Stuff I like 


Inconclusive, unorganized, maybe awe-inspiring! Ignore the typos throughout and my inconsistency in adding the date — but let me know if there are broken links. At some point in 2024 I archived them all so remove the archive.org business from the URL if things are too slow.  I dare you to email me a fun link!
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  • Info dumping about a Civil War-era clusterfuck with crazy cameos from famous people! Daniel Sickles was a lifelong womanizer and politician who got married at age 32 to ~15yo Teresa Bagioli, granddaughter of Mozart’s friend and librettist. Because Teresa’s family opposed, they were married again by the NY Archbishop (future founder of Fordham) this time. Another opponent was Sickle’s mistress Fanny White, an orphan-turned-wealthy prostitute, but he soon brought to Europe while a diplomat and they met Queen Victoria. Brief Fanny White aside: she married a younger man at 34 and died three years later, prompting widespread rumors he killed her for her money! Anyway! Daniel Sickles made it to US Congress by 1857 and in DC, he and Teresa (who attended Mary Todd’s seances) befriended the Lincolns. Starting spring 1858, Teresa had a year-long affair with the “most handsome man in Washington” who was literally the son of Francis Scott Key, nephew of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and US Attorney for DC. Daniel Sickle discovered the affair from an anonymous letter and forced a (graphic!) written confession from Teresa which leaked to the papers. Also Sickle gunned down the guy in broad daylight across street from White House! Sickles’ attorneys included future Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and it was the US’s first successful defense by temporary insanity, which he claimed was caused by Teresa’s infidelity. A theatre adaption of the murder was performed within a week of the trial. Teresa became an outcast and was publicly reviled the rest of her life, especially when Daniel reconciled with her. Daniel was a high ranking Union general in the Civil War and famously lost a leg at Gettysburg (he goofily smoked a cigar on stretcher to cheer up troops). Got Medal of Honor, the leg is literally still on display in DC. In 1867, 31 yo Teresa died of tuberulosis. Sickles was a diplomat all over, and in Spain he remarried and had a affair(?) with deposed queen Isabella II. He had stints as Congressman, county sheriff, civil service commissioner, etc. — he led a NY monuments commission til he was caught embezzling $27k and died at 94 in 1914.   

  • Chamber’s Dictionary is known for humorous definitions like éclair, “a cake, long in shape but short in duration”, and end-reader, “one who peeps at the end of a novel to see if she got him.” The publisher removed them in the 1970s but due to backlash from readers they were reinstated in 1980. Here’s a chart tracking a few cheeky definitions in different editions! I think they’re fun! 


  • Actual headline from 2010: Former cops guilty of penis size murder (two brothers/former policemen murdered four people on September 10, 2008 in a pub brawl triggered by a guy at the urinals commenting on another guy’s penis)

  • 1998 research paper by Diana Elgersma: “Serious-ass morphology: The anal emphatic in English” explores the -ass suffix, including the interesting case of “the prefixed ass-backward. This latter variant can potentially be explained as an iconic reversal; that is, putting the normally suffixed '-ass' in a prefixed position is in itself backward.”

  • Good TV show to fall asleep to: Balderdash and Piffle, a 2006 BBC show where Oxford English Dictionary staff investigate the origins of words/phrases. It’s hosted by Victoria Coren (who I know from University Challenge, another good show) and lots of episodes are on YouTube!


  • 1997 LA Times article about the truly insane battles between Beanie Babies and knockoffs. After Ty apparently threatened him at the New York Toy Fair, a competitor took out ads to accuse Ty of “using its World Wide Web site to encourage children to tattle” on lookalike products, and of lifting his designs: “Who is COPYING whom?” The competitor believed Ty would “destroy his Little Mini Bean Pal Babies” and said Ty “thinks he is some kind of Goliath, out to crush anyone in his path,” in an interview. Meanwhile, Ty obsessively searched toy bins for fakes, then pummelled them with lawsuits (once he went to the hardware store for a hammer and returned with a knockoff platypus plus seven others). The whole thing was just a mess of lawsuits — Ty was sued for copyright infringement two years earlier, and his pricing was being actively investigated by Connecticut authorities after he forbade discounts (and sued a store called “Tybran Toys” apparently just for having “Ty” in the name?).  In yet another case, a seventh grader with 108 Beanie Babies was recruited as an expert witness. In court with Beanie Babies and a toyseller who offered “Friendly Pebble Pets”,  seventh grader Katy Clune took the stand to profess the differences in the two plush toys (alas, it was not enough for Friendly Pebble Pets to avoid paying a settlement).

  • Atlantic article about Reddit, “The nicest swamp on the internet,” introduced me to the German-language subreddit r/rentnerzeigenaufdinge where people post photos of random retirees who are pointing at stuff (statement of purpose translates to “Here, old people get the stage they deserve”) and r/Lurkers, there are >40,000 members but  no one posts anything.  r/DivorcedBirds is for pics of birds that “look like they are twice divorced (or more!) and an original caption about their backstory.”

  • Fun fact: there’s a 9.5% chance your social security number appears in the digits of pi (well, the first 100 million at least). Your 10-digit phone number has a 1% chance and your 8-digit birth date has a 63% chance. Search for yourself!

  • a 1455 Gutenberg Bible sold on Christie’s had one of Gutenberg’s own eyebrow hairs that had gotten stuck in the ink (well, maybe). Description included “Eyebrow hair, 12 mm, COMPLETE with bulb at one end and natural taper at the other, blond or white, [middle of the 15th century]. Soiled with printer's ink over a segment approximately 2 mm in length.”


  • Thsrs, a thesaurus that only gives synonyms that are shorter (created with the Twitter character limit in mind).



  • Sunday Magazine surfaces the most interesting articles in NYT magazine a century ago!


  • Thrilling discovery! In the Wikipedia article “List of University of Michigan arts alumni” there is only one person listed under the category “Other” and it’s me! (as of April 24, 2025)




  • 2024 game Guess Me If You Can is a digital museum where all the art is actual eBay listings and you have to guess the prices. It requires a download but it’s worth it!



  • Purdue University’s engineering magazine put out April Fools editions including a 1964 parody of Playboy magazine! Articles included “Stress Analysis of an Evening Gown”, a mathematical formula for a person’s happiness based on lip length, and a tribute to a US missle crowned Playmate of the month and dubbed Miss Fire (”Her pleasing smooth curves round out to a neat 600-750-890.”) I was less humored by the startlingly mysoginistic stuff on page 9!

  • The Burnt Food Museum, where harpist Deborah Henson-Conant displays everything she has burnt since 1989, startinig with “Free-Standing Hot Apple Cider” from 1989. Even has merch! I like the stone coasters. How many museums can say they have an official museum harpist!

  • Ironic Sans, great blog with >25 years worth of posts in the archives! 

  • interview with Louis Klein, SNL superfan who was in the live studio audience for almost every episode from the very first until 2016ish. 

  • YouTube channel Something Weird posts exploitation films from the ~1930s–1979s.

  • Daily Wordle-style game Gisnep where you guess a (well-curated!) quote using certain letters. It takes a minute to figure out... start with the two and three letter words!

  • Normal Gunston, an Australian guy who was doing awkward celebrity interviews in the 1970s that evoke Nardwuar, Nathan Fielder, Ali G, etc. Lots on YouTube — Muhammed Ali,  the BeeGees, Zsa Zsa Gabor, tons more


  • Aaron Schwartz’s blog on procrastination: “just as you can’t get two repelling magnets to sit together just by pushing real hard,” he can’t force productivity through sheer willpower, since the mind will always find a way to wriggle free. “You have to rotate a magnet.” The mental force field fights tasks that are either hard or assigned. His advice is to build momentum and convince yourself tasks are fun, which isn’t groundbreaking, but I like his examples, like writing each paragraph in a required essay with its own specific style/voice! Or starting it on a 5 minute subway ride.

  • Aaron Schwartz’s website is still up. Here’s the archive blog posts. He has a bunch of short book reviews, mostly nonfiction. I want to read The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit’s Long Struggle for Survival , the story of how mismanagement of the museum has kept it on the brink of bankrupcy.


  • Tex Watson, a member of the Manson family and murderer in prison, once edited his own Wikipedia article by hand via PDF from prison!

  • while digging into the former, I realized that famed Manson murderer Tex Watson is still actively updating his Christian ministry site aboundinglove.org which has LOTS of faith focused blog posts, plus pages called “Why the Crimes?” and “My Love for Cars” and some freaky PDFs of his bespoke theology!

  • Dennis Rodman World Tour, short-lived 90s talk show that isn’t necesarily that great but fun to have on in the background. Free on youtube

  • Paris Review article about the decline of roadslide attractions in America written by the person who wrote a book about them in the 70s!


