Here's a vision of the future present that appeals to me.  This was drawn in 1910, and shows a futuristic vision of the future in the year 2000.  It's hard to say what I like best about this future.  Is it the fact that they don't have paved roads in the year 2000?  Or is it those crazy motorcycle fairings that look like aerodynamic riot shields?  (Speaking of which, are those guns projecting from the fairings?  Wish I had one of those when I was riding through Romania.)

Of course, you gotta like those motorcycle helmets.  Shiny gold centurion brain buckets, with integrated shades.  Sweet.

And the cherry on top of it all are the swords that the riders are carrying.  Gotta have a back up plan for when that big gun runs out of cannon balls, I guess.  It all just makes so much sense, I can't figure out where we went wrong.

This and more visions of the year 2000 at http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/feuill/index.htm.

Spam is so tediously dull these days, it's rare that I come across one worth commenting on.

But courtesy of Kevin H., a Nigerian-style scam landed on my desk yesterday.  The interesting thing about it, is that it was a snail-mail scam.  It had the usual blah-blah about unclaimed millions in a bank account (in this case the unclaimed estate of a victim of the Madrid train bombing), and it purported to be mailed from a lawyer in Spain, whose name is Denis Dorkry.

The whole thing wouldn't have been worth a second thought, except for the fact that the postmark indicates that the letter cost 78 Eurocents to mail, which is more than a dollar.  The sucker rate would have to be astronomically larger than for email Nigerian-scams for this to pay off.  We can assume, therefore, that the scammers have a hacked postage meter and the post mark is forged.  I wonder what the penalties for mail fraud are in Spain?

A bit of sleuthing turned up a few other tidbits.  First of all, Mr. Dorkry is in fact a lawyer in Spain, and his website is more professional than the scam letter would otherwise suggest.  In the scam letter, he mis-spells his name as "Dorky" at one point, which is (1) funny, and (2) evidence that the author is not, in fact, Mr. Dorkry at all, since we can assume that the real Mr. Dorkry (as the British-trained Barrister that he claims to be) has a lifetime of practice avoiding that unfortunate and embarassing typo.  I also suspect that the real Mr. Dorkry would know how to spell "confidential", among other words that lawyers tend to use from time to time.  So we also have a case of the scammers attempting to steal the Mr. Denis Dorkry's identity.

If I ever need a new hobby, I think it will be urban spelunking.  It reminds me of semi-terrified explorations of the underground tunnels below Van Tech when I was just a punk trying to find the fabled subterranean swimming pool and archery range that were supposed to be down there somewhere, before they got locked away because of some unspeakable accident involving the death of one student or another.  Most of the terror came from virtual certainty that if the boiler room custodian (a giant, balding man who bore an uncanny resemblance to a medieval gaoler or perhaps a torturer) ever caught us, we would be torn limb from limb, brained with his giant crescent wrench, or perhaps even suspended from class.  Terrific article here about the drains of Toronto, but it appears we have a nice little community in Vancouver as well.  No stories about giant medieval gaolers, but apparent the sounds of a subway train passing close by has an uncanny resemblance to the sound of a giant wall of water bearing down the sewer toward you.  The Vancouver site had a fairly creepy anecdote about descending into one sewer in winter, but finding that the manhole cover had frozen securely in place when they tried to get back out.

I have no idea why this sounds fun, but it does.

While I'm posting cool, creative things that other people have done, I might as well include this thought-provoking image of Middle Earth, projected onto Europe with a lowered sea level:

Now, I've been to Transylvania, and it was pretty nice (see top). But then again, it's been several thousand years since Sauron was ruining the neighbourhood, so they've had some time to get over it. Except for that little Dracula thing. And Ceaucescu. Okay, maybe they haven't completely gotten over it. But close.

Here's a nice vid that reminded me of when I once worked in astronomy...

In lieu of being truly creative and writing something, I decided to update the look of Mobu.  It's a work in progress, so there may be some glitches for now.  I'm trying to keep it clean, so at least 50% of the design effort is in simple stuff like font selection and use of white space.  Read more here.

So we've been talking for years about doing some cosmic sword fighting, but we finally got out of our armchairs and made it happen.  It took five black lights, one fog machine, 50 pounds of dry ice, 140 feet of LED xmas lights, some rocking tunes, and a few cases of beer, but by the end of it, we were swashbuckling like radioactive alien lifeforms.

Sadly, the fog machines all choked and were pretty sad at cranking out fog.  The dry ice worked great for about 5 minutes, after which it just froze its water bath solid and refused to make any more fog.  The black lights were awesome, but some experimentation with tape for the blades is in order.  The tapes we used were only so-so at glowing, and when they move really fast they just disappear.  Now, that's not unlike what they do in normal fencing, so it's not a serious problem, but it would definitely be a nice enhancement to have the blades glowing like light sabers.  Perhaps genuine glow-in-the-dark tape instead of just day-glo tape would do the trick.  Clearly a prolonged and expensive research program is called for.

You can see more pics of cosmic fencers here and here.

It's been a while since the last baby-killer episode, but it seems like some of the Africans figured out how to make babies (yum!) and keep the other fish from munching them down like the delicious little bits of sashimi they are.  They must have cleverly hidden the eggs in a crevice that the mean ol' pleco couldn't get his big nasty sucker mouth into, because somehow they hatched.  Since cichlids are mouthbrooders, the babies must have hid out in mom and dad's mouth for a week or two until they just got too big.  And then one day, mom spat them out and they were on their own, and to everyone's surprise, there were a bunch of cute lil' baby africans just cruising everywhere.  They are yellow-pink and striped, so they could be the offspring of Mean Mr. Pink, who has a personality not unlike Saddam Hussein.  I have high hopes for the chaos that will ensue when the babies grow up to be rowdy teenagers.

The most awesome home page on the internet.  (If you're fond of hairy Turkish men, that is...)