Brain Food

(via Friday Fishwrap) and they have a MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/thewrongtrousers

Worth 1,000’s recent photoshop contest asked competitors to take key landmarks and relocated them. Some of them work well (Lincoln rowing a boat) and other’s don’t seem to quite get the concept. Back in 1997 when I visited Germany to see my friend Cate, one the castles we visited was Burg Vichering, a small 16th

CNN Article on the value of “slacking off at work.” What they’re actually saying is that you need to take the time to think things through.

According to a study by MIT students, tinfoil hats actually enhance (rather than scramble) invasive radio signals. Darn, I guess I’ll have to start making tinfoil origami animals with all that extra Reynolds Wrap I have laying around.

Telstar posts a photo of some electronic gadget purchased at a flea Market, and asks “What is it?” Madness ensues. I actually have a what is it pic I need to post on Flickr sometime, when we get back from New York. If I remember to.

I ran across this product on a design site I read regularly, because it get’s good reviews for usability. It’s a compost machine that you keep in the kitchen next to your trashcan. Since Stephanie and I have been dating, I’ve moved toward recycling almost everything: aluminum cans go to a scrap metal place where

Deeply cool folding paper robots.

This guy compiles and compares the weather icons used by all the major news reporting sites.

A scouting troop reference guide to tying “popular” knots. I guess the unpopular knots don’t get asked to prom. Stephanie and I were trying to tie down stuff to my truck the other day, and I was very frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how my dad ties knots; he has some sort of slipknot

PledgeBank is a site where you can sign up to pledge to do something — but only if other people will do it. You can either make your own pledge, or find a pledge that someone else has proposed and add yourself to their list, thust providing support for each other.

Courtesy of my friend Lori, a pointer to the best car magnet ever on northern sun’s site… the “support our pants” magnet. I currently have two magnets on my car — a rainbow one, which I bought, and a Women’s heart health one I got free from Clarian for spending $43,000 of my insurance company’s

Yep, a google map application that shows where you’ll come out on the other side of the earth. Heh. I end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Just about where the Tsunami hit, after the earthquake. Uh Oh. Ididn’tdoit.

From Strange Horizons. yep, stupid is a good assessment. I know I shouldn’t say this out loud, but I will: you could add several of the all-female, feminist dystopias from popular lesbian sci-fi novels into the list of “stupidest,” like Daughters of a Coral Dawn, and the one I read recently, Ammonite. As annoying as

A VW with a USB connection in the arm rest to plug in your mp3 player or memory stick…

Fun photoshop contest on what the world would look like if Goths were in charge.

Retro Crush has a cool article on how to beat the odds stacked against you when playing carnival games.

Wikipedia lists the major ones.

Check it out on the Baby Name Wizard. Mine was on the ascent in the late 60’s when I got it, and it peaked in the late 80’s.

Interesting; a custom-turned wood piece to imitate your profile.

Hannes Koch created this cool labeling tape, where you simply black out some lines with a black marker to create the words you want. Fun. I love labels. They are fun. This makes me want to go home and play with my label maker.

1. Use this site to create a UPC bar code that contains your personal data. 2. Tattoo your new bar code on your body. 3. Find people who own one of these camera cell phones, and have them scan your tattoo to read your data. I’m not kidding; this is a real dating phenomenon.

This should interest my friend Doug: newspaper readers in the UK are currently being treated to a truly great series of print ads. The Stella Artois adverts place objects that may be familiar to you from various movies into a single landscape, and the challenge is to figure out what movies all the images are

Stephanie and I are going down to Louisville, Kentucky, again this weekend, this time to meet her friend Lisa from North Carolina, who is road-tripping up for the Kentucky Art Car Weekend. Lisa is coming up in a caravan with her friend Sarah, who has an art car in the art car show. Lisa will

An interesting article at Gaping Void on How to Be Creative.

An article on how to create your own wind turbine — two years ago, I was searching the web to find plans to make one of these. I don’t know why; I just though it would be a cool thing to learn about. Don’t know that I’d ever actually attempt to make one myself.

Really cool site that lets you download word files and use them to print out foldable gothic toys, like killer robots and haunted mansions. The site’s kinda slow, though, because it’s been mentioned on some big sites and thus is getting lots of traffic.

VW owners might love this… Pod Caravans are retro trailers that resembled the old-fashioned teardrop trailers from the 50’s.

