MemeMachineGo!

Speaking of John Kessel, a fun throw-away line in his first novel, Good News from Outer Space was:

Dadaist punks had broken into his car and installed an expensive stereo.

Meanwhile, in Rockridge (a neighborhood in north Oakland):

Is it a twisted Rockridge Robin Hood, a bizarre new brand of treasure hunt, or slightly meshuga malfeasance? One resident reported to her neighborhood-group on August 11 that whoever had rifled through her husband’s car the night before “took some $1.50 in loose parking change, and they made an exchange — they took his flashlight, and they left a different flashlight. The flashlight they left is smaller, but is waterproof, so we may even be ahead on the swap.” A neighbor responds that her car too was rifled through, and oddly enough “they took a small flashlight from the glove compartment and left us a bigger, maybe better, one. They also left us a very nice 7-disc CD set: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition. We certainly have a lot more we could learn about classical music, and the course looks interesting.”

For the record, I wouldn’t mind finding the odd Teaching Company course in my car.

=v= It seems the Democratic Party is fixin’ to have the greenest national convention in history. (The first thing this brings to mind is the prospect of the Green Party having the most democratic national convention in history, but that’s a side-issue.) Naturally, I had to wonder whether all this greenness will extend to transportation, and was thrilled to see this announcement in June:

Denver Host Committee President Elbra Wedgeworth and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper unveiled plans for a bike-sharing program called Freewheelin, part of Denver’s efforts to support healthy living and environmental sustainability during the Democratic National Convention.

Freewheelin, which for some reason lacks a trailing apostrophe, will provide 1000 bikes for conventioneers to get around on. Not too shabby. In 2004, fixing and providing community bikes for RNC attendees was an all-volunteer effort.

One problem, though. Citing “security concerns,” bikes won’t be allowed anywhere near the DNC. Not even at the hybrid-only parking lot. I guess it’s just impossible to separate terra-ists and bicycles. or something.

Now here’s a specialized blog: The Ampersand.

The current war in Ossetia may be an unpleasant reality for the people actually dying in it, but it’s the war of Gary Brecher’s dreams.

This is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning, a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.

At Denvention, I attended a John Kessel reading of “Pride & Prometheus”. It’s just what it sounds like: the brilliantly obvious-in-hindsight fanfic mash-up of Pride & Prejudice (1813) and Frankenstein (1818). Mary and Kitty Bennet meet Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval at a ball.

Afterwards, Kessel explained just how neatly it fits. Frankenstein says:

We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February. We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July.

Matlock is a town in the county of Derbyshire, where Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, is. Lizzy and Darcy chatted about it when Lizzy visited Pemberley with her aunt and uncle.

He then asked her to walk into the house — but she declared herself not tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At such a time, much might have been said, and silence was very awkward. She wanted to talk, but there seemed an embargo on every subject. At last she recollected that she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dove Dale with great perseverance.

It’s in his new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which is available as a free download. I bought the trade paperback at the con, and regret only that I hadn’t known that the hardcover has this hilarious double-sided dustjacket allowing you to convert it into a financial book.

My situation has flip-flopped. I acquired a reservation at the Hyatt (the non-party hotel) from friends who weren’t using it, so now I’m looking for roommates. Anyone need a room? (The reservation is for arrival Wednesday, August 6th and departure Sunday, August 10th.)

I’ve been really lame about my planning for the forthcoming Worldcon, only arranging travel a couple of weeks ago. Just one more tiny little detail to take care of… anyone have any space to share?

I just read JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, written by comic/TV writer Patton Oswalt. It was disjointed in places, but is redeemed by Batman delivering this superheroic Anna Karenina principle:

That’s why evil always fails. There’s only one kind of good, and it’s all evil ever gets to battle. Makes it weak and narrow-minded. There’s an endless variety of evil. And good’s got a lifetime of tricks up its sleeve. We learn from the best.

