Welcome to Post-Colonial Williamsburg. After our group breakfast and orientation each morning, you have the rest of the day to entertain yourselves on our grounds. All of the following historical attractions begin on the hour, and can be accessed by high-speed monorail through the B gates. Your entries are all-inclusive, and tips are not accepted by the few remaining human operators. We'll see you again for the unbearable period-costume banquet at seven pm. Please enjoy your stay.

Splitting the Check:

Watch as two of the eight members of your party throw down the exact amount of their food and drink and then dash out to split a cab to [...]

This survey of relationship trends in Japan is fascinating and bizarre. Some of the more confounding numbers:

- One in four Japanese people in their late 30s has never had sex.

- 61% of unmarried Japanese men and 50% of unmarried women don't have girlfriends/boyfriends.

- And 90% of unmarried young Japanese women prefer to stay single, although 89% of them say they want to get married someday (?).

This in addition to Japanese teens feeling ambivalent about sex, and the looming "demographic crisis." Their toilets and candy, however, remain second to none. [Via]

My favorite way to waste time at work is by worrying about my future. Horoscopes are one way to get my fix, but better is Llewellyn.com's secret free tarot card-reading portal, which I stumbled across years ago, and which I've since visited daily to learn about the mysterious men and bad omens about to influence my destiny.

It's well designed, easy to navigate, and about as good as a free online tarot card-reading site could conceivably be: You get your choice of nine different card decks, ranging from Llewellyn's signature deck to the druid-inspired "Sacred Circle Tarot" to the glitzy "Gilded Tarot," and your pick of spreads (the [...]

The day my husband announced he was leaving, two days before Halloween, a pack of Rider Waite tarot cards arrived in the mail. Tarot folk wisdom suggests that instead of seeking out your own cards, you should wait for them to come to you. (Although I don’t think deliveries from Amazon were what anyone had in mind.)

Of course I had ordered the cards myself. When I picked out the pack, I was already predicting my need for them. My husband was on tour in Australia, operating concert lighting for a musician's world tour. Most times his absence didn’t bother me — I knew what I was in for [...]

… Among them, a "Science of Happiness" badge (to the left), which is earned when a girl spends a month pursuing something that's "generally believed" to bring her well-being, and then reports on how it all went down. One example of a generally believed pursuit is "being forgiving toward others," but another should be "looking at that pretty rainbow badge," because that is one pretty rainbow Girl Scout badge.

Other new badges include Money Manager, Budgeting, Financing My Future, Good Credit, Meet My Customers, Business Plan, Customer Loyalty, Computer Expert, The Science of Style, Digital Movie Maker, Website Designer, Geocacher, and Locavore. Geocacher? The Girl Scouts are taking over [...]

Soon we will pee into our cars.

Tangerine Tango. “Sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive," says a Pantone colorwoman, "Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it. Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy.” Damn, that's a fancy orange. Now that we've come to the end of 2011, in what ways did honeysuckle color your year?

Photo by Sergio33, via Shutterstock

"Remote virtual love making would allow individuals to 'connect with their partner' while away from home, although lenses could be worn to adjust how their partner looks." —The future is looking bright, according to "futurologist" Ian Pearson. He used some kind of magical portal to peer all the way into the year 2030, and the news is good. Not only does it seem like our civilization still exists (though no word on whether it is still cool enough to safely go outdoors), it also turns out our hotels are fantastic! You see, they're loaded with fancy technology that can do things like diagnose medical conditions, control our dreams, and [...]