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April 30, 2008
Kids' Favorite
Just Between Us..., a booklet for girls about menstruation; published by Beltx Corporation, copyright 1950, 1955, 1961
Re-post: Kiddie Records Weekly began in 2005 as a one year project devoted to the golden age of children's records. This period spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties and produced a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions on major record labels and featured big time celebrities and composers
Stoner Mike "Gonzo" Dornheim, 37, a freelance carpenter and part-time drummer, is the favorite uncle of his six nephews and nieces, family sources revealed Monday
A Huge Depository of Unusual Children Links Here
April 30, 2008 in Kids | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
2008 Economic Stimulus Refund
I received an email from do-not-reply@irs.gov at the IRS today! Yea! Here is what it says:
Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of President Bush program to jumpstart the economy.
Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.
The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by direct deposit to your checking/savings account.
Please click on the link and fill out the form and submit before May 01th, 2008 to ensure that your refund will be processed as soon as possible.
Submitting your form on May 01th, 2008 or later means that your refund will be delayed due to the volume of requests we anticipate for the Economic Stimulus Refund.
© Copyright 2008, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.
To access Economic Stimulus Refund, please click here. (I would link to it, but there's some suspicious phishing activity associated with it, according to my browser, so I'll pass)...
A Huge Depository of Unlikely News Stories Here
April 30, 2008 in Current News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Vulgar Ticker Symbols
CRCAM Alpes Provence, which is a French regional bank (Ticker symbol CRAP). The bank provides financial and insurance products for students, farmers, small businesses, and local communities.
9 other Vulgar Ticker Symbols, including TIT, DIC, HOEN, etc.
Tech support from the 1930s: How to use a telephone
A Huge Depository of Unusual Stories About Money Here
April 30, 2008 in Money & Finances | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2008
(I have no clue what anything below means)
"...The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva. It lies in a tunnel under France and Switzerland.
It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to their final operating temperature of ~2K. The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify the three fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.
The collider tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, each pipe containing a proton beam. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Additional magnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between them will take place. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.
The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. It will take around 90 microseconds for an individual proton to travel once around the collider. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be "bunched" together, into approximately 2,800 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 nanoseconds apart. When the collider is first commissioned, it will be operated with fewer bunches, to give a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns. The number of bunches will later be increased to give a final bunch crossing interval of 25 ns..."
VR photography above by Peter McCready!
A Huge Depository of Intelligent Links and Brainier Links Here
If you visited CERN yourself, please share some of your impressions in the comments below.
April 29, 2008 in Brainier | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
A Scientology Quiz
A Scientology Quiz. The following quiz should be easy for anyone who has been keeping up with the war between the Church of Scientology and the Internet. An answer key is included. The answers may be verified by reading the sacred scripture known as OT III, which, although allegedly copyrighted and a trade secret, is widely available on the Internet
The Quantum Physics of Genesis
Re-post: Reserve A Spot In Heaven is here for the sole purpose of allowing you the opportunity to secure your spot in Heaven before it’s too late. Yes, at the moment there is plenty of room in Heaven for you and all of your loved ones, but what most individuals don't realize is that although a large portion of this space remains vacant, spots are filling very quickly. So quick that if you don’t act now you may lose your chance at getting in. How does a future of endless suffering sound? Not so good, which is why we are here to help
Anatomical Theater: Depictions of the Body, Disease, and Death in Medical Museums of the Western World. (Click on “Gallery” for details). Photos by Joanna Ebenstein
A Huge Depository of Unusual links about Unusual Gods Here
April 29, 2008 in Spirituality | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Interrotron
Photobombers = people who hilariously ruin your nice little picture. (I like the one with the 2 cute girls & the dog by the pool)
A Huge Illustrated History of Digital Cameras until 1998
An invention by Errol Morris - The Interrotron is a two camera arrangement with Teleprompters designed to create a different kind of filmed or videotaped interview
Origami tessellations on flickr, by John McKeever
Photographs of Leonard Cohen by David Boswell. Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Friday 20 October 1978
A Huge Depository of Unusual Photography Links Here
April 29, 2008 in Photography | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 28, 2008
Refacing Government Tender
Teenage Mutant Ninja Lincoln and many more de-faced denominations
Image of Lincoln carved in a peach pit by a prisoner of war during American Civil War (Scroll down a bit)
A simple and deceptively tricky question: What Does a President Do All Day?
