The Longest Now

Every now and again I run across something sufficiently excellent that I am bound and determined not to let it, or my interest in it, become buried in the Web’s swamps.  This post will be without other useful content…

Turtle Fur Maskots have been a wintertime standby of mine for years.  Balaclavas with good nose and mouth cover that finesse the various physics challenges posed by that arrangement, they are happily still in production (though they were scarce a few winters ago).  Without one I would fear to bike through winter ice.  With one, it is a cheerful game to tangle with the coldest winds and densest snows.

<NTS: this was almost buried in a swamp, drafted but unpublished, for lack of finding a link!>

That the commenter with 22 exclamation marks per paragraph is the highly prolific xword puzzle writer featured here.  I suppose I mean I would never guess.   And it’s not guessing now that I know.

I should put in a plug for Joon’s crosswording feats : congratulations, my friend.

A friend of mine had a stroke last night, and tried to sleep it off before heading to the hospital in the morning. It is hard to know how to deal with sudden changes out of the blue, especially when they are to something as fundamental to your sense of self as your body or mind… I’m not sure how to think about such things, or how to prepare for them.

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The compleat works of favorite source of ear-worms, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, has finally returned to my possession after some time apart.  Welcome home!

Here’s a favorite from one of their albums. I transcribed a bit here, but you can find a book of their songs for further reading.

Have Some Madeira, M’dear (listen)

‘That decanter and this hat gave us the idea for this little Edwardian song…

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Bake a Pi, have an re[ci|ea]ting contest, sing a traditional rap.  And happy birthday, einstein.

Recently, I have been having troubling dreams of identifiers and classifications.  Something is missing in my soup.  Also, our public library system is surprisingly behind the times on providing basic public services such as universal global identifiers.  (come to think of it, who does provide such a thing?)

Update: As Jeremy Baron points out, the development of WikiData helps move us much closer to having a functional perpetual cauldron of soup. Huzzah!

I have to think up a list half as good as David W’s (how did I miss that last summer when it came out?) : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wein…

What have you stolen recently?