without enough members to make up a baseball team or they are the tinpot dictators lording it over millions of people.

Specifically, I was pondering how the same sort of characteristics that lead someone to become a cult leader in the first place, namely the kind of combination of unstable but demanding ego and emotional intelligence it takes to have the charisma necessary to attract followers and dominate them psychologically leads, predictably, to how they inevitably become paranoid and obsessed with ideas of betrayal and apocalypse.

When the cult leaders start out, having any followers at all is enough to satisfy their incomplete sense of self. A lot of these people are, quite frankly, losers before they get into the cult biz, people who have had very little success in the world, often due to a highly immature personality, and so when they hit upon a way to have people not only respect them but worship and adore them, that is enough to satisfy them for a while.

But the ego is unstable and hence needs larger and larger amounts of reassurance in order to remain strong, which means the cult has to expand constantly, and sooner or later, it reaches its limit. It can expand no further. So the leader has to face the truth, once more, of the great majority of humanity who does not worship and adore him and how, no matter how much he gratifies his ego with the cult, someday he will die and the world will move on and forget him.

So, being fundamentally immature and unstable, they begin to obsess about the dreaded outside world and the “other” that now looms large in their mind. They become convinced that outside forces are conspiring to come take their beautiful new world away from them, and often this is when the pogroms begin.

Eventually, this mutates into the vision of the Apocalypse, where the intolerable outside world will meet the horrible, bloody, violent end that it so richly deserve for being scary and big and refusing to become an extension of the leader’s ego like it was supposed to do.

It’s all kind of sad, when you think about it.