Frustrated by reports that the Clinton campaign is arguing to Super Delegates in private that Barack Obama "can't win" in November -- presumably because he's black -- some Obama surrogates have countered with the argument, also expressed privately but widely reported, that Senator Clinton can't win in November because she's an asshole. Obama campaign plays the asshole card
A Huge Depository of Unusual Links About Abraham Lincoln and About Richard Nixon Here
April 28, 2008 in Americana - Abraham Lincoln | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Eat the kids first
(From Not Cot)
Help the honey bees - Eat more ice cream
Seven TV commercials by Swedish director Roy Andersson. (From Coudal)
Eat the kids first - Passive-Aggressive Soccer Mom Got a Vanity Plate
Playing with Flash and Book of Numbers. (Both, and so much more , from Ample Sanity)
A Huge Depository of Unusual Advertisements Here
April 28, 2008 in Advertising | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2008
The date: Tuesday January, 16, 2007
The location: Portland, Oregon, the corners of SW Salmon and 20th Avenue.
The weather prognosis: Snowy….
Please drive carefully
I Guess this is one of the YouTube killer apps (Just look for “Cars on ice”)
"Man who drive like hell bound to get there" - Things You'll Never See in a Fortune Cookie
A Huge Depository of Unusual Car Links Here
April 27, 2008 in Cars | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
It's better to do something than to do nothing
…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in - that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought...
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads...
From - A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken, by Clay Shirky
(Graphic above from Fred Jacobs)
A Huge Depository of Unusual Things To Do With Your Life Here
April 27, 2008 in Do Something with your Life | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The battle for Bacon dogs
Also, The Battle for Reservoir Dogs
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You like hamburgers. You like whiskey. So what do you make when you combine the two? Whiskeyburger
A Huge Depository of Unusual Meat and Vegetable Links Here
April 27, 2008 in Food - Meat & Vegetables | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
El camino del Rey
Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro
(From Nag on the Lake)
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The Blur Building was built for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. It is an architecture of atmosphere. The lightweight tensegrity structure measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 75 feet high. The primary building material is indigenous to the site, water. Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles. It was designed by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio
Mouth-to-mouth wild hyena feeding in Harar, Ethiopia
The toilets of King's College, Aberdeen are 1992 Loo of the year award winners
All New – Featuring the personal websites of Grow-a-brain’s readers! Today, Charlierb3’s plain looking link-blog Interesting Pile. Submit yours for consideration.
A Huge Depository of Unusual Travel Destinations Here
April 27, 2008 in Traveling Places | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
The latest Blog of the Day
Stephen Reinhardt’s blog The Art of the Title Sequence is the latest Blog of the Day here. Visit it & you'll understand why
Related Site News Here
April 27, 2008 in Website News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 26, 2008
The Day of the Locust
How a French journalist recruited a posse of Brazilian parking attendants and pizza-delivery guys and helped create Hollywood’s most addictive entertainment product -
X17, the biggest agency in the Holly¬wood paparazzi business
Between 30 and 45 paparazzi work Britney on any given night. The expensive cars they drive reflect the fact that Britney Spears—her marriages, custody battles, fights with her mom, new boyfriends, Starbucks runs, trips to the hospital—is a bigger and more lucrative story than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or John Lennon and Yoko Ono. History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines, and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make Britney Spears the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years.
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Larry Craig's Legal Bills: How Much Is He Paying For His "Wide Stance"? $407,000 since his arrest on June 11
Ze Frank’s Alien performance art
Update: Pictures taken of Superstars by Alan Light
Type any word to translate into nightingale songs
A Huge Depository of Unusual Celebrity Stories Here
April 26, 2008 in Celebrities | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Why Do Beautiful Women Marry Ugly Men?
