A new saying. The Freakonomics blog posted a "bleg" from "Yale Book of Quotations" editor Fred Shapiro, in which Shapiro blegged for modern proverbs. He got more than 150, including:

> It is what it is.

> A walk is as good as a hit.

> Your mileage may vary.

> You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours. (Yogi Berra)

> Happy wife, happy life.

> Lather, rinse, repeat.

> Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. (Yoda)

> The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an ever expanding bureaucracy.

> Most people would rather die than think. Many often do.

> A dying mare kicks hardest.

> The easiest way to make a small fortune is to bring a big one.

> Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.

The value of error. Robert Rauschenberg (above), the artist who died last week at 82, was ever the improviser, The New York Times reports. "Screwing things up is a virtue," he said at age 74. "Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."

Interactive tombstones. A Japanese gravestone maker is offering a new marker containing a bar code that gives the visitor access to photographs or video of the deceased. The Mainichi Daily News reports that the visitor uses his or her cellphone to read the code, then gets connected online to information about the person. "Tombstones change with the ages," Yoshitsugu Fukazawa told the Daily News. "If my grandfather who started the company could see this, he'd probably be really surprised."

E.T. 101. A University of Wyoming professor is teaching a creative writing course called "Intersteller Message Composition," in which students try to figure out how to explain humankind to an alien life form. During one of the first classes, professor Jeffrey Lockwood told his students to describe the human condition in 250 words, then 50, then 10, says the Christian Science Monitor. "I leave here with a headache a lot," student Christina Ingoglia tells the Monitor.