Chile’s looking to win whales’ swing vote with its new cetacean sanctuary. It will no doubt earn the affection of freshly enfranchised teen starlet Hayden Panettiere, who with her pictogram brigade, is looking to kick Iceland when its down.  (I wonder if she’d tolerate a dreamy Ivy-league Brooklyn boy who turns an Inupiat whale hunt into an Internet kalaidiscope.)

From the aforementioned beleaguered land of ponies, Björk shoots off a op-ed telling the IMF where they can stick their aluminum smelters. Then she suggests her homeland’s “almost untouched nature” (don’t ask about the missing trees) could become “one big lush spa.” We heard this same call for conservation as part of a “let’s solve all our problems at once” approach on the Obama Show tonight. Reliving a couple weeks of 1929 has got folks revved up for what came next.

Newshour last week featured this stomach-turning depiction of a “trash-out,” the hauling away of the innards of repossessed McMansions to the landfill.  I suppose it’s just another chapter in the Story of Stuff.  Bright side: foreclosed houses make great bobcat habitat.  (Things don’t look as good for their domesticated brethren.)