Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez have created an interactive map of literary road trips, complete with quotes about specific places from the books. If you are so inclined, you could recreate those trips in your own car, making all the pertinent stops along the way. or you could sit at your computer and make it a virtual tour.

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.

And if you haven’t read all twelve of the books, you might want to pick up a new one to enjoy the scenic route. The interactive (and bigger) version of the map is at Atlas Obscura.

In this short by Russian filmmaker Michael Tivikoff, a cute bunny rabbit is sent on a quest to deliver a magical object. You’ve seen that story before, in everything from The Lord of the Rings to The Wizard of Oz to The Forbidden Kingdom. Except this time, the star is a bunny rabbit. That’s different enough.

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Another difference between this and LOTR is that the bunny was smart enough to take the first available flying shortcut. And his reward at the end will tickle you. -via Tastefully Offensive

(Image credit: Google Maps)

The enduring image of the story Gulliver’s Travels is Gulliver tied down while tiny Lilliputians walk over his body. The scene is recreated well at Gulliver’s Park in Valencia, Spain. An enormous likeness of Gulliver serves as a playground for children, who climb over him just like in the book (or movie).

The Gulliver Park is probably the most inspired playground I’ve ever seen. Valencia’s Fallas artists have created a giant replica of Jonathan Swift’s hero in the Turia Riverbed, sprawled out on the ground and bound by ropes. The body is cleverly designed, with Gulliver’s hair and jacket serving as slides, folds in his sleeves and pants becoming stairs, and the ropes which trap him knotted for climbing.

(Image credit: Mike Powell and Juergen Horn)

Mike Powell and Juergen Horn got to see the park up close, and have plenty of photographs so you can get up close to this magnificent sculpture and see how much fun it is for kids.  

A computer geek goes through his entire checklist of things that happen to other people’s computers. He knows it’s something Mom did, so he’s ready to fix it and be a hero to her -again. And then he is hurled into The Twilight Zone. This is the latest comic from Invisible Bread by Justin Boyd. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Took my daughter on an African safari but I won’t let her play on her iPad so I’m an asshole. #assholeparent via @kristenhowerton

Parents get blamed for every problem a kid has. Even when the problem is completely beyond our control. Even when the problem is completely caused by the child. Even when the problem is no problem at all. Parents have a place to vent, on a Tumblr blog called Asshole Parents, which was shared on my private parents group. Our kids are mostly teenagers, but believe me, we came up with a long list of reasons they consider us such. If you’ve ever expected your child to drink his favorite beverage from the wrong cup, you may be an asshole parent, too. There are 181 submissions so far, so first take the short tour by seeing some of my favorites.

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To do yoga, you need to get on the floor. To a dog or cat, a person getting on the floor is an invitation to play, obviously. These people should know better. They should do their yoga in the table! -via Tastefully Offensive

Dan Charles at The Salt was doing research on cottage cheese and was sent this photo of cottage cheese and canned pineapple on a presidential plate. It was the lunch President Richard Nixon ordered just before he resigned from the office. It was never a custom for the White House photographer to take pictures of meals, so you have to wonder what was going through photographer Robert Knudson’s mind at the time.   

The discussion on this meal at Metafilter covers Nixon and his crimes, the best way to eat cottage cheese, and the demise of ordering milk with a meal.

By the way, the original article he was researching is The Fall Of A Dairy Darling: How Cottage Cheese Got Eclipsed By Yogurt. 

(Image credit: Robert Knudson/Nixon Library) 

As the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1989, Russell Guy bought a group of crates from some military officers that turned out to be a treasure. They were intricately-detailed maps of the world, created by Soviet cartographers with the help of government spies.

During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories. They’re the kinds of things that would come in handy if you’re planning a tank invasion. Or an occupation. Things that would be virtually impossible to find out without eyes on the ground.

Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

The maps are a storehouse of not only geography, but intelligence about the places shown. Guy made a business out of them. But he wasn’t the only one to come into possession of such maps. Others, such as John Davies, have spent years studying them. Read about these beautiful and detailed formerly secret maps at Wired. -via Metafilter

I learned a new word today. Recrudescence is “the revival of material or behavior that had previously been stabilized, settled, or diminished.”  It makes plenty of sense as it pertains to this comic from Lunarbaboon. And it also made me a little bittersweet. I have one child wanting to spend all her time with me because she’s leaving for college soon, and another who needs my help finding one for next year. And then there’s my husband, planning all the stuff we’ll do when we’re alone together. 

If you are a fan of Lunarbaboon, you'll want to go to the webcomic site and leave a comment of congratulations on Chris' 500th comic.

Chuck Jones directed more than 200 cartoons for Warner Bros. You watched them over and over: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner, Pepe le Pew. Here we have a chance to see those wonderful characters again and learn about their motivations, personalities, and how they managed to give us so many laughs. There’s a lot more going on than you realized as a child watching cartoons.

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Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) takes a look at how legendary animator Chuck Jones crafted his wacky cartoons. -via Metafilter

A near-complete fossil specimen, including feathers, of a dinosaur in China has been named  Zhenyuanlong suni. It was about five feet long and closely related to Velociraptor.  

Claim to fame: Feathers didn’t evolve for flight. They allowed it. Paleontologists have recognized this since the 1970s, at least, and numerous discoveries of non-flying dinosaurs covered with fluff, bristles, and other types of wispy integument have confirmed that feathers and their forerunners must have had functions outside the aerodynamic realm. Described by Junchang Lü and Stephen Brusatte, the dinosaur Zhenyuanlong adds to that picture with its extravagant coat of feathers.

It’s possible that Zhenyuanlong suni, which scientists believe was flightless, may have evolved from earlier flying creatures. Read more about this unique feathered dinosaur at Lealaps.

(Image credit: Zhao Chuang)

Alfie is taking a walk through a field with his humans. But the grass is high, taller than Alfie! How is he going to find his way around and keep up with his people?

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With an intermittent vertical check to gain his bearings every so often! He looks like a Jack-in-the-box, but it worked for Alfie. -via Arbroath

I had never heard of the Magnus Effect before, but if it explains this weird flying basketball, clue me in! Derek Muller shows us how his buddies threw a basketball off the top of the Gordon Dam in Tasmania to see what would happen. A little backspin made all the difference.

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It turns out that you can do all kinds of things by harnessing the Magnus Effect. Cool! -via Viral Viral Videos

Owners of the Colorado Cherry Company in Lyons, Colorado, got to work on Tuesday morning to find their shop had been broken into. The culprit was not caught by the shop’s surveillance cameras, but from the claw marks it left behind, the perpetrator is assumed to be a bear. A hungry bear. The animal had devoured 24 cherry pies and 14 apple pies. However, he left the frozen pies alone, and did not touch the strawberry-rhubarb pies. The bear has taste. The owners of the shop were able to clean up and open for business the same day. -via HuffPo

(Image credit: Colorado Cherry Company)

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Ethan Scott has been colorblind all his life. Some colors are muted for him, and others he’s never seen -like purple. Then his friends got together and bought him a pair of those new EnChroma glasses that allow colorblind people to see colors. They didn’t tell him what the glasses were for, so we get to see his complete surprise as he discovers what the world is supposed to look like. He gets a little emotional. Contains some NSFW language. -via Viral Viral Videos