  • Ben Schott compiled official sponsorship trademarks approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Natl Association of Realtors is “Official Sponsor of the Word ‘Home’” since 2005 and the American Cancer Society is the Official Sponsor of Birthdays. Elmer’s sponsors “the first day of school”, Wendy’s sponsors “families”,  Proctor & Gamble sponsors “You”

  • Looksmapping is a site that shows LA and NYC restaurants scored by the average hotness (according to AI) of their reviewers

  • YouTube video about the unsung creators of clipart! via Tom Scott’s newsletter


  • There was an 1874 hoax article in a Kansas City newspaper that convinced people (or at least tried) that the newish (1858) transatlantic cable was disrupting magnetism and gravity and pulling the earth closer to the sun. A completely tropical earth was due within 12 years,  uninhabitable soon after. It’s funny seeing global warming predictions from so long ago! Even if they are just pranks by mischevious tricksters  (Wikipedia)

  • Before Tinder there was Operation Match, America’s first computer matchmaking program, started by Harvard undergrads (mostly) in 1965. They charged participants $3 and rented out a room-sized computer from 2-4am on Sundays. There’s an amazing pdf with the questionaire, marketing materials, and press coverage. and one of the founders was randomly a Reagan-era nominee to the Supreme Court who failed because he had smoked weed “on a few occasions”

  • “The Mother of All Swipes” article about Joan Volmer, the working-class English woman who started the first ever computer matchmaking program in 1964. She ended up in debt after the press stopped letting her run ads. She struggled with dyslexic and trauma from an abusive childhood. Not sure how credible this is (seems mostly pulled from Joan’s autobiography) but fascinating life nonetheless!



  • Interesting longrunning blogs: ScoutingNY is a film scout's blog of various NYC locations, hollywoodjuicer has witty ruminations from a late-career movie set lighting guy, Codex99 is a blog about design and architecture, thingsmagazine.net has been kicking since 94


  • If you have any interest in Apple history you can browse folklore.org, a collection of stories from former employees that was created in part by Susan Kare, the legendary icon designer whose slouchy 1980s picture goes around social media every so often

  • New Yorker article about the former US military commander (led the operation that killed bin Laden, among other things) who now writes children’s books like “Make Your Bed with Skipper the Seal.”






  • 1972 NYT article about the McDonald’s HQ which had suede waterbeds instead of chairs

  • via Audobon: Magpies and Crows Are Using "Anti-Bird Spikes" to Make Their Nests


  • sayonemorething.com lets you write an emotional email to someone with a one in a million chance it will be sent


  • “All human knowledge” is an essay/chart about historic attempts to catalog the world along with a tables full of estimates such as the number of roads in the world (36,118,087), asteroids in our solar system ​(1,441,778), journal articles (50 million), encyclopedias (13,000), etc etc 



  • The son of Henry Heimlich (of maneuver fame) operates an expansive blog of his dad’s career of lies and fraud. Lots and lots of material besides the fact that the maneuver isn’t really proven (The Red Cross and their ilk have mostly removed it from protocol), or that there are plenty of Heimlich-induced injuries and deaths. It’s better!!! An extremely rich “Heimlich Institute” devoted to “maleriotherapy” AKA giving malaria to patients of AIDS or cancer (or Lyme, or any ailment). VERY BAD! Prompted multiple federal investigations — here’s Dr. Fauci in the middle of the second vid saying maleriotherapy kills people. Yet Heimlich has collected MASSIVE donations from celebs (Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicholson, Bette Midler, etc), and possibly does millions of $ worth of tax fraud? It’s somewhat odd how this guy chronicles his father’s misdeeds with such... viciousness?  But his brother is a right wing pundit, and his (completely uncredentialed) mom sells quack homeopathy guides. Career-wise, Dr. Heimlich quickly quit actual medical practice for (potentially $$$) medical patents. Oh, and the many many headlines like “Heimlich inventor finally uses his tecnique to save a choking victim!” including one from NYT in 2016 when he was 96 raise some doubts. Also all these people have memoirs.


  • “ACRONYM” acronyms, such as “A Contrived Reduction Of Nomenclature Yielding Mostly nonsense, A Clever Re-Organization Nudges Your Memory, A Cryptic Reminder of Names you Misplaced, Alphabetically Coded Reminder Of Names You Misremember

  • GUY WITH A CRAZY LIFE ALERT! Paul Winchell, born 1922. To come his childhood shyness, which was probaby caused by his bout with polio, he became a boy ventriloquist and became a regular radio performer mid-teenage years, then a slew of his own shows, including one sponsored by Tootsie Roll.  In 1954, he published the book "Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit." How did a famously visual illusion work over radio? I don’t know! But he got roles on tons of shows (The Beverly Hillbillies, Perry Mason, etc), then steady voice actor positions including Gargamel (The Smurfs), Dick Dastardly (various Hanna-Barbera), and Tigger (Winnie the Pooh)— which earned him a Grammy AND and Oscar. Tigger’s catchphrase “ta ta for now” comes from Winchell’s British third wife! Anyway the non-entertainment career is uhh less awesome

  • Winchell had a brief stint studying pre-med at Columbia in the 50s — didn’t graduate but returned to a far more dubious strain of “medicine” in the 70s and practiced acupuncture and medical hypnotism. He filed like 30 patents, some while affiliated with groups like the Red Cross? He claims he patented the disposable razor, flameless cigarette lighter, invisible garter belt, fountain pen with a retractable tip, and battery-heated gloves. Oh also he’s rich from a $18 million lawsuit verdict. Threw himself into promoting tilapia aquaculture in sub-Saharan Africa, unsuccessfully testified before Congress for funding. Teamed up with his friend Henry Heimlich (of Heimlich maneuver fame) and built an artificial heart which got a patent in 1963. Paul’s own blog is available via Wayback Machine, but it mostly just points you to his other website protectgod.com, a “painstaking investigation of the Bible reveals that Scripture defames God by maligning His character and morality” (his words). He published an autobiography in 2004 (age 81) called “Winch” that was so ruthless it caused his kids’ estrangement. When he died the next year his daughter April, who happens to be the voice of Minnie Mouse’s best friend Clarabelle Cow, offered a trite blog post summing him up as “very troubled and unhappy”.  April’s high school boyfriend was Kevin Spacey by the way. Also her non-Disney fame comes from her aughts-era blog-turned-book deal “Regretsy” —the premise is that she mocks the handmade products sold on Etsy.

  • https://asteroids.wiki/ is the best wikipedia game I’ve seen in ages, maybe ever! real-time wikipedia edits are astroids that you have to shoot!!!! when someone creates a new article you get an extra life, and a big astroid mean it was a big wikipedia edit

  • what if you took one of NYC’s open competitive exams for a random city job, like exterminator or tax auditor or something. it’s $68 which is basically the same as a dinner date and wouldn’t it be memorable






  • George Laurer, inventor of the supermarket barcode, had a personal website full of replies to conspiracists who believed that the 666 pattern, which is indeed in each barcode, was planting evil or whatever. Laurer EMPHATICALLY denies all accusations of sinister Satan worship, ominous surveillance, etc. Unfortunately his denials tend to raise many more questions than they answer. It makes me LOL. For example: 
  • “Yes, they do RESEMBLE the code for a six.... There is nothing sinister about this nor does it have anything to do with the Bible's "mark of the beast" (The New Testament, The Revelation, Chapter 13, paragraph 18). It is simply a coincidence like the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have 6 letters. There is no connection with an international money code either.” Suddently can’t stop thinking about the six letters in his names!!!!!

  • The first supermarket barcode debuted on a Wrigley’s pack of gum in 1974 in Ohio! A year before, the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council (group of grocery executives and engineers) decided on the rectangle of stripes over other designs, like these bullseyes, or these things, or these weirder things. 

  • More about George Laurer, the Universal Product Code inventor: his website has tons of pages dedicated to documenting the downfall of his professional rival, a serial inventor named Jerome Lemelson who filed patents so prolifically that he’s second only to Edison (!) and litigated like crazy to get big companies to pay big bucks for his tools (including a barcode scanner). Apparently he made 1.5 billion this way, and George Laurer— who did not patent the barcode and never made royalties,  hates this guy so much ( You can click around George’s site for some extremely fierce criticisms. I love a professional feud!!

  • More about UPCs and barcodes because I’m obsessed!!! there’s an entire book devoted to barcode history! Revolution at the Checkout Counter, pubbed 1997, and Spreading the Barcode from 2009. Another thing that exists: archives of the apparently real publication “Barcode News.” Oh, and this article called “Reading Between the Lines” is written with such energy that I was on the edge of my seat about a the supermarket symbol selection! I’m curious about the nonprofit org that assigns universal numbers to products.

  • The Error of our Ways, Medium essay about the “father of Windows error reporting” Kirk Glerum who pioneered crash reports for Microsoft in 2001 and personally looked through them all. Crashes plummeted! Computers got less terrible! He also shaved his head for halloween one year and glued keys ot it (no idea if that detail had anything to do with the story but I liked it)   

  • The architect who made the Lumon HQ from Severance (AKA Bell Labs Holmdel in New Jersey) is the same guy who made the Gateway Arch! Eero Saarinen! Wow!

