politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

First off, a brief apology for the lack of a drunken-post last night. I came home and just… didn’t want to post. Sleep seemed good to me at the time. Also, nothing particularly blog-worthy occurred.

Though the Cute Canadian is not to be referred to as the Cute Canadian for the next week. Not only did he not get Jeff the beef jerky and day-old taco he had promised, he failed to get me some yoghurt covered preztels. The feloniously acquired penguin signage was just a pipe-dream, I accept that, but yoghurt covered preztels?! I haven’t had any in a year now and am suffering serious withdrawals. You just get funny looks when you try to find them in this benighted country. And now the Brother is no longer NY-based, I have no reliable supply lines. Here’s a lesson to you girls out there – never trust a man. Especially cute ones. Or Canadian ones. If they’re both, you don’t stand a chance. Grr.

So, till next Sunday, he’s to be known as the Decidedly-Not-Cute-Canadian-Who-I-No-Longer-Have-A-Thing-For. As that is a bit of fingerful to type, that will be shortened to the DNCC-WINLHATF. Grrr.

Ack. The sites filed in my ‘random’ folder seem to have been breeding. Kinda like Tribbles. You have one, then two, then before you know all the storage bins are filled and you’re looking at the sharp end of a bill to restock an entire colony’s food supplies.

A quick digest*1* brief-ish roundup of the best of the rest. (Oh, and warning, I’ve stopped using the target=blank attribute. Got an ear bashing from a someone in the lab about the need for elegancy in code etc. Bah! All you happy-browser people [Firefox, Safari etc] just ctrl-click or cmd-click depending on OS and you’ll get a new tab with the link in. IE people ditto will automatically open it in a new window.)

CNet’s Top 10 Web Fads. Worth it just to remember the Hampsterdance.

Something Silver. There is some truly shiny jewelry on this site. Even some gorgeous amber and silver combos. Tip – way to my heart? Silver and amber combos.

Paper Princess. Stationary and other paper-based crafty goodness.

The NYPL Picture Collection Online. A great image resource. Isn’t internet research just the best?

Crystal Chess Set. SHINY! If these came on a glass board I would be hard pressed not to be buying this right now.

Vertical Chess Board. And this I want. Might have to see if the Crazy Canalman is feeling creative enough to make similar for my birthday. Trying to work through the implementation in my head and I think it’s possible. Maybe even have a wall mounted version in the house so you can have an ongoing game of chess without the worry of the cat knocking the pieces off. Also, I do have a number of sets I can’t display because they just take up so much surface space. I am all excited about working out the mechanics of the game – if you’ve ever tried to play chess on a computer in the schematic layout, you’ll know what I mean when I say how unusual layouts really screw you over till you’re used to them.

Many-To-Many: the biases of links. Just occasionally I am going to be throwing some heavier stuff at you, and this is one of them. I am doing research in the field, after all! That first paragraph just sums it up perfectly.

Artist to recreate Afghan Buddhas. I know the artist says he’s not doing it for religious or archaeological reasons, but as a representative of both groups, I say bravo! The buzz on the WAC lists is positive as well, which (considering that archaeologists rarely, if ever, agree on anything) is a sure sign its a good idea.

New lemurs found in Madagascar. So cute and fluffy! And so like the little baby lemur in the Madagascar cartoon! (Oh, and go the psychotic penguins!)

Many-To-Many: Valuing Social Gestures. More semi-serious research stuff. All about how you can rate blogs other than on link-counts a la Technorati etc.

Bush weighs into evolution debate. I’ve said it before, and no doubt I will say it again, but how, by all that anyone holds holy, did this man get voted in a second time!?

Private company plans $100 million tour around the Moon (NYT). Right, where can I get my mits on that amount of cash? It’s a bit more than I could find down the back of the sofa…

Read Print. More online books. Not a fan of the format, but love the idea.

Banana Box. Why?

Bush 2K. Not content with destroying world peace, the man now has to start on my computer?! Grrrr…

Bad news for my bank balance. Three of my all-time top bands have released new material. And by all-time-top I mean bands whose new albums I will buy without even listening to them first. Warning – bands seem incapable of realizing that flash heavy and flash-only sites are a pain in the unmentionables. Even on a T1 line these took a while to open, so if you’re on dialup, I’d think twice.
Lifehouse
Three Doors Down
Matchbox Twenty (check out the ‘Unwell’ video. Genius song, genius video

It Plays Doom.Com. For no other reason than I have fond memories of the game. And the screaming nightmares I got when I tried to play it again a couple of years ago. For some reason, poking the eyes out of pink demons with your fingers is cool/funny/non-gross when you’re like 12. When you’re in the mid-twenties, night-terrors galore. Looking forward to the movie as well.

Experts decipher Inca strings. Interesting, if only because I recently read a sci-fi book where one of the main forms of recording was in the form of knotted strings. Synchronisity.

The Killer Bean. Thanks to Spooky McDougal for this one. The guy who did a lot of the Matrix animation has fun with beans…

Konfabulator. Yet one more way for me to avoid doing work. The IMDB widget is really rather handy though. Blame JB for this one. I had managed to forget all about it, till he reminded me last week. Grrr.

Computer Applications in Archaeology 2006. One of the better conferences around, and in Fargo… Oh, I so want to go!

Big Brother Final. Thank god it is finally over, if only for another year. Perhaps now C4 will get back to sensible programming, like Lost. I will say this for modern media – I was able to keep up with conversations in the lab about BB, even though I haven’t caught an episode since the first series, because every move was reported so religiously in the media.

*edit* forgot one. Thanks to Moose for this one (read to the end of the article to find out why it had both of us giggling like little school girls). Knowing A Man’s Mind

Endnotes:
*1*Who am I trying to kid? I’ve never been concise in my life!Back