I love the internet.

"Information, meet You."

"You, this is Information."

A week later, I had all six stacked on my desk. Thank you Internet (specifically abebooks.com).

But there's another layer to this story. I had long forgotten the titles and authors of these books. I only had them recorded because I asked on rec.arts.sf-lovers in 1991. I was able to describe enough of the storylines for someone to remember the books. Thank you Internet-of-yore (specifically Steve Hoy of mdcbbs.com).

(The books were by Bamman, Odell, and Whitehead.)

Tony @5:
Since I work in the field of library search engines, I know exactly how you feel.

In fields like history and so forth, or indeed any of the historical sciences, where you have a choice of finding the information in incredibly dense and (sigh) often-badly-indexed or just plain lost books, or not getting it at *all*...

... however did we manage before search engines?

Research and methods for writing history and biography are so different now.

Love, C.

I've been grocery shopping and cooking. It's been too hot to do either for so long er'tr out of everything -- and My Person is home again!

Love, C.

Me, today: has a hold at the library on "Men Who Stare at Goats"

I was skimming this article in the Atlantic Monthly : Is Google Making Us Stupid? -- and thought, no. It's definitely making me smarter. I have always been absent-minded. Where before a fact that fell out of my head would have stayed fallen, now I can retrieve it quickly. If a brain is like a computer, the internet brings that metaphor to reality -- I can access and load into temporary memory (the kind I use to think about something) tons of information that I never had to memorize. Then I can trust that it'll be there, retrievable, if I ever need it again, and can use my limited brainspace for more immediately important things.

I don't think the internet is making us dummy terminals, though. I don't have the incredible recall of someone like my brother. (My brother is the kind of person who can memorize, recall, and hold forth about tremendous quantities of facts. I've always envied him, because I have to rehearse things until I'm ready to scream if I want to give a talk without recourse to notes, and still usually stumble. Whereas he could give you a 30-minute lecture on, say, ethanol policy off the top of his head.) So I need the external memory of the internet more than some people. But some of those facts do stick in my head, in enough detail for my brain to put them into analysis -- so I end up synthesizing some very interesting ideas that I would never otherwise have come to. And because the detailed facts are quickly available, it's easy to refine those ideas.

*Help A Bitch Out

This subject reminds me, sort of, of a remark that goes around in geeky circles: the idea that you don't have to remember anything anymore because you can just look it up, and so that part of your brain responsible for remembering facts atrophies. Sounded plausible or at least like a good line to me, but the more I thought about it the less it seemed to be the case for me. The availability of Wikipedia and search engines has resulted in being able to remember more information because it's so easily refreshed in passing. Can't remember whether that rebellion was 16th or 17th century? Quick Wikipedia check, ah it was 16th, that fact now refreshed in my memory and ready for new connections.

Pre-Internet, well: 16th or 17th? Hmm. No idea. I guess I could look it up, but that seems like a lot of work. So I'll just keep letting that memory fade away, vaguer and vaguer.

And because of the variety of subjects I wind up covering in a typical dig through Wikipedia (and usually Google & Amazon & sometimes Flickr too, for more background or books), the amount of interconnected stuff that's been recently in memory is much larger than it would be if I had to go to the library to find a set of books on a subject, and then wind up running around in the library trying to find the connections. The interconnections are key to having some novel thoughts on the subject, and the fact that you can know those connections without great effort helps you fit your own thoughts into the pattern. It's not just a set of disconnected facts, in other words.

As I mentioned, Google plays another role in finding background information, and so does Amazon for locating relevant books (and sometimes Ebay for locating relevant physical objects), and Flickr for finding the right photos. So it's not just Wikipedia. But it sure is mostly Wikipedia.

Anyway, point is, I don't think Wikipedia or the wider Internet makes you stupider. I think it makes you much smarter. Hooray for the future.

Just Googling around, looking for mentions of the family in the county in which they lived. Mind you, I'd never have found them if I'd looked for the family name--my cousin had changed the spelling.

It's amazing to see how much I resembled my grandmother at a certain age, allowing for hair length and glasses.

Internet? Well -- I work in Puerto Rico for companies mostly in Europe, and my bank is ... somewhere now. This would only have been marginally possible pre-Internet, as I do technical translation for about 15 agencies. I got my start on Proz.com; in the pre-Proz fax days, in fifteen years, I managed two translation jobs, and neither established any more. So - I found my entire lifestyle, one I'd wanted way, way early on in life but, pre-Internet, had no idea how to achieve.

Then there was the time they had baklava at the daycare's parents' party and I ate two pieces and my wife thought she'd asked me to snarf some for her but I misunderstood. The next day, I looked up baklava, went out to Kroger for the ingredients (even I'm not so foolhardy as to try making my own filo dough), and made her an entire tray of it.

Knowing how to make bagels. Knowing how to make salad dressing. Knowing what to expect this week, as our first dog enters her first heat cycle. (Yikes!)

Downloading fresh software every time I think of it. This week, as we start a new homeschooling year (ish), I got the newest Logo; this time, it clicked, and both kids were happily doing geometry exploration, just like the articles say they're supposed to, while I piddled around for an hour and got about 40% through an implementation of Pong.

Dumber? Hell, no. The Internet makes me, in apprehension, like a God. And every year it is better.

Much more prosaic but also lost from my youth:
Irish Language Lab, by way of Michael Nesmith.

