Archive for July, 2004

Did writer Annie Jacobsen and her family witness a trial run of terrorists assembling a bomb aboard a June 29th Northwest flight from Detroit to LAX? Or were they just 14 Syrian musicians going to Vegas? We’ll hear more about this one.

Seattle photo student Ian Spiers had a scary run-in with the Feds for photographing one of the most popular tourist spots in Seattle, the Ballard Locks.

If you want to hire only smart people, ask a question that only brings smart people to you. Google recently put up a billboard on Hwy 101 near the Ralston exit that gave out this URL: first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e.com. That ought to do the trick.

The next generation PDA is all thumbs. Jackito has no buttons or stylus, all data on removable storage, is custom built, and is powered for weeks by a single AA battery or a solar charger.

A British druid was charged for carrying sword while shopping at a Portsmouth hardware store. At Merlin Michael Williams’s court appearance about a dozen fellow members of the Insular Order of Druids sat in the court’s public gallery, while chief druid King Arthur Pendragon, wearing white robes with a red lion emblazoned on the front, acted as Williams’s legal adviser.

Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) is a collection of some 265 jokes from Greece in the 4th or 5th Century. They are so unfunny to a modern person that they’ll make you laugh.

Color images are coming back from the Cassini-Huygens mission around Saturn, including this ultraviolet view of Saturn’s rings.

SENT: America’s first phonecam art show is on view at the Standard Hotel in LA July 10-17 and online indefinitely.

The American Museum of the Moving Image has a great online collection of U.S. Presidential campaign commercials The Living Room Candidate has commercials dating back to 1952.

When wearing an iPod gets a little too obvious, turn it into a RetroPod. The Retropod case is made from a vintage Sony Sports Walkman. The guts of the cassette player are removed from the Walkman, leaving an impact-resistant plastic shell. A stereo jack is wired into the shell, then the case is lined with thick foam.

Package designer Steve Portigal has a built an online Foreign Groceries Museum.