Two brothers in Turin built their own listening station in a WW II bunker to listen in on the U.S. and Soviet space programs.

The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.

“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.

They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index - the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face - to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.

A mantis shrimp can throw a punch at 50 mph.

In April 1998, an aggressive creature named Tyson smashed through the quarter-inch-thick glass wall of his cell. He was soon subdued by nervous attendants and moved to a more secure facility in Great Yarmouth. Unlike his heavyweight namesake, Tyson was only four inches long.

Previously.

I mentioned before that Tor was promotionally giving out free e-books, while mentioning that I’d never actually finished anything book length on an electronic device.

For one last week, all of the books in the promotion are available, listed in one convenient entry of the new Tor blog.

One of the things I hoped to use my new Nokia n800 for is as an ebook reader. I just finished reading John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars on it, and I’m happy to report that it was a wholly pleasant experience — the n800’s screen is big enough and crisp enough to make a passable substitute for printed text.

Now I’m off to download all the ebooks.

And this time, I’ll finally finish Blindsight (not a part of the Tor promotion, just something I’d previously failed to finish while reading it on my Palm.)

(US-centric advice follows.)

With some exceptions depending on your exact location, dialing 911 on a cellphone will get you the local state police. If you’re on a major road, that might be the relevant organization. Most other places, it’s not. In an emergency, you don’t want to waste any time, and getting to the top of one 911 queue only to talk to someone who doesn’t recognize the names of local roads and needs to call another 911 system will waste time.

There is an alternative. Many police departments offer phone numbers that go to the same system as their 911 calls, so that you can call them directly from cellphones.

Where I am, most of the local police departments are in the 21st century and present these direct-dial numbers prominently on their websites’ front pages or on a ‘Contact Us’ page, and identify them as what to call from a cellphone. (A couple of towns didn’t have a direct-dial equivalent; I entered their general phone numbers anyway.) I label them all starting ‘911’ so they’re together in one block at the top of my contacts list.

It’ll only take a few minutes to look up the numbers for the police departments of the municipalities you frequent and enter them in your cellphone. Go ahead. I’ll wait. At least do your work and home.

It could be a matter of life or death.

Back in the day, the blogosphere was abuzz with the story of British novelist Matthew Branton, who was so fed up with publishing, he was just giving away his new novel.

So far as I can see, that novel never had a book publication. And matthewbranton.com has gone 404. And the Independent isn’t hosting the novel anymore.

Had there been a book, one could probably find a used copy (online.) With no book, well, if it weren’t for the Internet Archive (1 2 3 4 5), it might have disappeared entirely.

That’s the slippery thing about the net… obscurity can be one of the things it makes easier.

Haven’t been blogging much lately. Here are some things I have been doing:

I trashed my system hard drive, and started over from scratch with an Ubuntu 8.04 installation. Still have to see what, if anything, I can recover from the old drive.

New job! I transferred to a new department with my employer. I’ll have to learn Java, which will beat all heck out of Progress 4GL. My commute is a little longer, and almost all of the longer part is uphill, but I can still bike to work in under a half hour, and don’t expect much sympathy.

Visited my parents in New York for my mother’s birthday. Ever since we saw Rivers and Tides, a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy’s art, Pocahontas and I have wanted to visit the Storm King Art Center, to see the Storm King Wall (which may have been featured only in an extra on the DVD instead of the documentary itself — I don’t recall.) We finally made it — it’s a great place and I’d like to go back when we have more time. They also had three George Rickey kinetic sculptures. And we saw Spamalot on Broadway. Sure enough, the geeks have won.

We watched Jekyll on DVD. On his blog, screenwriter John Rogers said:

[…] The easiest way to start a conversation in Hollywood right now is to simply ask “So, favorite bit in Jekyll?” The love is universal.

And it was really good. James Nesbitt’s Mr. Hyde was a better Joker than any actual portrayal of the Joker I’ve seen.

