In your honour

In honour of the 10,000th visitor, that is.  I’ve changed the look and feel of this site.  I like it!  Hope the feeling’s mutual.

So the question is this:  who was the thousandth?  I figure it was either Scotty or Howard.  Congrats, guys!

Now, Cookie once said something about a carnival.  Well, there are a whole lot of them out there.  I’m gonna have to go think.  A carnival of what?  Blank verse?  I haven’t written much of that lately, but I have  only 750 lines of it to go.

So have at it.  A carnival of blank verse!

Wee-hee!

I gotta thank Scotty for this one

 

 

Forget about donating your body to science after you die. Donate your body to art.Thomas Peipert / AP file

A full-body “plastinate” is displayed at Gunther von Hagens’ “Body Worlds” exhibit in Dallas. The show, which puts real human specimens on display, has been fiercely criticized. Von Hagens, depicted in the background, insists he’s helping viewers understand how their own bodies work.

Well, medical art, that is. Here’s how you do it:

Proto-emoticons

 

September 19th was the 25th anniversary of the invention of the emoticon. Hoo-ha! garyg would have celebrated. The ACSII emoticon, read sideways, was invented, apparently, by a guy named Scott Fahlman.But hey. Didja know that proto-emoticons have been around for more years than have personal computers? I didn’t. I assumed, wrongly, that they were part of the information age. But no:

emoticon-like symbols also turned up from time to time before the age of online communication. Urban legend debunker Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes.com recently found just such a forerunner in the May 1967 issue of Reader’s Digest:

Many people write letters with strong expression in them, but my Aunt Ev is the only person I know who can write a facial expression. Aunt Ev’s expression is a symbol that looks like this: —) It represents her tongue stuck in her cheek. Here’s the way she used it in her last letter: “Your Cousin Vernie is a natural blonde again —) Will Wamsley is the new superintendent over at the factory. Marge Pinkleman says they tried to get her husband to take the job —) but he told them he couldn’t accept less that $12,000 a year —) “

(Reader’s Digest, May 1967, p. 160, citing Ralph Reppert of Baltimore’s Sunday Sun)