Waffle Bike

"Waffle Bike is a fully weaponized waffle making device complete with call to prayer public address system."

NME brings us the best headline of the current presidential campaign so far.

See for yourself.

"Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back"

"The Love Poem Project, in which we take love poems and swap out any mention of the word love."

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 70

Just a note. When I've had multiple ads in a post, I've always gone from top to bottom. This one I'm doing the bottom ad first. You'll see why.


The Delta Queen is now being operated by Majestic America, but it looks like this summer might be the last - it had been exempted from maritime safety regulations, but the exemption is about to lapse, meaning that it will be no longer considered seaworthy. Naturally, there is information on the site that you can share when you contact your Congressperson, the media and whichever Presidential Candidate you might think would be interested in lending a hand.

In other bits of the site, I notice that you can cruise the Alaskan Fjords in a riverboat!

Outdoor traders is now setting its sights on sporting goods and not on casual wear of the caliber that you see pictured here. If you really want to rock the Madras Patchwork Trouser look, I was able to find some from Brooks Brothers.

Madras fabric is a light summer weight cotton fabric that is most frequently printed with plaid patterns. It is named for the city of Madras, India which is now known as Chennai.

Who am I kidding? I mean, just look at that. If only it was in color. Sigh.

Well I'll be dashed!

The internet did this all by itself! Honest!

The sun always sets on the internet

Constant/Setting "is a simple website that displays in real time, any sunset images taken and posted to Flickr as creative commons that correspond to the cities where the sun is setting at the moment."

As you can imagine, some times of day have a bit more variety than others.

Picture time fun

Blogger in Draft is tinkering with the photo interface, so I've been noodling with random pictures to see how it works. This post is an excuse to play. Perhaps you will notice the pictures change size and move around!

In order to find the random pictures, I'm using my latest dum-head internet game:

1. Get a random page from Wikipedia
2. Search for the random thing on Google Image Ripper.

Let's play!

First the random article: Fanny Normann.

She was Max Schreck's wife, and had a part in Nosferatu, so when I put it in the ripper, the first image to pop up is a screen shot of her:

That's the only image of her that comes up. All the rest are such things as:

• Some pictures of an audience.
• Pictures of chairs
• A fish and a cellphone in an aquarium
• Two pictures of Natalie Portman
• Some LOLcats
• An antique print of Sam Houston
• A clipping from an antique book about pies.

This is great.

Here's another go:

The random article: "Liberty Corner"

Score!

Look at this neat old store:

They don't make em like that anymore.

And this gorgeous old map:

Plaque

plaque
Originally uploaded by 0tralala

"A Two-Headed Turtle Is Stolen in Brooklyn"

From the New York Times.

The article includes a bit of background to the care of two-headed turtles:

Turtle pellets must be broken into two pieces or the two heads will fight over the food.

And a bit of insight into the life of a two-headed turtle owner:

The turtle was nameless, in part because Mr. Casey is afraid of giving animals names lest he get too attached to them. He had been planning on having a naming contest. . . There was no rush, he said. "It’s not like a doggie needs a name. He won’t come when you call him.”

On Thursday, the creature killed Myrtle.

Jezebel provides an explanation for what's going on in a Vogue Magazine fashion spread.

And in other news

"A giant inflatable dog turd brought down a power line after being blown away from a Swiss museum."

Slavoj Zizek is a right jolly old elf

Here he is at the Guardian.

Hello, George

The Orwell Diaries have now started posting.

As of this writing there are three posts up.

Topics:

1. snakes
2. rain
3. rain and snakes

Thinking about something to say about this has caused my brain to start singing:

    All the snakes have drowned/and the sky is gray...

There is also some talk of apples.  Which go with snakes, I suppose.

I love strange travel books

Here's a list of ten - I am astonished to realize that I have none of them in my collection.  Currently.

That is a page recommender widget. I have no idea what it's for.

Added to the bottom of the right hand column is an "Amazon Page Recommender Widget"

Help your visitors discover relevant pages within your website, using Amazon's own recommendations technology - for free! Drive page views, session lengths, and referral fees by placing this widget on the pages you'd like to be recommended to your users. Amazon's unique understanding of your users lets us target related pages and products tailored to their individual tastes.

How this seems to work:

1. Joe Example is surfin' the internets and comes accross this humble blog.
2. Joe is already logged into Amazon, because he just purchased some books on Thermodynamics.
3. The Page Recommender Widget will give him a list of links to portions of this blog that mention the sorts of things that Amazon thinks Joe is interested in.  
4. The widget will also show Joe a list of things to purchase that he might be interested in.

The trouble I am having is that I can't really expect the widget to work for me, because while Amazon knows what I am interested in, I also know that I am interested in most everything that is on this blog, so if I look at the blog, with Amazon logged in, it will give me a list that is pretty similar to the list of things that it would give me anyway.  And if I'm not logged in, the widget won't work for me because Amazon doesn't know it's me and has no idea what I am interested in.

There's a fine line between clever and stupid.

It doesn't seem to be recommending pages yet, because it needs to learn (by watching the page traffic) what people are interested in.  Considering that the whole stated purpose of this widget is to help "drive page views," I think that seems a bit recursive.


Still, if it does something really clever for you, please leave a note.  And don't be surprised if it disappears.

Hello Fjords!

Telemegaphone Dale stands seven metres tall on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.

When you dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number the sound of your voice is projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.

But there's trouble!

 Telemegaphone Dale is wind powered and self-reliant. Recently however, the weather has been exceptionally calm in Dale and there has been a massive amount of people calling.

I wonder if the folks working in the Dale Sweater factory are delighted to hear "Hello, Hello, is this really Norway? Hello?  Am I supposed to hear something?" echoing in the distance as they whomp up their traditional Norwegian knitwear.