A friend of mine is looking for a house to buy. He found a candidate last night, out in the country. It has its own well since there is no municipal water system out there. He also noticed an industrial site a couple miles away and wondered how that might affect the well water. With a couple mouse clicks over at the EPA, he found out that the industrial site has some major pollution. See how many sites are near your house!

Bob Zmuda remembers when he first saw Andy Kaufman, when Andy did his Elvis impression at the Improv.

World New York pointed me to a fantastic article in the New Statesman. This article warns that we should not fear overpopulation, but instead underpopulation. Sounds strange, but even the UN, who has sounded all sorts of alarms this week, agrees that the world population will soon peak and then plummet. Not from famine, disease, and the “obvious” suspects, but from the fact that women’s rise in society has caused the world birth rate to drop drastically. In much of the industrial world, the birth rate is already too low to sustain current population levels. The developing world is showing the same trend. It’s a very interesting read, and it’s a viewpoint I hadn’t heard expressed before.

The Immanuel Baptist Church has taken the time to draw up a chart explaining what happens when we die.

Arthur C. Clarke, author and prophet (he prefers “extrapolator”) predicts what the next hundred years will bring. The end of the fossil fuel age is just three years away, when household cold-fusion devices become available.

Silly Y2K story: Maine’s State government got its first Y2K surprise months early when owners of 2000 model cars and trucks received titles identifying their new vehicles as “horseless carriages.”

The new season of Space Ghost Coast to Coast started this weekend with some all-out weirdness. But that’s to be expected, of course. You can find a transcript of the episode off Space Ghost’s wonderful official web site.

There’s another Kestrel’s Nest out there: I am a Wife & Mother, Witch & Bard, a Woman & Falcon….

When I first started using the nickname Kestrel some 15 years ago, first in role-playing games and then in the SCA, it was a unique name. When I moved to Georgia, I found there were already two other SCA Kestrels and on-line it’s near impossible to use that as a log-in name anywhere.

I’m quickly becoming a fan of the Public Radio program To the Best of our Knowledge. This show covers a wide range of topics, and has always been worth listening to.

Today’s show was titled “For the Love of Books”, and touched many of the topics that have been the focus of discussion in weblogs lately (see Peterme, Whim & Vinegar, and Bifurcated Rivets).

At AdAge.com, you can find, among other things, reviews of many advertising campaigns.