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And who knew that the reason the cross bar on women’s bikes are lower is to allow space to carry an orangutan?

Via User Friendly

(click for a bigger version on flickr)

(via Kottke), but there’s only one thing that comes to mind upon seeing it (tapers off around 3:20) …

What does Margaret Thatcher have to say about all of this?

The delivery is terrible, but the crowd seems to love it. I guess that’s politics for you.

Make a wish...

My blog turns two today and I’ve upgraded a bit from last year’s birthday combo – this year, I sprung for birthday Swiss Cake Rolls- extra convenient as they come two to a package.  And just what we need, a two year old toddler of a blog all hyped up on sugar running around biting people.

I kind of feel like I’m supposed to say something sentimental here, but sentimental just isn’t something I do real well.  Mostly, I’ve enjoyed sharing stuff that I think is cool/interesting/novel/insightful/clever/etc, and it’s gratifying to know a bunch of strangers out there (and a few people I know, too) stop by now and then and take the time to read what I’ve put up.

So, in the interest of keeping things, well, interesting, it’s time for my annual appeal for you to chime in-  What do you like around here?  Which posts make you go “dear god not this again”?  Favorite topics?  Favorite formats (list of links, link and commentary, two random things that are related in my mind, pictures, stories, musings, etc, etc)?  Things you love seeing links to?  Things you love reading commentary about?  Things you hate reading commentary about and would just prefer the link and get out of my way thank you very much?  Preferences for videos, music, short articles, long articles, reference to whole other sites, etc?

It’s not that I’m going to completely re-formulate the site to be all lolcats all the time, or to be a series of in depth articles on the role of Constitutional law in modern political dialog (though don’t be surprised if either pops up from time to time).  But, at the moment I have so much stuff bookmarked and little notes scribbled down of things to write about that I’m pretty sure I could blog as a full time job for the foreseeable future (aside from that no money part, and who would buy my blog Swiss Cake Rolls then?) and not really run out of material I’d like to post.  So, I don’t have any problem with giving priority to any given realm, topic, format, etc when things are slow.  You’ll still be getting whatever I happen to find interesting that day, but it’s a chance to influence which one of the 10 interesting things that I come across that day I blog about, and which 9 I bookmark to blog about later.  If you’re new around here and you’d like to get a feel for the place, there’s a little over 450 posts in the archives now, and the tags are a fairly good way to get a flavor of what I tend to post a lot about.

Also, for some of the ones people have mentioned as liking in the past, I have a vague idea for the next post in the Dino Saga, but I need to come up with a bit more of a plot wrapper around it before I start really putting it together.  Also, Free Idea Friday will be making a come back at some point here, I just need to get around to writing up a couple of them in a form other than the jumbled notes I scribble when they occur to me.  I’ve also been waffling a bit on a few of them on whether to write them up, or actually just take some of the time I’d spend blogging about them and actually do a couple of the smaller ones.

Anyway, thoughts, suggestions?

cumulostalgia

n. self-aware satisfaction with discussing the weather, which although a well-worn marker of shallow conversation thwarts the suspicion that any day now our fragmented and variegated selves will no longer overlap long enough to maintain a working definition of ‘we.’

Or:

anti-aliasing

n. -soc. psych. curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr. Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm.

Or:

contact high-five

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress—that you enjoy more than you’d like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

Intended or not, some of the best contemporary poetry I’ve read since college.

Via Kottke.

Ps – So, after writing this, I clicked the little information button at the top of the page, and it turns out the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not only cool (and has a bit better definition of itself than what I came up with above), it’s also local, written by John Koenig of St Paul.  Adding local tag…

Apparently it’s an original composition, but I couldn’t help but think of Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.  I’m not the only one, someone else mentioned it in the comments on the video (on the Vimeo page, which unfortunately isn’t embed-able so you get youtube above) and Diego replies:

A friend of mine, fan of DM, told me the same.
I know some of their music, but I wasn’t thinking about that song. I was inspired by the hours of western music I’ve heard in films, it’s that kind of triplets “horse galloping” pattern you hear in the “bunch of bad-ass cowboys going to place x to fix the situation” kinda scene : )

Which I makes me sort of wish I knew how to do 3-d computer animations and such to be able to make the scene that goes with that.

For some reason it also makes me think a bit of the general vibe of Cowboy Bebop, though that admittedly usually has more horns – perhaps the general Western vibe.

Also, things like this are why I oscillate wildly between thinking I’d really like a really little place in the city with minimal stuff, and (where this comes in) a few acres of land next to a junk yard somewhere out in the country where I could hack together things like this without bothering people in the next apartment (a large reason why I don’t play my tuba more).

Via Boing Boing.

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

The full lyrics and a download-able version of the song are available on the video’s site.  Not only a great intro the two opposing theories, but one of the more fair juxtapositions I’ve seen on the topic.

Also, the comments on the video on youtube are both strangely civil and informed (for the most part), which I’m pretty sure means it broke the internet.  Though, at least currently, it still features an incendiary political ad and the top related video has a thumbnail featuring a woman bent over on her hands and knees from behind while clad in a suggestive outfit touting “tight buns”, so I suppose the internet is at least trying to reassert itself:

Ahhh, youtube

Via Boing Boing

feeble hands cramping
toothpaste hides in corners deep
man must find new tool

why must you taunt me
fuzzy teeth from days with out
just one more dollop

tried to stab the tube
for one more glob, cut my hand
blood does not clean teeth

must keep tension tight
do not want my toothpaste stripes
turned to a gray mix

Crest and stripes on flag
I have made a mess again
want to fly white flag

And, because I find it amusing, I’d like to point out that the part Animal sings is the tuba part.  Just saying.

Also, if you haven’t visited it yet, pretty much all of the Muppets Studio youtube channel is great.