Wednesday, November 30, 2005
- ChicagoIST's Overheard column (which I wish was a column in itself, a la Overheard in New York) is side-splittingly good today. Here's a sample:
Guy: I'm still getting used to the city, but in general I like it. Except for the West Side.
Guy's friend: Why, is it sketchy?
Guy: A little bit. But, like, there's this one street, Milwaukee, that goes diagonally. It's totally
f-cked up. I get lost there every time because of it.
++
Girl 1: Which direction is the lake from here?
Girl 2: It is east.
Girl 1: I know it usually is, but it moves. - Slate reports that chunks of marble are coming loose from the façade of the Supreme Court building. The cause? Too much
bullshitpigeon guano. Seriously. - Cellular News reports Tokyo-based Scalar Corp. has developed a virtual 28-inch video screen for cell phones for private video viewing.
- A recent University of Pennsylvania study finds you can defeat Federal wiretaps by playing a beep-tone into the phone. Great. Now that they know we know we know, they'll change the wiretaps...you know? [via BoingBoing]
- Canadian "War on Christmas"? The CBC reports on some lovely interfaith holiday bashing this
ChristmasHanukkahKwanzaa...er, to heck with it. - First Marshall Field's, now this: the Chicago Sun-Times' Bill Zwecker informs us that the downtown Chicago Trader Vic's location will be closing after New Year's Eve. They've been a retro staple since 1957. [via Gapers Block]
- The BBC reports French surgeons have performed the world's first face transplant on "a 36-year old woman whose face had been destroyed by a dog." [via Slashdot, more at the Washington Post.com]
- "Lower Prices Every Day...for Jesus!" "This is the day that the Lord has made! We shall rejoice and be glad in the new Wal-Mart that the Lord has made." [Richmond County Daily Journal, via MeFi]
- "Astronomers have spotted a second moon around [2003 EL61...'a particularly bizarre member of the Kuiper Belt'] a massive, cigar-shaped world at the fringes of the solar system." [New Scientist]
- Googled™ an image lately? It seems recently Google has switched over (maybe in conjunction with GoogleBase?) to including web text surrounding an image on a page to index and search for pictures - not just the filename and alternate text of the image. This is very helpful, since may online images have no alternate text associated with them, or their filename has no connection with the content of the image. I've been finding many more image search results than before for the same search terms.
farkleberries Links du Jour 126: The Dial V for Value(s) Edition
