Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Who knew that Frankenstein and Dracula actually encountered one another in reality long ago? How cool is that?

Moving westward from Transylvania...the Rosslyn Chapel, mentioned in the DaVinci Code and in oodles of Templar lore before that, is "deciphered" and the many facets of Untold London are unveiled to online readers.

Closer to home, the Mothman legend lives on in Athens, and hey! why not check out the pig, chicken and cow population of America?

And lastly, the Magician's Hidden Library features a wealth of information for the aspiring magician.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Today's entry ended up as a hodgepodge of pop culture history. We start off in the 1960s, when Richard Scarry's books were well-read and well-loved by kids. They're still well-read and well-loved, of course, they're just a little different these days. (The comments are great, too.)

Moving on to the 1980s, nearly every game you played at the arcade seems to be online now.

In the 1990s, there was RuPaul. Who knew there were so many different RuPaul dolls?

And nowadays, we have impromptu dance parties/protests at Wal-Marts (this is brilliant, and one of the very few reasons I'd go to a Wal-Mart these days) and DVDs may be made obsolete. Soon people will be spending more time transferring their media to different storage systems than they will actually watching or listening to said media.

Knitting will always be around, apparently. Now you can use the Random Stripe Generator to create patterns!

Monday, November 28, 2005

Hi there. While I get over travel lag (which included a non-starting car - not mine, but my dad's, which meant driving him back to his place out in the middle of nowhere last night), check out the splendiferous Altered Books. Back tomorrow!

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Today is one big crazy travel day for most Americans. Yeehaw. Therefore...

You can play Airport Insecurity if you have a mobile phone or a Palm or some such gadget, and unnerve suspicious fellow travelers. Or, if your travels involve subways instead of airports, there's Subway Scramble for the downloading.

In olden days, travel was more fun. Or, at least, they tried harder to make it seem fun.

If you'd like a surreal t-shirt to wear on the plane or train or at the family dinner table, try the Hipster T-Shirt Generator. I ended up with the phrase "I like spines" below a picture of a house. Bonus points if you can figure out a meaning to the shirt and explain it to others successfully!

And when you just want to imagine that you're somewhere else, there's PyramidCam and an interactive map of Narnia. Good luck, happy Thanksgiving, and I'll see you Monday!

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The posting schedule this week is going to be erratic due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Tomorrow I set off for Chicago to spend the weekend with my dad's side of the family. Hopefully I won't be driving through a blizzard to get there.

At any rate, today's links skew toward the geeky. Want to build a robot for an office war? ReadyMechs to the rescue! If you're ready to move on to a higher level, you could build a Dalek. Extermination functions not required, but a plus. If your Dalek (or other mechanized instrument of destruction) runs on electricity, world domination might be an issue unless you have this handy World Electric Guide.

For scientists tired of explaining why science is not always the way it looks in the movies, LabLit does a great job of exploring "the culture of science in fiction and fact."

The I Dare You candy collection is perfect for the 12-year-old boy in your life...or perhaps the person in your life who acts like a 12-year-old boy. I know oodles, myself.

And lastly, a real-life scientific horror story: one man's search for the truth behind his lobotomy. He survived the procedure without much damage, but he was one of the few lucky ones.

Monday, November 21, 2005

More fun with Flickr: librarian trading cards! You can see ours in the pool; if you're a librarian, make your own and add it to the group. (Fd's Flickr Toys also has calendar, badge, and motivational poster options among its many fun features.)

Welcome to life in the 21st century, where you can choose to read the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet via emoticons or text messaging, depending on your preference. I think I like the text messaging option better. If you're reading the full text of classic novels and thinking that perhaps they're not so classic, you can see which Amazon reviewers agree with you. (I do agree with the Faulkner reviewer. Someday I will try again, but I have never really understood Faulkner at all.)

Behold, Stick Figures in Peril! Will no one think of the stick figure stunt workers who risk their two-dimensional lives every day?

And for your arty (if slightly disturbing) quota of the day, I bring you Mouse Angel. I think the Lakshmi mouse is my favorite. (It's Lakshmi, right? Not Kali or Shiva or some other Hindu deity?)

Friday, November 18, 2005

This weekend there's a psychic festival in town, and if Glenna has her way we'll be there to get our past lives critiqued or our auras recolored or whatever. Good times. Say hi if you're there!

From the Graveworm: are ghosts really all that scary? Also, an interview with Daniel Ash. (Bauhaus is in Cleveland tomorrow. Ooooh. Ahhh.)

