Neat

Quite a while ago, Lynn of A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance pointed me to Locust St., which recently finished a great blog series on the Seven Drinks of Mankind, starting with Beer. Inspired by Tom Standage's book A History of the World in Six Glasses, these lengthy posts are well-illustrated, entertaining, and chock-full of cool history and facts. Perhaps the best way to catch all the posts in order is to start with the November archives and work you way back up to January. Of course, whatever you do, don't miss Tea.

Defective Yeti recently had a flash of inspired brilliance, in the form of this great Infocom-esque text adventure version of Bush's presidency. Here's how it all starts off:

Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure
Revision 88 / Serial number 54892

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal.

> EXAMINE CHAIRS
They are two several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES
You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes.

Hilarious.

I don't recall now where I found it, but Grocerylists.org is a strangely entertaining collection of found grocery lists, many of them featuring amusing combinations of items, odd misspellings, repetitions, curious notations, and other quirks. For example: "Squirt Gun, Hot Peppers, Strawberrys, Bee Trap, Pie Pans". For the best, skip right to the top ten lists.

Here's a neat news story: A caricaturist draws a quick mug of the man who robbed him, leading to his swift capture by police.

Via Cynical-C.

The Daily Grail reposts a Globe and Mail article about a new diet snack-food fad...communion wafers, marketed and sold in grocery stores as "Host Pieces", in godless Quebec.

Is nothing sacred in Quebec any more? The answer may lie on the grocery-store shelves of the province, next to the chips, corn puffs, and salty party pretzels.

That's where shoppers can pick up an increasingly popular snack: communion wafers and sheets of communion bread. These paper-thin morsels made from flour and water hark back to Quebec's churchgoing days and the sacred rite of receiving holy communion.

But in today's secular Quebec, the wafers and bread are packaged like peanuts and popcorn - and sold as a distinctly profane snack.

"They melt in your mouth, and they're not fattening, so it's better than junk food," said Françoise Laporte, a white-haired grandmother of 71 who buys packages of Host Pieces at her local IGA in east-end Montreal. "I'm Catholic. This reminds us of mass."

For older Quebeckers, the snacks offer up a form of nostalgia. Surprisingly, however, they're also finding favour with a younger generation that has rarely, if ever, set foot inside a church.

"My son can eat a whole bag while he's watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He's had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."

I want. Via Michelle's Mental Clutter.

Michelle also has a great post with loads of Simpsons links, including a mildly amusing SimpsonMaker character creator, and a really cool Interactive Map of Springfield. Go see!

Some of that old-time atheism

A few interesting things I've come across lately.

Bibi recently posted about the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which I'm amazed I haven't heard of before. It's a wonderfully rich and thorough resource, a complete Bible with copious annotations divided into numerous color-coded categories such as Injustice, Absurdity, Cruelty and Violence, Family Values, and Contradictions. There are also illustrations, a discussion board, and links to that other great version of the Bible, The Brick Testament (which I discussed here and here). They have a Koran and Book of Mormon, too.

Stumbling Tongue blogs about faith, and includes a link to a very interesting article about meta-atheism. As the author explains, meta-atheism is the view that "Despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." He then lists eight compelling reasons why this may be so.

A while back, I gave my cat Sidney to my friend LadySusan. Soon after, he got sick and eventually died. LadySusan blogs about his illness and how she talked to God about it, and shares a transcript of their intriguing conversation. The point of all this is to direct you to igod, an amusing chatbot with the tagline "repenting made easy".

While I'm at it, some other links of interest from my collection:

Positive Atheism
Agnosticism/Atheism at About.com
CelebAtheists

It really is Gorges

Well, I just got back from yet another visit -- and yes, I did go west again -- this time to see LadySusan in Ithaca, where she's settling in and about to begin life as a grad student at Cornell. It was good to see her again after the summer, as well as my cat Sidney, whom she's just adopted. The visit was great, except for the bit where I left my wallet at home and was turned away from a couple bars and refused alcohol for the duration of my stay. This also scrapped our plans to visit a local winery, which we had been very much looking forward to.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that in one of the many little bookshops that line the Ithaca Commons, we came across the Brick Testament book, which was a neat find. (Interestingly, the book is rather cleaned-up -- many of the most risqué panels from the website are omitted.) Reading the introduction, I realized that I had mischaracterized the project in my earlier post. The creator, "The Rev." Brendon Powell Smith, is not actually a reverend at all -- he's an atheist -- and the purpose of the site is much more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek than I believed. It's not religious at all, which goes a ways toward explaining the tone of the narration. So there you go. Should have been paying more attention. The site is now even more highly recommended.


