Tag: Burst of Weirdness

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ever wonder what the sport of parkour looks like to those actually doing the…umm…parkouring? Wonder no more:

(This video may be triggery in people with problems with vertigo. Or people who just don’t much like the idea of plummeting great distances to injury.)

:: Never let it be said you can’t keep a good idea down! Sure, a disaster involving an enormous fireball and a number of deaths can be a setback, for decades even, but eventually we were bound to get back to the airship, weren’t we? I would love to see these in the sky!

:: It kind of bothers me that I remember each and every one of these.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Glenn Beck’s psychodelic road show. I actually kinda want to see this, just for how gonzo it sounds.

:: Need a reaction GIF from a Hayao Miyazaki movie, tailored to a specific emotion? Here you go.

:: Lots of weird stuff in the Amazon. It’s all probably hostile, so hey, Brazil? Could you bulldoze the rest of the Amazon faster, please? Thanks!

:: Finally, a salute to a typewriter repairman who died last month at the age of 96, working almost to the end. I used to dink around on a typewriter a lot as a kid, and I imagine typewriter repair was a nice niche field to be in for quite a few decades, there.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Happy birthday, Spitzer Space Telescope! The image leading the article there was a masthead image for this blog for a while last year.

:: Behold, the Geek Zodiac.

Via.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ahhh, training videos — the bane of existence of everybody who has ever worked, well, anywhere. Personally, I can’t stand training videos and I invariably find them a giant waste of time.

But this one, from Wendy’s in the 80s, is fascinating. It’s just your normal boring training video, dull-as-ditchwater, until you get to about the 3:40 mark.

:: James Garfield is the only President to prove a mathematical theorem. Now, there are two things Garfield can be known for! (The other is that he died of a gunshot wound just six months into being President.)

:: If you’re on Facebook, go like a page called “Grandiloquent Word of the Day”. Because then you’ll get a daily dose of words-gone-by, words just waiting to be dusted off and used again, the vocabulary analogs of poor Woody in the toybox. And the words come with nifty illustrations!

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Think you own the cutest car ever? Well, you DON’T. (I don’t either.) #beetle #VW #Cutemobile, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Oddities and Awesome abound!

I wasn’t online as much this week (beating my book’s final sequence into submission, and no, it’s not done yet), but check out this car. Is that not the cutest car in the history of cars? By pure happenstance, we emerged from a store last night to find this parked next to us. How sweet is that!

More next week. And hey, don’t forget to Ask Me Anything!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Remember those old “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” humor bits on Saturday Night Live? I always figured that they were written by staff writers and just put up under a generic name. I didn’t realize, until last week when I bookmarked this article, that Jack Handey is a real guy. Wow.

(Yes, this makes me feel like an idiot.)

:: A different hypothesis about vampirism. Wow!

:: A Chinese bakery’s plan to use drones to deliver cakes has been shut down. This is very likely a bad idea for obvious reasons, but me being me, I can’t be totally dismissive of cakes or pies flying through the air. As someone is quoted: “What if a cake fell on a passer-by from the sky?” Indeed.

(BTW, the headline on that story is figurative, not literal. This also disappoints me.)

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

Just one thing today, but it’s a doozie. If you’re like me, you often lose time on sites like Cracked.com or TV Tropes. That’s because you read one thing end up clicking more things, and next thing you know it’s dinnertime (you sat down at the computer at breakfast), your family is irritated with you, and you have seventy-nine browser tabs open to pages on one of those sites. Well, here’s a new site for the list: The World Geography. Just go. Thank (or curse) me later.

I’m spending a bunch of time on the site doing location research for future volumes of the Princesses In SPACE!!! series (not the actual title). That’s my excuse, anyway. Yeah.

More next week!

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Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: An oral history of the 1989 Cleveland Indians. Oddly, official Major League Baseball archives don’t seem to have much information about this team, so this oral history and the cinematic documentary on the subject, are likely to remain the only sources of historical data.

:: Here is the short tale of a very helpful motorcyclist.

:: Another baseball-related item: Baseball’s dying traditions.

More next week….

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