Archive for January, 2004

Style and content to burn. Great black & white photos from Nikolai Cornell at his site Shadow & Light. He documents a 3-month architecture tour of Europe.

St. Paul Minn.-based architecture studio Alchemy is selling weeHouse, lovely little 2 bedroom prefab buildings for as little as $65,000 –and studio cabins for $45,000. They put ‘em on a truck and send ‘em to your site.

Godfather of Soul arrested again for domestic violence.

I know it’s still early in the year but when you see a candidate who rocks this hard, you just know it’s right. Houze.net is officially endorsing Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio for president. We gotta get this country rockin’ again!

Cars and shops were splattered with blood and guts when a 50-ton sperm whale explodes in the streets of Tainan City, Taiwan.

It’s that time of year again. Along with Cinco de Mayo, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest avocado consumption day of the year. This means just one thing to San Diego Sheriffs: avocado poachers.

Opportunity has landed in a crater, and hits scientific jackpot with views of first rock outcrop ever seen on Mars, says the ebullient report from NASA on Opportunity, the space agency’s second successful rover landing. Software file management problems are to blame for the rover Spirit’s recent problems, apparently it’s no big deal and it’s up and working again.

Lots of bloody red and judge-robe black crayons used in the Law & Order coloring book.

The Library of Congress has launched Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories where all known recordings of former slaves in the LOC’s American Folklife Center are available to listen to on the web. Don’t miss the recording of Fountain Hughes. His grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson and he remembers when the Yankees come along and took all the good horses and took all the, throwed all the meat and flour and sugar and stuff out in the river and let it go down the river. (read Hughes’s transcript)

Behold, perhaps the largest collection of vintage nerd watches in these United States. I like the round face and convoluted design of the 1978 Citizen Round.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle is investigating a Watergate break in for the 21st Century. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Several Judiciary servers have been seized already, including one from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist.

Dogster.com

Music Plasma is a visual search engine for music. Enter a band’s name and you will see that band’s near neighbor relation. It must be built on Amazon sales– why else would Norah Jones and Josh Groban loom so large.

You are yeti. Swat the pingvin.

Before the Flood: Photographs by Edward Burtynsky at the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York has some amazing images of village life where everyone is demolition every structure in site. China’s Three Gorges Dam Project on the Yangzi river will create a dam one and a half miles wide, 575 feet high and a reservoir nearly 400 miles long. The hydroelectricity from the dam will be equal to 18 nuclear plants. 1,300 archeological sites will be flooded and more than 1 million people must be relocated.

The newest app for your phone: turn it into a bar code scanner and get reviews and coupons for the product.

NYC women walking her dogs electrocuted when her dogs step on uninsulated wires.

Tomorrow evening at 6pm PST the President gives his State of the Union Address. Lucky for us in California, that’ll be conveniently timed with happy hour. The State of the Union Drinking Game will be just a little cheaper this year. Unlike most Americans lately, I feel better about Bush’s presidency already.

Mike Rowe, a British Columbia high school student builds websites and got his own domain to promote his work, MikeRoweSoft.com. Microsoft doesn’t get the joke.

Has there been anything good written about Wal-Mart lately? Maybe there’s nothing good to write about. An article in today’s New York Times says that for more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores.