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        11.7.2000/06:57
Ostrich myths.
    11.7.2000/06:55    
Perfect Christmas gift idea for anyone whose head is exposed to danger... or is planning to star in a Monty Python movie.
  11.7.2000/06:50      
Get away from it all.
11.7.2000/06:45        
The entire Bayeux Tapestry, with very good resolution images.
    11.6.2000/21:00    
Sites That Are What Their URLs Say They Are Dept.: www.pinenuts.net.
      11.6.2000/19:50  
Chocolate for a dog? Never! Try one of these instead.
  11.6.2000/06:51      
It's actually raining here this morning. I had almost forgotten what it was like.
        11.6.2000/06:50
Save big! Buy direct!
      11.6.2000/06:45  
Nice squid.
11.5.2000/19:40        
R.I.P.
    11.5.2000/18:00    
Great book! I had never read Ian McEwan before picking up The Innocent this weekend and delving into it for my plane ride home. I don't know whether to be sorry I missed getting around to McEwan before, or glad to just now be discovering that this is an author whose work I will want to continue reading. I hardly noticed the flights home or the moments spent waiting for my connection (I finished the book in the clouds a hundred miles from home). The jacket notes compare him to Waugh, but I would say maybe Waugh flavored with John Banville, though Banville's The Untouchable by far remains my favorite book on WWII/Cold War spooks, betrayals, etc.
        11.5.2000/17:50
Also on my morning walk in Our Nation's Capitol, was delighted to see this fanciful rider's headgear.
  11.5.2000/17:45      
I was in Washington, DC, at the end of last week and over the weekend, serving on an arts panel and staying in the same hotel as I did a year ago for the same purpose, which meant that I had the pleasure on my morning walk of visiting once again this statue of the Ukrainian hero/poet Taras Shevchenko.
        11.2.2000/06:35
Save the Rottweilers.
  11.2.2000/06:30      
Here's the pika from the Animal Pictures Archive.
        11.1.2000/18:45
An index to the music in Warner Bros. cartoons, found via Zoetrope.
11.1.2000/18:25        
I found this to be a particularly nice photo of George W. Bush holding a fish. And here also is a picture of Gore getting his picture taken, although, regrettably, I could not find one of him holding a fish.
      11.1.2000/18:15  
Long-haired Svetlana just may be a great catch for the right man! Let's toast our best wishes with the hopes that good matches can be made on the net...
    11.1.2000/18:10    
Nice group of pix of WWII fighter planes with their pilots, etc.
11.1.2000/07:15        
Yet another Christmas gift suggestion from your helpful friends at Poor Clio.
      11.1.2000/07:10  
The parts of a bat.
        10.31.2000/07:40
Note that there could have been only one choice of background color for the Nader Trader, an election special that lets you have your cake and Ralph it, too.
10.31.2000/07:30        
This sudden last-minute uncertainty over whom California will vote for is great for the TV networks; we'll all have to stay up now until some results come in from there.
  10.31.2000/07:20      
The Useless Knowledge quote of the day is from comedian Joe E. Lewis: "You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough."
      10.30.2000/19:50  
Our Bush-backing friend Patrick Little is not only a loyal Republican, he's a clever one, too; he's encouraging his Democratic friends to splinter off some of the vote by saying, "You look at Gore and you look at Bush, it makes you want to Ralph."
10.30.2000/13:55        
Stormy weather.
        10.30.2000/08:00
Interesting way of making photo links on this page.
  10.29.2000/21:25      
This evening I finished reading Gore Vidal's The Golden Age. Perhaps it betrays my generational myopia, or even pre-generational myopia, that I was very much engaged by the book without developing a desire to read the several other historical novels leading up to it.
I find the 1940s and 1950s compelling, though that of course may be because I was born in 1951, and saw the tail end of the era that began with a depression and ended with, well, the fifties.
Coincidental in timing though not in the rationale for my interest, this weekend and through Halloween, the cable channel American Movie Classics is having its Monsterfest, movies mostly made in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The ones from the Depression era and into WWII are mostly imbued with ancient European (or, in the happy case of the Mummy, ancient Egypt) themes, scenery and faux folklore; while those made near and after the date of my birth concentrate on maliglantly gigantic home over-grown bugs and spiders who owe their threatening freakdom to radiation or isotopes, facing down our fierce force of overarmed military and sleek jets (in the case of the giant tarantula, nothing stops it until an eager defender calls for napalm). Another vein of action has extra-galactic visitors coming to warn us of our doom if we don't control our warring ways, now that we have nuclear weapons. Except for the glacially-paced Hammer set piece remakes of the sixties, I have very little interest in the genre as it developed in my later life, the advance of special effects displacing the gothic and eternal, thus robbing horror movies of anything but reminders of how awful it is to be stabbed or crushed or ground or bled.
The last great horror movie might be William Castle's The Tingler (1959), which I continually remind all who will listen (or read) is the greatest movie ever made, though I wouldn't want to have a decades-dismissing discussion like this without a nod to Tremors, a fairly original idea for something coming along in 1990, and last year's refreshingly low-key Bats.
      10.29.2000/13:10  
This morning Susan and I went for the first time on the new three-mile hiking trail at nearby Lake Fausse Point State Park, where we saw an armadillo dillo-ing in its armor.
  10.29.2000/07:40      
By clouding the minds of others, you can become invisible!