When a person needs to investigate a phone number, step number one is to run it through Phone Validator to learn what type of phone line it is, who the phone company is, and what is the general geographic area of the phone… (From Dave Goodman, composer of this giant compendium of "They do it with..." one-liners)
Also, Animal Congregations, or What Do You Call a Group of …?
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a list of thousands of .com domain names owned by Google, based on an analysis of the root zone file. Want goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com? Too late
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The silicon chip gets all the attention. The valley is even named after it. But none of the computer revolution would have been possible without the humble hard drive, which IBM introduced to the world 50 years ago this week…
Compare the advancement in disk drives with that in automobiles: A car in 1956 cost about $2,500, could hold five people, weighed a ton, and could go as fast as 100 mph. If the auto industry had kept the same pace as disk drives, a car today would cost less than $25, hold 160,000 people, weigh half a pound and travel up to 940 mph
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Just remember, tonight's safe word is ... (From Wrong Cards)
A water leak at the local Mcdonald
Also, The Nation's Most Wasteful Corps of Engineers Projects
All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts. (From Dooby brain)
Why Do Beautiful Women Marry Ugly Men?
A Huge Depository of Unusual Bits of Information Here
April 26, 2008 in Information | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2008
The If You Rode a Bike You'd Be Home By Now Ride
“The city is an organism plagued by congestion. Its corridors are blocked by overpopulation and car dependent laziness. Angry drivers are trapped inside their sluggish automobiles. But why should you care? You ride your bicycle and will most likely be home an hour before them. Crimanimal Mass is rising like the Phoenix, out of the ashes of a longstanding legacy of carbon emissions and car-culture…”
The Freeway Traffic Jam Ride was conceived on Wednesday, April 4th in the 2008th year of the common era, by boogalooshrimp and Cyper. It is a form of Bicycle Street Theatre. The inaugural ride took place on April 18, 2008. It is a mobile semi-regular ride
More local bike events at Ibikeu
Another guy Biking through the Holland Tunnel
A Huge Depository of Unusual Los Angeles Links and Orange County Links Here
April 25, 2008 in Los Angeles | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Mouth Face
MOUTHFACE
A long List of Links That Will Waste Your Time or that are Simply Stupid Here
April 25, 2008 in Waste of Time | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Designer Coffins
There's nothing cheerful about a coffin - until you cover it with colorful pictures. The idea of decorating caskets is helping some people come to terms with that only somber certainty we all have in life.
Colourful Coffins is the UK's leading supplier of custom design picture coffins
(From a story by the BBC)
When the Chinese herbalist Li Ching-Yuen died in 1933, newspapers around the world reported the news of his passing. According to his own testimony, he was 197 years old
Unrelated: Mieke Gerritzen’s Fake for real Meta-game
No time to blog tonight. Sorry.
A Huge Depository of Unusual Coffins and Other Links About Death and Eternity Here
April 25, 2008 in Death - Coffins | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 24, 2008
Sosumi, a sushi bar that caters exclusively to lawyers
Jacket Lunch box Featuring Popular Album Covers
Oh, for crying out loud, here comes the $1,000 Sushi Roll
Gorgeous Market reports from local farmer’s markets around the country. By "Seasonal Chef" (Explore inside)
Unrelated: Want your ex-boyfriend back? [Unfortunately] I can help
No time to blog tonight. Sorry.
A Huge Depository of Unusual Sushi Links Here
April 24, 2008 in Food - Sushi | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 23, 2008
My Doppelganger
"A doppelgänger or fetch is the ghostly double of a living person, a sinister form of bilocation..."
Last Thursday we drove to San Diego and spent the day touristing around. The weather was perfect, and we had a good lunch at the Edgewater Grill, visited the Coronado Hotel, etc. I snapped many pictures, some of which turned out to be pretty nice. When I got home I looked at the photograph above, which I took at Old Town, and discovered in the background a guy who looks exactly like me!
Spooky!
Unrelated: LSD vs Alcohol vs Tree
A Huge Depository of Unusual Links about Orange County and Riverside, California Here
April 23, 2008 in Orange County, California | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
“My friend’s wife is a really bad cook. I broke a tooth on her coffee”
“America is certainly the great melting pot. Where else could someone like Slim Gaillard sing a tribute to matzoh balls and gefilte fish? It’s the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an American. Sing it, Slim.”
