Linksfest: In Bloom

I love Slate’s the Explainer column, and this week’s collection of the questions the Explainer couldn’t answer is pretty funny. (Sample: “yea i have my own 620 gang and i dont know how to run it to make not look like a little bitch gang joke it is just me and my friend how do i run it?”)
Personal ads from the London Review of Books. Literate, wry, self-deprecating.
Saparmurat Niyazov, old-school dictator, passes away. The NY Times’ “Fantastically well-developed personality cult” barely scratches the surface - but then it seems hard to describe someone who created a statue of himself that rotated to face the sun.
In case you ever needed to buy pantaloons. Or bloomers. The most disturbing part is that they offer “split crotch bloomers”.