That's all that comes to mind off the top of my head. Unfortunately, this is because right now this minute most of my head is taken up with trying to remember this gosh-darn ghost story I read in some compilation or other many years ago. It popped back into my head and I'm going crazy trying to identify the tale. And, darn it, the Internet is not helping me!

Synopsis: There's this widow, she runs an inn [where?], she's going broke, she's going nuts trying to figure out how to put dinner on the table for her guests. The ghost of Mark Twain appears to her and says, "Serve them turnips." She's like, "what?" The ghost reiterates. In desperation, she takes its advice and serves turnips baked, roasted, mashed, sliced, etc. The guests eat it all up, complimenting the innkeeper on the tender roast pheasant and imported caviar and such. Good news for the innkeeper--until all her guests DIE OF TYPHOID!!! Or food poisoning. Or something.

Google keeps giving me Mark Twain's short story "A Ghost Story" and instructions on how to make a jack-o-lantern out of a turnip. I am not amused.

Because the internet brings us communities of people who can Name! That! Story! In five notes!, and because this thread conveniently showed up during my feverish ransacking of Google for an answer, I appeal for aid to the Fluorosphere.

A deepening respect for and admiration of librarians, especially reference desk people, because as noted above by Tony Zbaraschuk "... the boring part of [their] job has mostly been automated away and [they] can focus on the more interesting parts."

And people like me can take on some of the boring part to an increasing extent, figuring out how to craft useful search strings, urging people to do it for themselves, and endlessly encouraging people to look it up, whatever it is, rather than relying on fallible human memory.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward" (Lewis Carroll)

It's a poor sort of memory that only works, imperfectly, up to the point in the past where I last looked something up or thought hard about it.

"A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/memory_and_addiction.php

Search engines improve on this astonishingly, by remembering anything _anyone_ indexed for search has looked up, written down, or asked about up to within the past day or so.

It ain't the future, but I can see it from here.

I googled 'Visio conversion' and found a downloadable program that converted it to PDF. Problem solved in less than five minutes.

Without the Internet, we couldn't have found the converter.

(For amusement, google: "Cat found" possum)

I've been saying "PoTAAAto" to my kids all their lives, and now they can see why! Wow!

Melissa @28 - speaking as someone with full mobility, I have to say I agree in all respects.

My last three jobs: the first in 1991, the second in 1998, and the most recent in 2008.

Friends all over. The chance to interact with some wonderful minds. Music videos I haven't seen since 1986. The tools of my trade: editors, languages, libraries, techniques. Incredible insights into the human condition. Poetry. Matt Harding doing a goofy dance all around the world, with people joining in. Rick Astley. Places to stay, places to visit, places to just be. Beautiful words, beautiful music, beautiful photos, beautiful videos.

What have I found on the Internet in the last 10 minutes?

Another reason to be sad I can't make it to Denvention. (Sigh.) But perhaps I'll still hear back from an old friend.

Speaking of DVD: Netflix is amazing. The VCR was an incredible thing back in the eighties--you could rent movies instead of waiting for them to show up on TV. But the available video rental places didn't have the most wide-ranging selections. They had all the latest stuff, but a haphazard mix of older films, and some movies were tantalizing mysteries--I never did find a VHS of the original Cat People, for example, and while I could occasionally buy a copy of something like Dead of Night my budget was small and I had to pick carefully. And there were plenty of movies I never heard about. Now I can see any movie that's had a DVD release. Netflix is what allowed me to become a film buff.

The internet also introduced me to my favorite insane old-time detective stories. This can be doubly laid at the feet of the internet: I first heard of Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces from Bill Pronzini's Gun in Cheek, which I would never have had a chance to read if I hadn't ordered it off the internet. (I'm very glad waiting for lucky finds in used bookstores is no longer my only option for finding out-of-print books.) Then I recognized the title while browsing Project Gutenberg. So I downloaded the thing, and it was odder than I could have imagined.

And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404.

(Now that I've got that off chest, where can I find Magic Boy?)

The day Google comes up with an ap that jacks straight into our skulls, I'll be standing at the front of the line.

And, now that we're on the other side of the country, the Internet helps us keep in touch with friends and relatives 3000 miles away, or further. Just the other morning, my wife was chatting with a friend in Sweden while downloading episodes of Dr. Horrible and I was looking for houses in Portland.

I did a presentation during my recent job interview, on how web 2.0 apps like Flickr and LIbraryThing can be used in an Academic Library. During the research process, i found that the Library of Congress has put hundreds of historical photos online, as has George Eastman's House.

I'm likeing the 21st century, even without my jetpack.

Blinklist. Works great for keeping track of bookmarks across platform and on multiple computers.

That right there is enough to make me love the internet. Holy smokes. Neil Young covering Lennon/McCartney.

And apparently Young has used that song as an encore before; on that YouTube list of related videos is his performance of it in Dublin.

I can say - let's see, I know I was at Interesting News Aggregator and I think there was a link there to Thing, and then a link to Other Thing, and - yes! There's the link to Cool Thing!

Also, I'm really enjoying Read later (with handy Firefox extension action).

And I guess this counts as my sensawunda for the moment... :)

YouTube as a shared cultural memory repository is a fine thing too.

One example: some time ago I read The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, an art book by William Gaunt, who judging by the backcover blurb was once an important art critic. Try and find information about him online however!