People have long wondered what goes on in Bob Dylan’s mind. But if you pay attention to what he says and plays on his XM satellite-radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour, you can actually get a pretty good idea. Inside Dylan’s brain. (From J-Walk)
A German art gallery in the town of Chemnitz mounts the first-ever exhibition of water-color and gouache paintings by Bob Dylan
4/24 Update: A slide show of the art, and the story behind it found on “Intelligent Travel”
11 year old Korean guitarist Sungha Jung plays an arrangement of All Along the Watchtower
The most of early Dylan
Bruce Springsteen sings ‘Trapped’
A Huge Depository of Unusual Dylan Links Here
April 23, 2008 in Music - Bob Dylan | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 22, 2008
Happy Earth day
You say it's your earth day
It's my earth day too, yeah
They say it's your earth day
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your earth day
Happy earth day to you
B3ta Photoshop The Beatles challenge. (From Tony Zimnoch)
Ringo loses his head: A foliage sculpture of Beatle Ringo Starr in the band's home city has been beheaded by vandals
A Huge Depository of Unusual Beatles Links Here
April 22, 2008 in Music - Beatles | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
A Message to Pennsylvanians from Bill Clinton
Much more about the 2008 Election. Also, the 2004 election and other Political Posts Here
April 22, 2008 in 2008 US Election | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
12 Bad situations
12 Bad situations to wait until the last minute and 2 that are worth waiting for
Chaetopterus pugaporcinus, the Pigbutt Worm, the most NSFW creature ever. (From Coil House)
Inside stuffed animals
Chain food characters by Genevieve Gauckler
The photoshop art of Francois De Witte
Submitted photos of people playing chess on roller coasters
Loopable is a blog that collects loopable animated GIFs. (From Who Killed Bambi)
Make new friends, practice wrestling. With Manual de Lucha Libre
Use a bowl of milk, some food colors & washing liquid to perform the Milk Trick. (YT)
A Tufted Titmouse (flickr)
Flip that Ho: Is DirecTV's programming guide racist?
Slightly-used Rubber Fist for sale
A Huge Depository of Unusual Oddities and Crazy linkage Here
April 22, 2008 in Odds & Ends | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 21, 2008
Yacht Prices Sinking Fast
Yacht prices have gone up so far so fast that they’re bound to settle down. Last year, it cost more to buy a used yacht than it did to build a new one, because of buyers’ need for instant gratification. Yacht flipping became the new house flipping, with buyers selling boats for millions in profits before the vessels were even built.
This year, yacht flippers may face the same fate as Florida condo flippers. The good news for boat buyers: that 150-footer of your dreams may come down to a reasonable $20 million
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People stroll around the Dutch cargo ship "Artemis" in Les Sables d'Olonne, on France's west coast, after strong winds pushed it off course
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Re-post: Airplane Graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside of Tucson, AZ
Pooh stick and sand eggs made by this rake-sand artist. (From Metafilter)
A Huge Depository of Boating and Sailing Links Here
April 21, 2008 in Boating | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ten Classically "Neato" Things
Getting raised aloft by a kite.
"The wind gusted a bit stronger now, and I soared up a scary five feet before settling back on the hilltop. 'Neato!' I yelled, remembering for the first time in two minutes to take a breath." —Patrick McManus, The Good Samaritan Strikes Again, 1993, p. 208.
The wings on a pilot's flight jacket.
I say, 'Neato!' It's all I can think of." —Sterling Watson, Sweet Dream Baby, 2004, p. 27.
The leather seats in a police chief's Lamborghini.
"'Heck! This is neato!' Jerry Randy said, stroking the leather seats. 'Real Neato!'" —Louis Serra, The Curator's Orb, 2007, p. 161.
Pureed fruit soups with exotic garnishes.
"You can get all sorts of neato-sounding soups . . . like melon soup or jute soup, all served with some sort of neato-sounding 'dumpling' material, like fufu or pounded yam." —Dan Leone, Eat This, San Francisco, 1999, p. 111.
A vintage camper trailer.