  • Acronym stuff... Sioux City’s airport code is SUX and when the city tried (for the second time) to change it in 2002 the FAA literally offered GAY instead (among a few other disappointing options). Intead the city embraced the slogans FLYING SUX and FLY SUX and sold merch.







  • From 1959 to 1979 University of Michigan psychologist James McConnell, who studied planarians (flatworms) by day, wrote a satirical journal called Worm Runner Digest that got written up in Time Magazine in 1966. It had serious articles mixed in, and he started printing the satire upside down after people complained it was too hard to tell them apart



  • There’s a huge archive of The Guardian columns by Marc Abrahams, the Ig Nobel Prize organizer guy. I’ve learned so much! Like the quickly-debunked 1999 study called “What's in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols” by UC San Diego psychologists that said: "Individuals with 'positive' initials (for example, ACE, VIP) might live longer than those with "negative" initials (eg PIG, DIE)." But alas, their overreliance on death records screwed up their findings. Also, he introduced me to this 1978 Alabama Journal of Mathematics article: “George Washington: He Liked to Count Things” that discusses the extensive counting (thousands of peas!) Washington recorded in his diary.

  • This 1987 article from the Whole Earth Catalog, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” by Berkeley economics professor Carlo M. Cipolla, is apparently kinda well known? I find it so insufferable and kinda mean! I guess I don’t mind interacting with “stupid people” as much as these guys. I suppose the borderline militant intellectual superiority of the article is interesting because I always think of the Whole Earth Catalog as a product of the Haight Asbury ~free love~ anti-government hippies of the 60s but I forget that it evolved with culture, and so of course it ended up reflecting the libertarianism (increasingly ruthless libertarianism maybe) of 1990s Silicon Valley. Blah blah blah blah blah i’m just typing stuff I’m not sure about! anyway

  • hoaxes.org is the website of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego and it’s great! Mostly written by one guy, Alex Boese. I am interested in Sober Sue (1910s NYC performer billed as the girl who never laughed who secretly was paralyzed in her facial muscles), all the hoax websites, and the 100 best April Fools


  • https://realbirdfakebird.com/, a daily Wordle-type game where you guess real names vs fake names of things in rotating categories (like salmon names, or ikea designs, etc)

  • Foldnfly, a website of paper airplane folds








  • Brian Moore links incoming! As I have said many times, everything he makes is cool. I think my new favorite is theripoff.game, which declares which twitter/x user was first to post “RIP Jimmy Carter” (or whatever name) when famous people die. 2/16/2024   

  • LANY Hat is a robotic baseball cap that switches from NY to LA depending on who is winning.

  • Random other Brian Moore stuff that Busy Simulator is a site full of notifications that will make you sound busy, CRYNYL is a Fall Out Boy record that is physically filled with the band’s tears, 


  • More niche museums with online shops... the London Transport Museum sells seating with the classic patterns so you can feel like you’re commuting. The British Lawnmower Museum (which abbreviates itself to BLM) sells tshirts and cards that say “Mow Your Birthday Be a Cut Above the Rest” and other mow puns haha.

  • taboo.xyz uses random jump scares to train you to stop going on bad websites

  • fun to browse abandoned trademarks, like “King Burger” and “MEAT’NORMOUS (owned by Burger King)




  • In 2020 researchers discovered, to their surprise, that platypuses glow under UV light. The paper in the journal Mammalia has wonderfully odd diagrams and photos!! I’m sure there’s a lot out there about bioluminescence of cute animals! 




  • On the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, where the Barclay’s Center currently is, an early 20th century “street dentist”-turned-circus ringleader named (literally) Painless Parker set up shop.


  • How Reddit content by category changed from 2006-2013. Initially all NSFW, then dominated by programming, then the arrival of science, politics, gaming, and entertainment in 2007 and 2008. Wish this were updated for the past 12 years but still interesting. I still, STILL, can’t get over how many major internet platforms started out by shilling porn (or scantily-clad selfies, or some other objectified media). “/r/AskReddit was born on January 25th, 2008 when some Redditors noticed that "Ask Reddit" was becoming a popular posting trend. Sadly, the only questions asked that day were questions about how the subreddit would work.”

  • The very first post in r/gonewild, on December 2008, says “Greate idea for a subreddit, but who will contribute?”. In the comments, a few dudes awkwardly encourage each other to upload their penises. (“I am straight and I like penis for some reason. Weird that that all three of us all have penises, what are the odds of that?”

  • The United States that Could Have Been, a map of unsuccessful American seperatist movements and proposed states. “Aroostook” in Northern Maine, “West Florida” along the Gulf Coast, I’ve seen this on Reddit many times but I FINALLY FOUND THE SOURCE: a geography prof named Andrew Shears! Click for yourself, but here’s what I like. The Midwest has Blue Wisconsin, Red Wisconsin, Little Egypt, and Forgottonia. The bottom third of California is “Reagan” while the bottom chunk of Mississippi is “Yazoo”. Others that are fun to pronounce: “Nickajack,” (covers the Tennessee mountains) and “Aroostook (Northern Maine). I chuckle at Westsylvania, Westmoreland (Philly-area), West Kansas, West Florida — what’s with the West? Oh, and imagine if McDonald weren’t just a fast food joint but an entire STATE!

  • A chart of the Trustworthiness Of Beards (just based on vibes, I think). The panic zone includes The Hitler and John Waters-style pencil mustache. Less dangerous but still threatening are neck beard and soul patch.


  • Stanford website sorts out which historical figures were writing letters to which other historical figures and even makes maps and stuff.




  • This map of NYC by nationality/density looks so cool and art deco but it was created by Tenement-House Committee in the 1890s and published in Harper’s Weekly. Blog about it!



  • I’m not sure what, exactly, I recommend looking at on this interactive map of American natural resources, but I definitely do recommend clicking around this site, “US energy atlas.” 



  • Real headline: Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke. (the story, which is from 2010: he went surfing at age 84, dozed off while paddling, “started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought ‘I’m dead!’” But they were just porpoises and they pushed him to shore—“The porpoises were unavailable for comment.”)







  • Map by temperance leaders, including Henry Ward Beecher, published in 1885 marks the saloons on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which were more numerous than present day! The title of the map is “A MAP OF BEERDOM” which seems unbelievable but Slate wrote about it so I trust that it’s real! An accompanying “balance sheet” notes that there were 19 churches, 5 schools, 1 hospital, and, in all caps, “346 SALOONS.”

  • This old school website, the Antique and Art Glass Salt Shaker Collector’s Society, goes by the unweildy acronym AAGSSCS haha



  • Via datapointed, a map of streets named Annie! Click the upper right for the blog post explaining it.


  • There used to be a site called crossing.us (archived version) that let you input two words and revealed if there were intersections anywhere in the world of streets with those names! You could try your name and your crush’s or something. But the link died, RIP, someone bring this back please please



  • Big cities colored by street orientation. Another one from Datapointed! Makes it clear (and beautiful!) how regular Chicago is compared to everything else. Also interesting how Boston, despite its reputation for being notoriously hard to navegate, is splotchier thus less random than Tokyo and Berlin.



  • This “famous movie quotes as charts” thing has been around for awhile and even though I roll my eyes at how dumb most of them are, it is admittedly kinda fun when they take a second to figure out. 



  • PopCharts sells posters of Beatles songs timelines, American flags of history, famous sneakers, the history of graphic design, etc. And scratch-off sheets of classic horror movies, baseball stadiums, essential cocktails. I know this poster genre is played out but some of these are pretty creative! Good for birthday or Christmas gifts


  • Can you tell I spent way too long on a few map and chart-focused blogs today?! I made it to page 7 of chartporn and I have to cut myself off now. 



  • Imagine being able to say “my parents invented Jibbetz and sold it to Crocs for $10 million in 2006.” Three mid-20s people can! Reminds me of Gretchen Wiener’s dad inventing the Toaster Strudel in Mean Girls.

  • You can make a “Little Free Libarary” with anything. Portland has one for Crocs Jibbitz! Kitchen tools? Office supplies? Postcards? Stickers? MAGNETS? I’m sure theft would be a problem but still!


  • Phone case with a real ant farm ($40, ants not included)

  • The so-called hardest exam in the world, the essay-based application to All Souls College at Oxford. Essay prompts include sweeping, existential questions of modern life like "Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”, or single-noun prompts like “water” (applicants have 3 hours to write the essay). NYT article about the exam.



  • Graphical comparison of the six Rocky movies by minutes of dialogue, training, montage, pre-fight, and fight they contain. I liked “using empirical data collection (ie watching the is movies over six days straight)”

  • In 2010 some guy spent 30 days driving 12,328 miles through 30 states in a path that spelled “READ AYN RAND.” The project is preserved on worldsbiggestwriting.com


  • I was talking to a genetics researcher and I asked him why he got into biology when he was a teenager. He said that in elementary school math was his worst subject, so he studied it until it was his best. Then in high school, Chemistry was his worst subject so he studied it until it was his best. Then at the end of high school, biology was his worst so he studied it until his research into the genetic mechanism that led to tail loss in humans was on the cover of Nature!







