Some links.

Via Andrew Sullivan, in light of my recent body painting adventure, in which I did have help (at least getting my back), which was lovely and rather relaxing:
Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, believes, based on his time with the Masai in Kenya, body art predates cave paintings: "They were probably decorating one another, and this was like, in a broad sense, like when you look at non-human primates that groom one another, it was a way of developing social contact and social connectedness and cohesiveness. So the earliest art really goes back to Southern Africa [...] Europe wasn't really the place where the creative explosion happened. It came along with us into Europe and developed over time to the point where you have the first impressionists, twenty-five thousand years ago," by which he means the cave paintings at Lascaux. (That link leads to a 3D virtual tour of the caves, if you are interested.)

Kathleen Parker reflects on the growing sense of political unrest in the face of the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which is today. "Is the political environment becoming so toxic that we could see another Timothy McVeigh emerge?

No one knows the answer, but fears that anger could escalate into action beyond the ballot box are not misplaced. Ninety-nine percent of angry Americans might be perfectly satisfied to rail at their television sets -- or to show up at a Tea Party rally -- but it takes only one.
[...]
Add to the mixture of organic anger and grass-roots momentum the heckling language of Beck, Limbaugh & Co., and one fears that volatility could become explosive. What's next, militias?

Well, yes, now that you mention it. In Oklahoma, un-ironic legislators are sympathetic to a proposal to form local voluntary militias to thwart unwanted federal initiatives and to preserve state sovereignty."

Scary stuff. Here's hoping that the Second Amendment rallies today stay nonviolent, though, and that all those guns are in fact unloaded and holstered!

Also scary, but less because of my fellow man- a veritable hit parade of the biggest explosions in our history! Includes Krakatoa, the unexplained explosion at the Tunguska River in Siberia that leveled over 2000 square kilometers (that's over 1200 square miles!) in 1908, and Lake Toba, which was a supervolcano in Sumatra that cooled the earth 70,000 years ago and may have contributed to a decline in the human population at that time!