Profoundly Meaningless (Yes Yes Yes):  Mother Jones blog reports on the closing of the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine.  According to Mama J, hipsters have underwritten the boom of cheaper keffiyeh production in China.  [Thanks to hawgblawg for finding this story].

Zombeconomics:  Worried about the shrinking global economy and the over population of over qualified professionals?  Overthinkingit.com has the solution.  One major outbreak of zombie attacks would both thin out the world population, and, once controlled with biotechnology, become a cheap source of labor.  Makes sense to me.

The Public Anthropology Public: Daniel Lende wrote two posts on neuroanthropology this week on public anthropology.  The first purports to be a review of Rob Borofosky’s explanation of Public Anthropology, but it is much more.  The post assembles various perspectives and multimedia interviews and examples of public anthropology.  In the second post, Lende compiles a list of further resources for people interested in deeper exploration.

Hey, Hey, Hey, I’ve Got It (World Cup Fever): Well, actually, I was gay-vaccinated against the fever before first going to Brazil in 2002.  (They won that year, and I hid from the hours of fireworks).  But others have the fever.  Material World posted on Lynn Jarvis’s Homeless World Cup, and Language Log explores the reported origins of the vuvuzela, a South African horn played at soccer matches.  (yes, i said it, soccer).

Sugar and Spice: Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily posted a very just critique of a recent article from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, claiming that infant girls were more attracted to pictures of dolls while infant boys were drawn to pictures of toy trucks.  Perhaps the post should have been titled, ‘babies socialized into gender roles really f’in early.’

Ok, I promised myself that this week would be MJ free, but this post at Language Log reached down and tapped my inner-child-ethnomusicologist.  Benjamin Zimmer tells a compelling tale about the Cameroonian origins of Jackson’s line ‘ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa,’ and in the process the globalization and transnational consumption of popular music.  Wanna be startin’ somethin’ indeed.