Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Amazon’s A9

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Interesting: Amazon just launched A9, a Google-based search engine, choosing to break the news via John Batelle’s blog.

A9, Amazon’s much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news – I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here’s why: On first blush it’s a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google – and more broadly, the entire search-driven world – react?

(via Boing Boing and Jason Kottke)

iTunes: “Ill Flower” by Future Sound of London, The from the album Lifeforms (1994, 3:24).

Online crack

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Hey Alan — you thought this game was bad?

Wait ’til you start this one…;)

My first game I made it to level six, with 3650 points and 141 coins.

I’m going to waste so much time on this thing!

(via D)

LiveJournal voyeurism

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Entirely random and surprisingly addicting: LiveJournal Images, a page which displays the last 40 images posted to LiveJournal weblogs. So many pictures get posted so quickly that you can get an entirely new set every few seconds. Lots of kittens, anonymous people, celebrities, random wierdness, and the occasional NSFW image (be warned, just in case).

I just found this, for instance…

Der Mensch als Industriepalast

(via MeFi)

iTunes: “Personal Reality” by Guidance from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 6:53).

Good for you, Janet

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Given how incredibly silly all the controversy was, I think it’s great that Janet is spoofing her “wardrobe malfunction” — and doing it in character as Condi Rice, no less!

It was inevitable: Janet Jackson spoofing her infamous wardrobe malfunction by flashing a heavily pixillated breast on “Saturday Night Live.” The one surprise was the context. Jackson portrayed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice opening her blouse at the Sept. 11 commission hearings, in an opening skit on the comedy show.

The skit showed Vice President Dick Cheney, played by Darrell Hammond, suggesting Rice should “flash a boob” to distract the public from her testimony.

“Just one headlight, real quick,” he said. “It does two things. You win over the liberals, plus, it’s a distraction for the press. I guarantee that’s going to be the headline, not the bin Laden thing.”

Jackson, as Rice, huffily refuses.

“I am not a prude, sir, but this hearing is not the forum for that kind of lewd conduct,” she said. “There are other forums, like pay television or national sporting championships. That would be fine, but I am the national security adviser.”

Cheney reluctantly agreed. “It was Ashcroft’s idea,” he said.

iTunes: “Among Myselves” by Future Sound of London, The from the album Lifeforms (1994, 5:52).

Moving the library

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For someone who whines and complains every time I switch apartments, I’m fascinated by what it must take to move the Seattle Central Library to its new building.

It was the biggest word problem the Seattle Public Library had ever faced:

If the Central Library housed 855,840 items, and they weighed around 14,000 tons, how could they be moved out of the old building in 2001, separated and stored for years, reshuffled into an entirely new order, and moved into a landmark new building?

The logistics of the double-move seemed unfathomable. Most people were convinced the splashy new Central Library, scheduled to open May 23, couldn’t be built on the same site as the old one.

“She’s crazy” is the chorus City Librarian Deborah Jacobs remembers when she broached the plan.

But now, book by book, waist-high packing box by waist-high packing box, the freightloads of the final move are under way.

I pass by the new library building every night on my way home from work, and I was excited to notice a couple weeks ago that, even though interior construction still seems to be in progress, books were starting to line the shelves visible through the windows.

I’ve taken a couple evening walks by the library, getting off my bus a couple of stops earlier than I normally do so that I could walk by the new building once I noticed that construction had moved to a point where the sidewalks around the building were open again. I’d already decided that I liked the design, but at night, it’s absolutely gorgeous, with all the odd angles picking up reflections of sky and stars above, other buildings across downtown, and traffic streaming by on the streets below. Really makes me wish I had a new camera.

Just a few more weeks until the new library opens, and I’m hoping to be able to stop by on opening day just to wander around. The funny thing is, I’m not entirely sure now much I’ll actually use the library — they always have this funny habit of wanting their books back, something I have deep issues with. ;)

iTunes: “Girl” by Amos, Tori from the album Little Earthquakes (1991, 4:07).

Sci-Fi museum to open in two months

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Paul Allen’s new addition to the EMP, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, is due to open in approximately two months, according to the Seattle P-I.

About 13,000 square feet of the Frank Gehry-designed EMP will be dedicated to the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (which was initially dubbed SFX, for Science Fiction Experience). This new sci-fi wing will have three levels of exhibit space and add more than 1,000 square feet of performance space to EMP.

Exhibits and artifacts celebrating such movies and television programs as “Star Trek,” “Planet of the Apes” and “Dr. Strangelove” will be complemented by objects or exhibits aimed at demonstrating how the literary genre sometimes leads to real scientific developments or technological achievements.

I’ll be very interested in checking it out, of course — my only worry is that I found the EMP to be fairly ridiculously overpriced, and I wasn’t a large fan of how the displays were set up (very little textual information, as there were PDA-ish handheld audio devices to guide you through, which were too heavy and kind of a pain to use). Hopefully the SFX doesn’t have these same issues, though as they are part of the same complex, who knows.

Guess I’ll find out in June, huh?

That’s one kinky rabbit

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Okay, so there isn’t really a lot of connection between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a magical rabbit that distributes eggs to children…but couldn’t this church have come up with a better way of getting their message across than whipping the Easter Bunny during a church pageant?

A church that put on an Easter show said it was trying to teach about Jesus Christ.

But the people who saw the show say they were upset by performers who broke eggs and pretended to whip the Easter bunny.

People who attended Saturday’s performance of an Easter celebration at a memorial stadium in Glassport, Allegheny County, quoted performers as saying “There is no Easter bunny.”

If I could draw, I’d have all sorts of fun with that combination of elements…I’m thinking something involving furries in S&M gear in front of an altar.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go scour my brain to get rid of that image.

I am a grammar god! Bow before me!

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Grammar God!

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
Brought to you by Quizilla

In all honesty, I was a bit surprised — while I’m generally fairly sure of my ability to use the English language, some of the quiz questions actually had me debating and choosing whichever one “felt right”. Apparently my instincts haven’t gotten too terribly sloppy yet after all!

(via Shelley)

iTunes: “Habanera from Carmen” by Bizet, Georges from the album Trainspotting #2 (1994, 2:08).

Gmail and Safari

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So I got curious about Gmail, Google’s new e-mail service, and thought I’d stop by to take a look.

Safari not supported

Somehow, I’m not very impressed so far.

Update: As it turns out, they’re in a closed beta right now, so I couldn’t have signed up in any case. Still…the lack of support for Safari — the default web browser on all new Macintosh computers — hardly leaves me with a good first impression.

iTunes: “Run to the Sun” by Erasure from the album I Say I Say I Say (1994, 4:25).