The same week more current geeks were standing in line for a new iPhone, I bought a used Nokia n800 “Internet Tablet”, sort of a laptop for someone with a very, very small lap. I wrote almost three years ago about my lust for its predessor, the Nokia 770. If I write up my thoughts on the device, I’ll post them to Strange Loopiness.

Read lots of books and comics, but if I say anything about them, I’ll save it for another entry.

I'm currently upgrading to MovableType 4. Any number of things are likely to be broken while I'm doing this.

Updated: Searching and commenting look like they work. The blogroll is toast, though.

=v= In honor of high gas prices and whatnot, this year the theme of Black Rock City's streets is a celebration and glorification of carsickness.

I was unaware that Nevada needed another Vegas. The Green Man is so last year ago.

=v= I've been remiss for not having yet mentioned Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. It's a webcomic that centers on bicycling, thereby combining two of this blog's abiding interests. In many ways I am Yehuda Moon, so I have to admit to some bias, but still and all, it's a great comic strip that's gone through some interesting twists and turns. I highly recommend reading it from the beginning.

One strip in April introduced the phrase "Dateline moms". Curious, I consulted various search engines and only found 3 hits, one of which was an interview with the cartoonist. Two months later, still the same 3 hits.

A friend inquired about the phrase, and the cartoonist mentioned the movie Knocked Up. In one scene, a fretful mother has come across a website of registered sex offenders, and her husband asks, "How much Dateline NBC can you watch?" I don't watch TV, but apparently this is a show that features things you can be scared about. Especially if you're a mom.

At this point, it's been parlayed into a mini-meme, not yet spread very far by the Internet, much. Is that even allowed?

This weekend I reread my favorite Daniel Pinkwater fiction book, Young Adults. This is the saga of the Wild Dada Ducks, five Dadaist boys at Himmler High School. One of their artistic actions is to print and distribute cards declaring "Horace Gerstenblut [their high school principal] n'existe pas." The principal calls them to his office (they being the usual suspects.)

Mr Gerstenblut had fifteen or twenty cards on his desk. "What do you fellows know about this?" he asked, handing the cards to each of us.

"It's in French," Captain Colossal said.

"It has your name on it," I said.

"It says that you don't exist," Igor said.

"And what do you weirdos have to do with this?" Mr. Gerstenblut asked.

"I'm afraid we can't tell you," Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico) said.

"And why not?"

"Because you don't exist." [...]

Mr. Gerstenblut told us that he was going to let us off because he didn't have any proof--but he was going to watch us. He said that we were nihilists and that he wasn't going to stand for any of that at Himmler.

We looked up nihilist in the library. We were tickled. Of course we weren't nihilists--Dadaists are constructive artists--but we all agreed, if we couldn't have been Dadaists, nihilists would have been a pretty decent second choice.

Young Adults includes Young Adult Novel, previously published as its own volume, but also two other Dada Ducks stories (the Pinkwater omnibus Five Novels reprints only Young Adult Novel.) For my money, the second story, "Dead End Dada", is even funnier. In the first story, they hung out at a local drugstore where they could monopolize a booth for a cheap order of cinammon toast. By the second story, the drugstore has been replaced by a Chinese laundromat. The Ducks have continued to hang out there. When they decide they're going to be students of Zen, they adopt the laundromat owner as their Zen master, without telling him this.

Finally, during the dryer phase of our meditation, Master Yee addressed us all with a profound question for study.

"Okay, you laundry all finish," our esteemed teacher said, "What you do now?"

"Our laundry all finish," we responded in unison. "What we do now?"

"Our laundry all finish. What we do now?"

"Our laundry all finish. What we do now?"

"Our laundry all finish. What we do now?"

"Our laundry all finish. What we do now?"

It became a chant as we folded the laundry carefully, consciously, mindfully. It was, as we later agreed, the highest moment yet in our spiritual and artistic experience.