  • Random aughts NYT articles: MySpace origin story (published 2009), Tila Tequila and self-made stardom online by a slightly-snarky and very witty Guy Trebay  (2007)

  • The page personalization that became Myspace’s first distinguishing feature happened by mistake! A programmer forgot to block people from inserting their own random HTML, which was a security risk but also a very lucky accident! (seen in links I would gchat newsletter)

  •  Myspace Tom hacked into a Chase Manhattan Bank system in 1985 when he was 14! He didn’t do anything bad with everyone’s financial records, just showed off to his friends. Tom, AKA Lord Flathead (his hacker name),  became the target of one of California’s largest FBI raids ever. Agents confiscated his computer but  did not arrest him since he was a minor. TechCrunch wrote that the reason he hacked into “living room sized mainframe systems“ was to practice programming C, since his machine didn’t have enough memory or processing.

  • Short New Yorker article that lists some of the more unusual pre-Christmas product recalls. I genuinely thought this was a Shouts and Murmors that they forgot to label. Handlebars on a youth ATV that “may lacerate your kid’s head,” a Temu “I ❤️ Dad” kids pajama set that is highly flammable, etc

  • Learned from intro of this unrelated Publisher’s Weekly article about weird old books, like the memoir Elizabeth Taylor wrote about her pet chipmunk Nibbles in 1946 when she was 13, and the 1980 guide to home computers by Dune author Frank Herbert

  • I listened to the audiobook version of Connie Chung’s memoir, which was a delight, and learned about the brief wave of hiring diversity the equal employment opportunity commission sparked. CBS hired Connie and a few other women including Leslie Stahl and a Black woman from Chicago named Michele Clark who had an interesting story! When she was 8, her family’s move to a white neighborhood triggered the 1951 Cicero race riot, where 4000 people mobbed her building. After college and a modeling stint she became a correspondant for a local station, then national, then the 1972 presidential campaign (just like Connie!). 60 Minutes hired her but before she started, while traveling home from reporting a Watergate story, her plane crashed into a residential neighborhood. It killed her and a few other political insiders (a congressman and the wife of Watergate mastermind E Howard Hunt) and became known as “the Watergate crash” because of conspiracy theories. What a crazy life and tragic death! I wish we got to see where her life/tv journalism career would have gone 


  • Royal Navy sailors wrote down the time, position, temp, and wind every four hours and a project called Old Weather, organized by British academics, rounded up eccentric volunteers to transcribe all that handwritten climate data into a public digital repository. Long-ish, in-depth Reuters article about the results!

  • I really love this essay by Ed Park about finding surreal poetry in the Chicago manual of style! Mystic section titles like “Words Used as Words (6.76),”  kooky example sentences like “The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Oscar J. Blunk of the National Cyanide Laboratory in the preparation of this chapter.” Sometimes he suspected the reference work had an elusive plot (“hints of plot tantalized”)

  • More random stuff from the Chicago manual essay: “The non sequiturs cluster into miniature Ashbery poems (5.70: “One committee member may be from Ohio, another from Pennsylvania, and a third from West Virginia. / Ronald adored her and she him”)” 

  • Ed Park article about “invisible books,” the phantom literary titles mentioned in movies, television, and fiction. “Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones.” Mentioned so many interesting examples from books I probably should have already read!


  • The best of Craigslist! I like the person who accidentally rescued a wild bobcat: “as cute as he is, he is CRAZY and has gotten into everything in the house in 1 night and is EXTREMELY AGGRESSIVE!!”... “Almost lost my fingers this morning trying to pet him. Has been growling and hissing and calling all morning He is just a big grouch.”


  • I should be an audience member for more TV tapings! You can sign up to be a seat filler on sites like 1iota and seatfillersandmore


  • Wokeipedia is a site dedicated to documenting the things that have been labeled “woke” (dinosaurs, brie, sign language)


  • iphone.com used to be the domain of a New Jersey telecomms company




  • Article from 1997 about the web “making us addicted to speed” reads like it was written today, not 30 years ago. Quotes a study about so-called ‘grazers’ who change channels 22 times a minute. ''They approach the airwaves as a vast smorgasbord, all of which must be sampled, no matter how meager the helpings.'' Calls MTV the “principal villain” of “fast-paced and discontinuous cutting style”

  • Article about the rise of advertising online from 1996, when “the Internet commands just $50 million of the $133 billion believed to be spent yearly on advertising” already. “For Internet old-timers the lesson is: There goes the neighborhood. Is cyberspace really descending to the level of any old baseball stadium -- or worse, television?”





  • In honor of 1929 works entering the public domain, it’s the sixth annual public domain game challenge! Make a game inspired by newly public domain stuff. 1/3/2025

  • Some highlights of Public Domain Day 2025! Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”, Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”, the characters Tintin and Popeye, Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, first Steinbeck novel “Cup of Gold”, Hitchcock’s first film “Blackmail”, first Marx Brother film “The Cocoanuts”, songs “Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Singin’ in the Rain and Bolero by Ravel, lots more. Sound recordings entering public domain are from 1924 and include Rhapsody in Blue. 1/3/2025

  • I use a paper calendar since it’s the only way plans feel real to me. It’s fun to find vintage ones! If you want to know which years line up, there is an aptly-named, single-focus, absolutely perfect website: https://www.whencanireusethiscalendar.com/

  • David Rumsey map collection sells prints! might get a historical Michigan map for my dad if I ever am out of bday/Christmas ideas







  • the name Coney Island comes from konijn, Dutch for rabbit 

  • Patridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). Some highlights from my 5 minutes of browsing: “mustard pot” meant female genitals and “mustard” was adj meaning “to be excellant (at anything)” or “to be sexually ‘hot stuff’” and beau-nasty, “one finely dressed, but dirty” (18th to 19th c.), poop-off was a noun for foolish person. Dook was a large nose. Dookie was an unlicensed theatre




  • Words formed by radio call letters in the US... kinda fun to have “WANT real country” in TN, WINK-FM in Florida, “WIFE-FM” in Indiana (Mike Pence had a radio show there lol). Now-defunct “WOKE radio” in Charleston has a memorial webpage “WOKE memories.” Fittingly WIND (AM) is in Chicago and WING in Dayton (Wright brothers’ birthplace). Seems like a lot of the stations with fun names are Christian, like WILD (AM) in Boston and WEED (AM) in Eastern North Carolina which airs “rockin’ gospel.” RIP to “WAIT” in Chicago.

  • Wikenigma is a wiki of humanity’s knowledge gaps created by Martin Gardiner (who is involved with the Ignobel Prize, another thing I love) 

  • Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley (who also was a seamstress for Robert E Lee’s wife and a bunch of other important people on opposite sides of the Civil War) wrote a scandalous memoir about living in the White House. It’s called “Behind the Scenes” and it’s available for free. I want to read it!

  • Cornell professor Gene Ziegler was inspired to write a Dr. Seuss-style poem when his grandkid messed up his computer in 1994. My favorite stanza: “If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, /and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, / and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort / then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!” Honorable mention: “If the label on the cable on the table at your hous / says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, / but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, / that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall” 12/7/2024

  • The poem spread like wildfire via email but was wrongly credited to “Anonymous,” which inspired Gene’s next (and only other) poem, “Hang the Information Highwayman!” 12/7/2024


  • Did you know Dr. Seuss had a Wario? Dr.  Hans Suess (note spelling difference) and cartoonist “Dr. Seuss” both lived from ~1910-1990 and resided in La Jolla, California. Hans was a physicist who helped discover shell model of atomic nucleus, one of four founding faculty of UC San Diego, calibrated carbon-14 radiodating scale, studied greenhouse gas-CO2 stuff and created Suess effect, etc. They had mail mixups all the time! It’s still a problem since their files are still in the same library! Also, there’s apparently a Theo Geisel (German physicist born 1948) so there’s that. 
  • Dr. Seuss is the namesake of a Mercury crater. Dr. Eduard Suess (grandfather of Hans, first proposed supercontinent Gondwana in 1861) is the namesake of a crater on Mars, a crater on the moon, and “Seuss Land,” a penninsula of Greenland 

  • Anyway, I wonder how many Dr. Seusses there are out there. Do you think people named Seuss become doctors because it just sounds so natural? Need someone to analyze this potential nominitive determinism extensively. There’s a Pulitzer-winning poetry professor named Diane Seuss, but she only has a masters. 12/7/2024


  • Basically everything on walzr.com is delightful or profound or useful and this newspaper front page archive is all three! very easy to click back to see a year ago today, or a month ago, or whatever. 





