The Gallery of the Absurd features advertisements and products that are just weird.

John Perry thinks like I do and has written a passionate Plea for the Horizontally Organized. He begins by talking about the plight of left-handedness. I’m both left handed and horizontally organized, so I guess this counts double for (or against…) me. There are other light essays on his site as well.

The English newspaper The Guardian has been publishing a cons ice history of the millennium over the last year and a half, covering two years of history per day. Today’s section includes, among mention of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, the introduction of Dr. Who. Full archives are on-line, and the medieval years are highly recommended.

Recently, my office got an ADSL net connection, so I’ve been revisiting all the high-bandwidth sites I had to avoid before (during my coffee breaks, of course). My favorite is My Boot’s Movie Theater and its annex. The theater has several high-caliber movie clips of spoofs, home-videos, and other mostly funny pieces. The annex is a jumping-off point to other worth-while films, such as those offered by TrailerVision (The trailer’s better than the movie, especially when there is no movie.). The theater is just a small part of the whole My Boot site, run by Craig Mitchell of St. Louis. My Boot also includes the entertaining story “She Hates My Futon “, about dating and relationships set in and around St. Louis. If you like what Craig’s done, you can send him an entertaining Alpha-numeric page.

I’ve just had the wonderful experience of repiecing my computer together because windows died in a hard, hard way this morning. I’ve recovered everything but my main email folder now. I talked to Microsoft Customer Support for a good while, because I use Outlook Express. I’m sure I got what I had coming to me for that. Microsoft told me that I may need to uninstall Outlook Express and all of Internet Explorer 5.0 and then redownload and reinstall each component from scratch. The mail file may be unrecoverable, but they suggested that I use Netscape’s mailer to try and read it. Unfortunately, Netscape can’t directly convert Outlook Express 5.0 files, so I may be just out of luck.

The European Space Agency has a successful launching of an Ariane 5 rocket bearing the XMM Telescope. This telescope, named the X-Ray Multi Mirror, could be as important to astronomy as the Hubble Space Telescope (currently inoperational, with the Space Shuttle repair mission delayed yet again). Besides the X-Ray receiver, there are optical instruments on board as well. I do take issue with the following line: with its sensitive cameras it will see infinitely more than any previous X-ray satellite. “Infinite” is a mighty big word to be throwing around, especially in the space sciences.

Poetic language from Randy: Arrived yesterday in Seattle. The skies had parted and let a little bit of the sun through for the arrival. Today, though, the sky has been stitched shut and has resumed its slow leak. This morning, the moss ladened lawns are glistening and spongy to the shoe. They smell like dirt. That is a smell that is lost a majority of the year in the Southwest. There isn’t much like this overcast gloom.

A BBC story about the Cuban Boys’ single featuring the hampster dance. It’s poised to knock off England’s current number one single, a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer set to the music of Auld Lang Syne. I wish I was funny enough to make this stuff up.

In the Orkney Isles of Scotland, archaeologists are studying Mine Howe and its 29 steps that lead “into the bowels of the earth.” Probably thousands of years old, not much is yet known about this chamber, located underneath one of the familiar earthen mounds located across northern Europe. Local surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that the immediate area may be littered with many of these chambers, undisturbed for countless centuries.

From the BBC: One in four Britons would rather be using their computer than having sex and four out of five would rather be using their home computer than eating a portion of chips