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These items have no theme (well, okay, maybe "gender and genre"?); just wanting to close some browser windows. I think I got several of these from Cheryl, but I've lost track.

• "Water ice in crater at Martian north pole." It looks a little like a fried egg, over easy.
• Bit of a kerfuffle over this year's Rita Awards ceremony, that being the Romance Writers of America award. Apparently the ceremony featured "a video and audio rehash of every national and international tragedy that's taken place since 1980, set to a back-drop of kicky tunes from each year represented." They asked Nora Roberts to MC the ceremony, but she refused; I gather it's her who posted a letter explaining why she declined.
• Regender is a fascinating little toy/tool that lets you view any given web page with the gender of gendered pronouns and nouns (and even some people's names) reversed. Badgerbag has some discussion, cogent and interesting as usual. I'm tempted to redirect all of the links I post through that filter for a while, but it seems to be a little slow (at least with the connection I'm using) so I'll probably refrain. When I'm on a faster connection, I may try to run some online hard sf stories through it. . . . Note that the tool also provides buttons across the top to change to nongendered terms and so on.
• While I'm on the subject of gender, I may as well mention a new sf anthology, Emerald Eye, just released by Aeon Press. It features "the very best of modern science fiction, fantasy and horror" mixed with "highly imaginative work from mainstream masters." Eighteen stories—only one of which is by a woman (Anne McCaffrey). I don't know enough about Irish sf authors to know whether there are any other Irish women writing "imaginative work," but it does seem likely that there might be. Oh, well.
• I haven't been paying attention to the shuttle the last few days, so I'm pleased and relieved to see that Discovery has returned safely home.
• Attributes of good interviewees.
• Cheryl continues to provide lots of WorldCon-report links.
• PNH writes about reforming the Best Pro Editor Hugo award, only I'm not seeing a link to the final proposal. Anyone got one? If I had a faster connection, I'd spend some time Googling for it, but I'm about out of time for now anyway—time to go find out how to print a cover letter, I think.