Boo!

The scariest books of all time on CNN. – I vote for the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is my favourite story by Poe and a classic. I found The Tell-Tale Heart online, in case you want to read it. (Here is another, more scary-looking version with horrible sound – or is it music?)

I would recommend listening to the story even more than reading it. Here is a real audio version of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, but since I don’t have a real audio player installed, I couldn’t test it.

Link via Sheila.

Big brother is watching you…

Die Big Brother Awards “soll missbräuchlichen Gebrauch von Technik und Informationen aufzeigen und so zu ihrer Akzeptanz beitragen.”

Unter den Ausgezeichneten 2000: die Payback-Karte, Bahnchef Mehdorn, Mailanbieter GMX und das Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln.

Die Big-Brother-Awards sind ein Cousin der Big Brother Awards USA/Kanada; weitere Awards gibt es in Großbritannien, Österreich und der Schweiz.

Hör mal wer da hämmert

That’s the German title for ‘Tim Allen’s Home Improvement’.

Garret and Sandra are getting excited about their house, and Garret is thinking about woodwork so much he fears his blog “may turn into a santa fe version of tim allen’s ‘home improvement’ …”

Hey, Garret, I wouldn’t mind at all! I used to watch ‘Home Improvement’ a couple of years ago (when I still had a TV set).

Today’s Sunset

More good news

Hey, Christopher came home from the hospital! Good to hear he’s better.

Finally!

Okay, I’m veeery late on this. But still – congratulations, Susan, on the release of ‘Bryce 4’! What a happy day!

Gefunden

Die Referrer logs sind schon was Interessantes. Fand ich da doch einen Besucher, der von http://blah.blah.de/ronsens/ gekommen ist. Und was finde ich auf ronsens? Einen Link zu mir. Okay, das war nicht so überraschend, aber ich fand dort auch jede Menge Lego-Links!

Leider hat die Site ja überhaupt nicht meine Neugier hinsichtlich der Autorin oder des Autors befriedigt. Kein Link zu sehen… Wer bist Du?

Lego links

Legopolis online – “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a minifig…”

This is just too cute. The site has everything for the daily life in Legopolis, even an online flower shop – which of course sends Lego flowers!

Be sure to visit the Legopolis Museum of Science’s Dead Dino Exhibit

The Minifig Museum of Modern Art is also pretty neat.

Links via ronsens (German site).

Happy Birthday!

I just read on dangerous meta that it’s Sandra’s birthday today…

Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Sandra!

Coke is evil-discussion

Garret posted another message today and asks:

“art laffer is a questionable source for information, imho. it’s his ‘laffer curve’ that got us into deficits in the first place. [i wonder, if the curmudgeon is reading this, if he could tell us what the rep for laffer currently is amongst scholars. the american economic association, at the time of reagan’s election, had very few proponents of supply-side theory. very few. i wonder how many currently are supply-side converts?] “

John, if you are reading this and could help out, we would be most grateful!

Tad Williams

Tonight, André and I are going to see – and listen to – Tad Williams (deutsche Site), author of Otherland, the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy and several other books. He’s one of my favorite authors, so I’m looking very forward to tonight. He is going to read from his latest book, Montain of Black Glass, the third part of ‘Otherland’. The book has recently been released in German, but of course we bought it in English last fall while in the USA.

Since reading it, I’ve been waiting for the fourth and last part… (I’ve written about his books here (deutsche Version).

Here are two interviews with Tad Williams:

• SF Site: A conversation with Tad Williams, August 1999.
• SFFWorld.com: Interview with Tad Williams, October 1999.

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database is ten years old this month (on October 17th)!

Ich habe auf IMDb auch einen Link zur deutschen IMDb-Site gefunden, aber da scheint was nicht zu stimmen, denn die Texte sind alle auf Englisch, nur eine deutsche Bannerwerbung konnte ich entdecken…

Lego links

The Schockwellenreiter had a ton of links for me last night!

The Matrix (Matrix on IMBb), Monty Python’s Holy Grail (Holy Grail on IMDb), and music album covers, all done with minifigs! They’re really cool!

Mathematics

Ever needed the first 5 million digits of the square root of two? Look them up!. (Only 4.8 MB…)

Link via Schockwellenreiter.

Feeling better

Both Christopher and Scott are feeling better, says Scott. He posted a photo of Christopher wearing the hairnet and waving his hand, as if to say: “Don’t worry, folks, I will be back home soon!”

Hungry?

I’m just eating — um, reading my way through the Edible Journey through China. Very interesting site!

Link via Al on VanEats.

Need translations?

Take a look at YourDictionary.Com. The site has lots and lots of links to dictionaries for lots and lots of languages. Very useful!

Link via /usr/bin/girl.