Always miles ahead of us, the Zen master, seemingly irrationally, became agitated. "Okay! Okay! Now you go! You get out! You crazy boys! You go home now! You crazy bald-headed boys!"

It was precisely the right thing to do. The master's outburst shook us loose from our moment of detachment and brought us into confrontation with reality. This was exactly what had happened to Dr. Wizardo in Captain Colossal's comic book.

The final story, "The Dada Boys in Collitch" is presented as the first chapter of an unfinished novel telling what happens when they go to college. It's the classic Pinkwater story: students, failed by conventional institutions, discover how to get their real education. I'd dearly love to see Pinkwater continue it.

For all I love Young Adults, my favorite Pinkwater books are his essay collections (mostly commentaries for All Things Considered), Fishwhistle and Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights (collected in single volume in Hoboken Fish and Chicago Whistle.) I wish that "Who's [sic] Little Jackson Pollack Are You?" from Fishwhistle were online, so I could link to it.

Disinfo's series of books is reminiscent of a modern-day People's Almanac series, delivered with the conceit that they're revealing suppressed information.

I just finished 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know. A lot of the theoretically suppressed information isn't that obscure. Some of it is obscure only because it's not all that interesting. The Korean War never ended! ...because an armistice isn't a peace treaty.

But here are some I found interesting.

The US Air Force dropped two atomic bombs on North Carolina.

Just ten days after the Kent State shootings, police killed two students and injured twelve at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson State is a historically black school, and the circumstances and handling of the shootings were generally uglier.

The Ten Commandments aren't the Ten Commandments, arguably. The Ten Commandments we always hear about are what Moses told the Israelites before he received any stone tablets. Exodus 34 is very explicit that the second set of stone tablets, the ones put in the Ark of the Covenant, said the same thing as the first set that Moses smashed, namely:

1. Worship no other god than Yahweh: Make no covenant with the inhabitants of other lands to which you go, do not intermarry with them, destroy their places of worship.
2. Do not cast idols.
3. Observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days in the month of Abib in remembrance of the Exodus.
4. Sacrifice firstborn male animals to Yahweh. The firstborn of a donkey may be redeemed; redeem firstborn sons.
5. Do no work on the seventh day.
6. Observe the Feast of First Fruits and the Feast of Ingathering: All males are therefore to appear before Yahweh three times each year.
7. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice with leavened bread.
8. Do not let the Passover sacrifice remain until the following morning.
9. Bring the first fruits of the harvest to the Temple of Yahweh.
10. Do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.

Those are called the Ritual Decalogue as opposed to the Ethical Decalogue -- the familiar Ten Commandments. (Given that no one counts these as the Ten Commandments, this is, perhaps, of a similarly hair-splitting nature as the Korean War not having ended. But this one I found interesting.)

Sand in close-up.

The Flynn Effect refers to the increase in average IQ over time.

IQ tests are updated periodically, to replace out-of-date questions ("typewriters" have given way to "computers"; dated words like "delectable" have been jettisoned for modern jargon like "operational"). Whenever a test was updated, a single group of people would take both versions—the obsolete and the replacement—to check that each ranked people in a similar order.

As a matter of completeness, the groups' average scores on both versions would be published in the test manuals. And, pretty much always, the group would score higher on the old test. An IQ score shows how a candidate does in comparison with a large "standardisation sample" of people who took the test when it was first introduced. Flynn's discovery indicated that the people who were used to calibrate the earlier tests were consistently easier for test-takers to beat.

Now Flynn found himself with a much bolder hypothesis. Rather than just one disadvantaged group—black Americans—having made cognitive gains, could the average person be getting smarter? He looked up every study in which a single group had been given two tests, one calibrated before the other. By 1984 he had compiled results from more than 7,000 subjects, and about a dozen combinations of tests. And they pointed to a startling conclusion: that white Americans had been steadily gaining around three-tenths of an IQ point a year for almost half a century.