And it makes explaining all kinds of stuff to your child SO much easier. "Who's Penn and Teller? What do you mean, Strawberry Shortcake? Who's on First?" - here, kid, let me show you. (This morning I woke up with the Ewoks cartoon theme stuck in my head. Why? I do not know. But I do know that I can show it to my daughter and prove that I'm not COMPLETELY insane.)

Now, that's a Disney movie I'd pay to see.

Also nice to get a little vocal slice of home if you've moved away.

Following in the vein of the descriptions given by travelers to the New World of the strange flora and fauna, a hybrid creature was born one fateful night last May. Like those centuries-old accounts, the components of this beast's anatomy seem disparate at best, horrifying at worst. What is this thing, which combines the body of an Elder God with the frozen, psychotic grin of an immature baby meercat?
Answer: Cthulhu Matata.
Song: "Devil Inside," by INXS

That's something they'll never show on Animal Planet's show Meerkat Manor.

Again. There are plenty who tend to forget their moronism will be all over the net in no time short.

I also found YouTube recordings of some of my favourite opera scenes played on TV ages ago, and I can't imagine to plan a journey without the net ever again. I do use the internet for research as well, but it hasn't replaced books.

still there is nothing to tell me where I left my sunglasses.

Again, the databases are invaluable, and many of them are available from your home desk via the portal of your university or public library. I can even access Lexis from my home computer!

Love, C.

True. Your keys, however, are another matter.

And yet...

still there is nothing to tell me where I left my sunglasses.

Can't help you with the current lost pair, but thanks to the Cory Doctorow story Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town (wherein The Inventory is the important idea for this post) and some other web-thing I cannot recall right now I can offer an idea for the future:

RFID tag all your stuff, and put a small web-enabled RFID scanner in your living area. If you lose the next pair of labeled sunglasses in your living area, you can web-search for them...

Heh.

I just found Cory's book again, 'cause I was looking for that Inventory reference. I have also found, in the past, archives of a number of my old Ten Page Technical Rant posts to the LCML, back when I was in or recently out of college and still had an active vehicular hobby involving a truck referenced in my current internet "handle". (Look for the Nuclear Parking Brake and you'll see my tendency to verbosely provide a plausible - if impractical - solution to a given problem/question)

I also found ML, via BoingBoing, and have stuck around.

Haven't found many old friends yet, but that's mostly because I haven't taken the time to get set up on FaceBook or similar.

How long before the scanner is misplaced?

My own contribution: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.

This was my favorite TV show when I was 14. No one else had ever heard of it. Then I discovered the fan site. Power on!

Meanwhile, right here, the mentions of obscure movies prompted me to search for my favorite, and found two versions of the early Douglas Fairbanks farce, Mystery Of The Leaping Fish!

CP also shares a few writers and producers. There are hints of B-5 all over the thing.

Uncle Jim is of course right about bookmarks and 404s. This is why the scripting demigods of the Firefox add-on community gave us Scrapbook. (It's also good for turning several pages full of blog entries and forum posts into several hours of reading for the train.)

Hey, Cajun! Who are we, chopped liver?! *g*

And that RFID idea? That will make my husband go squee. He wants to replace our car look and home door lock with rfid sensors. I am slightly nervous about this, but I don't think it will actually see implementation for years, or until he runs out of other things to do, whichever comes first.

When your friend tells you she hasn't yet seen Ghostbusters, and you don't want to leave the house or wait on Netflix to amend this woeful state of things, the Internet is your friend. Boy is it ever. Between bittorrent and YouTube, our friend could soon recite "When someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!" with the best of them.

When I was a child, my dad and uncles would sing St. Anselm's Proof of God to the tune of Waltzing Matilda every time they got together. Dad's been gone twenty years, and I never got around to asking the uncles whether they made that up themselves, or where they got it. They had the kind of education which made it very possible they had made it up.

So, anyway, a few years ago I found it. Origin unknown, a piece of academic theological folklore filk.

The net is definitely my offboard brain, so the idea the whole concept of serendipitous discovery is no longer unusual but a norm, at least for me. I've been excited to watch my eldest (12 yrs) grow up with this as a core element of her environment - it should be very interesting as she enters her academically intense years.

I doubt this won him fans, but they did understand what I was talking about.

Of course, on the other hand, the easy accessibility of formerly obscure music means I now have a very overwhelming folder on my desktop with several hundred albums I absolutely need to listen to right away.

Oddly enough, I've been criticized for urging people not to contribute to that problem, which is to say, for urging them not to break links when it's avoidable.

This thread eloquently demonstrates that web resources often have value that is completely invisible to, and unexpected by, the owner/hoster of the resource.

I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would use a smartphone. Weren't those for corporate workaholic types? But I end up using it much more for looking up interesting facts (and useful facts, like where the nearest Subway is) than for doing anything work-related. It makes me really happy to be able to find things out quickly.

On the other hand, I'm looking for an SSH iPhone app so that I can run simulations from my cell phone. I joked about this with the grad students when I did an internship at a nuclear lab a few years ago -- running your experiment from your cell phone while lying on the beach. My lab experiments can't be run remotely (unless I invent quite a system of waldoes first), but simulations and data processing could...

