Tag: weird
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For unknown reasons, someone in northern Europe is leaving odd gifts for people all over the place - carved stone heads with rhymes taped to them. Each head (face, really) is carved into a large rock, about one foot in height, and from looking at the pictures of the faces they've been finding, they're very well done. Not exactly life-like, mind you (a little stylized), but each is unique and recognizable. So far 13 of them have been left on the doorsteps of random people, and each has been at least 100 miles from the others.
Supposedly, one of Britain's public …
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Back in 2003, a small group of artists in the state of Rhode Island attempted a daring art hack: They snuck into the Providence Place Mall and hid an apartment in a corner of the parking garage as part of a guerilla documentary they were making on mall life. Michael Townsend and his cohorts, from all reports I've been able to dig up, set up a wall of cinderblocks which blended in with the rest of the structure to hide the 750 square foot chamber. A standard utility door allowed entrance and egress. The interior walls were also plastered and …
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Yes, folks, there are televisions bolted to the tops of gas pumps in LA, or at least at the gas stations that my cow-orkers and I visited during our time on the west coast. They're all tuned to local news stations or CNN so that you can keep an eye on your stock prices or the traffic situation in LA while you're gassing up.
I was half-expecting to see a women pushing a baby carriage with a television in it down the sidewalk whilst pumping fuel.
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Depending on whom you talk to, the Voynich Manuscript is either one of the strangest books on the face of the planet, the key to the secrets of the universe, an elaborate puzzle by Dr. John Dee/Abdul al-Hazred/the Comte de Saint Germain/$other_mystical_figure, or a brilliant hoax. The text of the book is utterly incomprehensible - if it's a cypher, it's a damned good one. Many cryptographers and puzzle freaks over the years have tried and failed to decode it, though they've discovered a few interesting things. Current thought has it that the script was created from scratch by …
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Wow.. are there only three days left in 2006?? It feels like time's been flying by faster than even the most sensitive of clocks can account for.
Lyssa and I have been back in DC for about two days now, and it's been a hell of a vacation thus far. On the 26th, while we were still in Pennsylvania, Lyssa spent some time at home with a friend of hers while I trekked back to Pittsburgh to see my family some more, and catch up with some close friends thereof who have gone above and beyond the call of duty …
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EDIT: Google link fixed! Chris, one of my readers, was kind enough to fire over to me a link to Nakamatsu Yoshiro's portfolio of patents, courtesy of Google. There is some fairly mundane stuff in here, like a couple of patents related to golf clubs, a device for increasing the activity of the human brain, and some just plain nifty stuff. I get the feeling that this is only a partial list, because he's reputed to have a couple of thousand under his belt.
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If this guy has even half the brains on the ball as the article says he does, he's a force to be reckoned with. I write of one Nakamatsu Yoshiro, profiled at Brainsturbator (note: relatively safe for work, despite the domain name). He's got over three thousand international patents to his name and is shooting to die at the age of 144, hopefully after he hits his goal of six thousand inventions. Just about everything he does is geared at overclocking his wetware and keeping his mind creative and flexible. He somehow manages to get by on just four hours …
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It's just about the middle of January, and just now has winter come to DC. I don't want to say that it's cold or anything but we've gone from wearing t-shirts and shorts outside to frost on the windows and multiple layers of clothing because the temperature has been below freezing for much of the day. As if that weren't enough, the wind's been cold enough to feel like it's cutting right through you, and the pressure waves of cold air coming off of the Metro trains when they arrive at the station are enough to deaden one's sense of …
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It is now officially the middle of January - so why is it 65 degrees Farenheit and why are there people walking around in shorts and t-shirts? No, seriously, what gives? I'm sitting here in khakis and a polo shirt in downtown DC (wishing that I was working from home because it is, apparently, a holiday and as such 90% of the city has the day off) in a building that's so empty that most of the hallway and office lights weren't even turned on to conserve power. It's a little creepy, actually.
Friday night I wound up staying up late …
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