Belgium, Man, BELGIUM

Here's an excellent, if not exactly newsy, obituary of Allen Walker Read, a philologist and lexicographer looking for the origins of, well, you'll find out...

Thanks to Foxy Roxy for the link.

And while we're on the subject of death notices, also worth checking out is the Association of International Obituarists' site. There's information on their upcoming conference and links to obituaries of notable people from Strom Thurmond's babysitter to a Case Western Reserve reference librarian who organized his memoirs by subject.

Hi-YAH

Happy Birthday to Jet Li!

Duct Tape Fashions!

Stuck at Prom 2003
Originally uploaded by Miss Quizzy.

The Duck Tape brand of duct tape sponsors an annual contest where students make and wear prom outfits out of duct tape. The winners get $2500 college scholarships. The outfits, as one might imagine, are at once insanely ugly and insanely creative. Here are the most recent winners and runners up. And here are the also rans.

A View from the Other Side of the Knife

If only I were made of sterner stuff, I would be all over this site. As it is, just typing this makes me queasy. MedlinePlus has posted videos of actual surgical procedures in the following categories:

Bones, Joints, and Muscles (back, knees, hips)
Brain and Nervous System (includes epilepsy)
Cancers (lung, prostate)
Digestive System (gastric bypass)
Heart and Circulation (aneurysms, heart failure, heart surgery, etc.)
Women's Health (hysterectomy, uterine fibroids)

Thanks to the NLM and the NIH for providing this great service to voyeurs with strong stomachs everywhere. (And for the rest of us, an easy to understand encyclopedia of medical problems, a medical dictionary, and a directory of medical resources, among other information.)

link from lii

And Now, a Word from Our Sponsor

Who says databases have to be boring, or that special collections just means elderly books? For a blast from the past, ad-wise, check out this browsable and searchable database of over 7,000 print ads from 1911–1955 courtesy of Duke University Special Collections Library.

Cool Pix of Cool Houses

This website is from L.A. Obscura: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman, a 1998 exhibition at USC. There is a small gallery of his pictures of homes around LA, but the very coolest picture to my mind is the one you see here, which maddeningly, is not identified. But what a spiral, eh?

Talk Nerdy to Me

Some very clever MIT students built a light-up disco dance floor for their dorm lounge a la Saturday Night Fever, only much cooler and a lot more complicated (smaller squares, computer controlled, multiple shades of purple...). This site explains it all, and it is all great--the video, the how-we-did-it diary, the FAQs, the geek-love feeling it gives me.

I want one for my hallway!

Baby Birdies!

The falcon chicks have hatched! Check out the nest cam to see them do their chick-y thing. Right now (6.56 pm) they are being fed--very exciting!

Crazy Whistling Songs Site Leads to Resurrection of Wacky Internet Movie

After posting yesterday's aural day brightener, I decided to look more closely at the site where I found it. Turns out that the site is called The Online Guide to Whistling Records. That's right, a whole site devoted to recordings of people (and birds!) whistling along to music.

It turns out that Brother Bones recorded a bunch of other fun songs, which you can listen to here. One of which, Ja-Da, turns out to be the same song as was sung in Swedish and used in my all-time favorite weird internet movie, which I thought was lost to me forever. But now thanks to Brother Bones I found it! Margaret Thatcher, bunnies, people singing in Swedish to banjo accompaniment, crummy animation, and the music of Rammstein, what more could you want?

Go Globetrotters!

Need an aural day brightener? Click here!

Youth Wants to Know...

... Is a pair of twins two or four persons????

That question has been needling this youth and a few of her youthful companions ever since a fateful visit to the old facts section of the reference department. Here I encountered George W. Stimpson's fantastic and fantastically random 1928 book Nuggets of Knowledge. The entry on the aforementioned question caught my eye, but I was so dazzled by all the other nifty nuggets (such as "If a tree should fall in a forest thousands of miles from any living creature, would any sound be produced?" and "Why does a salute consist of twenty-one guns" which, oddly, are the nuggets that precede and follow the twins question), that I didn't bother to actually read the entry. So, for those of you who have been losing sleep over this burning question, here is his answer:

Is a pair of twins two or four persons?

The word twin as a singular noun is generally defined as "one of two children or young brought forth and birth." The plural form twins is defined as "two children or young brought forth at one birth." Logically speaking, then, a pair of twins ought to mean four children. But it does not and never did. Nobody uses the expression to mean more than two. When a speaker or writer employs the phrase pair of twins he invariably means exactly what he would mean if he said merely twins. "Mrs. Jones has a pair of twins" and "Mrs. Jones has twins" are identical in meaning. Since the word pair adds nothing to the sense, why not say simply twins? It cannot be questioned, however, that pair of twins for twins is widely used in popular speech and has some literary support.

So, basically, a pair of twins is like a pair of pants.

What's in a Name?

The Baby Name Voyager has got to be one of the coolest ways to view statistics that I have ever seen. You type in a name and the site charts the popularity of that name throughout the decades of the last century by using data from the Social Security Administration. Type in a root and you see all the different forms of the name. I find this endlessly fascinating and could spend a lot of time typing in the names of everyone I've ever known.

My name was ranked 580 for girls in the 60s, but by the 90s was ranked 28. I am obviously a trend setter. How does your name rank?

Corn? When Did I Have Corn?

As a public service to the corn lover(s) in my life, here are two corny links courtesy of lii: The Story of Corn and National Cornbread Festival Home Page.