Oh, and I just found another useful language-related link there: Common Errors in English. The author, Paul Brians, has links to pages about English as a second language: Curricular Resources in English as a Second Language and English as a 2nd Language (About.com).

Sechs Monate

Der Schockwellenreiter feiert heute halbjähriges Weblog-Jubiläum! Gratulation auch von mir!

More discussion

The Coke is evil discussion about politics in the USA continues…

Quiz
Answers to the questions I posed yesterday:

Do you know what a ‘Baker’s dozen’ is? – Thirteen.

Or who sang ‘Tainted Love’? – ‘Soft Cell’.

The name of the band Annie Lennox sang with before the ‘Eurythmics’? – The Tourists.

Which town’s football team is called ‘toffee makers’? – Everton, Liverpool.

What is celebrated on November 5th? – Guy Fawkes Day.

How many balls in a ‘cricket over’? – Six.

How many airports does Belfast have? – Two.

In which town is the Grand national horse race? – Aintree, Liverpool.

At the ‘Fiddler’s’

Yay, it was quiz day at the Fiddler’s. They handed a sheet with 25 questions out to every table, and the one with the most correct answers won 5 (imperial) pints of beverages. We were second best with 16 out of 25 points and won 2 pints. That was half a pint for each of the five of us.

The questions were all about Ireland or Great Britain, except for one that was meant to confuse people, I think: ‘Where was Beethoven born?’ – Even I knew he was born in Bonn, although I’ve only been living here for a couple of years.

The other questions were more difficult. Do you know what a ‘Baker’s dozen’ is? Or who sang ‘Tainted Love’? The name of the band Annie Lennox sang with before the ‘Eurythmics’? Which town’s football team is called ‘toffee makers’? What is celebrated on November 5th? How many balls in a ‘cricket over’? How many airports does Belfast have? In which town is the Grand national horse race?

Correct answers tomorrow, if I can still remember them then, heehee.

Found it?

Garret mentions that he and Sandra seem to have found a house. Good luck!

Silly Putty

And once again, I found a Silly Putty related link: Silicone Bouncing Putty on the web. It seems the owner is a serious Silly Putty fan because he has advice on how to order large amounts of Silicone Putty, 100 pounds and up! It seems they use a different kind of Putty than the one that comes in those little eggs.

Redesign

Whenever I go over to View from the Heart these days, I am surprised by a new theme. I’m curious about that new design Al mentioned the other day.

Slow day

Oh, what a slow day. I don’t seem to get anything done. No math, nothing to post on the weblog, nothing else.

Tonight, André and I will meet with some friends we haven’t seen in a while at the Fiddler’s. So the day will at least not be completely wasted.

Lost a sock?

“Where do all those lost socks go? Sock-eating dryers? Alien abduction? Runaway socks hitting the road and living on the streets? – Look in your sock drawer and drag out those socks for which you’ve lost the match. In all likelihood, your socks have ended up in…

The Land of Lost Socks“

The Coke is evil discussion continues…

Banana Bread

Rick Saenz teases me again with pictures of his daughter baking banana bread. It looks delicious!

Not long ago, I had to save a bunch of bananas from getting brown and not being eaten, so I made banana bread of them. Here’s my recipe.

All this food talk makes me hungry. I think it’s time for dinner! We’re having Sauerkraut-Auflauf today. (I think Auflauf is casserole in English.) No, it’s not a typical German recipe, but Hungarian. André made it, so I’m sure it will be very good! Guten Appetit!

Africa

Craig says he wants to go to Africa one day, and links to The Africa Guide. It has, among lots of interesting information, great photo galleries with an overview page with thumbnails. Choose between wildlife, places and scenery and people.

Another great source is African Vacation, which seems to be about Kenya only, but is a good resource nevertheless. Africa Online also has a section on travel in Kenya.

The Great Outdoor Recreation Pages have info on adventure travels all over the world, including Africa.

In 1995, I spent four weeks in Kenya and Tanzania. In Kenya, I went on a seven-day safari and visited the Masai Mara (see also here), the Northern extension of the famous Serengeti, Lake Nakuru (another page) and Samburu National Parks and saw all kinds of wildlife, from Dik Diks to leopards. (The Kenya Wildlife Service has a website, too.) In Tanzania, I visited the Ngorongoro Crater (picture gallery), Lake Manyara (see also here) and Tarangire (see also here) National Parks. In the Masai Mara I’ve seen the migration of thousands and thousands of zebras and wildebeest, and have been a fan of zebras ever since. The photo shows a Grevy zebra and was taken in Samburu on September 10th, 1995.

Here’s a site on Kenyan History and one about regional museums in Kenya.

I have about 500 slides from the trip, so I guess one day, when I have a lot of time to spare, I’m going to get a PhotoCD made and post some of the photos here…