In the staff room right now is one of the armchairs, with a piece of red tape across the arms bearing a sign that reads “SMELLS LIKE BEER.” I love my job.

Close-up magicians are super cool, but the freaks get the chicks. A great article about some guys who can do some cool stuff.

A UK library that’s doing many of the things that US libraries are already doing to meet “customer” needs is calling itself an Idea Store, and the librarians are “Ideas Supervisors.” I guess it’s good to move away from the image of “jerk who makes you pay fines” but I’d rather be the jerk who helps you find stuff instead of having to supervise any damn ideas. I also notice that they have a “cheery” security guard to tell the kids to stop making fart noises. I wonder if parents listen to them more than they do me.

A first-person account of the flu-like scary sickness (currently nicknamed SARS). The CDC is keeping us posted.

Maybe it’s a really bad flu, but it doesn’t look like they think so. Anyway, people are dying, and we’re not sure why. On a purely selfish note, I’m especially disturbed by its presence in BC and GA.

Grauniad cricket journo goes goofy, public reaction mixed. It’s a much accelerated version of that column about balancing work and life, I think.

I was unable to find a more pertinent link for the Betty Crocker recipe cards mentioned earlier. Some may take this to mean that there is a niche open for my collection on the web. Others may point out that Betty Crocker is owned by General Mills and they may not be happy about even a research-oriented web display of their wares. Moral: I am a chicken.

This seems like the kind of project my co-blogger might get into. We already own a complete set of the similar cards produced by Betty Crocker at about the same time.

The FP collective has been advocating the policy of swapping shopper ID/discount cards at every opportunity. This guy has taken that idea in an interesting direction: send him mail, and he’ll send you a sticker to put over the barcode on your Safeway card so that you’re contributing to his shopper record. I’m thinking I’ll do it.

OK, so I’ve decided to allow myself to read a book other than for professional purposes (that is, I’ve decided to read a grown-up-person book), and would like to read one with a more involved narrative than the craft books I’ve been skimming. But now that I set my mind to do it, I’m not sure where to start. Can you help?

Here are some books that I’ve really liked, and keep in mind that you should avoid the kind of book recommendations common with a certain provider of book recommendations (I’ll just call them What Do I Read Next, because that’s their name) that holds that should the hero happen to use a canoe in the book you like, you must be an avid fan of any book involving canoes. I’m much more interested in writing style and ideas than canoes, thank you.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

A Darker Place by Laurie R. King

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

Passage by Connie Willis

Get your artificial hippocampus now. Designed entirely through black-box analysis: “Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals millions of times, until scientists could be sure which input produced a corresponding output.”