Lost: a short posting by a techie describing a boss who'd read about domain-name spoofing, and who, whenever something strange was going on, would suggest "Maybe we're being domain-name spoofed." The techies told the boss there was another attack called "goofballing", and, sure enough, the boss started suggesting "Maybe we're being goofballed." (I must be wrong about the name being "goofballing" or this would be easier to find.)

Searching the present:

I couldn't do my job without google. Last week we found a bug in the application I work on, that resulted from installing a new version of the content editor we use. It took me a few minutes of search to confirm that it was in fact a bug in the editor, already known to users, and a few more to discover that it had been fixed, and new version posted the day before. I downloaded the new version, installed it, and the bug was gone. Prior to the internet, this process would have take several weeks and a lot of phone calls.

Searching the past:
I have a lot of old books on film and animation, including textbooks and histories with stills from old movies. There are a couple of stills from a paper cutout silouette animation called "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" made in the 1920's. I searched the net, but could not found any copies except films that cost hundreds of dollars to purchase, and couldn't be rented except locally. Then one day I tried again, and found a small VHS tape sales company run by a retired couple in Arizona who had tapes made from the best available print at the time, for only $15, and a week later I was able to watch the film, which was as beautiful as I'd hoped.

Searching for people: I'm still not sure how I feel about this, but I got a letter from my mother a couple of weeks ago. We've been estranged for more than 20 years, and she found me by googling me and finding my blog. On the other hand, a couple of years ago I googled for my best friend in elementary and high school and found his website: he's a professional jazz musician, just as he'd wanted to be.

You can have all the OpenSSH goodness you want from your iPhone if you don't mind jailbreaking it. Don't worry, it's pretty easy and fairly stable. Lifehacker has a great tutorial here.

Thank you, thank you for that link. I love mathematical sculpture, and I don't think I've seen that one. In return, one you may have seen before, but is always worth looking at, Bathsheba Grossman's mathematical sculpture, much of it made on a rapid prototype machine (aka "3D printer").

Also, the OpenSSH iPhone app looks like it's meant to allow you to SSH from a machine into your phone (to transfer files to your phone, or use the EDGE connection on your computer), rather than SSHing from your phone to another machine (which is what I want to do). Am I missing something?

Christian the Lion

And I cried.

He was also the head writer for the early episodes of 'The Real Ghostbusters'. I recall watching that regularly; it was syndicated here M-F with two episodes back-to-back starting at 7 am. Unlike Carrie V., I don't have the excuse that I was 14 at the time.

Xopher @ 78
"and would sing them at the drop of a hat."
No "At The Drop of a Hat" was Flanders & Swann...

James D. Macdonald @ 33
"If you find something on the Internet, better bookmark it because you'll never find it again.

And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404."

I really hate it particularly when "official" websites go and re-organise and stuff gets lost (e.g. when NOAA re-organised and all their really useful oil spill documents moved. Luckily I'd already downloaded them (and had them referenced with date of downloading and url at the time of downloading).

In my job (writing/editing a large electronic encyclopaedia on wild animal health) the stuff it's possible to find on the web is amazing and saves me huge amounts of time heaving large, heavy bound volumes of journals around and standing over photocopiers.

Still, if you don't know how and where to look, you can waste a lot of time - good librarians or others who do know how/where to look are a huge (and often underappreciated) asset.

p.s. I have a metatheorem prover, and I'm not afraid to use it.

Writing this comment has been a bit odd. For years I'd tried to remember a book from my high school library. No luck until, long story short, I found a trace of it on Loganberry Books' "Stump the Bookseller" feature. The book is Lillian Lieber's Infinity (just reprinted, squee!). Amazon's front page showed me ... corn stickers. They're stalking me across threads.

Bruce Cohen (StM) @84, finding people is definitely a mixed blessing. I found my father's obituary online. Basically, I'm estranged from his side of the family, which was active on their part (for reasons I have literally no clue about), more or less passive on mine. And still, despite minimal contact over a period of around 40 years, I did feel hurt that neither I (3d daughter) nor my mother (2d wife) were so much as mentioned. (I exist anyway. Ha!)

Venkman: Cthulhu? What's Cthulhu?
Spengler: Cthulhu makes Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine.

Once again, YouTube comes through with the episode, "Collect Call of Cthulhu." The villain is Clark Ashton. Teehee. I totally didn't get that when I was 14.

(smacks head)

Me too!

OBjustification
Now, if the post had asked what was the most important thing I'd found on the Internet...
/OBjustification

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @#72:

Hey, Cajun! Who are we, chopped liver?! *g*

*ahem* See above, y'all aren't anymore chopped liver than my spouse is...

And that RFID idea? That will make my husband go squee. He wants to replace our car look and home door lock with rfid sensors. I am slightly nervous about this, but I don't think it will actually see implementation for years, or until he runs out of other things to do, whichever comes first.

Heh, he sounds like me! Too many ideas, not enough time/money/tools/workspace to implement them faster than they pile up... RFID can be worrisome (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for some info, or just Google the Instructables from that book, or look for RFID US Passport issues), the problems can be mitigated. Any convenience can introduce new potential points of failure, but it doesn't have to.

Just wanted to report back, FWIW, that I finally found that dang ghost story. It was on Page 291 of Gumbo Ya-Ya, a compendium of New Orleans folklore. (Happened to notice it on the shelf and have a lightbulb go on in the brain.) Apparently it was raw turnips, not baked/fried/etc., and the guests died one by one... of a surfeit of raw turnips. How does that kill, I wonder, if not simple through malnutrition? And how exactly does "having eaten a great quantity of raw turnips" feel, that one of the guests should be able to report that feeling at the hospital?