And scientists have made a video game, playing which predictably raises the player's IQ.

Jaeggi's volunteers were trained daily for about 20 minutes for either 8, 12, 17 or 19 days (with weekends off). They were given IQ tests both before and after the training. The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.

Today's value of dumbest thing ever.

Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors. [...] There is speculation that hand-reared Knut killed the carp just for fun.

Controversy. Apparently, there are people shocked, shocked to learn that the solution to the equation polar bear + fish = dead fish.

Before writing the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming was pitching espionage plots to British Naval Intelligence.

Fleming [...] devised Operation Ruthless. This was a plan to obtain a German codebook by crashing a captured aeroplane into the Channel, where the crew would be rescued by a German minesweeper. The 'survivors' would then kill the German crew and hijack the ship.

I'd seen mention of roasting your own coffee with a hot air popcorn popper.

At the beginning of March, Pocahontas and I visited Hawaii's Big Island. While we were there, we toured a coffee farm, and drank a lot of Kona coffee. It really is better than most coffee I've had, but the price is prohibitive in the continental U.S. One of the things the tour guide said was that green coffee beans keep for a couple of years -- it's roasting that gives coffee a short shelf life.

Which is one of the reasons that green beans are cheaper. So much cheaper as to make Kona feasible.

So we found one and a half popcorn poppers at a yard sale for $3 -- the half popper was missing its hood, which is fine for coffee roasting. We kept the whole one for actual popcorn popping (we'd both forgotten how much better and easier hot air popping is than old-fashioned popping in oil.) We found a green bean seller in Oakland, and bought a sampler of 8 half-pounds of different varieties. I modded our popper per directions for the model, and we began roasting our own coffee.

The various warnings on the web lead one to expect plumes of stinky black smoke, even cautioning one to wear old clothes you don't mind stinking of coffee. Doing a tiny batch outside, there wasn't much in the way of smoke or stink. We just guessed as to how long, watching the beans for color. After somewhere in the neighborhood of five minutes for 1/3 of a cup (raw -- they increase in volume as they roast) we were done.

The advice on the web was to wait at least 12 hours before making coffee with them, so we waited till the next morning to try it.

It was fantastic. With a yard sale popcorn popper, a regular coffee grinder, my aeropress, green coffee beans, and time, I'm drinking the best coffee I've ever had, for less money than we'd been paying for roasted beans from Peet's.

We still haven't tried roasting our own Kona. It gets hard to imagine our coffee getting any better.

And we totally got this Final Jeopardy clue.

William Gilbert, the dude who first figured out that the Earth had magnetic poles, thought that quartz was sort of like ice-9.

Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal [quartz], which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines.

A Cultural Briefing for the Warriors.

Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child's play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England.

The warriors, who are leaving their remote Tanzanian village to run in the London Marathon, have been given a detailed four-page guide on how to contend with the most curmudgeonly species they may ever encounter: the English office worker.

"You may be surprised by the number of people that there are and they all seem to be rushing around everywhere," the guide says.

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don't enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."

How was Lester Dent, the creator of Doc Savage, so prolific? He had a formula.

The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here's how it starts:

1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO

Paperbackswap is a great way to turn a pile of books you don't want into a pile of books you do.

The idea's simple: all books of acceptable condition or better are assumed equal. You list your books; if someone wants one, you mail it at your expense. When the recipient says it's received, you get a credit, and can ask someone else for a book, and you get it without further expense.

I used to have a bunch of books listed on Half.com. Occasionally, one would move; mostly, they languished there month after month. A couple of weeks ago, I finally registered with Paperbackswap. For listing ten books, I received two book credits (in this respect, it's sort of like a Ponzi scheme that works.) I requested Alternate Oscars, which I received promptly, and there wasn't any other activity.

