Read Patrick Combs' tale of depositing - and clearing - a $95K junk mail check.

The American Scholar has an interesting piece regarding the science behind Moby Dick, specifically the buoyancy of the whale.

The New York Times undertook an unscientific of three major libraries, in London, New York and Paris; all of them underwent an overhaul of their facilities in the past year. The results are interesting for library buffs. [auth. required]

I have to say, you'd think that a company as technologically savvy as Ameritech would be able to get the year correct...

The Guardian has launched a new portalesque website, News Unlimited. Yes, it requires registration, but It's worth checking out, particularly if you're a generally anglophilic stateside reader...

Found on Barger's page: the Chicago Blizzard 99 Web Cam. Yes, it is quite cold here....

Pick Listening of this past week is probably the eponymous Lucinda Williams album. Originally released on Rough Trade (rip), it's been reissued by Koch International, and though not a 'nice-price' record, it's certainly worth every penny.

Of great delight is the increasingly more useful CDDB. Using a compatible CD App, you can connect to the CDDB to download full track information in a relative heartbeat. Sure, it's only vaguely necessary, but it's nice to be able to do.

Want to keep track of your Mac Software versions? Don't forget (as I did) about the Version Tracker web site.

The past week's New Yorker (the Fiction issue) has a typical, and thus fascinating, review of Nabokov's Speak Memory by none other than Nabokov himself. In a way, it's a one-off, but when the one-off is created with such talent, it becomes somewhat more...

Anne hastens to point out one of her favorite sites, the Cosmetic Connection. Perhaps it removes a bit of the mystery, but it's no skin off my nose... so to speak.

For an interesting, if not necessarily 100 percent applicable, look at how one might store and display site configuration data, check out the Web Design - MetaGrrl pages.

Some interesting insights on design in an online and electronic world can be garnered from the Ask Tog pages.

Fun TeleTubby nonsense is probably in more places than one. But the TeleBubby site is probably ahead of the game in merging South Park with the premier show of the toddler set.

In the MPP section of this self-indulgent site I make reference to Gerry Reith. You can find a set of his writings which weren't all collected at the Inspiracy: Gerry Reith site.

In Chicago we talk about many things (thus the name Windy City). One of them is the state of our transportation infrastructure, and of particular interest to myself is the state of the public transportation hereabouts. At Chinet, there's a reasonably active Transportation Forum.