But I suppose that these are questions that *can* actually be answered by The Internets. And if The Internets can point me in the direction of articles from the New Orleans Item Tribune from 1925 through 1930, which Gumbo Ya-Ya says actually reported the deaths and the story, then the Internets will deserve a fresh batch of cookies.

I found the only recording of my grandfather -besides the reel-to-reel he sent my mom when I was a baby, singing "aint she sweet" to me - here (warning: early 30's era racism, weirdness). He's got the pretty Samoan Tenor voice - Bimbo's singing voice, among others.

I also found god - well, the church I go to and sing at - on the web. I thought I was only looking for Christmas music, but my subconscious apparantly had other ideas. I suppose I could have just looked in the phone book under Episcopal Churches, but that wouldn't have told me which parish had the most funny hats and incense.

I've never had a good memory, which is why one of the few things I ever memorized was large chunks of the Dewey Decimal System. I rarely knew details of something, but I always knew where to look it up. Now, my fingers do the looking.

My mother recently got an internet connection, and she's really excited about Recent Earthquakes for southern California.

For me, no other online find will ever top that.

I also found great videos of squid.

The internet's kind of great.

I've just found the name for my superhero sidekick on the internet*!

Last thing I found before that: not only is there an extensive Crime Traveller fan site, but that there's a petition to bring it back 10 years after it finished.

Lost not found: Some years ago I read something that suggested that Vandals liked to dress in and paint their faces and shields black, while Goths preferred greens and blues, but i can't find anything on this. I'm beginning to suspect i made it up.

* although I will be writing it Eng-Lad

That's the story that made me realize he, too, was a plausible New Heinlein, which is related to why Cory is such a shit magnet (which I don't mean as a bad thing, except toward the shits).

I recently reconnected with the one classmate who did know what the internet was - it turns out he had worked with one of my LinkedIn contacts.

I like finding old video games I played as a kid, too. Some old stuff that I played on our Commodore 64, and newer stuff (relatively) from our first IBM compatible PC's.

Shorter me: thank you, more than I can say.

Oh my giddy aunt!

Want to see Public Image Ltd.'s appearance on American Bandstand? (Yes. You do.) It's there.

Oh, yes, yes I do, but I cannot find it! Help me! Help me!

A new future every day.

You'll have to ask Bob Rossney...

(Actually, we make stuff up anyway, because life's more entertaining that way. It's gotten to the point where our daughter won't believe any "strange-but-true" stories we tell her without calling Grammy to confirm. But that's good! Don't just trust people because they say something's true, even if they are your parents.)

It's with the happy trees? *evil grin*

I didn't read the thread correctly, and assumed that "Bob Rossney" was a person of some importance related to the band or the youtube upload and Rob's post was a hint on how to find the video. I didn't see that he was the original poster of the "look what you can find!" post.

Sorry for what is probably quite a tired old joke, Bob.

You are evil and have a low sense of humor, and I love it. Children should always be a little confused; it makes them more open to discovering the truth themselves. And it can be highly amusing in an evil and low kind of way.

(Does not want to know how Xopher knows this, does not want to know how Xopher knows this, does not...)

I even re-used the Calvin strip for my own benefit, when I explained to my son that the world used to be in black-and-white.

Yeah, the Experts don't know what they're talking about there. I met my husband on-line. I email my father nearly every day with a link or a clipping or a joke that's not quite worth the commitment required by a phone call, but is nonetheless worth his seeing. I have a dozen or so knitting buddies, all of whom I met online, whom I chat/post with daily, all of whom get together at least once a year for a knitting and drinking festival.

Aside from that, the fact that I do 90% of my shopping for things like books and clothes and yarn online means that, with the time I'm not using to run errands, I can go to the pool with my kids, grow a bumper crop of backyard tomatoes, have dinner with my friends, and be more social in 3-D.

And I won't even go *into* the usefulness of the net for my job. Except to say that yesterday I found an obscure article about Richard Barnfield, an even more obscure one about the Elizabethan penny, found--and began to work out--a perplexing reference in Das Kapital, and....

I wonder if experts have ever seen the internet?

...except on Sundays.

That is what you meant, right? ;-)

Were you living in Toronto?
:-)

Actually I was referring to the Sunday Funnies (which were Friday Funnies where I grew up) being in color.

In all this cheer, I had a sad thought: What about the have-nots? What's it like to *not* grow up with unlimited information? Is this the new gap between the well-to-do and the poor -- and how wide is it really?

I can't figure out what terms of use that would be against, either.

TimeLife is releasing the complete series on DVD

Found via an RSS feed from TV Shows on DVD which is currently down for maintenance but is an amazing resource for DVD release information.

Things found on the Internet: William Addison Dwiggins, whose typefaces populated the books of my childhood. The half-remembered Green-sky books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. A cousin from my family on the other side of the world. One of my current significant others. (The other one says he first developed a crush on me when, in an IM chat, I linked the Neal Stephenson Slashdot interview.) Things too countless to name!

I've actually lived in Guelph, not Toronto. So close, and yet -- so far.

Add to the list of "Cities That Close On Sundays" the name of Baltimore. The only things open were the newspaper places.

Add to the list of "Cities That Close On Sundays" the name of Baltimore. The only things open were the newspaper places.