  • Spent way too long reading about Lurleen Wallace today so here’s a too-long summary! Need a Sofia Coppola movie about the tragic wife of four-time Alabama governor (and 1960s presidential candidate) George Wallace. He’s most famous for bitterly defending segregation so I expected him to be awful but somehow the way he treated Lurleen is more terrible than I imagined. As a baseline, he neglected the family and constantly cheated. He refused to inform Lurleen of her cancer diagnosis, letting it metastasize untreated for FOUR YEARS until a different doctor finally told the woman her own diagnosis — and when she shared the news she realized people had known for years. After George basically killed her, he made Lurleen (who was very shy, disliked politics, was literally dying, weakened by last-ditch surgeries and radiation treatments, you get the picture) spend her last two years of life as governor of Alabama so he could govern despite the term limit. He up and left during her final painful months for his far-fetched presidential campaign. When she died, he refused her single request for a closed casket (!!!), parading her emaciated body through the streets for political theatre. He dumped the three youngest kids with relatives and returned to the racist campaigning. I find Lurleen interesting as a character because she’s simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator of cruelty! Many such cases


  • Some of the Nobel Prizes that have gone to people who self-experimented (link is to twitter)

  • After Teddy Roosevelt left office, President William Taft tried to make his own own version of the teddy bear called "Billy Possum" because he liked eating possum (people even gifted him live animals on the campaign trail). It did not catch on. One ad depicted the Billy Possum cooking and eating a teddy bear (quite the choice for a children’s toy!)

  • The old essays by Laura Kipnis are kinda fun for subway rides etc. Lots of pop culture references I forgot/didn’t know about





  • website called “trend list” might be fun if you like quirky web design and graphic design in general? (It’s fun to browse but i can’t figure out how to actually navigate it)



  • Another top-tier personal website of an eccentric tenured math professor: Thomas Forster. I particularly like his 8100 word appreciation of Pygmalion (half as long as the play itself) and the paragraph on his homepage about all the famous people (broadly construed) he has mutual friends with. Apparently Facebook keeps suggesting he friend Jacinda Arden. 10/9/2024

  • Somehow I didn’t know about the bathtub hoax til now. In 1917 a guy named Mencken published a fake history of the bathtub involving Christmas plunges, “violent discussions” in newspapers, and president Millard Fillmore. Mencken later wrote, "My motive was simply to have some harmless fun in war days.” In 1926 he cleared up the hoax and bemoaned its spread. “Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous "facts" in the writings of other men.” 10/9/2024


  • A guy on Flickr called jeffreyww, who uploaded hundreds of photos of things he ate with titles like “Mmm… cookies!” and “Mmm... Grilled steak for the win” and “Mmm... sometimes it just has to be pancakes”. Almost as bizarre/transcendent as Wikimedia Commons user Corn cheese.

  • The lip dub Wikipedia article mentions my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which put on a lip dup in response to being  #10 on Newsweek’s list of dying cities. “The video was labeled by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times as "The greatest music video ever made." 10/8/2024


  • Bop Spotter: a San Francisco person has a phone hidden in the city, constantly set on Shazam, that reports when certain songs are playing at that one specific intersection. 10/3/2024

  • The Netherlands has an online map of all street signs in the entire country. 10/3/2024


  • In the Ford Theatre’s explanation of why it no longer performs Our American Cousin (and hasn’t since 1865), the last reason is simply that the play isn’t funny. “its class-based humor poking fun at country bumpkins and British aristocracy simply doesn’t land nor carry the attention of modern audiences.” 10/1/2024

  • There is a committee of like 7 people at ICANN who, when together, can combine their keys into one key and make changes to DNS. (I hope I’m understanding that right? check The Guardian article from 2014, and an ICANN article clarifying things. 10/1/2024

  • I certainly do not read all the slate star codex blog posts but they’re fun here and there. For choosing which posts to read: one person’s compilation, another, and the Most popular posts. 10/2/2024

  • Fun to go on the linguistics stack exchange and sort by various things! 9/30/2024

  • Wanker’s Corner, a locale (and store) in Oregon named after early settler Mr. Wanker.

  • A guy named Steve had a blog in 2003 called “Steve Don’t Eat It” in which he recounted the experiences of consuming horrendous foods





  • Radioman’s website!  (the formerly homeless guy who has been in like 300 movies as a background actor)

  • Alan Abel’s Timeline of hoaxes (guy who made a satirical activist movement to put clothes on animals (including 1963 White House protest demanding Jackie O put pants on her horses), Citizens Against Breastfeeding claimed the act was incest (and found authentic adherents, including a woman from Santa Barbara who sent 40k), a fake school in the 1970s recession that claimed to teach the art of panhandling, appeared in a 1999 HBO documentary falsely claiming to have the world’s smallest penis, etc etc tons more)

  • Virginia City, Nevada holds World Championship Outhouse Races. People push outhouses through the city. The event is inspired by a real incident in which people blocked the door to the courthouse with outhouses to protest plumbing restrictions.

  • There is such thing as the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships and you don’t have to qualify. You just get tickets right when they go on sale and show up. 


  • Fun, searchable map that shows which people are from which areas of the world! It uses the Wikipedia API.

  • In truck spill news: “Boxes of french fries covered Los Angeles highway after crash, causing 6-hour long cleanup,” reports USA Today. It appears the police called the fries “hazardous materials.” From November 29 2011: 2 tons of marmite


  • In ship spill news: The NYT wrote about The Lego Spill of 1997 caused by a cargo ship that lost 62 of its shipping containers and nearly capsized. The 5 million Lego pieces keep appearing on shores in Europe!

  • Maybe I should have known this already but in 1958, Bank of America sent credit cards to 60,000 Californians who never asked for them. It was like that U2 album but it led to more financial fraud. “first unsolicited credit-card drop”








  • 400 people applied to adopt a parrot named Pepper who kept saying “do you want me to kick your ass?” 8/19/2024


  • YouTube channel that covered WW1 and WW2 week by week in "real time" for 10 years.


  • locations and relative sizes of peat bogs in england and wales vs places where the surname "moss" is disproportionately common (tweet)

  •   2009 Shaq tweet: “Dear ashton kutcher yo momma so old the key on ben franklins kite, was to her apartment. Respond if yur not scared”

  • Paris Review article about how an anonymous Federal Government employee doodled every day on his calendar during the entire 1980s The entire set was sold at auction for over $5,000

  • I am very charmed by an email to Vanderbilt neuroengineering professor Daniel Gonzales from Vanderbilt Daniel Gonzalez that basically is like “hey, for months I have been getting a bunch of emails meant for you and gently informing the senders and I don’t mind but just so you know I’m graduating soon and won’t check this email anymore.”

  • Statistically happiest American based on Gallup polls would be an observant Jew, Chinese guy, 5 foot 10, has kids, lives in Honolulu, older than 65, married, runs his own business, makes more than $120k a year. There is a guy who named Alvin Wong who fits all these! There’s a 2011 NYT article about him. He does seem happy!


  • The IRS updated its employee manual in 1989 to say that in the event of nuclear war, the agency will resume tax collection within 30 days.



  • This math paper from 2021 that opens with “Since the dawn of time, human beings have asked some fundamental questions: who are we? why are we here? is there life after death? Unable to answer any of these, in this paper we will consider cohomology classes” on a compact projective manifold that have a property analogous to the Hard-Lefschetz Theorem and Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations.”

  • Illustration of the proper method of wrapping a Royal Air Force pigeon for air delivery, c. 1919



  • Ask Jeeves was so big from 200-2004 that it had Jeeves as a Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloon.




  • Catalan doesn’t play around with its top level domains. Requires all .cat websites to have a version in Catalan within six months of registering the domain.

  • Badalona is a municipality near Barcelona. Ronald Reagan’s treasury secretary was named Donald Reagan. Zilwaukee is across the lake from Milwaukee. Mario/Wario situations.

  • A September 30 1963 Peanuts strip about ZIP codes, which had just been introduced, where 5 says “My dad says we have so many numbers these days we’re all losing our identity.”

  • Fossilized footprints in New Mexico show a toddler walking with an adult, and getting picked up and put down over and over. National Parks article. PBS video.

  • Since 1995 there has been a group called the Texas Camel Corps dedicated to studying and reenacting events of the United States Camel Corps, an 1850s military project that imported camels. You can visit the group’s current website or the archived older versions of its website which are more detailed. 8/6/2024

  • Click that Hood is a quiz on neighborhoods of the world (but it’s pretty hard!). 8/5/2024


  • starringthecomputer.com is a website run by one guy that documents the computer models that appear in blockbuster movies. 8/1/2024

  • http://timezoom.org/ takes timelines from Wikipedia, combines them, and puts them into zoomable view.










  • Knitting wasn’t invented until the year ~1000 but Peruvians did naalbinding which was similar close (Youtube tutorials), and tons of people around the globe made “sprang.” Blog post and followup about ancient textiles!





  • You can buy prints of cool posters created by Canada’s Department of Agriculture between 1947-1973. I don’t actually think I’m going to buy any but if I did, it would be the one about rat control in Alberta (because Alberta is now considered rat-free which has led to a few Wikipedia kerfuffles)!







