The gap in posts for the last many days is a good indicator that I pretty much only post from work. Here’s a cool interview with the armorer for the Lord of the Rings films. Neat!

Tapeworm birth-control: “It’s all right, honey; I’m taking my parasite every day.” An interesting twist with this one is that it works for men or women. I’ll have to ask my contraceptive experts if they know anything about this.

Oh, dear. Nothing I say can prepare you for Middle-Earth rap.

Another BBC story, this one about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and its forthcoming adaptations. It’s a much better work than the Harry Potter stuff, and far more subversive. I’m glad to see that “There has also been opposition amongst the religious right in the US. But it has not stopped Pullman’s books selling over three million copies in America.”

Thermoacoustic refrigeration from the BBC. My favorite nugget of trivia is pretty far down in the story: “Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person’s hair to catch fire…” Since that’s 30,000+ times the pain threshold, I imagine there would be other ill effects, as well.

This just in, I’m gonna be union! Further news as it develops.

Thrift + Craft = thriftdeluxe!

I’m at one of those places in life where almost every song seems SIGNIFICANT and MEANINGFUL. Yes, I’m turning into a teenager again. So far my top hits are “No Such Thing” by John Mayer and “Giant Step” as sung by Taj Mahal. If I take notes, I could make a mix CD to commemorate my inner turmoil.

If your trip is more about the destination than the voyage, there are some pretty good deals available at Travelocity. You have to book by December 12, travel by April 4, 21-day advance purchase, and travel only on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday; but the round-trip fares to popular (for some definition of popular) destinations are down around $200. Y’know, for when you know 21 days in advance that you’re really going to want a Saturday-Tuesday break.

This article showed up on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to. I have mixed feelings (so what else is new?) about the state of “personalization technologies.” The existence of those profiles seems like a dream come true for the Total Information Awareness people (does your TiVo think you’re a terrorist? You aren’t the only one), despite the fact that they are clearly not all that useful for drawing conclusions about the profiled people. Or maybe the people complaining are just in denial.

My chosen on-line shopping site (buy.com) offers such recommendations as “People who bought Malcolm in the Middle also bought Big Fat Liar,” but they either don’t base their promotional mail on their customers’ purchasing history or their algorithms suck, since I keep being surprised every time a new MST3K shows up at Silver Platters.