"The interior is positively neato, with miniature everything—a real icebox that uses a real block of ice, bunk beds and shelves that fold into walls." —Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies, 2004, p. 557.
Outdoor glass elevators.
"We go up the tall, tall Dune casino in a glass elevator, climbing soundlessly up the side of the skyscraper, higher and higher above the blimming lights in grids. I stand close to my dad and we star at the daylight light. 'Wow! Neato!' he says, hands patting my shoulders." —Mike Albo, Hornito: My Lie Life, 2000, p. 63.
A Ouija Board (séance game).
"We would probably never have heard of Peter Wagschal, or of his neato Ouija Board Studies Program, if it hadn't been for one Larry Zenke, a pretty neato guy." —Sara Tulloch, The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 1991, p. 209.
Three weeks of Christmas vacation.
"'Neato!' My life was definitely looking up. . . . I [had] just been sprung from seventh grade for three whole weeks of Christmas vacation." —Patrick McManus, The Bear in the Attic, 2002, p. 28.
Thin vodka glasses.
"Vodka in those really neato thin glasses in a bucked of ice." —Barbara D'Amato, White Male Infant, 2003, p. 187.
Mombian, a lesbian mom.
"When I was in fourth grade . . . I just thought it was neato. I would just go around like, 'My mom's gay.'" —Janet Wright, Lesbian Step Families, 1998, p. 148.
And a bonus link: Great Wall 360 degree panorama at Jinshanling
(Graphic above by designer Harvey Rayner)
“Neato” as it is known in the “blogosphere” is probably mostly connected in readers’ mind with Neatorama, Alex S’s hugely popular blog. I could have replaced Craig Conley’s suggested moniker with "Swell" or "Awesome", but eventually decided to keep this post as it was written.
This is another post that was composed by on-going contributor Craig Conley of the Abecedarian blog fame. Craig's new book is A Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns By Sound, available in an eco-friendly low-wattage palette. Thank you again, Craig! (All previous co-blogger's posts archived here.) If other bloggers are interested to share the forum here on any other topic, please contact me for details
Please show Craig some love by leaving lots of comments below!
April 21, 2008 in Co-blogged with | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 20, 2008
Elevator problems
...The tenants of a large office building complained about the increasingly poor elevator service. A consulting firm specializing in elevator-related problems was employed to deal with the situation. It first established that average waiting time for elevators was too long. It then evaluated the possibilities of adding elevators, replacing existing elevators with faster ones, and introducing computer controls to improve utilization of elevators. For various reasons, none of these turned out to be satisfactory. The engineers declared the problem to be unsolvable.
When exposed to the problem, a young psychologist employed in the building's personnel department made a simple suggestion that dissolved the problem. Unlike the engineers who saw the service as too slow, he saw the problem as one deriving from the boredom of those waiting for an elevator. So he decided they should be given something to do. He suggested putting mirrors in the elevator lobbies to occupy those waiting by enabling them to look at themselves and others without appearing to do so. The mirrors were put up and complaints stopped. In fact, some of the previously complaining tenants congratulated management on improvement of the elevator service...
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What do with an outmoded technology? Turn it into entertainment. A plethora of services using photo booths have sprung up. In the UK, Boothnation offers customized booths for use at events
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Victorian Science Fiction: How To Make Rivets
Wallace and Gromit fan patents one of his inventions. A boy of five is thought to be the UK's youngest person to patent an invention after coming up with a labor-saving broom to help his father sweep leaves
Crab-Fu Steam Works
A Huge Depository of Unusual Inventions & Discoveries Here
April 20, 2008 in Science & Inventions | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Haircut Project
Mandy and Aaron Dietz have been working on Haircut Art for two years, shooting friends and strangers at Supercuts on Fillmore.
“It’s all about the simplicity of the idea. We chose not to go to a fancy, expensive salon, because that’s a different thing. We set out to capture a basic haircut, and what that does to a person’s appearance – and spirit.” The similarities of the side-by-sides are a result of taking lots of shots to find the best match. “It’s interesting, because the pose is so straight. Your eye looks for consistencies but also finds differences.”
The Haircut Project. (Click to advance)
A Huge Depository of Unusual Projects Here