Here’s a nifty little set of role-playing games set in the worlds of Victorian science fiction, and the stories of E. Nesbit! Also, a quite fab illustrated online Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)!

I’m glad to run across this, from Sarah, 7 October 2002, since I can never remember the site: "For my pal with hugely long legs and the broadest of shoulders (all the better to bear the weight of the world): SeatGURU. They have seat space ratings for lots of airlines and airplanes."
They rate the seats by desirability according to various reasonable criteria, and show the location of power points, enabling me and my fellow traveller to watch Dr Who on my laptop all the way home during our last air trip.

From an ad in the New York Daily Times, January 28, 1854:
“Caution to the Public — Beware of Humbugs and false certificates in favor of quack nostrums, and remember that HOBENSACK’S WORM SYRUP is acknowledged by all to be the most safe an effectual remedy now in use for the removal of worms; and as that is now proven without a shadow of a doubt to be the cause of all disease, no time should be lost by those suffering from weak appetite, giddiness in the head, sickness and sourness of the stomach, in making use of this great remedy…”

Golly, if that’s all it takes to end the epidemic of giddiness of the head! And it makes the second appearance of worm syrup in this publication.

This seems to have been my first posting to the old blog, on 27 August 2002: "I love the train. Especially Trains that tilt. These are similar to, but different from, the Talgo ‘pendular’ trains used on Amtrak for the Seattle-Vancouver and -Portland runs. Hereabouts the tracks suck too bad for them to go anything like 125mph, to say nothing of 140."
Despite the sucky track, the Talgo makes the Portland run in substantially less time than the alternative (3.5 vs 4.5 parsecs) and the return leg on the alternative is always late. And the Talgo has business class, which everybody at my house will be taking not too many hours from now.

From Sarah, 18 August 2002: "Another extremely narrow way to look at the news (one of my current interests), the corrections column of the New York Times."
My favorite part is it doesn’t ask you who the hell you are before letting you see the corrections page.

From Sarah, 22 August 2002: "When you learn a new thing, you see it everywhere. While looking for craft blogs, I found someone’s links to a rec.arts.dance Lead and Follow FAQ. The snippet that was quoted in the blog reinforces my thought that I have much to learn."

In an effort to make the old blog go away, or at least make myself stop checking to see if it’s still there, I’m going to do more reruns from it.
On 18 July 2002, my esteemed co-blogger wrote: "How long will adflip last? They claim fair use on the basis of research for, of all things, goofy vintage ads you can send as ecards. A bit of a stretch. Download all the ads (1940 to today) you need for your own fair use before they get the inevitable cease and desist ecard."
And if somebody wanted to remind me tonight to check to see if my copy of the 1st edition AD&D Player’s Handbook is a true first or merely a first printing, so I can price it according to this guide, I’d be grateful. How grateful, you may ask? Well, it turns out better judgment prevents my saying here; you’ll just have to take your chances.

The Thirteen Treasures of Britain are pretty cool, if excessively practical.

Russell Davies says his new Doctor will have a "modern action heroine" for a sidekick. Which seems to me to miss the point of a sidekick. If your sidekick is too able to take care of herself, you end up requiring badder baddies to create any sense of peril (or you have to make her twist her ankle during the chase scene, or something), and your hero has to get commensurately more powerful, and you end up risking a ridiculous escalation.
I’ll just hope the reporter is not accurately representing Mr Davies’s intent.

Not one, but two fiction books on the subject of synesthesia came out this year, and both are written for teens. A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass and Mondays are Red by Nicola Morgan.