The rest of today's entry consists of some truly odd links I've been saving up and can't fit in anywhere else. Random Friday fun! Have at them!

Have a spiffy weekend, everyone. See you Monday.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Today, we bring you library news from around the country.

And lastly, if you're as sick of people misusing the word "literally" as I am, you will love this weblog which points out the craziness as it happens.

Tomorrow: links from others!

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Today: spooky tech. The exception is the Lego 3D Designer, which lets you create anything you want and then order the bricks to make your design a reality. This is not to say that you couldn't create something spooky, of course...

I think the new Olympic mascots are kind of spooky, myself. I also think the Chinese have a lot of nerve including a Tibetan antelope in the mix, seeing as how they are not exactly great protectors of all things Tibet. Grrr.

You can pretend to battle the mascots, or anyone else you want, courtesy of the Surrealist monster battle. According to the surrealists, my monster is an armored blob. Er.

In a great parody of a Chick tract, the Cthulhu witnesses convince the nonbelievers that yes, you do want to be among the first to die. Lovecraft would be so proud.

The Graveworm beat me to posting this, but this study of the effectiveness of tin foil helmets should be widely disseminated, I believe.

Forbes is giving you an opportunity to email your future self. Yes, really! Remind yourself of what 2005 was like. You'll either cry or laugh about it twenty years from now.

Alternatively, you could go all Back to the Future-esque and email yourself plans to build a flying saucer. The flux capacitor plans are optional.

In London, you can dine at the Cafe in the Crypt at St. Martin's. How cool is that? Over on this side of the pond, the secrets of the Haunted Mansion are online for the brave and/or the inquisitive.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

I've been felled with the sinus headache from hell all day. But I did find a fun time-waster:

You can make your own at the TekTek Dream Creator.
(This does look like me, actually. I had different hair, but Bunny said it needed to be "messier." Thanks, sweetheart.)

Monday, November 14, 2005

Have you ever looked at a book cover and thought that you could do better? Well, here's your chance! Penguin is looking for photographs to illustrate the covers of a few books by Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf and others. It's like Jones Soda, only with a more literary (and potentially more permanent) bent.

Synesthesia alert! If you've ever wondered what color a word is, the Color Code uses web images to give you an answer. The only problem with this idea is that all the colors tend to blend into a beige brown blah. Folderol looks sort of like a cool taupe.

When an artist starts working on Barbies, great things happen. Check out the version of Death!

We went out to dinner with some friends over the weekend, some of whom smoke, and they nearly walked out with the chef's lighter accidentally. With this in mind, the Six Degrees of Smoking project, in which lighters travel from person to person with photographic evidence, seems like a good plan - if the people remember to take the photos, at any rate!

Remember actress Daryl Hannah? She's gone off and invented a board game called Liebrary. It's true!

Friday, November 11, 2005

Help, I've been seduced by Sudoku. Supposedly it's good for my brain, but I'm not so sure...

Speaking of being seduced by strangeness...I try to stick up for George Lucas, really I do, because Star Wars was an integral part of my childhood. I have to admit, though, that when I watched Revenge of the Sith, this was very close to what was going through my head.

And now, on to the links from others. Thanks, everyone!

And finally, one more reason I wish I lived in Seattle, or thereabouts: the Salon of Shame.

Have a spiffy weekend, everyone. See you Monday!

Thursday, November 10, 2005

If you are, have been, live with, or want to be a librarian...

For those not necessarily obsessed with librarianship: find out what the most stolen car is in your state. Honda Civics are the most stolen overall, but in my state they didn't even make the top ten - Oldsmobiles are apparently the cool thing here.

Also, a computerized effort to recreate the Byzantium of 1200 A.D. This is super cool.

Tomorrow: links from others. As a preview, consider setting aside two minutes of silence tomorrow to think on those who have died as a result of war around the world recently.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Okay, today we have Tuesday links to make up for yesterday's Wednesday links. Got it? Before that, however, we have some local news. I saw the photos of a goat on a trampoline last week when it ran on the front page here, but now Deadspin has got hold of it and is pointing out the "goat poll" and accompanying hilarious comments. (The best part is that the goat-on-a-trampoline angle isn't even the focus of the original story. Do goats normally cavort on their hind legs on trampolines?)

If you like goats on trampolines, you will probably love sheep playing volleyball. The site's in German, as it's for Mentos, but it's pretty easy to figure out.

