Category: Web

Move over clowns, this guy knows his unicycle. At first, extreme unicycling sounds silly. But go look at the films and photos over at Kris Holm’s site. Holy moly!
By way of J-Walk Blog

“I am culturally quite conservative and being a writer is the purest form of entrepreneurship there is. And I am a Christian and had a fundamentalist upbringing and Republicans assume all fundamentalists are on their side. So I am a sort of conservative Democrat and the Republicans do find that odd.”
Garrison Keillor profile in the Guardian.

Brilliant Nike ad here. We need more ads like this, methinks.

I never knew this ever existed.
Kempa.com: Vinyl Data
By way of Robot Action Boy

Amazing tales of relationships destroyed by a husband’s or wife’s addiction to Everquest and other online games. Scary the similarities of all the stories.
Everquest Daily Grind
By way of BoingBoing

A good article that focuses on sociologist Ray Oldenburg, and his observations of urban living. Yes, you may be surprised, hanging out is good for you, in fact, essential.

Street Life
A CENTRAL CONCEPT in the book is “the third place”, which sounds like the title of a collection of poetry, and we should not by any means underestimate the power of a name in contexts like these, as the name is appearing pretty much everywhere. However, the name has a very everyday explanation: if home is the first and work the second, then the informal meeting place in town is the third. A clarification is needed here, however. The third place has nothing to do with the anonymous life we can see in a shopping centre or at Sergels Torg Square in Stockholm, where people stream out from the tube station complex at T-Centralen, do some shopping or have a quick coffee with a friend and go home. Ideally, it is about a place within walking distance of home to which you go regularly to meet other local people. The British pub, the continental café or the Swedish konditori often act as third places, to the extent, that is, that they have a regular clientele. It is thus not the establishment itself that is the point but the fact that people regularly spend part of their lives on premises, at a public place and thereby maintain social relations other than those they have in the home, at their workplace or together with some carefully chosen friends. Apart from bars, the main streets of small towns, the rural general store, post office, hairdressers, library and the like have had these same functions, and have them still.

By way of The Anti-Mega Outboard Brain

From the ridiculous to the sublime. My friend Phil notes his experiences as an Englishman w/out car in Houston. Phil probably doesn’t intend this list to be funny, but I thought it so, because it is so absurd.

Houston’s Mass Transit
*The sidewalks between home and the Park & Ride were intermittent; apparently it was up to the property owner to put them in.
* When cycling sweatily along the sidewalks, the only other cyclists I saw were Latinos wearing uniforms belonging to McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, etc.
* It was rare that I saw anyone walking far. I felt like people were staring if I ever did.
* There was a little minibus service that started running around the Clear Lake area, with friendly drivers picking up and dropping off at a handful of locations, running every couple of hours. I was often the only person on board. I think the service probably stopped.

For a few week’s faithful readers have noticed that the comments section was down. I wasn’t really paying attention until I realized that BlogOut wasn’t just temporarily down, but over with, finished, kaput. Upon the recommendation of Patrick, I’ve now gone over to Halo Scan. Not only do I get comments, but “Trackback”. Cool!

Wow! A great collection of deep sea fishes. There’s needs to be a coffee table book featuring these monsters. Apparently, evolving at the low depths meant that a) being streamlined is not a priority and b) you get to have BLOODY GREAT TEETH!

This story gets more gruesome as it goes on. A little girl is born without the ability to feel pain. Sounds “cool” eh? Right, Mr. 2,000 piercings, Jim-Rose-Sideshow person? Howabout the fact that she scratched out her eyeball, quite unawares? Brrrr.

The Girl Who Feels No Pain
Gabby Gingras has a disease so rare she’s the only person her parents and doctors can find in the U.S. suffering from it. Like any other three-year-old, Gabby takes her share of slips and falls. Her reaction to each is predictable — at least for her family.
For no matter how hard Gabby hits the ground, she will not shed a single tear. Hard as it is to fathom Gabby Gingras feels no pain. There is no cure, nor will she outgrow it.
“She fell down the stairs the other day in the garage,” her dad says. “She just picked herself up and started climbing up the stairs again like nothing had happened.”
“She never cried,” her mother adds.

By way of Metafilter.