In Wired.

A cheap moon mission. A cheap reliable voting machine.

Slate has a good article about The Cult of Che. The damn Che T-Shirts were everywhere in Europe. I can’t figure out if it’s ignorance of history or a genuine wish for violence. Either way, it’s a bit scarey.

This house just off Holland Street had a mannequin head impaled on a weathervane spike for many years, dating back to the very earliest days of the Terri and Ezra Show– in fact, before there even was a Terri and Ezra show pilot.

So it was with some sadness that when we became landowning citizens of Somerville last year that we noticed that the head no longer was impaled on its spiky home. So, imagine our happines earlier this summer when we saw the return of the impaled head. We don’t think it’s the same head. But to some extent, an impaled mannequin head is an impaled mannequin head, right?

The other “Welcome to Somerville” photo I’d like to present is of a unicycle and a two-seat running stroller in front of the Someday Cafe. I think it speaks for itself.

The Someday has come back into favor with us. I had all but given up on it sometime in about 1998 or 1999. I just couldn’t take the grunginess and the awful music (AC/DC, Kiss, etc.) that the omnipresent long-haired baristo insisted on blasting at conversation-imparing levels. Sometime when I wasn’t looking (read: sometime when we lived in Cambridge), the Someday became a stealth Toscanini’s. Toscanini’s as I’ve mentioned before has hands down the best espresso drinks in the Boston area. Plus, now, the Someday sells Tosci’s ice cream. The vibe is different than the vibe of the overt Toscis; it has kind of a wacko grungy unapologetically 90’s vibe, but my own vibe is sort of unapologetically 90’s, and they’ve dropped the metal, so things are very good between me and the Someday.

Also, someday I hope to have a unicycle.

This fantastic gallery reminds me of the kind of things we used to find in the Crawfordsville Goodwill in college. Gallery 2 also features a picture of me when I was young, as well as Terri’s cousin, C. Dexter Wise.

This elector, a Republican mayor, threatens not to vote for Bush, regardless of WV’s popular vote.

Should I rip this?

This story points out that Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, the shop that did the Computer Generated graphics for the Lord of the Rings movies are renting out their massively parallel computing facility, which is the world’s 80th most powerful supercomputer. Tolkien loathed most of the modern world, especially technology and commerce, so I have to wonder how he’d feel about indirectly spawning such a successful and potentially profitable technology project.

This article in the Boston Globe points out that “preppy” is back. Whatever; I endured it once, and I will endure it again. What really knocked me out about this article, though was the name of one of the sources they got to comment on the trend: C. Britt Beemer of America’s Research Group. C. Britt Beemer? That has to be a joke. That could have been the name of the president of the preppy fraternity in Revenge of the Nerds (played by no less than Ted McGinley, the actor perennially added to sitcoms’ casts, as the show entered its twilight seasons). For that matter, it could have been the name of Jamie Gertz’s character in Square Pegs.

The beach be one of the best things we got

From Scientific American: “The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America”