Reprinted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Fast-Acting Long-Lasting. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ..." wrote Charles Dickens, whose life was a rich mixture of all of the above. Here are the 8 odd facts about the novelist: WHAT THE DICKENS? Charles Dickens was the first literary superstar - his popular works reached a wider audience than any writer before him. With classics like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield, Dickens dominated the literary life of 19th-century England and the United States. But like many remarkable people, Dickens was a complex, multi-layered individual, full of peculiar quirks and odd habits. • OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE. Dickens was preoccupied with looking in the mirror and combing his hair - he did it hundreds of times a day. He rearranged furniture in his home - if it wasn't in the exact "correct" position, he couldn't concentrate. Obsessed with magnetic fields, Dickens made sure that every bed he slept in was aligned north-south. He had to touch certain objects three times for luck. He was obsessed with the need for tidiness, often cleaning other homes as well as his own. • NICKNAME-IAC. Just as some of his most endearing characters had odd nicknames (like Pip in Great Expectations), Dickens gave every one of his ten children nicknames like "Skittles" and "Plorn." • EPILEPTIC. Dickens suffered from epilepsy and made some of his characters - like Oliver Twist's brother - epileptics. Modern doctors are amazed at the medical accuracy of his descriptions of this malady. • PRACTICAL JOKER. Dicken's study had a secret door designed to look like a bookcase. The shelves were full of fake books with witty titles, such as Noah's Arkitecture and a nine-volume set titled Cat's Lives. One of his favorites was a multi-volume series called The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, dealing with subjects like ignorance, superstition, disease, and instruments of torture, and a companion book titled The Virtues of Our Ancestors, which was so narrow that the title had to be printed vertically. • EGOMANIAC. Dickens often referred to himself as "the Sparkler of Albion," favorably comparing himself to Shakespeare's nickname, "the Bard of Avon." (Albion is an archaic name for England.) • FAIR-WEATHER FRIEND. Hans Christian Andersen was Dicken's close friend and mutual influence. Andersen even dedicated his book Poet's Day Dream to Dickens in 1853. But this didn't stop Dickens from letting Andersen know when he'd overstayed his welcome at Dickens's home. He printed a sign and left it on Andersen's mirror in the guest room. It read: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks, which seemed to the family like AGES." • MESMERIST. Dickens was a devotee of mesmerism, a system of healing through hypnotism. He practiced it on his hypochondriac wife and his children, and claimed to have healed several friends and associates. • CLIFF-HANGER. When The Old Curiosity Shop was published in serial form in 1841, readers all over Britain and the United States followed the progress of the heroine, Little Nell, with the same fervor that audiences today follow Harry Potter. When the ship carrying the last installment approached the dock in New York, 6,000 impatient fans onshore called out to the sailors, "Does Little Nell die?" (They yelled back that ... uh-oh, we're out of room.) |
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Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Memorial Day is more than just a 3 day weekend and the (unofficial) start of summer. Our pal mental_floss has a neat article explaining how Memorial Day came to be:
Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War, in which some 620,000 soldiers on both sides died. The loss of life and its effect on communities throughout the North and South led to spontaneous commemorations of the dead:
• In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pa., put flowers on the graves of their dead from the just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Miss., cemetery.
• In April 1866, women from Columbus, Miss., laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. It was recognized at the time as an act of healing sectional wounds. In the same month, up in Carbondale, Ill., 219 Civil War veterans marched through town in memory of the fallen to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Union hero Maj. Gen. John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance.
• Waterloo, N.Y., began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. Although many towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as the “birthplace of Memorial Day.”
Happy Memorial Day, everyone!
The Internet is an incredible productivity tool, according to Mike Elgan of InternetNews. It's filled with unprecedented information and communication, not to mention wonderful productivity blogs like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Web Worker Daily, and so on.
Then there's the likes of Neatorama:
And then along comes YouTube, the agent of our destruction. And FaceBook. And BoingBoing. And Slashdot. And Digg. And Fark, the Drudge Report, Neatorama, Apple's Movie Trailers page, eBay, Flickr -- (I get paid by the word, so I'll just keep going) -- Break.com, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon.com. Google, for crying out loud. [...]
Whenever we've got something boring, unappealing or difficult to do, we know that passive, easy, fun, interesting and compelling content is just a click away.
The Internet is an incredible productivity tool that offers unprecedented access to information and communication with others. But it's also distracting. Really distracting. More alarmingly, it's getting increasingly distracting every day.
Here's an article by Mike Elgan about how to deal with "the distraction virus" that is Teh Interweb: Link
(There's no cure for Neatorama though, mwuahahahaha!)
