Month: October 2002

“Point-Counterpoint: Wines.”

Nine years ago, James Tiu quit his job as a lawyer to sell vegetarian burritos on the street. Now he uses his legal acumen to advocate for other Washington, DC street vendors.

People build some crazy stuff with LEGOs. There’s the LEGO desk, the LEGO version of M.C. Escher’s “Ascending and Descending,” and, perhaps most amazingly, Henry Lim’s completely functional LEGO harpsichord. (And don’t miss Lim’s 14-foot-long, 6-foot-tall LEGO Stegosaurus.)

SeatGuru.com is a tremendously useful site. It provides precise descriptions of every seat on planes flown by American, Continental, Delta, US Air, and United. An indispensable resource, especially for long flights.

Arts & Letters Daily, one of my favorite sites, is closing. Too bad. The editors, apparently, will now be working with Philosopy and Literature, which seems to be a similar sort of endeavor.

The AP reports: “Montana’s Libertarian candidate for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed would protect him from disease.”

The story about natural blondes becoming extinct within 200 years turns out to be a hoax.

Great Onion this week: “Temp Hides Fun, Fulfilling Life From Rest of Office,” and, best of all, Capt. Ron “Mongoose” Haller declares himself “The ‘Top Gun’ of Commercial Airline Pilots.”

In pressing for an invasion of Iraq–despite protests from virtually all of our allies, the U.N., and much of Congress–is the Bush Administration attempting to implement “Pax Americana”? Is Bush’s coterie trying to achieve world domination? (I guess “Coca-Colonization” hasn’t worked.)

Jakob Nielsen, a renowned Web usability expert, has just published an informative new column: “Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off.” The most important point he makes is that people have emotional connections to email communications, while Web sites are static and impassive. As Nielsen says, “Newsletters feel personal because they arrive in your inbox; you have an ongoing relationship with them. In contrast, websites are things you glance at when you need to get something done or find the answer to a specific question.”