reading: Gregory Maguire, Lost
saw: Firefly; The Black Adder

music: "cooltunes" mix, curr. "The Egypt Journey Part II" from the Shade - Wrath of Angels soundtrack
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

Stuff and things

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

How Do People See You?

the Wit (52% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 40% on dark You scored higher than 7% on spontaneous You scored higher than 20% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Start ya off with a couple nice quiz results. Now that I've got y'all warmed up...

TIME has just created a worthwhile list of the fifty coolest websites. I was quite pleased to discover that I already knew about most of the interesting ones.

A man in Spain is building his own cathedral. It's pretty impressive-looking. Sadly, he's having trouble finding people to support him, and the unapproved building will likely be torn down after his death.




In other singlehanded-monument-construction news, a retired carpenter who believes he knows the secret to Stonehenge is raising his own Stonehenge in his backyard using only rudimentary tools and the power of his own body to move stone blocks weighing tons. (I read a news story about this somewhere, which had a video of the guy in action showing how it worked, but now I can only find his own website, which is much less interesting. Damn. Sorry.)




Giant "Bra Fence" Sparks Controversy: Official Says Fence Offends Asian Cultures, South Africans. For years, women returning from a pub in the nearby town of Wanaka have stopped at the fence and removed their bras...




The New York Times article Bad to the Last Drop explains why tap water is better than bottled.

There is apparently an update of the EPIC 2014 media-documentary-from-the-future video (I originally linked to it here): EPIC 2015.

I've just stumbled across somebody's blog called Bluetealeaf. I know it's impossible to be truly original in this world, but I'm always a little unsettled when I come across other people with identities I feel are unique and original to me. No sign of what inspired his name; I promise to tell the story of mine someday soon if anyone's interested.

The Brick Testament: the Bible in Legos! It's a Christian site, naturally, and while I am generally repulsed by things evangelicals do to make religion hip and appealing to kids (like Revolve, that New Testament packaged as a teen fashion magazine, and Refuel, its masculine counterpart, for example; or that game King's Call, which I'm still sore over), I like this particular project a lot. It's not cleaned-up at all, either -- a helpful little code warns about episodes containing nudity, sex, violence, and cursing, of which there are many. I never expected to see so many naked little Lego people knowing each other Biblically, so to speak. The segments are very short, and sometimes quite surreal and strangely humorous -- a lot of which comes from the source material, I suppose. The many panels which read simply "And then he died," with a little croaked-over figure, are wonderful. Ever read the Bible? There's some weird stuff in there. There's essentially no effort made to interpret or reconcile the bizarreness of some of the stories -- they're just there, built brick-by-brick as faithfully as possible. The Brick Testament is really a very impressive artistic endeavor, and a lovely rendering in Lego of a great work of literature.




UPDATE: I was not entirely right about what The Brick Testament is all about.

Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions is a pretty cool site for science-fiction fans comparing images of spacecraft, bases, and other objects from numerous examples of the genre to show relative size. It also makes a nice visual compendium of sci-fi vessels. Very comprehensive.
Via Bibi's box.




reading: Charles de Lint, The Newford Stories; A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (re-reading -- I love that book); Kenneth Morris, The Dragon Path; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Lois Gould, Subject to Change
saw: Firefly; Beverly Hills Cop 2

music: The Blue Room on BBC Radio 1
beverage: Twinings Darjeeling tea

The latest

You may have noticed new sections in my ever-growing sidebar: the blog categories have been expanded, and I have three all-new sections, Forums, News, and Resources.

These links are probably more for me than for anyone else, though if someone happens along and is enticed by the SurLaLune message board, then all the better. I figure if I have links to BBC News on my sidebar, as I'm scrolling down clicking my links I'm more likely to actually look at the news and learn something about what's going on in the world. And then find an interesting article and link to it in a post. Good for everyone, eh?

Speaking of links, here are some links.

