“Most of the puzzles in Puzzle World fall into the Put-Together, Take-apart, Interlocking or Impossible Object categories because this is where most of the high-quality handcrafting takes place.” —Puzzle WorldJohn Rausch) Similar:Facebook Fallen Angel « AwkwardFamilyPhotos.c…Amusing"Know that I glory in this nose of mine."Was browsing YouTube for a few of my fav…AestheticsT.S. Eliot: "when we…
(rec.humor.funny) [random joke] “Is this a burger which I see before me, The soft bun in my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I eat thee not, and yet I want thee still.” Gregory Lam —MacDonald’s Soliloquy Similar:Le règne des robotsÉcrite en 1920 et jouée pour la première…CybercultureWhen T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster Prufrock cannot…
“The likes of my colleagues no longer thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated thoughts originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become native speakers.” Deborah Cameron —The Tyranny of Nicespeak (New Statesman) Similar:In MLA Style, use the ellipsis only to mark an omission from the middle…
“Under every scenario used in the study, the winning margin remains less than 500 votes out of almost 6 million cast.” —Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush (Washington Post) Similar:Carolyn's Theater Bio for Prime Stage's The Outsiders (Mar 6-15) Actor biography sample Program bi…BooksBBC News – TS Eliot's widow Valerie dies aged 86 She guarded…
“So who is this mysterious kingmaker who changed the world from her shadowy government bureaucracy? Has she seen any good movies lately? Is her marriage happy? America wants to know. America needs to know!” —Official Terry LePore Ballot Designer Fan Page Similar:Do you really keep a diary?ALGERNON Do you really keep a diary? I’d…AmusingRehearsal Rabbi-CamThis…
A lake. A salt mine. An oil drilling rig. A lack of communication. You figure it out. —Peaceful Lake Peigneur Turned into Maelstrom Similar:Architecture in Video Games: Designing for Impact Deanna Van Buren writes: I wonder w…BusinessIn March 2000, I was blogging about Palm V computers for the Navy, NCAA banning online jou…In March 2000,…
Coca-Cola spent $750,000 to develop a procedure to serve carbonated beverages in space. Pepsi filmed a $5 million commercial aboard Mir. And then there’s “Final Frontier Beef Jerky.” —A Brief History of Space MarketingSpace.com) Similar:‘Hunger Games’ to digitally recreate Hoffman filmmakers behind the “Hunger Games” mo…CybercultureIt's reckless and dangerous for a leader with a habit…
Hmm. Jakob Nielsen writes a column with a headline that implies you are being inhumane if you don’t make your web pages accessible to the disabled. Jakob Nielsen‘s company is selling a 148-page report on making web pages accessible to the disabled. Coincidence? (Nielsen is smart. He’s doing good deeds. He’s giving away lots of…
“Everything, everything, everything boils down to the heart, and poetry is a vehicle of clarity, an articulate and strong voice screaming through the static and white noise.” -Frank Matagrano, a poet featured on Jan Carroll’s poetry weblog. —And Now It’s Dark: Three poets talk about poetry after September 11, 2001 Similar:Loki's Loop Escape RoomGreat concept for…
“Corporate English obscures reality by excluding people.” While this article is marked as “commentary,” I find it ethically unsound for its author to suggest that magazine writers should intentionally insert biased language that promotes a pro-union / anti-business point of view, on the grounds that “corporate English commonly portrays economic processes as if they just…
Novell releases a survey showing that British companies lose billions annually due to spam. Guess who sells a product that helps companies filter out spam? “Surveys are a time-honoured PR tactic for getting coverage in hard-to-reach publications.” —Junk Mail Costs Lives (The Register) Similar:The false link between Amy Coney Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale, explainedOne…
“[L]anguage is often under-estimated, under-valued, and under-funded. How many times have we seen companies import bland, cheap information instead of hiring talented, knowledgeable writers to write fresh, original, interesting content?” Julia Hayden —Language: The Ultimate User InterfaceA List Apart) Similar:The daughter is in “Very Berry Dead,” a new play which opens this Friday and runs…
Ever been frustrated by a “404: File Not Found” message? Did you ever stop to wonder how the web server feels? —File Not Found! Similar:Media Companies Are Getting Sick of FacebookAll of us with Facebook accounts do work…BusinessIn February, 2001, I was blogging about computer nostalgia, Napster, a horror typing game,…In February, 2001, I was…
Eugene Schlanger is a corporate lawyer and a respected poet. “Poets today tend to write to audiences of other poets. It’s unfortunate. You have poets celebrating pure emotion, but it’s not grounded in anything.” —Wall Street Poet Takes Stock of LifeSunSpot.net) Similar:Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve racked up prizes — and completely misled you about the…
“[M]ost tragedies are caused not by hate-filled maniacs, but by small, unnoticed failures in complex systems. A badly trained worker makes a tragic error; an oversight by an engineer produces a fatally flawed component.” (Review of Inviting Disaster.) —When Malfunction and Error Meet: a Compendium of Disasters (Boston Globe) Similar:Behold this stack of August Wilson…
Which is real and which is fake? The website behind curtain number one? Or the website behind curtain number two? Read about The Yes Men, who use a fake World Trade Organization website to trick the organizers of an international conference. (See: “Evaluating Online Sources.“)Parody? Activism? Lies? Similar:New rules governing drone journalism are on the…
Digital cameras are great, because you can preview the shots immediately, and delete the ones that aren’t any good. “But if a photographer is focused on getting three, four or five pictures to the news desk as quickly as possible, he is not just getting rid of the rubbish; he’s not entering the alternative viewpoint…
Like the dystopian autocracy depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984, Microsoft has a policy of eliminating “offensive” words from its official dictionary. (A Slashdot poster asks, “Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language?”) —Bowlderlized by Microsoft (NY Times — registration req’d) Similar:Pope Leo XIV…
Charging that Microsoft has started hijacking browser users who mistype an address (users are sent to a Microsoft page rather than shown a generic error message), Yahoo! has started doing some hijacking of its own. Microsoft has started excluding non-MS users from parts of its website (which, thanks in part to the hijacking described above,…
“Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” A remarkably convincing fake website by Paul Guinan. —Boilerplate: Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century Similar:Are we spreading fake news about fake news?In a new research paper that Poynter say…CultureSports Illustrated Published Articles by…