Fun with Flash: you can decorate a cake with gel and sprinkles on one site, or create a space robot at another. I think my SpookyBot would make a perfect explorer.

There's now a root beer-flavored energy drink. I'm having a hard time envisioning this. BrightFeet Slippers, on the other hand, I can imagine easily. As long as you don't run into any obstacles above ankle level, they should work perfectly!

And finally, for something completely different: Puppet101 shows you how puppet magic is made.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Hey, I finally updated the Steampunk Librarian, and will hopefully be on a more regular schedule there, maybe 2-3 times a week or so. Comments/suggestions/complaints are welcome!

RIP, Mana ("China") Nishiura. Shonen Knife won't be the same without you.

I didn't have any coffee this morning and thought today was Wednesday, so you get spooky stuff instead of techy pop culture links (I do try to stay on topic every day, believe it or not). So tomorrow we'll pretend it's Tuesday. We should all be thoroughly confused by the end of the week.

They've found the remains of Copernicus under a medieval Polish cathedral. How cool is that? In other underground news, a secret British "city" constructed during WWII is now public knowledge, and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has created a silent film version of Call of Cthulhu. (What? Cthulhu lives underwater. The segue sort of makes sense.)

The Dead Puppet Show is beautiful and disturbing in a David Lynch sort of way. David Lynch himself is busy immersing himself in transcendental meditation. This seems fitting, somehow.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Today's theme, although I didn't plan it, seems to be something along the lines of "everything old is new again." Without further ado...

Friday, November 04, 2005

It's Links from Others Day! Thanks, everyone.

From Glenna: Wild Mood Swings, where your mood takes you to a random website; Moonscopes from Yellow Springs; and a punch in the stomach over the 2,000 dead in Iraq.

From Holly: a camel library! Cool!

From Bunny: Meet Cleaver Theatre has been reviewed in the Secret Scroll Digest. They like us! They really really like us!

From a few different places: What Kind of Cheese Are You? (I am Brie. Woo!) and the ultra-cute story of Finnegan the squirrel, who is being raised with a litter of Pomeranians.

Have a spiffy weekend, everyone. See you Monday.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Meta-librarian geekout moment: So I've been wondering why my (admittedly crappy) photo of Grokker pins from Internet Librarian has been getting so many hits...and then this morning I looked at the IL Blog to find that Marydee Ojala had linked to it! (Marydee is the editor of Online Magazine. She was also on our flight out from Monterey to Salt Lake City and was happy to see that someone else was a fan of Kraftwerk.)

Grokker was the big hit of the conference, judging from the crowd around its booth at the exhibit hall. A similar visually-oriented way of using the web is at Mooter.

Happy Worldwide Usability Day! There are events going on in 35 different countries. Go and spread the word, and share your opinions on technology, usability, and humanity.

From a library list which labeled this "how to drive your shelvers crazy," I bring you...broken shelves. Purposefully broken, that is. It's a German company, which makes sense because I'd expect these shelves to be in the background of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or some similar expressionist film.

For the legal librarians, LLRX has a good summary of what's going on with the various courts affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Walt Crawford examines the recent phenomenon of life trumping blogging. Folderol readers, here's a serious question: would you prefer quality over quantity, or do you like the current setup?

For the geographically geeky (and I'm including myself here), check out Earth Contest. With prizes, even!

Tomorrow: links from others. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Geek alert: Worldwide D&D GameDay is this Saturday! Prepare your character sheets and polish your dice! (I say this with love. I'm a geek myself, if not a D&D-playing one.)

You could also theoretically drink absinthe while you play, although your character might die awfully quickly. Absinthe is making a comeback in the U.S. Hooray!

By the end of this month, British pubs will be able to stay open as late as they want to, which will be a radical change from having to close at 11 every night. No word yet on whether they'll serve absinthe eventually.

If you work at a place that goes by Mystery House, you should most definitely put out a weblog detailing what goes on there.

Finally, Poly9 uses Google Earth to solve the pesky problem of "where was that UFO again?" Hee.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

And verily, the Great Wall of Bread appeared, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land...until those who worshipped toast learned of the Great Wall...

First it was knitted robots zombies. Then it was knitted zombies. And now, there's a whole knitted digestive system on the loose. When will the madness end?!?

Has anyone experimented with the cold heat soldering iron yet? Does it work? Does it break immediately?

And lastly, I would have bid on this if I'd had a way to play it. This was the Holy Grail of Thompson Twins devotees back in the day!