In Kearney, Nebraska, the only places open on Sundays were the churches. Maybe gas stations? But those in their fancy clothes sneered at the greasy-handed guys as they drove by.

...now thinking of one of the "Back to the Future" films where someone pulled into a service station and four guys in uniforms ran out to pump the gas, check the oil, add air to the tires, and wash the windows.

"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear..."

Charles Mingus

[ /pedant]

I found a catalogue listing for some letters that my great grandmother wrote 100 years ago when she and her husband moved from the Boston area to Billings, Montana. (I've got later letters she wrote to her daughter.)

Her name? Misspelled. Am now corresponding w/ the librarian who fixed the listing (at my request); librarian did some research and told me the date of her death.

#113 The Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (Japanese girls' high school's jazz band) ripping through Miles Davis's "Haitian Fight Song"

Charles Mingus

[ /pedant]

"Mingus Mouse plays the bass."
/A DOOM Babba DOOM Babba DOOM/

My wife and I can pretty much recite the entire Ella Elephant Scats Like That book without having the book in hand. Thanks to rote repetition learning via multiple readings of said book to our daughter. Fun book, really, but more than 20 repetitions in a few hours can get wearying... We're trying to teach her to say "Mama, book!" or "Dada, book!" when she brings a book over for reading. At least she'll put the book back on the shelf sometimes when asked to after we read it...

So many of my favorite works (I have to include books and CDs in that statement) are only available in digital format now (or in the case of some of my favorite childhood books, are only available if you have an independent printer print a copy for an extra amount). There is still something to be said about holding something real -- rather than a digital version. "Progress" is a double edged sword I guess.

See? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. On the other hand, "tight boy" really has only erotic meanings (though not necessarily pornographic; one could be referring to highly toned and defined musculature, for example). And I should add that "-lad" and "boy" in superhero names refer to anyone under the age of 30.

Debbie 144: Self-serve is still illegal in New Jersey. Allegedly for safety reasons, but I think actually to preserve jobs.

Gas is still cheaper here than in New York.

Luckily his name wasn't Lennie Briscoe otherwise I'd also have had a wisecrack thrown at me.

Re: more things found on the Internet - Amazon's MP3 store is a dangerous place. I found the same Peter and the Wolf that I had as a child - the recording is pretty crap, but for a dollar, I'm not complaining. Much. I'd been meaning to play that for the kiddo for awhile, and the instantaneous gratification was worth sacrificing a bit of quality.

Something doesn't sound right about that sentence.
:-)

The year is 2008 CE. Gaul The US is entirely occupied by the Romans spirit of DIY. Well not entirely! One small state of indomitable Gauls civilized gentlepersons still holds out against the invaders.

(And I used the internet to refresh my memory for the quote, so I'm not completely off topic.)

As per the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, wrap the corn (still in its husks) in alumin(i)um foil, and put it on the barbie for about ten minutes while the steaks are doing their thing. Or you can substitute butter for the husks. I think it might be fun to combine the rub/spice method with the foil, grill, and see what happens.

Or the ingredients are too exotic for this part of the country. I did see shad roe this spring--just once--but it was gone before I could persuade myself that I should have some even though spouse hateses fish eggs.

(Of course, some of the ordinary local ingredients are off--in both senses--at the moment; nobody's selling jalapenos due to the recent unfortunateness in re salmonella. I am informed that cooked, baked, and pickled ones are OK, so I can keep on with nachos, but I am still worried about the chances for this year's Hatch chile crop.)

* He really ought to be Brit-Man, but as ought to be clear, he isn't very bright

I imagine you could easily modify by soaking without re-covering, then dry the ear, apply spice run, re-cover and grill. Mmmm. I think I'll experiment with that later this summer.

Sounds good, but I can never remember to do a soak/marinade in time to cook whatever it was. Corn is particularly last minute, as in: what do we want with the steaks that I'm about to start the grill for? (I can barely remember to get the water boiling before the rest of the steak process gets started--one more reason to grill.)

Old friends

Making Light

Family history from 1680's Massachusetts (My ultimate American ancestor was whipped naked in public at age 15 for breaking and entering)...

But the TRUE sensawunda is knowing that we are living in what will eventually be known as THE pivotal point in history... 300 hundred years from now, this era will be taught in schools in far more detail than the Industrial Revolution is taught today... We are living at one of the most momentous times in history, and a lot of people don't realize it... that boggles me...

...and new ones.

Robert Llewellyn, aka Kryten from Red Dwarf, did the voices.

Phil Austin, and Derek Hayes, who made Skywhales, also produced another short animation in the 1980s called "Max Beeza and the City in the sky". I only saw a review of it in an early issue of Starlog, which was a shame, as the plot revolved around Max raising funds for "Bison for the deaf" and featured another character called the Wicked Stepladder. Sounds like a gas.

I have a couple of Krazy Kat strips cut from 1927 newspapers my parents found in their house. They were printed at a size of 2 7/8 inches by 11 3/8 inches.

I haven't dug out as much information as most of you -- the geekiest thing I've done is use various mapping services to get the coordinates of airports, so I can add them to a distance-calculating program without having to find a library big enough for a good gazetteer -- but I've been fascinated by many of the links people come up with. Mr. Bean's air-drums, the mechanical music machines someone posted here, ... Sir Arthur Eddington (who I just looked up) was exaggerating; this world by itself is stranger than we can imagine, but now we can see where our imagination fails. The Naval Observatory's map of timezones (there are a lot more than you'd think) and a plausible explanation for the (known to be false) type specimen for the Darwin Awards are among the disappearances I regret; but just having seen them was a broadening experience.

