Frank Fairfield is totally awesome
Last week, I stumbled into a jam session with Frank Fairfield and other musicians by accident, and blogged a quick iPhone video snapshot. The next day, I started googling and YouTubing and Myspacing to find out more about each of the musicians, and...

Garden Jawa
Bonnie sez, "Measuring close to a foot tall and crafted in durable all-weather resin, the Garden Jawa protects your tomatoes, zucchini, and daffodils from the dark side, armed with a garden tool bandolier, a garden hose, and a thumbs-up attitude....

Garden Jawa
Bonnie sez, "Measuring close to a foot tall and crafted in durable all-weather resin, the Garden Jawa protects your tomatoes, zucchini, and daffodils from the dark side, armed with a garden tool bandolier, a garden hose, and a thumbs-up attitude....

Garden Jawa
Bonnie sez, "Measuring close to a foot tall and crafted in durable all-weather resin, the Garden Jawa protects your tomatoes, zucchini, and daffodils from the dark side, armed with a garden tool bandolier, a garden hose, and a thumbs-up attitude....

Replacing $100K diagnostic chip fab with Shrinky-Dinks and a laser-printer
CCrawford sez, "Michelle Khine couldn't afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem."To test her idea, she whipped up...

China: real-life fashion police crack down on public pajama-wearers
Shanghai will host the World Expo next year, and city officials are preparing for the influx of foreigners with a campaign to ban citizens from wearing their pajamas out in the streets. An article in the Chengdu Business Daily expresses outrage over the...

Google Wave as an RPG environment
Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google's collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game:The few games I'm...

British couple who blogged sailing trip around the world feared captured by Somali pirates
Update: Confirmed, the couple were captured. Their boat is believed to have been spotted.A British couple in their mid-fifties who pretty much live their lives sailing around the world on their boat, "The Lynn Rival," are feared to have been captured...

My Parents Were Awesome
"Before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome." myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com [via Dangerous Minds, thanks Tara McGinley!]

Al Franken kicks eleventy-million kinds of ass in health-care hearing
Watch Senator Al "Kick-Ass" Franken wipe up the floor with this health-care-lobby shill from the Hudson Institute who claimed that universal healthcare would increase medical bankruptcies. This is the perfect mix of being sensible and being...

Al Franken kicks eleventy-million kinds of ass in health-care hearing
Watch Senator Al "Kick-Ass" Franken wipe up the floor with this health-care-lobby shill from the Hudson Institute who claimed that universal healthcare would increase medical bankruptcies. This is the perfect mix of being sensible and being...

Radical Militant Librarian tee
Just ran into a Norwegian librarian at Internet Librarian International in London wearing this killer tee-shirt, created in protest of the PATRIOT Act's provision to force librarians to reveal which books their patrons were checking out. The Latin...

Hallowe'en is safe
On the news that Bobtown, Pennsylvania has outlawed Hallowe'en to "keep kids safe," Lenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy points out that there has never been a single substantiated incident of a kid being sickened, hurt or killed by doctored candy...

All of Mojo Nixon in free, legal MP3 -- US ONLY
Mike sez, "For three weeks only, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering his entire catalog in MP3 format completely free, including his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion."Now there's some good news! There's nothing I don't like about Mojo Nixon. This...

Robert E Howard collection, HEROES IN THE WIND: revisit your heroic past
I was literally raised on Conan stories. My dad was a Conan fan, and when I was a kid, he would spin out half-remembered Conan tales for me on long car trips, changing Conan into a gender-diverse trio called Harry, Larry and Mary, who would vanquish...

Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan: kick-ass young adult steampunk series starts with a bang, a hiss and a clank
Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan is the first volume in one of the most exciting new young adult series to come along since Uglies (or, for that matter, The Borribles). Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are...

IT Crowd comes back for a fourth season!
Bill sez, "Den of Geeks is reporting that 'The IT Crowd' has been green-lit for a fourth season. Details are few and far between, but it looks like Moss, Roy, and Jen will be back for another 6 episodes."Hurrah! What wonderful news!IT Crowd and...