flickering pictures

As plucked from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and promptly googled:

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that […]

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Christopher S. Putnam writes a sad, excellent and Damn Interesting article on the Keystone Kommandos, a group of German spies who landed on Long Island in 1942 with $1 million in today’s dollars, a sabotage mission and lots and lots of explosives. I love historical adventure stuff like this — here’s how it starts:

Just […]

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I’d heard the rumours and seen the Seinfeld episode, but I’d never actually seen pictures of Japan’s drawer-style hotel beds. They’re apparently quite comfortable, even if they do look like Easy-Bake Ovens.
From a neat write-up on the aptly-named Cool Things in Random Places:

These hotels are available all over major Japanese cities — especially Tokyo, […]

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Here’s a crazy story that I missed entirely last fall.
From the BBC:

The key, with the tag “Crows Nest Telephone Titanic” opened the binoculars store, but was not on the ship when it sailed from Southampton.
It was in the pocket of an officer transferred off the vessel days before its maiden voyage. He forgot to hand […]

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Really busy day today, so no time for lunch — or updates — but here’s a quickie.
Kevin and Amanda want to turn your handwriting into a custom-made font for free. Just scan your writing, send it off to them, and if they choose your submission, you’ve got yourself a personalized font like no other.
They […]

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British Columbia’s forests are being ravaged by a scourge of tiny pine beetles, which are turning lush green trees into rotting pulp at an alarming rate. The beetles are killing so many trees that the greenhouse gases released by decomposing wood are expected to outweigh all similar gases emitted by BC’s 4.5 million residents […]

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In yet another breakthrough of modern medicine, MAKE Magazine features a homemade prosthetic wheel for an injured turtle, fitted after she was run over by a car and lost the use of her rear legs. Her shattered shell was held together with velcro and epoxy, and the turtle — named Little Bit — apparently […]

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In a shocking revelation, CNN says an “unspoken demographic” (racist white people) may not vote for Obama because he’s black:

As both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton race to make history, some political observers believe Obama might have a unique problem because he’s African-American.
They claim voters often say they’ll go one way, then act quite […]

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I came across this video quite a while ago, after falling head over heels for the brilliant piano piece called “Every Day” that accompanies it. The music is by Brooklyn-based Carly Comando, whose Myspace page lists over 380,000 plays for this song despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to have released a CD […]

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Some people surf the Web, while I seem to trip, stumble and crawl my way through it. Every so often though, I stumble across a real gem.
Elizabeth and the Catapult is one such shiny one. Their album is available at CD Baby, my very favourite source of under-appreciated CDs, and although the CD […]

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