Michael Hanscom

Sometime between June 25th and June 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Albanian Custom Fades – Woman as Family Man: For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men.
• He let them down. He ran around and hurt them.: "Robert" had just pulled off the most epic rickroll in intertubes history. The author of the game had never really intended for it to be a game at all. He just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got.
• The Big List of Things I Like About LibraryThing: I've been using LibraryThing for quite some time now to track my book collection and what I'm reading. This post has a nice roundup of some of LT's best features.
• Olympic start gun gives inside runners an edge: Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
• Chrysler will offer wireless Internet access in 2009 models: "With the added Internet connectivity, drivers and passengers will be able to get such devices as laptop computers and Nintendo Wii consoles online." Terrifying, though there's a certain dark humor to it. Steering wheel in one hand, Wiimote in the other
• The Fly: The Opera: Directed by David Cronenberg, music by Howard Shore, and conducted by Placido Domingo. No, I'm not kidding.

Sometime between 07:42 and 13:30, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Really clever advertising campaign for Breeze Excel laundry detergent:: Send detergent samples through the mail wrapped in t-shirts. After the mail has thoroughly munged up the t-shirt 'wrapping', the recipients wash the shirt with the included sample.
• An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant: "The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11."
• Religious Groups’ Official Positions on Same-Sex Marriage: Although the Episcopal Church has not explicitly established a position in favor of gay marriage, in 2006 the church stated its “support of gay and lesbian persons and [opposition to] any state or federal constitutional amendment that prohibits same-sex
• NYT: Reporters Say Networks Put War: Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television "with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad." He said CBS correspondents can "get in there very quic
• Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less.: 1984: WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats.
• Others’ grass not so green after drunken drive on lawn mower: "The first thing that went through my mind was someone was stealing our mower. And then I thought, wait a minute, we don't have a riding mower."

Sometime between June 23rd and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• June 24, 1947: They Came From … Outer Space?: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads [to] the term flying saucer.
• Bob Dylan On Abraham Lincoln: Tracing the origin of Bob Dylan's Abraham Lincoln quote: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool ALL of the people ALL of the time."
• Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard: There's a bunch of pretty high-level (Low-level? Technical bits.) geek stuff in here, but it's a nice overview of what's coming with Snow Leopard. The slimming down of apps is impressive.
• Neighborhoods Map – Neighborhoods Program – City of Kent, Washington: Oddly, Kent doesn't seem to be as well divided into discrete neighborhoods: there's just Kent, and a few small areas within designated as neighborhoods. Our new apartment isn't in any of them, so I guess we don't get a neighborhood?
• Seattle City Clerk’s Neighborhood Map Atlas: I use this a lot when tagging images I upload to Flickr. Click on a larger region to zoom in to more precise neighborhood boundaries.
• The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design: Paragraphs are punctuation, the punctuation of ideas. After selecting a typeface, choosing the right paragraph style is one of the cornerstones of good typography. This is a brief inquiry into paragraph style for the Web.

Sometime between June 21st and June 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Edgy comic George Carlin dies in L.A. at age 71: "The world is a big theatre-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. "Tune in and watch the human adventure."
• Return of the ’70s Weirdos: Bob Greenberg (center of old photo, in red sweater), then a programmer and now a tech and financial consultant, had won a photo portrait in a contest and used it to commemorate the soon-to-be disrupted group. The picture was shot in a shopping mall.
• Edith Macefield, 1921-2008: Ballard woman held her ground as change closed in around her: The Ballard woman who captured hearts and admirers around the world when she stubbornly turned down $1 million to sell her home to make way for a commercial development died Sunday of pancreatic cancer.
• Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe’s The Big Picture: The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.
• How scientists are bringing dinosaurs back to life with the help of the humble chicken: just like in the hit Steven Spielberg movie, these men and women are intent on cracking the genetic code of the dinosaurs and opening the possibility of bringing them back to life.

Sometime between June 18th and June 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script: First off, I enjoyed the newest Indiana Jones film, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. That said, this guy does an amusing job of ripping it to shreds.
• China renames oddly named menu items for Olympics: Among the dishes being renamed: "Husband and Wife's Lung Slice," "Chicken Without Sexual Life," and "Bean Curd Made By A Pock-Marked Woman"
• Indiana Jones and Nuke the Fridge: A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover.
• Flickr: Smithsonian Institution: The Smithsonian is happy to join the Flickr community. With our initial posting of 900 photographs, we look forward to your tags, comments, and general participation in this new venture. We will be adding more photos on a regular basis…
• Ridley Scott Admits Little Orphan Annie Inspired Blade Runner: "Little Orphan Annie is dark – Daddy Warbucks is so sinister – it’s like Silence Of the Lambs! It’s full of terrible things and bodies locked in cupboards…"