there is a small thread hanging off the world

This is a local-ish guy, and I saw an article about him in my local paper because he has a few of his pieces on display in my town. I thought his work looked kind of neat. Then I went through the gallery on his web site, and I'm filled with respect and awe.

http://www.jayrogersboxes.com/

I especially recommend to you his gallery of portrait boxes, where he has created beautiful and utilitarian art works that deeply relate to the people they were made for.

The other galleries are cool, too.

gaaked from woodardp

Jewel puts on a disguise and sings Jewel songs at a karaoke bar. I love the crowd reactions to hearing this "office worker who only sings at Christmas parties" give such an amazing performance.

From ResearchBUZZ:
Popular Science Archive Free Online for the win!
"I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available.
To search, you can start at http://www.popsci.com/archives ...."
(for the rest of the review, see: http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/popular-science-archives/ )

A look back at the decade from the POV of a Boston-based Rip van Winkle who dozed off in 1999.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/30/end_of_a_decade/

This is a good site for showing how "psychic" scams are fake, revealing how various tricks are done and explaining the science behind what you're seeing.

http://www.scienceofscams.com

A beautiful tribute to director John Hughes by a woman who was his pen-pal for two years:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

http://www.babble.com/Why-giving-kids-only-whats-good-for-them-is-a-bad-idea-In-Praise-of-Junk/index3.aspx

Especially relevant today, as the kids helped themselves to a "sometimes food" as a snack without asking me.

The New England Aquarium has a Turtle Rescue blog where you can follow the progress of the sea turtles they rescue every year. Today, you get to see x-rays and CT scans of a turtle with a suspicious shadow on his lung. It's not gross, and is actually kind of facinating.

Highway signs hacked in TX to warn of zombie attack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoCrqkQfJ5E

lifted from various sources ...


(ya know, LJ is great for short attention spans like mine today.)

I am so completely lovin' Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! Thankfully, they've added enough bandwidth to allow me to see chapter 2 today instead of tomorrow when demand dies down.

I sometimes refer to myself or others needing to conserve spoons (like when I was recovering from the rheumatoid arthritis last year). Some of you might not know where this comes from or what a powerful analogy this is, so please take 60 seconds out of your day to read the source material.

I'm very sick, either stomach flu or mild food poisoning.
DSR is also sick, with a bad cold and muscle aches (probably not flu, as he can still eat).
We're trading off kid duties as we can, and it's my turn after he feeds them so he can nap.

In the meantime, small pleasures:

Typo Hunt Across America:
The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) is dedicated to a more perfectly spelling union.

This March through May, we, sworn members of TEAL, will be taking a road trip around the country to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.
The itinerary is as follows:

* Whole of March: From Boston to San Diego, via the steamy South
* Much of April: Up the West Coast
* Late April - Mid-May: From Seattle, through the Northern plains and mighty lakes, to New England once again

He's an entertaining writer, and his stories of trying to fix typos can be pretty weird and amusing.

http://www.jeffdeck.com/teal/blog/

I used to love a web site called The Gallery of "Misused" Quoatation Marks. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in years. But there's a new source for spotting and sharing your most entertaining and/or painful sightings.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/




[Is there someone with a paid account willing to do an LJ feed?]

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam . Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital.

Take a look at HEMA's product page. You can't order anything and it's in Dutch but wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens.

This company has a sense of humor and a great computer programmer.

http://producten.hema.nl/

http://www.joblo.com/moviehotties/index.php?id=2788

Some Hollywoodisms, but a decent effort. If this movie does reasonably well, we can probably expect to see some new costume patterns on the market to replace or update the ones from "Shakespeare in Love".


But then there's the horror of the movie poster: http://www.joblo.com/moviehotties/index.php?id=2733

For those interested in following liamstliam's new "Hops and Houppelandes" blog, there's an LJ feed: liamtalksbeer.



Edit: (Thanks to whoever created the feed goldsquare!)

How many new episodes are left for your favorite shows?

http://brentevans.blogspot.com/2007/11/writers-strike-update-ultimate-guide-to.html

Shamelessly lifted from dreda because it made me laugh so hard I was wheezing:

the Calvacade of Bad Nativities

gaaked from various friends:
What's your sexual style? Take the sexual style quiz!

Figure out what your interactive style is, according to Mosher, who found a way of grouping people's hopes and experience about sex into three different categories. While the quiz does produce a result suitable for posting in your journal, it is also producing results for someone's graduate work, as part of a study (most people actually studying sex in grad school fall into one particular style, and running the quiz more broadly is producing interesting results).

So take the quiz, if you are over 13, and don't mind having your demographic data recorded about something kind of private. Help a friend, or friend of a friend do some science. The quiz is very short, and you can follow a link to an informative essay explaining what it's all about.

I mentioned this to bridgetminerva, so I'm reposting it:

In addition to our regular posts, many of us log stuff under private entries in our LJs that we use for reference or tracking. If LJ were to go kablooey, we'd lose all that. So here's the answer:
There's a powerful little tool online called LJBook (www.ljbook.com) that enables you to export the contents of your blog to PDF format on the basis of a user-selected date range. You can also elect to include comments and other options. The tool requires you to provide a password to your blog so it can pick up the filtered and locked posts: you can either trust the site when it says it expires the password shortly after you generate the book file, or you can chane your password for the quick duration. All things considered, it's a spiff tool, and an incredibly simple option for archiving the contents of your journal in a format that isn't reliant on the LiveJournal systems. I try to do my backups regularly.

http://www.twobirdsbridesmaid.com/

The dress is one-size-fits-all (0-16, of course), comes in 10 colors and two lengths, and can be styled 10 different ways from the waist up by twisting and wrapping. Pretty nifty idea, I think.

Irregular Web Comic has been doing a side feature called "Darths and Droids". The premise is that Star Wars Episode 1 is actually a role-playing game. It's hysterical, and actually explains a lot ...
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/darthsanddroids/episodes/0001.html

Reminder to self and for the use of others: http://www.coolest-birthday-cakes.com

The site has fabulous cakes that people like me can actually make at home, from tips on how to transfer an intricate picture to a sheet cake all the way to 3-D cakes that can be assembled from cakes or cupcakes baked in pans I already own.


Also excellent: http://www.instructables.com/id/ETZK3YEF3NHSGJG/

All kinds of awesome:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bDaB-NNyM8o