In a day of grim news all around, here’s some levity. Randompixel. The premise: a guy handed out disposable cameras and told people to send them back to him when they were finished. Kind of like the 4th grade projects to see how far a balloon would travel.

I like the effort he puts into trying to figure out where each photo was taken (finding really small clues in the pictures), and the asides in his commentary are pleasant.

At the very least, it’s a cheap way to see a slice of the world you would otherwise not have seen, and isn’t that worth 5 minutes?

…and they apparently didn’t believe him.
From The Times (of the UK) this Sunday.

The FBI’s counter-terrorism taskforce questioned the 29-year-old man for three weeks at Newark, New Jersey, in the spring of 2000. There, agents refused to believe his claim that terrorists were planning to fly passenger jets into buildings, even though he passed lie detector tests.

I sure haven’t seen this in any US media the past few days.

From US News:FBI keeping us safe from video game mob bosses. (scroll down to “The Google Terrorist” (which is a stupid headline)).

For word lovers: obscure words and vocabulary resources

The Infinite Cat Project

I just woke up from a dream that I was at a big, formal party which was supposed to be at a fancy restaurant/hotel on the 8th floor of the Prudential Center in Boston, but the building looked nothing like it. Donald Rumsfeld was there, and he was only about 4 feet tall– he was tiny. I thought, “He looks so tall on TV– this is really hysterical! This totally explains the Napoleanoic stuff.” He was making a big stink because the bar at the event didn’t have the scotch he likes. He stormed out, and came back later with two glasses of his scotch. I passed him in the hall and walking around the party a couple of times. The first time I couldn’t help but smirk because he was so short. The next time, he shot me a dirty look because I was smirking again, though I would have sworn he was actually getting smaller: more like half my height.

I noticed a bunch of truck stops on our way to State College the past few weekends advertising wi-fi. Says one trucker in this article, “The only time I really get to use any kind of broadband is out here on the road… That’s the whole reason I came this far last night.” But what spurs you on, Tim Helmecki? Just the lure of the road?

From CNN:CDs, DVDs not so immortal

It’s been a hugely weird day. There are guys standing outside the window here at work in hazmat suits, investigating a weird leak at the biotech company next door. A guy I went to college with won a Republican primary for state senate in Indiana under weird circumstances.

It’s time for some mezcal.

Just a note that I’ve updated some of our photos a little… I’ve added a few that should have gone up long ago and edited out a few that I’m sure no one will miss. More soon…

An IMDB user review of Peter Brooks’ miniseries version of The Mahabarata, which reads like one of those email forwards about 6th graders’ misreadings of history. Except this was apparently written by a grownup.

A small scale epic based on the Indian version of the bible, Sanskrit, the biggest book in history. This tells the story of two rival families who do battle. Plenty of philosophy and enlightenment. At times campy and the set productions are minimal, but hey, this is a fable for grown ups which will leave you memorised with all its wisdom.

Makes the area around Washington Square Park in NYC into a Pac Man maze.