  • “The Final Curtain” is a prank website from 1998 about a combined graveyard, funeral service, and theme park. It’s by a guy named Joey Skaggs who did tons of similar pranks from the 1970s to 1990s, like a fictional company that offered hair transplants from cadavers to living people, a celebrity sperm bank, and “‘Cathouse for Dogs’ where for $50 you could get your dog sexually gratified.” Some are better than others for sure but it’s a fun read

  • Ursula Le Guin’s old website is so nice (much better than the polished new one) and I like the blog. I’m assuming she surfed the web between 3 and 5pm.


  • Guy in Minneapolis with large wooden sculpture of a pencil in his front yard performed his annual pencil sharpening ceremony. The whole neighborhood came to watch. (TikTok link)




  • In June 2024, it came to light that the Oklahoma Department of Education couldn't log into its own website for two years because the employee who had run it left and didn’t tell it to anyone (gvt video of a meeting where it was discussed)



  • Google blog announces a new "Shipping Network Design API" for and operators of container ships to optimize their trade routes. 6/10/2024





  • Amazing that there is an annual horseshoe crab count in New York City! “Teams of volunteers fan out across the waterfronts of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens during high tide before and after the new and full moons to count crabs during their fornicatory frenzy.” 5/29/2024




  • From page 70 of Making the Alphabet Dance: “There are only a handful of words in the unabridged Merriam-Webster that exhibit three identical letters in a row without hyphens, apostrophes, or other punctuation: are headristressship, goddessship, patronessship, and wallles … The unabridged Random House dictionary also admits goddessship, and the Oxford English Dictionary adds countessship, frillless, and duchessship. Hostessship appears in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in Act IV, scene iv.”

  • The US Board on Geographic Names hates apostrophies! From a 2013 WSJ article: “The U.S., in fact, is the only country with an apostrophe-eradication policy. The program took off when President Benjamin Harrison set up the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. By one board estimate, it has scrubbed 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps ... Irish names (O'Fallon, Ill.) and French ones (Coeur d'Alene, Idaho) aren't possessives and get by. While administrative names can endure (Prince George's County, Md.), the committee has granted only five possessive apostrophes in 113 years: Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Ike's Point, N.J.; John E's Pond, R.I.; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Ariz.; and—in 2002—Clark's Mountain, Ore.”

  • 10,000 word essay on cardboard. It probably didn’t have to be so long but I still liked parts of it. 5/27/2024


  • I love articles like this! Joshua Bote from the SF Gazeeter located the kid from the semi-viral 1940s newspaper clipping who spent a "lost week" in SF theaters. 5/16/2024

  • I have not tried the app “Artly” but it has been recommended to me as “Duolingo for art history.” I have some gaping gaps in my art knowledge so this might be good for me 5/16/2024


  • lots of tools show the most common words in a text but I like this one that shows most common phrases. 5/15/2024

  • haven’t tried it but people like the text manipulation on the website languageisavirus.com. 5/15/2024



  • Australia’s richest woman (mining billionaire Gina Rinehart) is demanding the National Portrait Gallery of Australia remove her portrait and OMG you need to see the portrait. I laughed out loud. 5/25/2024


  • Lots of discourse about “nepo baby” musicians. My only addition to the discourse is that Tiffany Trump and Allessandra Mussollini have songs that are kinda not that bad.




  • Mark Twain’s patented a history trivia game and in a 1914 piece for Harper’scalled “How to Make History Dates Stick,” he said historical dates were “like the cattle-pens of a ranch—they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together.” I looked up the memorization-worthy dates and they were just the years of rule of  a bunch of European leaders, even the kind of irrelevant ones. 5/8/2024


  • 2017 article from The Awl (RIP) about a column called Queries and Answers that ran in the New York Times Book Review from 1920ish to 1970ish and was basically Shazam for poetry — readers sent in half-remembered poems and random readers helped identify them. Here’s an example from 1946. My favorite part is the Vermont retiree “Mrs. Henry D. Holmes” who identified SO many poems that she got fan mail and was, according to a 1937 article, Vermont’s most widely-known woman. The section’s editor, Hazel Felleman, published a bunch of the most-searched-for poems into a smash hit, top selling anthology in 1936 and I want to read it! 5/7/2024.

  • QZ article compiled questions that people have asked to NYPL reference librarians over the years.

  •  I like Clive Thompson, so this 2016 article in Smithsonian Magazine about the history of American newspapers was fun. 5/7/2024.







  • 404 article about Pokemon Go players abusing OpenStreetMaps.5/5/2024


  • All the men’s Olympic water polo champs since 2000 are from the same section of Eastern Europe. 5/2/2024


  • look at all the book covers this woman (nicknamed “The Everywhere Girl”) was on just from doing one stock photography photoshoot in the 90s! 4/30/2024



  • 9-year-old Seagull boy wins seagull screeching competition! “Cooper took his lucky mascot with him - a small model seagull which he calls Stephen and spells with a "ph", but his parents call Steven Seagull, like the actor Steven Seagal.” 4/24/2024

  • Ooh, this website shows recent edits to OpenStreetMap. 4/23/2024

  • The best baby name website is magic baby names, the one that tells you what sibling names are most frequently paired with a name (based on US census data)

  • list of autological words (words that describe themselves, like “unhyphenated” and “wee” and “common” and “spellable.”)



  • The Casio “Calculighter”, a calculator and lighter in one

  • an 11th century man named Richard the Horny popularized shoes that were so gay, they made them illegal (saw this from my pal Olivia)

  • Bell Labs employee Harry Nyquist who was a productivity multiplier. People who had lunch with him were frequently super successful. From the book The Idea Factory: “"Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking'"


  • A guy went to see all 43 pieces of art from Animal Crossing IRL!!



  • My friend Michael wrote a book that’s just full of the digits of pi

  • NYC’s building energy efficiency rating system has the acronym BEER



  • Lynyrd Skynyrd’s high school gym teacher was named Leonard Skinner! Maybe everyone knows this but I didn’t until today!

  • SQLite is maintained by three dudes who don’t accept outside contributors. And tz database, which pretty much the entire tech world uses for date and time, is maintained by pretty much one guy (and kinda another, but pretty much just one!)

  • NYT article about the real estate kingpin who literally walks the city to update his huge paper map of NYC properties.

  • some day I should sit around and explore the census data for a while.

  • from Twitter: “a truck carrying 100k chinook salmon smolts (yay!) crashed in eastern oregon and flipped over (oh no!) but did so right above a creek (yay!) and a bunch died (oh no!) but more than 75k of them were inadvertently released and will likely return there to spawn as adults (yay!)” news story







  • On a website called “The Fish Doorbell”, you can control a little door for fish to pass through a boat lock in Utrecht.

  • I’m a few months late to Natan Last’s article in The New Yorker about crosswords, but I loved it. Somehow, it told a compelling story while still feeling as factoid-dense as crosswords themselves



  • website full of floating fragments from Craigslist “missed connections” posts

  • Max Neely Cohen digitized his wardrobe and put it online! Something that no one knows about me is that I did this in college and then lost the website files and stopped paying for the domain. I should start it back up! it’s fun to catalog things you own!









  • Kate Wagner’s article about F1 (especially the last paragraph, which was almost certainly why it was pulled from the site)



















  • My friend’s dad made a website called “Palindrome City” in the aughts and it’s extremely wholesome


  • Wholesome blog about obscure 20th century comic strips called “Stripper’s Guide”. Found it when looking up a 1920s comic strip called “The Guy From Grand Rapids” (that’s my hometown!)




  • “careful words” is a tool that describes itself, correctly, as “a little more than a thesaurus.” 1/23/2024


  • fun tool called creepyface.io that makes it so that your eyes look at the curser! 1/23/2024

  • convert images to ASCII art. 1/23/2024

  • Spencer Chang’s are.na of “small tools” 1/23/2024

  • Website that shows Wikipedia landmarks near you. It’s like wikishootme.toolforge.org but, crucially, *there is no map*. If you like maps like I do, you will prefer the other one. But I’m including it here because if you like reading blurbs without opening new tabs, this one will be way better! 1/23/2024


  • The website locallingual lets you upload (and listen to) audio samples of language speakers all over the world. shows you dialects and accepts and stuff! 1/20/2024




  • Interactive site that shows which Wikipedia articles were written by more female editors and which were written by more male editors.

  • In 2000 and 2001, a bunch of computer scientists worked together on a website to write code to be able to watch DVDs on their computers  running Linux technology (which was high tech!!) and they did it! They made t-shirts and everything. Then the movie industry tried to shut them down! 1/13/2024


  • website full of small, good browser games. 1/12/2024





  • GeoSpy tries to identify where photos were taken. It’s okay, but certainly not as good as the Geoguessr guy!!! 1/12/2024



  • map of ~the small web~ compiled by Kris from the newsletter Naive. 1/12/2024

  • Grover Furr’s website is extremely bare bones and perfect, like many websites of tenured professors are. I love them all!! 1/12/2024.


  • IKEA For Irish Pubs article in Eater. There is an actual company which exports green clover paddy paraphenelia to restaurants all over the world. 1/11/2024.