Think that gasoline is expensive at $4 a gallon? Maybe, but apparently that price point isn't high enough to make Americans change their usual day-to-day driving habit:
If oil hits $200 a barrel, which is the upper end of Goldman Sach's prediction for prices over the next six months to two years, the gasoline picture changes quite dramatically. At $200 a barrel, crude alone would cost $4.76 a gallon. Add on the costs of refining and distributing as well as taxes, and pump prices could rise to a range of $6 to $7 a gallon.
U.S. drivers haven't radically changed their behavior, and it is unclear at what price it becomes unprofitable for Americans to go about their usual day-to-day activities, said Eric DeGesero, executive vice president of the Fuel Merchants Association of New Jersey.
"Maybe at $6 or $7 a gallon, it becomes less attractive to go to work," Mr. DeGesero said. "We haven't hit that point yet, but we might soon."
Previously on Neatorama: Gas Prices: How High is TOO High?
Some car dealership offers free oil changes, some offer cash rebate, but not Max Motors: they offer a free handgun with every vehicle sold (or a gas card, but so far almost all have chosen the firearm) ...
Owner Mark Muller said: "We're just damn glad to live in a free country where you can have a gun if you want to."
The dealership sells new and old vehicles, including General Motors and Ford cars and trucks, and its logo shows a cowboy holding a pistol.
It has sold more than 30 cars and trucks in the past three days, an increase which the owners put down to their promotional offer.
Mr Muller said that every buyer so far "except one guy from Canada and one old guy" chose the gun, rather than the gas card. (Source)
Links: BBC Article | Max Motors website
Meet the original Indiana Jones, a small and weasel-faced Nazi archaeologist named Otto Rahn that served as inspiration for Spielberg's hero.
And just like the fictional Indiana Jones, Otto was on a quest to find the Holy Grail:
Very little is certain in the short life of Otto Rahn. But one of the few things one can with any confidence say about him is that he looked nothing like Harrison Ford. Yet Rahn, small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick, undoubtedly served as inspiration for Ford's most famous role, Indiana Jones.
Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ's blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn's obsession ended up costing him his life.
However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that - if it ever existed - had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.
I'm a big fan of Nick Kim's Nearing Zero science cartoons (blogged about 'em on Neatorama way back in 2006), so it's a neat treat to find that he's put all of his best cartoons (over 100!) in one page: Link
"Leftovers make you feel good twice. First, when you put it away, you feel thrifty and intelligent: 'I'm saving food!' Then a month later when blue hair is growing out of the ham, and you throw it away, you feel really intelligent: 'I'm saving my life!'"
- George Carlin, comedian
Let's see if YOU can figure out the lyrics!
Update 2/10/10 - New YouTube embeds as Nick had converted his old ones to private viewing only.
Design studio Transparent House has a neat new way of dressing up stark industrial bare concrete floors. Supposedly their floral patterns can be applied to both newly poured floor and that where the concrete is already set.
No details on their website, so I'm guessing it's some sort of a sandblasting or acid-etching technique. http://www.transparenthouse.com/main/#/en/2/7/104/354/ [Flash, click on Portfolio, then Industrial Design if you don't see it at first] - via RuebenMiller
With the help of a GPS device and DHL, Erik Nordenankar created the biggest drawing in the world: a self-portrait in a planetary etch-a-sketch scale measuring approximately 40,000 km2!
17th of March 2008, I sent away a briefcase containing a GPS device with the express transportation company DHL. I gave them exact travel instructions, where to go an in what order. 55 days later the briefcase returned to Stockholm. The GPS automatically recorded the briefcase's journey around the world. The information was downloaded to my computer and gave me my drawing. Due to the GPS drawing technique and the magnitude of the drawing, the self portrait has to be made in only one stroke. That giant stroke passed through 6 continents and 62 countries, thus becoming 110 664 km long.
Now, fake or not (kind of hard to believe a DHL plane making those curly flight paths for the hair and so forth), it's still a cool idea! :)
Update 5/28/08 - The designer had confessed that it was all a hoax:DHL confirmed to the Telegraph that the artwork was an "entirely fictional project". A spokeswoman said they had allowed him to film in their Stockholm warehouse as part of a college project.
Link
The Whizzinator is a fake penis urinating device to defeat drug tests.
The device comes complete with dried synthetic urine, heater pack (so the urine will be body temp) and a realistic prosthetic penis in several skin tones including white, tan, latino, brown, and black. (Source)
So, what do you see in the LEGO Rorschach above? More by Shannon Ocean at MOCpages here: Link - via The Brothers Brick
Behold Naho Matsuno's Cube 6. It's a set of stools impossibly packed into one Borg-like cube. (Now this is the guy to call when you have to pack your suitcase or something!) http://www.nahomatsuno.com/cube6.html - via Yanko Design