Lance, #164, it's the husks and cob that you're soaking, so it would be a good thing to recover the corn with the husks. You're soaking so the corn won't burn on the grill, and you're essentially steaming the corn.

Other wonderful things I've found:

For years, I jotted down lines from songs on the radio asfastasIcould and just hoped to catch the title and artist so that I could request the song again (public radio, they actually take requests!). Now I go to mudcat dot org and find the whole song by searching on a phrase.

I also found a gently used library copy of the Child Ballads via online search. Now if I could only find a copy of this other book that has most of the surviving tunes . . .

It is highly unlikely that I will _ever_ be able to go to a bardic. But I can sing along with Leslie Fish at home.

Happy Birthday!
24 July 1971
Your date of conception was on or about 31 October 1970 which was a Saturday.

Great. Thanks. Now I've got this vision of my parents getting it on, on a drunk saturday night, in addams family outfits while "The Monster Mash" plays in the background.

There is not enough alcohol in the world to kill the braincells that need to die right now.

Did you ever see Hitchcock's North by Northwest, specificall the scene where Eva Marie Saint is sitting down with James Mason and Martin Landau standing behind her, and Cary Grant makes a crack about Charles Addams?

And did you know that Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch in the TV show, also was Thing?

And all their secret identities have been on unemployment since the plants closed.

Ginger @ 138

When I was growing up, all the US Northeast states had what they called "Blue Laws" which made it illegal to have certain kinds of business open on Sunday: department stores, liguor stores, groceries, etc, etc. (if you smoked, you'd better not run out of cigarettes on Sunday; I think even the stores that were open weren't allowed to sell them then). The Supreme Court finally agreed that was maybe just a little too much religious interference in people's lives.

And, no, it's not "right-sizing" either. The correct term is "cap-sizing". Ask any hourly worker.

Self-serve is still illegal in New Jersey. Allegedly for safety reasons, but I think actually to preserve jobs.

Ditto Oregon. The last time the question came up on the ballot as an initiative, someone ran an ad on TV showing a poor, helpless old grandma starving to death by the self-service pump, waiting for someone to fill up her tank. Also, someone started a rumor campaign about how people who didn't know how to work a gasoline pump managed to burn themselves to death.

Politics: it's not just for public office anymore!

Where did you see Ted Nelson singing in 1962?

(I'm his son.)

There was once a company called Formatt that made acetate shading film (like Zip-a-Tone, but not the same brand). I had the catalog a while ago and it was a very large selection.

I draw a blank when I search for it though. The only thing in the world that has that brand name today, it seems, is a matte box that mounts on a camera.

There was once a company called Formatt that made acetate shading film (like Zip-a-Tone, but not the same brand). I had the catalog a while ago and it was a very large selection.

I draw a blank when I search for it though. The only thing in the world that has that brand name today, it seems, is a matte box that mounts on a camera.

For government employees, it's "A-76", and "MEO". Yet another thing for which to thank Our Shrub in Charge.

If it's got char marks, it wasn't steaming.

Might this be a start?

http://www.creativityinc.com/westrim

I still have my job, and while my prospects for promotion may now be totally sidelined, we did just buy a house on Gabriola Island.

Or maybe I just have a quirky sense of humor.

Erik, #181, your grandmother is Celeste Holm? Wow. (Yes, your dad is famous, too, but your grandmother is a fabulous actress!)

Ibid, #183, These folks have it. Scroll down a bit.

joann, #187, if the corn has char marks inside the foil, that's transferred heat. It's still steaming. Otherwise, you could just lay the corn on the grill.

Earl, #190, sorry, couldn't find that. Feorag would probably know.

Wait, whoa, stop, hold it a second here. Ted Nelson is Celeste Holm's son? And therefore Dan Dunning's half-brother? Talk about a small world: Dan and I were in the same class in high school, and I met Celeste once when she came to see him (he was a boarding student, I was day-time). And though I've known of Ted for 30 years (I still have a copy of Computer Lib/Machine Dreams), I've never met him, though I think we have at least a dozen mutual friends and acquaintances from Silicon Valley, and the hi-tech community in general.

Yes, Celeste Holm is a terrific actress, though I have to say that her public persona was even more impressive to me as a teenage boy. She was incredibly gracious and charming, and I had a crush on her (sorry if that's too much information, Erik).

They look like something you melt (like multicolored seed beads with no holes, mostly, but there are a two or three larger pieces like heart-shapes), but, uh, I don't want to melt PVC in my house. Hey, maybe it's something that's been discontinued due to extreme toxicity! (Although if that were the case, you'd think I'd find it on a recall/class action site or something.)

Not that I have had any personal connection with your father, but Computer Lib/Dream Machines did confirm me in my belief that computers were what I wanted to do with my life. Amazing books.

They sound like the plastic version of what you fill bean bags with. The advantage over beans/lentils/rice is that you can wash the finished bag of them without it getting mushy, or moldy, or sprouting.

Oh! Oh! do you mean the little plastic bits that come in what look like craft-paint bottles, and they soften in hot water so you can mold them?

