Sunday Burst

Stay amazing, Internet!

:: I have some idea of how books get written, and how they get acquired by publishers, and how they get sold. But the actual, physical making of the book? Check this out:


Obviously this is a more high-end shop, making specialty items; I’m sure there’s a lot more automation involved in filling shelves nationwide with copies of the latest James Patterson tome.

:: Why spoon out your pancake batter when you can have a printer do it?

:: The coming whiskey shortage in the United States. Bummer, because I was just starting to discover bourbon again.

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Sunday Burst

You stay classy, Internet!

:: This is good a graphical representation of what it feels like to be in an ensemble, performing a piece of great music, as I’m ever likely to see. If you have the bandwidth, put it on fullscreen!


ZKO Rollercoaster // GREAT EMOTIONS from virtual republic on Vimeo.


:: The Songs of Summer. It’s not a list of songs specifically about summer, but rather…

…to discover which summer songs were either released or peaked in popularity during the summer of their respective years. Some are about the summer or the stuff of summer: parties, picnics, fleeting love, nostalgia or fun. Some have that summer feeling in sound alone. Many are relevant to their times. Some have become standards. Some annoy, like a sticky day with too many mosquitoes. Others slow down time, like an unexpected breeze one hopes will never stop.

(By the way, is anybody besides me starting to get a little freaked out with how recent “100 years ago” is getting to be?!)

:: I really like this graphic of typical kitchen measurement conversions. The only way it could be better is if it included ounces.

:: Solar roadways?!

::  And finally, the greatest refrigerator ever:

I love you, Internet!

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Sunday Burst of…a lot of stuff

Time to clear the decks of some stuff I’ve been saving up! Some of this stuff has been lingering in my Bookmarks folder for a while, and I’ve long-since lost track of the sites from which I originally filched the links.

:: The Uncomfortable, an art project described thusly:

The goal is to re- design useful objects making them uncomfortable but usable and maintain the semiotics of the original item.

:: My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection, in which a woman is listening and reviewing her way through her husband’s record collection. Despite the word “stupid” in the blog title, she is really making an honest effort with each record. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I bookmarked this), she calls the collection “stupid” because they’ve moved a few times, and thus so have the records. Moving a lot of records is a pain in the ass if you do it a lot. (Kind of like…books…hurg!) It’s interesting to read reviews of music from the perspective of someone who likes music just fine but isn’t really into it.

:: Weird American things that Americans don’t realize are weird. I don’t disagree with some of these; mainly this is a list of things someone not from a place found odd about the place they visited. It just happened to be our place. (If you’re an American reading this, that is. If you’re not, you’re likely reading this list and nodding along, thinking, “Yeah, you guys are weird!”)

:: Two older ladies go on an airplane. For the first time in their lives.


:: Wow:

On a nature hike along Germany’s Baltic Coast in 1913, 20-year-old Richard Platz scrawled a note on a postcard, shoved it into a brown beer bottle, corked it and tossed it into the sea.

The bottle was recovered from the Baltic last month. Researchers haven’t yet figured out what the note said (conditions and age have faded it badly), but they did manage to identify the author and contact his living granddaughter, who is 62 now.

:: The worst jerseys in the history of the NHL. I’m not a hockey fan (in fact, I tend to be irrationally anti-hockey owing to the game’s odd emotional hold over this area), but I link this because a recent Buffalo Sabres jersey makes the list.

And to be honest…I didn’t hate the infamous “Buffaslug”. I liked that more than the red-and-black “angry goat” that the Buffalslug replaced.

:: Romantic pictures from Russian dating sites. I don’t for one second claim that this bit of oddness is unique to Russia, because Lord knows you can find a lot of bizarrely creepy photos on good old American dating sites. In fact, it’s kind of endearing (or depressing, not sure which) to learn that “creepy dating site profile pics” seems to be a universal thing about our species.

:: Everything you don’t know about tipping.

:: Worst excuse for criminal behavior ever:

Police say an Iowa City man claimed a faulty belt was to blame after he dropped his pants in front two women.

Most amusing to me is that this happened in Iowa, which is the overalls capital of the universe. And I know, I went to college and found a Wife there!

:: Finally, pies in the face…in slow motion!


OK, that’s it. Back to packing. Damn, I have a lot of books….

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I know I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s been years and it’s always stunning to look again. Here is the amazing forbidden “Stairway to Heaven” in Hawaii.


I’d walk this. Would you?

:: I’m going to link this rather than embed it here, because the image is massive. It’s an infographic depicting the work habits of some of history’s great geniuses, from various walks of life. Interesting that most seem to have been early risers….

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Interesting article on the Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter:

WHENEVER Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg.

Lincoln was hardly unique. Among public figures who need to think twice about their choice of words, the unsent angry letter has a venerable tradition. Its purpose is twofold. It serves as a type of emotional catharsis, a way to let it all out without the repercussions of true engagement. And it acts as a strategic catharsis, an exercise in saying what you really think, which Mark Twain (himself a notable non-sender of correspondence) believed provided “unallowable frankness & freedom.”

Harry S. Truman once almost informed the treasurer of the United States that “I don’t think that the financial advisor of God Himself would be able to understand what the financial position of the Government of the United States is, by reading your statement.” In 1922, Winston Churchill nearly warned Prime Minister David Lloyd George that when it came to Iraq, “we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.” Mark Twain all but chastised Russians for being too passive when it came to the czar’s abuses, writing, “Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.”

That’s about it for this week. Interesting article, though, with an interesting hypothesis as to why the Internet is so often a cesspool of spittle-flecked rage. It’s not just that it’s easy to post angry missives online, it’s that the very ease of doing so negates the intended catharsis of writing them in the first place.

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome (late Saturday edition)

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Trains are wonderful and people are garbage, which is in partial response to…

:: …Amtrak is running a pilot program for writers’ retreats on their trains. If accepted, I guess you literally get to ride around the country on Amtrak and write. I’d consider this, if not for family obligations and the job at The Store and whatnot.

:: Want to listen to ten hours of “sad violin music”? Sure you do.

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Secret passage bookshelves. I dig this notion.

:: I note with sadness the passing of Geoff Edwards, who was a staple of my teevee watching as a kid, because he was…a game show host! As a kid, I loved me some game show hosts. Bob Barker, Bill Cullen, Jack Barry, Wink Martindale, Bert Convy…those guys were awesome. So was Geoff Edwards, who hosted a show I loved called The New Treasure Hunt. This show featured a whole lot of goofiness, with Edwards often ad-libbing to ratchet up as much tension as possible; producers were very proud that they actually got a contestant to pass out onstage one time. The show often descended into pure slapstick silliness, such as in this segment, in which cream pies are put to good use:


Gotta love the cheesiness of the 70s and 80s game show era! Colorful sets, weird skits, hosts in bad tuxes, and pies in the face. As much fun as Jeopardy! can be, I doubt we’d ever see Alex Trebek having any part of cheesy fun like this.

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: While I enjoy reading criticism, I don’t really take critics all that seriously, and here’s yet another example why. It’s always fun reading critics of the time trashing what would go on to prove iconic. I know that critics like to posit themselves as the educated arbiters of what’s good and what’s not, but ultimately, they’re just people paid to tell us their opinion of stuff.

:: A $60000 fountain pen? Check out the customer reviews.

More next week!

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