Bullet Point Rock: The headcold-muffled return

Here's some things.

• Via BFD comes the absurd Starbucks story of the day.


• Those crazy UK folk and their new year's reading resolutions. Seems I'm not the only one with Dickens in mind. Where did that come from, anyway?


• SlushPile comments on an article at CNN.com about the possible next round of competitors for the title of "the next DaVinci Code".


• Good quotes about experiencing art at Chekhov's Mistress.


• And finally, the Literary Saloon points us toward an article on Orhan Pamuk. Interesting stuff:
  

  At first, Pamuk was quiet when he found his books to be the object of controversy. Then a provincial governor ordered the burning of "Snow" last summer. What stains Turkey's history, Pamuk argued in his commentary, is the impossibility to speak freely.
  
  "I believe that in today's Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians [is] a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters [are] inextricably linked," he wrote.
  
  Historical truth is elusive and the best substitute is probably a constant competition of ideas. As long as scholars engage in research and Ottoman records remain accessible, it should be no recipe for media circuses or fatwas. And yet, timed as it is with heated debates about Turkey's EU candidacy, the Pamuk trial is one more in a long list of political scandals.