  • Listen To The Cloud, a site which lets you listen in to the chatter of airport communications over ambient beats. It’s interesting white noise. 1/11/2024

  • The inventor of the .zip file drank himself to death and one of his professional rivals left a brutal blog post about his obituary. Twitter has lots of puns about his death, like “Perhaps that's the only way he could decompress.“ and “RIP or should I say ZIP”.  1/9/2024






  • Since 1995, every day, NASA has published an Astronomy Picture of the Day on a web site that has barely changed its design. 1/1/2024





  • You can vote on the hottest member of the Senate (and see the rankings!). Created by my stew pal Faraz. 12/17/2023.



  • Glorious Trainwrecks slightly-niche online community collecting videogames that are extremely janky but somehow work 12/15/2023




  • Stamps Back is all about the Bulgarian tech scene of the 80s!





  • Spicy England, a Tumblr that shows Google Streetview images of the industrial estates where England’s condiments and spices are imported to, distributed from, or packaged. 12/15/2023




  • top-read New Yorker stories of 2023! 12/14/2023





  • The very good crisps article in The Guardian by Amelia Tate. 12/8/2023


  • site from NASA with all the precipitation on the globe currently. 12/8/2023

  • “sonic garbage”, a site where you can mix weird sound bytes. 12/8/2023



  • Letterboxd list of the movies Jimmy Carter watched at the White House. 12/5/2023










  • I like watching The New Yorker videos where cartoonists explain their cartoons and this interview with Maggie Dai is my favorite! I want to be her friend! 11/1/2023

  • The webiste pizzanipple.com has a gallery of nipple-pizzas (photoshopped to be in between the two).
  • The department of defense has to release a bunch of their photos and sometimes it’s fun to search banal terms like “baking” or “hug” and see what comes up. 10/31/2023


  • A LA QRTE is a portable printer that reads the QR code, feeds the resulting menu to ChatGPT, and prints a menu for you 10/30/2023
  • Article in The Verge about businesses with names like Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, and Plumber Near Me. 10/26/2023

  • Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) has a new book! The New Yorker wrote about him. 10/26/2023.



  • fonts.nyc, a site where you can submit and identify interesting signs with cool fonts around NYC! 10/24/2023

  • Article about girl who got attacked with a baseball bat while she was dressed as a hot dog mascot has the funniest quotes I’ve ever seen. 10/17/2023








  • Recursive recipes will show you the ingredients that went into into your recipe’s ingredients, and may leave you questioning your place in the universe. 10/16/2023



  • Strong Language, a blog about profanity! It’s by linguists and other smart people who think about words in interesting ways! 10/13/2023






  • Guardian article by Amelia Tait about the urge to buy “one in every color” 10/9/2023



  • Many episodes of Ologies with Alie Ward are very good, but I particularly liked the one about opossums! 10/9/2023

  • Cried reading the Slate article about the woman who stays on the phone with heroin users so that if they overdose, she can immediately call 911. 10/7/2023





  • There’s a Korean idiom that’s similar to “looking for a needle in a haystack”: 서울에 가서 김서방 찾기. It means “searching for a Mr. Kim in Seoul”. 10/4/2023

  • Mangalica pig is a Hungarian breed of pig with a wooly coat that makes it look just like a sheep. 10/2/2023


  • Michigan city called Zilwaukee that was maybe named that to confused immigrants and trick them into moving to Zilwaukee (instead of Milwaukee). 10/2/2023


  • Iowa City police log: SUBJECT IS MAD ABOUT DRUNK PEOPLE, INCLUDING HIMSELF, BEHAVING POORLY. SUBJECT WANTS NEW SHOES AND TO BE YOUNGER AND HEALTHIER. OPTIONS WERE DISCUSSED. 10/1/2023





  • The Michigan Stove Company commissioned something called the World’s Largest Stove in 1892 for the World’s Fair in Chicago, and there’s a cool blog post about how the big stove got moved in 1965. 9/29/2023.

  • P!nk recorded a song dressed as a pirate called “We’ve Got Scurvy” for Spongebob Squarepants. 9/29/2023.

  • I enjoyed this interview with Paul Bucheit, the guy that built Gmail. But maybe it’s just because I’m too young to remember a world without Gmail. 9/28/2023.

  • 2016 Toronto Sun article about Macaulay Culkin going to a cafe in Paris where the wifi password was “Macaulay Culkin” and a frenchman came out to say “I knew you would be here someday”. 9/28/2023.














  • Dees Nuts sued Mr. Beast’s Feastables over the use of “Deez Nutz.”

  • LOL at this old Vice article chastising a WSJ advice column. 9/6/2023.




  • When I was sixteen, I secretly confessed to my boyfriend that my dream job was running a hyperspecific museum. It hasn’t happened (yet) but I did feel some murmors of the heart when I read the Atlas Obscura “Ultimate List of Wonderfully Specific Museums” 8/30/2023





  • Sheldonbrown.com, another perfect minimalist HTML page run by a kooky guy. This one is about bikes. 8/28/2023

  • kleinbottle.com, the webiste of eccentric professor Cliff Stoll who used to be a Cold War cybersleuth and now makes silly useless objects. 8/28/2023

  • Check out how your NYC apartment looked in the 40s! This website was created by Julian Boilen with photos from the NYC Department of Records. 8/28/2023.


  • Dangerously fun game where you chop up shapes. 8/28/2023



  • Ed Droste from the indie band Grizzly Bear is second cousins with another guy named Ed Droste who founded Hooters. 8/23/2023

  • The world’s only giraffe without spots was born at a zoo in Limestone, Tennessee. 8/23/2023.

  • you NEED TO PLAY METAZOOA.COM! It’s a wordle-like guessing game where you guess animals. You can tell if you’re getting closer because the site will tell you what  taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) is shared by your guess and the correct answer. I don’t know if I’m making sense but you just need to play it. 8/22/2023.

  • PEPTOC HOTLINE gives you prerecorded life advice and pep talks from K-6th elementary school students from Healdsburg, California. The phone number is a local US number 707-8PEPTOC. Press number: 1 if you're frustrated, 2 for life advice, 4 for children laughing with delight and 6 for how awesome you look . 8/22/2023

  • The earliest known insult:"You are wearing such rags that your butt sticks out of them," an Akkadian insult 4000 years ago . 8/22/2023

  • The Yaghan people, indigenous to the Southern Cone (Argentine and Chile area) didn't wear clothes until European contact -- even though their climate got really cold! I forget that clothes are, like, not a prewired instinct like eating and sleeping. I would read a whole book about the psychology of dressing oneself . 8/22/2023

  • The Guardian chose a bizarre, evil-looking MS paint style lemon illustration for a how-to article in 2021 . 8/22/2023

  • Lasagna Love is a website that makes it easy to find neighbors to make lasagnas for. 8/22/2023

  • Big old organized archive of stories and books in the "mathematical fiction" category. 8/15/2023




  • WikiVoyage has a travel guide for the moon. 8/3/2023.







  • I was delighted and unsurprised to learn that The Political Graveyard, a sprawling 90s-looking website with obsessive records of political history, is maintained by an Ann Arborite!


  • Floors article from London Reconnections about wayfinding signage for floors in rail stations.







  • the US forest service lets you rent these restored historic wildfire lookout cabins for cheap. can find them on recreation.gov



  • A man who witnessed Lincoln's assassination appeared on the tv game show "I've Got a Secret" in 1956 when he was 95! 7 min Youtube clip

  • This  woman has claimed, for two decades, that she is the creator of the matrix and the terminator and there were rumors (not true) that she won a $2.5 billion lawsuit over the rights

  • The scribble of a flow chart from an FTX bankrupcy filing




  • Guy (possibly a student?) called mrtortilla3895 writing his life story in the YouTube comments of Clair de Lune for 1000 days. posted on Twitter by oscar schwartz. some inspiring messages toward the end!  “Give life a chance, even if it punches you in the stomach. To those of you who read my comments, thank you for staying in my journey. To those of you who reply to my comments, I read every single one of them. To those of you who do their own entries, keep on doing it. I’m so glad that this little community is so nice, who are supportive of each other”
  • you can get a replica of the jersey of a slam-dunking skeleton worn by the 1992 lithuania olympic basketball team. and the site is amazing.



  • if you turn off hardware acceleration in your browser you can screenshot to your heart’s content on ANY streaming site!




  • They’re IN LOVE! An American paddlefish and a Russian sturgeon hybridized despite not even being in the same family! “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said.



  • NYT article about the Georgetown professor who decorated a sidewalk with 10-foot sculptures of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, making the neighbors mad.


  • Last Stand of the Hot Dog King, article about Dan Rossi owning owned 499 street vending permits, the city passed a law saying you could only own one permit, a law he maintains was retaliation against him. Now, he says they want him away from the Met

  • One of McDonalds’ first promos, back in the 70s,was Garfield Mugs. So good! I want one so badly!










  • a website with every NYC apartment listing all in one. i’m not describing it well. it’s not practical. it’s really cool! 6/23/2023.


