Courtesy of the Slacktivist, 7 biblical women's names that deserve wider usage:

2. Jael. You meet plenty of people named after Mary, the other biblical character praised as "most blessed of women," but I've never met anyone named after Jael. Maybe it's because the name translates, literally, as "mountain goat." Or maybe it's because "bad-ass" isn't what most parents are looking for in a name for their baby girl. Jael was bad-ass. She took out Sisera, the general in charge of the invading army:

Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. "Come," she said, "I will show you the man you're looking for." So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple – dead.

Don't mess with Jael.

I know it's been linked to everywhere by now, but Google Exodus genuinely is well worth a look.

[Via Vidque]

Stanley Kubrick, accepting the D W Griffith Award and contemplating the lessons of the story of Icarus:

[D W Griffith...] was always ready to take tremendous risks in his films and in his business affairs. He was always ready to fly too high. And in the end, the wings of fortune proved for him, like those of Icarus, to be made of nothing more substantial than wax and feathers, and like Icarus, when he flew too close to the sun, they melted. And the man who's fame exceeded the most illustrious filmmakers of today spent the last 17 years of his life shunned by the film industry he had created.

I've compared Griffith's career to the Icarus myth, but at the same time I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, "Don't try to fly too high," or whether it might also be thought of as, "Forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings."

[Via NickW, posting at the Word Magazine Blog]