Last week, I passed on to Pocahontas a book I'd started and lost interest in. She quickly lost interest, too. "I know," I thought. "I'll post it to Paperbackswap." While I was at it, I posted three recent mass-market science fiction paperbacks, too.

And, boom. Members can have wish lists, and as soon as a book on your wish list is posted, you're informed and can confirm you really want it (or, alternatively, you can set it to automatically order a given wish list item without confirmation.) Three of the four new books had been others' wish list items. Then I cleared nearly everything I'd had on Half.com and listed them and more on Paperbackswap.

I ended up mailing 4 packages on Friday, and have 8 more ready to mail today, which include things that had just sat on Half.com. The cumulative postage for all of these will set me back around $25, but, for that, I'll have my pick of a dozen books shipped to my home.

(I vacillated on mentioning this, as I don't like any appearance of shilling, but if, when you register, you list zedlopez as having referred you, I get a book credit. But I recommend it whether or not I get any referrer credits.)

As a lad, I was a big fan of the People's Almanac series. I recently discovered that there was a relatively recent addition to the series, The People's Almanac Presents the 20th Century. Not long after taking it out of the library and beginning it, I ordered my own copy. Did you know that the superintendent of the NJ State police that investigated the Lindbergh kidnapping was Norman Schwarzkopf,. father of the Gulf War general?

A lot of content from the series is on-line at Trivia-Library.com, like this year-by-year events in U.S. history.

Here's a proposed wiki successor that doesn't appear to have any content yet.

The whole text of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, a detailed account of the poor of Victorian London is available on-line.

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• The Extra Volume

Read of the sham indecent trade, the clown who hates his job, the sewer hunters, the ratcatcher to the Queen. and more.

The Lego Star Wars Orchestra

Ooh Girl! is an R&B spoof reminiscent of Business Time.

Pirates of Penzance/Baby Got Back mashup

The Beatnix play a wonderful cover of Stairway to Heaven.

Here Comes Another Bubble from Bay Area local a capella group the Richter Scales. Check out "I've Got Mail" and "Stockholm Syndrome" on their website.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for some 3800 years, until the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln, England was rebuilt between 1307 and 1311.

Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas died in the same London flat that Keith Moon of the Who died in four years later.

At the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia was the deadline: anyone crossing it was shot dead. The OED's earliest citation for the modern usage of deadline is 1920: "Corinne Griffith..is working on ‘Deadline at Eleven’, the newspaper play." It seems that newspapers adopted the term because the deadline was the (temporal) point which, if crossed, would get your story killed.

Pocahontas told me a story of a college friend who'd stayed up until three the night before a final, so he set two alarms, one of them across the room, to be sure he got there in time.

He woke up three hours late with the alarm clock from across the room in his hand.

Maybe one of these top ten most annoying alarm clocks would have made the difference. I've admired several of these before, like the one that launches a helicopter you have to catch, or the one that rolls of your night table and hides, but the one that launches puzzle pieces into the air that you have to re-insert for it to silence was a new one to me.

This is an incredible video of wind-driven machines.

"Dachshund" comes from the German, "dachs" for badger and "hund" for dog. But a dachshund doesn't look it all like a badger, you might say. It's a small, sweet, lap dog.

But its name owes to dachshunds having been bred to hunt frikkin' badgers, animals known to fight off wolves, bears, and coyotes.

Bartleby offers a large number of references online, many of them public domain and available elsewhere, like Project Gutenberg, many of them not.

Some highlights are:

• The American Heritage Dictionary,
• The American Heritage Book of English Usage
• Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
• Gray's Anatomy
• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
• The Encyclopedia of World History
• Roget's Thesaurus
• The Harvard Classics
• Bulfinch's Mythology

There are tons more.

Elsewhere you can find the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. And For convenient downloading (and sharing), Project Gutenberg offers large numbers of books packaged as CDs and DVDs. Get them with BitTorrent to ease their server load.

This professor had an interesting technique to keep his students' attention.

"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day." And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insi