Wandering the Web

We went to the West Texas Food Bank’s fundraiser last night, partaking of food from a variety of restaurants (including red curry buffalo from Zucchi’s), watching (but not participating) in a sometimes listless auction of goods ranging from a rocking chair to a telescope, and listening to the current incarnation of The Lovin’ Spoonful. And as Jerry Yester crooned the lyrics of Younger Girl (“…and the younger girl keeps rollin’ ‘cross my mind…”), I couldn’t help thinking of the unfortunate coincidence of Roman Polanski’s long-overdue arrest. I doubt that’s the association the band wanted to create.

Anyway….

• What do you get when you cross a sculptor with a taxidermist and mix in a bit of steampunk? Why, Lisa Black, of course. Her creations are simultaneously disturbing and fascinating.
• I know that riding a recumbent already puts me squarely in the category of ubër-geeky, subcategory human-powered-vehicles, but I’m pretty sure that I’m still not willing to rock this:

It’s a heads-up navigational display designed for use with an iPhone, featuring a little flip-down eyepiece via which your route is projected in real-time/real-space. I confess to being taken with the concept, but in reality I pretty much never ride in unfamiliar places. Then there’s the idea of strapping a fragile device costing $600 onto something that’s designed to banged about with great force.

• I haven’t been on the Google Books website much, but if I was going to commit large chunks of my discretionary time there, most of it would land on the collection of the entire library of Life Magazine in its weekly incarnation (1935-1972). The ads alone in the old editions are priceless. (But I have to confess that I had no idea that Life discontinued weekly publication in 1972. Where do the decades go?) (H/T Kung Fu Grippe)
• The publishing world just got a lot scarier, with Sony’s announcement that it’s opening its e-Book reader to self-published authors. That means that I can, theoretically, add  “The Best of the Fire Ant Gazette” to the mix (if there was a “best of” to begin with). Sony says it will vet submissions only for hate speech, plagiarism, improper formatting or public-domain books offered by another other than the legitimate author. They say nothing about quality, so I’m golden.Talk about abusing the Long Tail…