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Don’t mind me…

I’m just doing a little dusting. Cleaning up a few cobwebs.

Its been so long since I’ve poked my head into the blog. There’s no particular reason. Just haven’t had much to say.

But I figured I’d stop by to mention a couple of new photos you can find over on my Flickr page. We got some free fabric so I decided to re-cover the dining room chairs. I never really liked the fabric that was on them that much. And after several years, they started to show some wear – mostly thanks to the cat. The fabric isn’t actually upholstery fabric so I ‘m not sure how long it’ll hold up. But it looks good if for no other reason than the fact that it’s new.

I’ll be back shortly to resume some semi-regular posts.

Happy 40th Anniversary, Sesame Street

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. Which is a surprisingly long time. There’s a sort of interesting blog post here on the Baltimore Sun website that takes a peak at the start of the series and encourages folks to pick up and read a copy of a book called “Street Gang” about the history of Sesame Street.

But what’s been getting the most attention are the Google doodles from yesterday and today which feature Big Bird and Cookie Monster. Here’s today’s doodle:

Who wouldn’t want a piece of furniture like this?

Inhabitat » Recycled Bowling Lane Furniture is Right up Our Alley.

This is the coolest idea I’ve seen today. I’d love to have a coffee table made out of a recycled bowling alley. Or maybe a butcher block counter-top or something like that.

Get your jack-o-lantern pics

We’re not exactly breaking new ground on our jack-o-lantern carving here. I guess you could call us traditionalists since we went with the tried and true toothless grin.

There are a couple of other pictures on my Flickr page. Click the image or go to my photo stream from the Flickr widget on the right.

Also, did you know that spraying something like Clorox clean-up with bleach on your pumpkin is guaranteed to keep it looking pretty good up to Halloween night? At least that’s what I heard. Plus, I bet it does a good job of keeping critters out of it.

Anyway, Happy Halloween!

New ways to waste time

A couple of new sites caught my eye over the weekend that I thought you might like to take a look at. And they’re sort of tangentially related (at least I’ll find a way to relate them to each other.)

The first is a Life Magazine photo slideshow called “When Newspapers Mattered.” There are terrific pictures here including some that I hadn’t ever seen before of William Randolph Hearst. You can view the slideshow from this link. I’m particularly fond of the photo of Peter Sellers from his hospital bed. But I guess I also found it interesting that a great magazine like Life that’s no longer in print has this excellent slideshow about newspapers and (in a certain way) about trying to remind people of a time when print media ruled.

So, it was the same sort of feeling I carried over to this new-”ish” blog called Letters of Note. A whole blog dedicated to actual letters. Not e-mails or IMs or cell phone text messages, but actual letters. Some of them are funny. Some are a little disturbing. And plenty of them are recognizable for their historical significance. But my favorites are the ones that make you wonder at what point we stopped being this elegant  and poetic in print with one another and whether or not we’ll ever see that sort of correspondence again. Personally, I doubt it.

The last post about old things

Somewhere on Twitter at some point over the weekend (that’s the problem with Twitter, it’s hard to track things back to the original source) I stumbled on a link to this terrific photography website where the woman behind it has been taking pictures of the oldest living things in the world, hence the title of the portfolio, “Oldest Living Things in the World.”And as you probably guessed, it’s all plants or vegetation of one kind or another. You’ll recognize some of them like one of the sentinel trees in Sequoia National Park, for example, which is approximately 2,200 years old. That’s astounding. A tree that’s been around for more than two thousand years. A living thing more than 2 millennia old. Here’s a link to that pic: http://www.rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/sentinel_2.html.

And here’s the Fortingall Yew in Scotland estimated between 2 and 5 thousand years old: http://www.rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/yew_1.html.

But this is the one that blew my mind…In Utah, there is a colony (that’ll make sense in a moment) of quaking Aspen that are estimated at 80,000 years old. That is not a typo. That’s the actual age. So of course I had to go to wikipedia to find out how the hell any living thing could possibly be 80,000 years old. As it turns out, this colony of trees all grow from a single root system estimated to weigh nearly 6,600 tons. And it’s the root system that’s been around for that long. It’s almost impossible to believe but there you have it. An 80,000 year old tree (or tree roots to be more exact). The wikipedia article, if you’re interested, is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree). Want to know what else was happening 80,000 years ago? I did. You know, for some context. Most anthropologists believe that it was about 80,000 years ago that Homo Sapiens first ventured out of Africa. And around that time, a supervolcanic eruption at Toba Lake in Sumatra nearly brought evolution to a screeching halt. According to some articles I read, it may have reduced the total world population to just around 10,000. We almost didn’t make it out of the Paleolithic! And the last ice age was really only getting going about 80,000 years ago.

All in all, 40 doesn’t seem that bad. If you’re a tree.

Found in one of our southern grocery stores

It may not be as big a deal as it once was, but for all of my Central PA readers, here’s a bit of home found in a Bi-Lo in Matthews, NC. If you’re keeping count, we now have Tastykakes and Turkey Hill Ice Cream. Now if we could only get some real sweet bologna, life would be almost perfect.

Ghost houses

No. This isn’t about one of those ghost hunter shows you can find on SyFy or on TBS. I was fiddling around on Google Maps today, scoping out areas around our neighborhood that might be good locations to make some photographs. Basically, I was looking for run-down barns, old houses, dead-end road types of things. And while I was searching, I was muttering about how I wish Google Maps would get with the program and get some updated images of our neighborhood. The satellite images of our neighborhood are from 5 or 6 years ago. When you search for our exact address, all you get is an empty lot.

But something interesting I noticed while I was browsing the neighborhood were these ghostly house overlays that you can see in the thumbnail above if you click for the larger image. What that means is that somewhere there are some more recent satellite images of the neighborhood but it’s like they’re either overlaid with the older images or they overlay the older images but at a very high opacity.

Things you find while mindlessly browsing

This is one of those things you happen to stumble on while you’re browsing the web with no particular goal in mind. And as is often the case, it turns out to be surprisingly interesting.

This is Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule out of his “Autobiography.” And if you’re interested in reading the whole autobiography, you can download it here from the Project Gutenberg website since it’s in public domain. I found it fascinating because its so simple and elegant and yet you can just imagine that he got a hell of a lot done in his day. What would this look like today with the web and TV and everything else competing for your attention? And isn’t it just a little ironic that I found this rigid schedule while I was mindlessly surfing the web with no goal in mind. While I was doing that, Franklin probably could’ve invented bifocals.

Click the image to view a full-size version.

More great reading

Fans of the Mythbusters and/or Popular Mechanics are going to love this article. It comes with a lot of video and it’s totally worth it to watch all of them cause you get a great backstage look at Jamie Hyneman and M5 Industries.

The Mythbusters’ Guide to Gonzo Engineering (With Video!)