There are a variety of weird websites lurking around Caltech; here’s one dedicated to infrared pictures of many different kinds of animals, from dogs to flamingoes to turtles.

I’ve never been a big fan of poetry; it’s an acquired taste, I think, and perhaps I simply have never taken the time. It may simply be that after so many years of reading and writing technical documentation I value clarity and precision too highly; many poems seem to me to be the literary equivalent of the entries to the annual Obfuscated C competition.

Consequently, I’m not the person to try to distinguish good poetry from bad poetry. But even I can tell when the emperor is naked, and so I found this article both enlightening and entertaining.

Over at 2blowhards,
Friedrich has been
playing
with blocks.

It reminded me of a time about five years ago, when David was very small,
when I went through a serious Lego phase. I bought a ridiculous amount
of Lego and built quite a few interesting things; the best of them was a
little number I call the Alcalde’s House. These are some pictures I took
at the time; low res, but that’s life. The house still exists (I can see
it from where I sit) but alas the kids are fascinated by it, and so it’s
a little worse for wear. (Click on any picture to see a bigger version.)

Will Duquette, The Alcalde’s House, 1998

If you’re like most people, you’ve gotten at
least one of those African Scam e-mails. They mostly read like this (I
paraphrase):

Hi, I’m related to somebody who
has been looting my small, underdeveloped nation and stashing the money
abroad, and I want my share; if you’ll just give me information about
your bank account I’ll funnel it through there and leave you a
ridiculously large sum as a gratuity!

This roughly translates as:

Hi, if you’re stupid enough to give me your account
information, I’ll take all your money!

Originally they all seemed to come from Nigeria, but they’ve evolved
since then; now they come from all over Africa and other third-world
locations. But today I got one with features
I’ve never before seen: it’s formatted neatly, with appropriate use of
upper and lower case.

Somebody notify the New York Times.

I checked my webstats this morning, and saw that
March 2003 was our best month so far with 19575 page views. That’s
an increase of 17% from February, and an increase of 5% from our previous
best month (November 2001).

And what did I do this month to increase traffic? I stopped blogging
for two weeks. Hmmm.

One of the joys of running a
website is checking your stats; and one of the minor joys of checking
your stats is finding out what odd queries to search engines brought
people to your site. Most of the queries I get are fairly predictable,
but once in a while I get something that makes me chuckle. For example:

ginmill strip club wisconsin

Now, I’ve clearly never used that precise phrase on any of my pages, so
it must have been put together from unrelated words. I’ve never been to
Wisconsin (though co-blogger Deb English is from there);
the “ginmill” part almost certainly comes from
Lawrence
Block’s book When the Sacred Ginmill Closes; what the words
“strip” and “club” were doing on that same page I’ve no idea.

Someone had far too much fun, as Jane would say. Beware–for the
dread
Plush Cthulhu is upon you!
(Link courtesy of
Felicity McCarthy, who might
be providing us with some reviews!)

I was reciting limericks to my boy David after dinner
tonight, and I told him one I’d made up when I was in college:

A young man both hungry and odd
Decided to dine upon sod.
  To do this he dared,

  But was quite unprepared
For the weeds that grew out of his bod.

After that I ran out, and of course he wanted more. So I had to make up
a new one, and here it is:

A famous explorer named Dave
Was lost in an uncharted cave.
  They found him at last
  When a decade had passed,
But there wasn’t enough left to save.

If you’ve got a favorite (clean) limerick, or better yet one you’ve
written yourself, send it to me and if I like it I’ll print it.

A couple of years ago, the TV show “Good Eats”
did a Thanksgiving special called “Romancing the Bird”, all about how to
prepare turkey. It was a good show. A week later, “Good Eats” was
“preempted” by a “documentary” about the making of “Romancing the Bird”.
(The “documentary” was in fact just an episode of “Good Eats” in
disguise.) A young filmmaker, Blair McGuffin, and her crew had
supposedly been following Alton Brown and his crew about during the
making of “Romancing the Bird”, but it was after shooting was finished
that the real drama began: it started to snow. Within hours a full inch
of snow had fallen and the city of Atlanta, Georgia was paralyzed. There
was no way for the “Good Eats” crew to disperse to their homes. There
followed a week of isolation, dread, and….lots of turkey leftovers.

It’s one of their best shows, and when they re-ran it this past Wednesday
night we had the opportunity to analyze it a little. The highlight of
the show is when AB’s cooking equipment lady, “W” (think James Bond) is
revealed to be…a cyborg. “C’mon,” says AB. “Nobody living could
possibly talk like that.” Apparently they use W to store all of the data
from their past shows; as AB speaks he’s got her hooked up to a PalmPilot
and a folding PalmPilot keyboard.

Then there’s the “Big Brother” like moment when, late at night,
Blair McGuffin tearfully confesses to the camera how hungry she is
(they’ve been on short rations) and how guilty she feels at lifting the
key to the ‘fridge. About that point the amorous and revolting Cousin
Ray sneaks up behind her and the camera fades out.

Then, finally, there’s the name: “Blair McGuffin”. “Blair”, of course,
from another noted “documentary”, “The Blair Witch Project”. But then
there’s that word “McGuffin”. In film, “McGuffin” is the name for the
device or plot element that drives the logic of the plot. And, in the
context of this episode of “Good Eats”, that’s Blair McGuffin in a
nutshell.