Day: January 24, 2005

Between the small towns of Fallon and Austin stands a tree on the side of the highway. Much like the gum tree in Ohio, it has become a living, breathing work of collective art – a piece which has an unwritten history and a fluid, unending future. It exists by the sheer will of its anonymous participants and the spirit of conspiracy. I present to you, in all its breathtaking majesty and glory, the Nevada shoe tree.

This website contains a collection of “hotspots” found with the open source software World Wind from NASA. This program allows you to view imagery of the earth from satelites, airplanes, and even the spaceshuttle. With a few minutes of your time, you can share those images with the rest of the world.

Although, I still enjoy visual astronomy, astrophotography has gained the upper-hand and requires my full commitment. Had I forseen what amount of time, perseverence, technology, know-how and – in the end – money would be necessary in order to produce first-class images, I would have had second thoughts about it – only to pursue the same path again!

Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked. This webpage contains some information about the sculpture, including some photos collected from around the web, some rubbings of the sculpture taken by your intrepid webmistress, links to other articles and Kryptos discussion groups here and there, and information about other encrypted sculptures which have been created by the sculptor, James Sanborn.

You can still order up a Big Mac and fries at the only drive-through McDonald’s in this Eastern Oregon farming town, but you’ll have to go by way of North Dakota.

That disembodied voice directing you to the next window is coming to you live from 1,300 miles away in Grand Forks.

The fast-food restaurant along a busy stretch of U.S. 395 is one of only a handful in the country using a call center designed to speed up service.

McDonald’s owner Lee Adams is lovin’ it, but some customers aren’t so sure.

Adams sees it as an opportunity for his franchises to become friendlier and more efficient — and bring in a lot more business — by freeing up workers to concentrate on making the food, not taking orders.

The humor here is, for the most part, unrehearsed and unintentional. Hundreds of quotations are listed. There are lines spoken by people intending to say something else. There are lines spoken by people who misunderstood something or other. They may or may not have known any better. The intricacies of human language may have fouled them up, or perhaps unfortunate slips of the tongue led them to ignominy. Whatever the case, there’s a lot to laugh at.

“A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.”

“Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.”

“To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.”