Sculptor Livio De Marchi has crafted an entire house that appears to be made of books, including the furniture.

Stephanie bought a Roomba vacuum cleaner this weekend at Target, for half price. It was originally $150, marked down to $75. She needed a vacuum cleaner, and I was looking for a dust buster in the same aisle, so she picked it up. We were busy yesterday, so she didn’t have a chance to set

I gave a set of these cat butt magnets to my friend Kathy for Christmas, but I never realized they also have a set of Humpy Puppy magnets, too.

Ain’t it cool news writes about a visit to Pixar studios, and publishes some kick-ass photos of the work spaces of Pixar animators. Instead of cubicles, they have little cottages, with doors, windows and addresses. Walking through the space is “like walking through a neighborhood for dwarves.”

These guys took photos of themselves, blew them up to poster size, and then took them to a baseball game to wave at the TV. That’s just too fun. Unfortunately, I’d be unhappy with all the pictures I took of myself, and would never get to the posterizing stage. 🙂 Except maybe this picture. I

Look, from the IKEA website, it’s Blue Flat Bear. I have one at home.

“In 1884, a wealthy widow named Sarah L. Winchester began a construction project of such magnitude that it was to occupy the lives of carpenters and craftsmen until her death thirty-eight years later. The Victorian mansion, designed and built by the Winchester Rifle heiress, is filled with so many unexplained oddities, that it has come

An excellent interview with Jamie Whyte, author of Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders, on logic and fuzzy thinking. “You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. Rather,

Remember that roller coaster that John Ivers, Indiana native, built in his backyard? Well these folks in Fremont, California built their own monorail.

Check out the screenshots of the hacks; they’re pretty clever.

Keynes�s remark that �The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent� is paralleled by (ahem) Teresa Nielsen Hayden�s observation that �The Invisible Hand is not to human scale.� Also, Hofstadter�s Rule, which states that everything takes longer than you think it will, even after you take Hofstadter�s Rule into account.

Someone who took a baby Jesus figurine from a church’s outdoor Nativity scene painted its skin black and then brought it back. The figurine was accompanied with a note that said the darker paint more accurately represents his skin color. “I thought I would point out that Jesus was not an Aryan but actually a

n : a manual of black magic (for invoking spirits and demons)

Lowenbrau, skittles. Try it yourself. Then tell me how it tastes.

Madame Tarra Fortune Teller. Crap; they cost thousands of dollars. Hmmm. Or I could just take a trailer to Vegas and steal one from the Strip. [evil grin].

This just sounds like a lot of fun. As long as I get to be the mustard.

Mr. Wozniak described WozNet as a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio signals and global positioning satellite data to keep track of a cluster of inexpensive tags within a one- or two-mile radius of each base station. WozNet, he said, will include a home-base station that has the ability to track the location

Interesting. I wonder if it’s for real. It’s also a bit small.

Samuel Pepys was an English gentleman who lived in the mid 1600’s, whose well-known and beloved diary serves as an excellent history of his era. Pepys was a practical man of business but also had a wide-ranging appetite for knowledge. His classical and mathematical education was the basis from which he explored the arts and

I think most people I know would get behind this one.

“You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.” Hmmm. Sounds fun. New Mutual Friends project? I’ll have to e-mail Lori.

The Go Game. Also, here is another explanation of the game from the SF Chronicle.

Before and after images of various San Francisco locations used in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece. My favorite Hitchock movie, right after Rear Window.

Okay, we just had a paper airplane flying contest at work… from the third floor balcony down into the lobby, with the object to hit the center pole on the revolving doors, a distance of about 60 feet. AND I WON. Me! I won! All the guys were busy aerodynamically designing their planes and test

I’ve written about it here before, but here are a few links about wabi Sabi: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/WabiSabi http://www.stonebridge.com/wabisabi.html And a couple of books available: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0879058498/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586850105/

You must be the change you wish to see in the world — Gandhi

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau. I like it. I need to come back to it again and again when I’m creating designs.

In a Snob-Free Zone, By Joseph Epstein My cousin Sherwin’s way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: Care only about one’s work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one’s work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more

This is really cool — the best of underground “outsider” video. Orson Welles drunk. Anna Nicole Smith stoned. A wierd movie pitch. Part of a cult recruitment video. Just watch.