ISTR that the Ballantine paperback from the early '70s had a one page genealogy chart. Unfortunately, my copy is long gone, so I can't check. Anybody have a copy and could check on that?

Eddison is not as popular as I think he deserves to be, and most of the interest seems to be in the Zimiamvian Trilogy; Ouroboros tends to be somewhat of an orphan. This despite the thing that got me interested in it, a review by no less than Theodore Sturgeon in Fantasy & Science Fiction that absolutely raved about it*.

* Paraphrasing from 40 year old memory: "Head, shoulders, trunk, and groin above every other heroic fantasy."

I thought I did, but it turns out I have a Pan edition (British) of the same vintage and with the same cover (and no genealogy).

Eddison is not as popular as I think he deserves to be, and most of the interest seems to be in the Zimiamvian Trilogy; Ouroboros tends to be somewhat of an orphan.

The trilogy has its charms, but the Worm has more fantasy and less of his dubious (and, at at least one point, cringe-inducingly racist) philosophy.

The way I heard it, Sturgeon always stopped at the groin.

Not that I have had any personal connection with your father, but Computer Lib/Dream Machines did confirm me in my belief that computers were what I wanted to do with my life. Amazing books.

Me, too. Something like that. I bought a copy out of Roger Gregory's trunk. Must have been 1978.

I met Ted once, over Chinese carry-out, at a house full of Xanadudes in Silicon Valley. I'm sure I thanked him for his book. I remember he told me that Mies van der Rohe said, "God is in the details." I probably could have learned that somewhere else, but I learned it from Ted Nelson.

Because of Computer Lib and especially its acedoublesque flipside Dream Machines, I could see the Nineties coming.

Which is exactly what I wanted from a computer book.

I just wish I could remember what they were called. Arg!

After some more digging, I think they must have only been sold as part of a kit, but somehow the kid got them solo. I've found some kits that have similar-looking pellets (Makit & Bakit - a different brand, and I've only seen their "suncatcher" type kits, but the Internet says they do have opaque pellet ones too.)

I still have no idea what the other, big bits are for. Kiddo opened the package; there were three each of teddy bear and heart beads. Maybe for stringing onto the finished product? It doesn't seem like enough to actually do anything with - what's only 6 beads big? (The beads are about 1/4" long - only "big" compared to the itty bitty pellets.)

The descriptions you've given make me think of little bits of plastic I've seen...somewhere. I want to think they were inside a sealed toy as a decorative element or noisemaker or stuff to work through a puzzle or something like that.

The bits I'm thinking of looked a little like they were slices off of a stick of plastic - the sliced-off ends weren't even, and the non-sliced sides were round or occasionally hexagonal.

But I can't remember any more clearly than that what kind of toy they might have been inside, and I definitely haven't encountered the stuff I'm thinking of as a craft material. About the only craft I could think of to use the material I'm thinking of for would be making some kind of a scavenger hunt toy, like this one. I can't image that they would work better than sand for the purpose, but that doesn't always stop the craft-goods manufacturers.

This is response to really distressing posts on news stories about the shootings at the Knoxville UU church (Tennessee Valley UU Church.) The posts were working from an assumption that Unitarian and Universalist views on the bible and finding wisdom in various sacred scriptures was somehow new. Found a 1889 article in "The Unitarian" in about two minutes.

...at which time you will be cordially invited over to my place for my Kinda-Sorta Cajun Corn Chowder.

Generally, when the Whole Foods is selling Longmont corn 3 for a dollar, it's time to hit the Farmer's Market hard.

Xopher @ 150 ::: Self-serve is still illegal in New Jersey.

Bruce Cohen (STM) has already pointed out that that's the case in Oregon... but I was always told (when John and I lived there, 1996-1999) it was a way of creating/preserving jobs. No one told me it was to protect people from dying of old age while waiting in vain for service...

Colorado finally nixed one of its remaining blue laws: You can now buy liquor on a Sunday in this state. Well. I overstate. Liquor stores are now allowed to stay open on a Sunday in this state. Should any choose to do so, this should cheer up those on a last-minute dead-dog-party supply run this WorldCon/Denvention.

It may be less than a boon to liquor sales in Wyoming, however.

i gave the clerk at our corner gas station the $20 I wanted to buy. I went back out to pump the gas. The asshole who had put the dispenser handle back HAD LEFT THE CLICKER THINGIE ON. so when I took it off the pump it started gushing gasoline.

It missed my clothing but got my hands and my shoes (fortunately I wore a pair of clogs, which I seldom wear in the summer, rather than sandals). Shoes had to be aired on porch, Dawn(r) took care of the gas sell on my hands.

I am still frustrated in not being able to track down a particular science fiction short story collection: Each of the stories dealt with the humorous travails of this one mad scientist who kept on getting things almost right. For example, in one story, he breeds human-sized rabbits to fill out the military's requirement for cannon-fodder. The only problem, all the rabbits are female. (This collection was written probably in the 1950s or 1960s, well before women served in the regular forces.) All the other stories in the collection have that same humorous twist ending.

For the life of me, I have NEVER come close to finding out the title or author.

Any pointers, anyone?

Tomorrow, when the flu abates, I'll search for the other web comic I'm missing (The one about the young female elf running about in the forest (ca 2003). I think she had a bow and some kind of bird, and the author/artist kept writing about graphics tablets and other tools)