Category: Web

It’s a simple idea really. Use logic to figure out the order of 10 disconnected objects. But game creator “ON” (that’s his name, not his position) has made this puzzle a beautiful animated work of art. GrowCube is the sequel to the (harder) Grow, but the solution is very much worth it.
Thanks to Robot Action Boy for the link.

The guy who runs The Cartoonist and his friend have just started a new blog called Beerwise. It’s all about beer, pubs, drinking, beer, and beer. Great logo, too.

Alfred Armstrong collects odd books so you don’t have to. He also knows a thing or two about physics, so he is attracted to bad science and new age books, ready for a good debunking. I love the title of the above book.
Found at Creative Generalist.

Keillor weighs in on podcasting and the return of community radio. Everything old is new again and vice-versa. Makes me want to run out and start podcasting my own particular brand o’ lunacy…

AlterNet: Confessions of a Listener: “The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.
After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.”

Proving that you can find pretty much anything on the web, here’s an online store that sells recreations of animal penises in dildo form. I’m not sure if some of these things are physically workable, or whether they’re used in combo with a furry mascot outfit.
UPDATE: Actually, I should have dug deeper, and discovered the customer mail page. Thanks to Jon for pointing this out.

Newseum is a cool Flash site that allows you to see todays front pages from over 420 newspapers across the globe. Roll over the map and see a thumbnail, click and see a full screen pdf.

Blogs like this, the well written Waiter Rant, make me wish they were available in print. If you liked Anthony Bourdain’s writing, you will like this.

I work in a Tuscan restaurant. Like salmon that must swim upstream to spawn, middle-aged Yuppies are genetically programmed to visit Tuscany before they die. The sous chef, who is from Lucca, jokes you can always pick the invading Americans out of the crowd; fat, slow, pasty and patronizing.

The days of the cassette are past, but the design lives on in this Russian online collection called Project C-90. Ahhhh yehhh. I always hated those mid-90s Maxell Tapes…

Met my friends Chris and Mr. C_____ for lunch yesterday, and in tow I brought the William S. Burroughs biography I’m currently reading. In passing, Chris mentioned the reclusive author Clark Ashton Smith, who was a fantacist and contemporary of Lovecraft, who Burroughs tried to visit in Mexico (this isn’t mentioned in the bio.) Back at work I checked out Smith’s Wikipedia entry, then found this gallery of Smith Ballantine Editions. I particularly like the covers by Gervasio Gallardo, who has a sort of Bosch thing going. A search of Gallardo popped up this (nearly) complete gallery of Ballantime Adult Fantasy Series covers. A further search came up with this illustrated bibliography of Lovecraft, from the deluxe to the mimeographed. Gallardo is in there somewhere. The artist doesn’t have a website, but there is a gallery representing him.
Pretty good for 15 minutes ‘work’.

Forensic artist S. Mancusi used his skills in aging people from photos (as witnessed on the “lost child” milk carton series) to figure out what Michael Jackson would look like if the pixie-man hadn’t lopped off half his face with a knife. The answer: Solomon Burke.