Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Things I run across that I find to be interesting, but might not have the time or inclination to craft a fuller post around it. Generally, short little “go here, look at this, isn’t it neat?” posts.
The basic idea has been around for a while, but I’ve never seen something quite like this German company’s line of ‘nude’ clothing. It does make me wonder what kind of trouble that might stir up over here — it’d definitely be an eye-catcher! I’d almost love to see a group of 10 to 20 people walking down the street wearing this stuff, just to see how much confusion and consternation it would cause!
(via Boing Boing)
Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.
(via DayPop)
After a short hiatus to regroup, the Web Standards Project is back up and running. These are the people that I tend to turn to when doing any major redesign on my site, and were instrumental in my decision to re-code my site to be entirely CSS-based and W3-compliant. Good place to start if you’re at all interested in web design.
I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.
(via MeFi)
I just took one of the many “What [random thing] are you?” tests that are floating around the ‘net — this one focused on X-Men characters. Here’s the results: I’m Remy LeBeau/Gambit — What X-Men character are you?
Look out and lock up your daughters, everyone, we’re in the presence of Remy LeBeau. That’s right, you’re that smooth-talkin’ Cajun boy with a flare for making women swoon and a great love for all things shiny and steal-able. Sure, you’re forever on the run from your past, but there’s no reason why you can’t run from it in style, oui?
I think this’ll be my last post for tonight…though, with me, you never know. I heard about this while we had the radio at work on to the Lionel Show, one of the talk shows on The Buzz, a local talk-radio station.
The original story was from the New York Times — “Where 9/11 News Is Late, but Aid Is Swift” (as the NYT site requires registration, and many people would rather not do that, I’ll include the article at the end of this post also). Basically, an African Masai tribesman who was visiting New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks went back to his tribe and, as they’re fairly cut off from the world, explained to them what had happened and how it had affected life here in America.
The tribe, then, felt that they wanted to do something to help — and so they took donations from members of the tribe, and are donating 14 head of cattle to the United States of America! I was just amazed at this — this is a fairly small tribe (the article mentions that a catastrophe that killed 3,000 people would be enough to wipe out their entire tribe) — 14 cattle is, by their standards, an amazing amount of wealth to give up freely! I’m not exactly sure how it would translate to our standards…possibly roughly equivalent to donating Texas to another country. Or Bill Gates. Whichever is worth more.
Anyway, I just thought it was one of the neatest stories I’d read in a long time, and while it may be incredibly bitter and jaded, I really can’t see us in the US doing anything like that. A shame, really — good to know that there are still some places in the world that seem to have their priorities straight.
Wil’s been exorcising his demons this week — some of the best writing I’ve seen on his site. Three posts in a series that are worth a read: Mirror Mirror, Turnaround, and The Big Goodbye.
Okay — this is one of the most truly ridiculous, bizarre, and contrived conspiracy theory links I’ve seen yet — and I had to share it.
So — here we have conclusive evidence that the US knew about the 9-11 attacks not just weeks or months, but years before they happened — there are hidden pictures of both the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks hidden on the new $20 bill!
Here’s a truly bizarre piece of work — Osama bin Laden’s Blog.
Oh, man — I could get so lost playing with virtual Legos that I’d forget all about work. That’d be a bad thing.