1000 Awesome Things

With the world seemingly rushing toward oblivion ('twas ever such), it's good to remember those small things in life that bring a bit of pleasure...you know, those awesome things:

Sleeping with one leg under the covers and one leg out
Placing the last piece of the puzzle
Locking people out of the car and pretending to drive away
The smell of gasoline

These are just four items picked from a wonderful website -- a winner of the 2009 Webby Awards -- that "Launched last year and counting down with a new awesome thing every weekday." As I write this, they've gone from #1000 and are down to #716...Rubbing someone’s newly shaved head.

Read more, and add your own in the comments section, by clicking on the title above. It's awesome!

Mourning the Death of Handwriting

From the upcoming issue of Time magazine.



"I can't remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. In grade school I was one of those insufferable girls who used pink pencils and dotted their i's with little circles. I experimented with different scripts, and for a brief period I even took the time to make two-story a's, with the fancy overhang used in most fonts (including this magazine's). But everything I wrote, I wrote in print. I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting."

Click the title to read the entire article.

Twibes fountain pen 'poem'

The founder of Twibes, a Twitter application, asked me to submit something on their new blog about the Fountain-pens Twibe I started recently.



If you're interested in joining the Fountain-pens Twibe, where you can share Twitter tweets with other collectors, please go to twib.es/6NP or here.

LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites

"NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions' lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon's surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules' locations evident.



The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks."

See the other sites by clicking on the title bar.

Bob Dylan show at Coca-Cola Stadium, Allentown, PA

Here's the set list from last night's Bob Dylan concert at Coca Cola Stadium, here in Allentown:

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
Rollin' And Tumblin'
Spirit On The Water
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
Workingman's Blues #2
Honest With Me
If You Ever Go To Houston
Highway 61 Revisited
Ain't Talkin'
Thunder On The Mountain
Like A Rolling Stone
Jolene
All Along The Watchtower

The concert opened with sets by the Wiyos, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp...and then the Master.


Some of the crowd at the concert

TEAM DYLAN -- Bob comes to visit me in Allentown

I think I got the first ticket.

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

The Art of Letter Writing

Another terrific piece from the wonderful 'The Art of Manliness' website.



The Art of Letter Writing | The Art of Manliness

Maisie's pool

What an inspiring woman!


Watch CBS Videos Online

Young girl yodels

The lost NASA tapes: Restoring lunar images after 40 years in the vault

The lost NASA tapes: Restoring lunar images after 40 years in the vault


"Liquid nitrogen, vegetable steamers, Macintosh workstations and old, refrigerator-size tape drives. These are just some of the tools a new breed of Space Age archeologists is using to sift through the digital debris from the early days of NASA, mining the information in ways unimaginable when it was first gathered four decades ago."


Orbiter image from 1966, and, below, after modern processing of the original data.