It's been around, but I've been planning to post my own link to it eventually. A panel of conservatives dreamed up a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I suggest that you run home and read them all immediately.

Yankee Pot Roast has an amusing list of Dead Ends from Rejected "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" Books. Man, I used to love those books.

In an article in the Times Online, a journaliast tries a week on the Jesus Diet.

Dontclick.it is an experiment in a new form of web browsing that eschews the mouseclick, navigating solely by movement and gesture. Interesting concept and implementation. The content is mostly for show, but there are a couple interesting games and tricks. Some self-control is required -- the website flat-out challenges you to resist the click!

Guess-the-Google is a fun game developed using Google's image search feature. View a montage of images and guess the Google search term that fetched them all.




The Face of Tomorrow is an intriguing project that digitally combines the faces of people living in cities around the world to predict how future generations might look. I'm a sucker for this stuff.




B3ta presents The Phallic Logo Awards.





reading: nothing new yet
saw: Rocky IV
game of the day: Acaro

music: a mix, curr. Porno for Pyros, "Pets"
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

A post I want to entitle "Errata" but can't

I have it in my head that "errata" should mean a collection of miscellaneous, meandering things, wandering here and there, but it doesn't. Pity.

I've submitted my senior project, had my board. The semester -- the year -- college -- is ending. I've got my Class of 2005 shirt on right now. Lots to be said about that, but I don't feel like going into it at the moment. So instead, I'll empty out some links I've been collecting.

First, because of all the language and lit blogs I read, stuff about ... well, language and lit.

An April Fool's joke proposing a march to end the abuse of the widely misused phrase, "beg the question." Sounds like a worthy cause to me.

It came up in our field studies class, so Bill sent us all a list (several lists, actually...this was the first and seemed sufficient to me) of collective nouns for groups of animals. I knew there were some crazy ones, but there are some crazy ones. A charm of hummingbirds? An ostentation of peacocks? I like "a memory of elephants" and "a storytelling of rooks" ... and "a tower of giraffes" is pretty amazing, as is a "crash" or "bloat" of hippotami. Last of all is the impressive "zeal of zebras"...

I may have posted this previously, I may not have. It's a bit old, but the sarcasm point is introduced.

Booksellers in Scotland stage a promotional book-burning.

The entire literary edifice of the West is built on a lie. According to one suspicious sleuth, "Proust didn't know from madeleines,", and his famous crumbly scallop-shaped cookie never existed.

Harvard students win prizes for the quality of their personal libraries. I want one of those. I also want a prize-worthy library.

Reasons Why the Female Characters in Certain Male-Written Fiction Are Not Like Actual Women at All.

All right, now some other stuff. Let's have a go at religion.

High-schoolers don't know enough about the Bible. They're talking about history and literature, so I agree with them there. I really need me a student's lit Bible.

From The Onion: "Scientology Losing Ground to New Fictionology".

A beautiful comic for the creationists: Science vs. Norse Mythology.

Let's see, what category next. How about "stuff I like."

A Yahoo! News story explains how fairy tales are linked to violent relationships. Seems Andrea Dworkin was right about all those passive heroines waiting for Princes Charming.

I'm increasingly considering copyediting as a profession. Which is probably why this article, an interview with a number of copy editors discuss the details of their largely uncredited and overlooked work, is interesting to me and me alone.

They're having a concert in California of orchestral music from video games performed live. It's called Video Games Live, and Jack Wall, the composer of the brilliant music in Myst III: Exile, is one of the people behind it.

The Forbes.com article Is Sex Necessary? discusses all the beneficial effects conferred by "having regular and enthusiastic sex."

Last category...a kind of alarming article that I post for the public benefit:

"The End of Analog TV? Will America's favorite technology really go dark next year?" Analog television broadcasts are supposed to be discontinued next year, to be replaced by entirely digital broadcasts. It was all part of a federal ruling aimed at switching everyone over to digital -- only no one bought digital, and now the deadline for the change is coming up. Even if it doesn't happen next year -- it will likely be postponed -- it will be happening pretty soon, and currently there is no warning in place for those who buy new analog tvs telling them that their sets might be obsolete in a year! So if you buy a new tv -- buy digital!

I think that's all for now... I'll post some talky stuff later.