Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A few links I started collecting before I left for Pennsic, and a few more spotted since (mostly forgotten whom I got each from), with a bunch sitting in open browser windows I can't reach at the moment that'll have to go in the next batch....</>

• Lightning Bolt Directly Strikes Norwegian Couple in Their Cast-Iron Double Bed (Associated Press). "Shortly after returning to bed, the room flared 'like 10 welder's torches' and then everything went dark [...] Pillows apparently insulated the couple from the iron bed frame."
• A short article about small-brand sodas that answered an etymology question for me. (My opinion: hurrah for diversity! It's good to have options.)
• I don't remember whether I'd gotten around to linking to these dancers before...
• Hey, 19 September is Talk Like A Pirate Day. "[...] for reasons we still don't quite understand, we started giving our encouragement in pirate slang. [...] By the time our hour on the court was over, we realized that lapsing into pirate lingo had made the game more fun and the time pass more quickly. We decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day." Given the number of my friends who need far less excuse than this to talk like a pirate, this could be interesting.
• "Whale flatulence stuns scientists" (Daily Telegraph) "We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly ... it does stink" But they did get an entertaining photo (go look) and learn some interesting and important stuff about whales on the expedition. "One pigmy blue whale wearing a satellite tracking tag was found to be returning to a former population off southern Australia which was thought to have been hunted to extinction by Russian whalers."
• Only a few people will be interested in this, but those few will probablly be pretty interested: A Concise Dictionary of Middle English by Rev. A. L. Mayhew and Rev. Walter W. Skeat, available as a dozen PDF files, each less than 2MB in size. Now I can learn more Middle English than is contained in the lyrics of that Sequentia CD I like so much.
• A cute sign for IT professionals (spotted on Elbows, IIRC)
• "Cops Against the Drug War" (Seattle Weekly), thanks to moominmuppet. "Cole is explaining why he ultimately turned against the war on drugs. He says he came to realize that he liked many of the people he was turning in and that his betrayal of them, rather than drugs, was what destroyed their lives. 'You can get over an addiction, but you can never get over a conviction,' he likes to say." The article makes a pretty familiar argument against the War On Some Drugs, but the twist is that it's coming from a group of law enforcement officers. It also reveals some of the questionable things police have done in the name of the WOSD.
• TrustFlow for LiveJournal" lists the fifty LJ users not on your friends list who are closest to being on your friends list. There's a description of the algorithm and a FAQ. "The 'Trust' in 'TrustFlow' is there because it's really meant for a different situation - one where you list people to indicate that you trust them. That's emphatically not the case on LiveJournal - LJ was just a handy platform on which to try the ideas out. It doesn't measure trust here, more the sorts of qualities which lead to putting someone on your friends list, which is generally acquaintance and interestingness." (Unsurprisingly, many of the folks on my "closest 50" list are people I read on the "friends of susboid" page and just haven't gotten around to adding to my own friends list.)
• I was amused by this observation in thespian's journal regarding a toddler's reaction to her tongue piercing.

Pennsic stuff and other musings coming when I feel less like a lump. Yesterday took a lot out of me, and today has been mostly just trying to rest enough to recover from that.