  • the excess equipment the pentagon gave to police departments includes 6 french horns and 1 euphonium, 179 assorted lawn mowers, 271 assorted treadmills,72 golf carts and 1 order of golf balls, 2 pizza ovens, and more !




  • I was on Lateral, Tom Scott’s trivia podcast!

  • Watch Mr. Personality, a five-episode reality dating show from 2003 where the male suitors wear latex masks and Monica Lewinsky is the host!? 6/20/2023.


  • guineapigzero, a zine about doing medical trials for $. there was a segment about it on This American Life a decade ago. 6/14/2023.


  • joke book from the fifth century. 5/23/2023.


  • “gigabrain” is like chatGPT but it’s answers from reddit. 5/21/2023.

  • website that lets you make cool QR codes! 5/21/2023.








  • queermaps, an online archive of gay bars. 5/11/2023.


  • NYT obit for a guy with a 37 million word long diary. 5/10/2023







  • On giantmicrobes.com you can purchase stuffed animals of microbes such as chlamydia. 5/3/2023.

  • if you know me well, you have probably heard me voice my desire for easy-access audio from Jeopardy! games for me to listen to as a podcast. TURNS OUT THERE’S A 24/7 JEOPARDY RADIO!!!!!!! My cup overflows. 5/3/2023.


  • Scrollable timeline of Twitter’s demise 5/1/2023.



  • Guy gives tours in various Spanish cities of the physical infrastructure that underlies the internet. 4/15/2023.

  • Middle aged woman spent 500 days alone in a cave for an experiment. She wrote a book and knitted a lot and didn’t want to come out. 4/15/2023.

  • Gretchen McCullough, who wrote the (great!) book Because Internet, has a list of good pop linguistics books. 4/13/2023.


  • Meta AI made this site where you can upload a drawing and then instantly animate it doing movements. 4/10/2023.

  • Someone got a version of GPT-3.5 to run on a TI-84 calculator. 4/7/2023




  • NYC released the most popular 311 calls over years and included some memorable calls... “ A goat is tied to the stairwell in my building.” 3/12/2023.



  • “Altered states,” or proposed states of New England that never happenned. Vermont used to be “New Conneticut”! Newfoundland almost joined the US, not Canada! 3/10/2023.

  • Cool website builder mmm.page. I should redo this website and use this 3/6/2023.

  • It’s cool that radiotrophic fungi just LOVE radiation. It’s kind of charming. How silly of them. How funny. 3/6/2023.






  • Are.na collection of eggs in art and design. 2/14/2023.



  • Durham guy set up camera at a short bridge and posts videos on YouTube of trucks getting their roofs sliced off. The bridge is nicknamed “the can opener.” 2/2/2023.


  • Found Magazine — comprised of little found notes. Based in Ann Arbor! 1/30/2023.






  • A film editor (and also my very cool friend!!!!) Sascha wrote a Slate article a couple years analyzing the editing in Trump’s campaign videos. 1/23/2023.

  • He played dead on TikTok everyday for nearly a year, hoping to be cast in a TV show or movie as a corpse. CSI: Vegas did.

  • A Nieman Lab article that opens: “’Reader, would you be surprised to learn that you had been a terrorist suspect?’

  •  The author William T. Vollmann wrote in Harper’s in 2013 about the process of FOIAing his FBI file and discovering that he had been a Unabomber suspect.” 1/23/2023

  • These interactive pages on earbirding.com will teach you how to create mental images of bird sounds according to their pitch pattern, speed, repetition, pauses, and tone quality. 1/23/2023

  • "the average SAT score of the highest ranked school that rejected a student is a much stronger predictor of that student’s subsequent earnings than the average SAT score of the school the student actually attended" from this NBER paper 1/23/2023

  • Kid from a 2013 Popeyes meme (instantly recognizable) got sponsored by Popeyes! 1/23/2022.

  • “maponshirt” lets you print a map on a shirt. It’s really not that groudbreaking but it’s fun to play with the website interface. I found it when I was trying to find cool retro OpenStreetMap merch (anyone have any tips?) 1/10/2023

  • Trashwiki, a hub for dumpster divers around the world. 1/10/2023

  • That one Chuck Norris-joke-esque college admissions essay that got send around on email chains in the early 2000s.  1/5/2023.

  • Heated Wikipedia discussion on whether “world’s smallest dinosaur” should be included in the lede in the “bee hummingbird” article. 1/4/2023


  • This is very bizarre and NSFW but this Russian photographer has been taking portraits of nude women who have code painted on their bodies. There are.... so many of these photos. They’re very strange and I’m amazed that he’s so committed. 12/30/2022






  • Master doc of all dril tweets. 11/29/2022.

  • The YouTube channel Answer in Progress put together a super video about why Japan’s internet has such bizarre, cluttered UX. 11/26/2022.


  • Claude Shannon, the 20th century mathematician called “Father of Information Theory,” wrote about the probablities involved in juggling. 11/25/2022.

  • This Cleveland Magazine profile of a local Ohio injury lawyer/ambulence chaser Tim Misny is genuinely one of the craziest things I’ve ever read. 11/25/2022.

  • 1985 street interview asking Irish people what they’re giving up for lent. 11/25/2022.

  • Youtube video of guy on public TV blending drinks, exercising, painting, and answering phone calls at the same time. 11/23/2023

  • Fun colors and design on my friend Forrest’s personal website. Zone out and move your mouse over the letters for one or two or thirty minutes!!!!! 11/22/2022


  • Bob Dylan was in a 2004 Victoria’s Secret ad. Very random. The Cut wrote about it. 11/20/2022.


  • Odd Salon is a speaker series where guests talk about odd stuff. There are videos! 11/6/2022.

  • ScanOps shows the hands and other evidence of human scanners in Google Books. 11/2/2022.

  • The New Forker, an interactive map of New Yorker restaurant reviews by my friend Reed Kavner!! 9/27/2022








  • Guy set up a neural net to go through 50 hours of archived cartoons in an attempt to identify a weird mystery cartoon and failed to identify it 9/5/2022






  • If you like the Rice Purity Test, you’ll like this metasite with TONS of purity tests. 8/30/2022



  • Atlas Obscura article “What is the Biggest Bird in the World?” 7/20/2022


  • “Everything is everything,” a startlingly comprehensive map of NYC bagels.  Now I have Lauryn Hill stuck in my head. 7/18/2022

  • Quanta (I love Quanta) wrote about the Princeton math professor who dropped out of high school to be a poet and then became a mathematician (PhD from Michigan, go blue) and won a Fields Medal and only works for three hours each day and is getting  “better and better at ignoring deadlines.” I have too many favorite lines to list but one is “He often works in the public library, in the children’s section, where it’s pretty noisy. “I don’t like quiet places,” he said. “It makes me sleepy.” Huh says this about many things.”  7/6/2022


  • The Wikidata game makes it easy (actually pretty easy!!!!) to make small Wikidata edits. 6/23/2022



  • Sometimes, it’s really hard to find a good photo for a Wikipedia article. Here’s a lengthy but interesting discussion about what photo should go in the article about arming teachers.  6/15/2022.





  • #HEXWORDS! Why bother with a random green when you can choose to be a #BADA55 !!! 6/8/2022

  • web app that lets you draw your own azulejo tiles 5/29/2022




           *most


  • Dracula Daily newsletter sends you Dracula in real time (it's written in letters and diary entries). It started May 3.

  • A pie chart of what other languages call “pie charts.” 5/17/2022

  • Redittle helps you search Reddit better. 5/16/2022.

  • Reviews for “Brain HP,” jelly beans for gaming 5/16/2022.




  • MEL Magazine talked to the writers of Arrested Development about the iconic line “It’s a banana; what could it cost, ten dollars?”  5/11/2022.

  • Laughing at this bug report: “Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash.” 5/10/2022.



  • Website that yells at you for touching your face. 5/9/2022.

  • Stanford computer science professor and “father of analysis of algorithms” Donald Knuth wrote about why he hates email. Here’s how it starts: “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” 5/4/2022.

  • Chicago launches 'Chicagwa' canned drinking water campaign. 5/3/2022.


  • Writing app where you have to keep writing-- if you take a break more than a few seconds, it deletes everything. 4/27/2022.

  • Website that lets you search a word and then will give you common adjectives for that word. 4/26/2022.



  • Aconyms used in chemistry (specifically NMR) that are ridiculous... PENIS (Proton-enhanced nuclear induction spectroscopy), DUMBO (Decoupling Using Mind Boggling Optimization) etc.  4/19/2022.

  • Detect bird sounds with a Raspberry Pi and BirdNetPI. 4/18/2022.














  • the Wadsworth Constant is the internet axiom from 2011 that states that you can safely skip the first 30% of any YouTube video and not miss anything. 2/24/2022.

  • Story in Wired about Spanish guy who lost his false teeth and then got them back in the mail after someone did DNA analysis. 2/24/2022.








  • “Real Me and Fake Me,” by Joe Dunthorne in the London Review of Books. He realized that someone on Instagram was impersonating him to schill crypto! 2/14/2022
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