and birds circle above you waiting for the night to fall

Terry Moore gives a short talk on how to properly tie your shoes. Hint: you're likely doing it wrong.

Also from Laughing Squid, ever wanted to write a bike? These people have. Really intriguing idea.

From personalized bike frames to "ghost signs"--it's a leap, but it's one well worth taking. There's a Flickr gallery (not all of which are actual ghost signs, but well worth perusing for fans of painted signery all around), there's a Wikipedia entry, James Lilek wholly redid his online gallery from 2007 for brighter, larger, clearer images, there's a Twitter feed, another Flickr group, and a Tumblr. (And that's not even touching the private pages devoted to "ghost signs" in specific towns.)

Basically, if you don't have an interest, you might still enjoy some of these pages just for the vintage aspect of much of the work, and if you do have an interest, maybe this will tell you it goes deeper than you knew!

You don't have to follow Horse_ebooks on Twitter to be charmed by this investigative article; in point of fact, it gives Tweeted examples, so you can get the jist of why this bot account has a following. Personally, I'm neither outraged nor offended that the writer tried to find--and in some sense, succeeded in finding--the man behind the bot. For me, I think it just adds to the mystique.

So, um...this is scary. It would likely go well with yesterday's barnacle lamp.

There's a grid-wide hunt that just launched that should be celebrated, at least a little--not because it's a 1L hunt, not because it's got some good stores in it, not because there are SLUrls for all the stores, and not because people obviously put more than three seconds of thought into the prizes. Those are all good things, but no; I recommend the Penitent hunt purely and solely because the hunt site HAS PICTURES. Frankly, more hunts should do this, seriously. Pictures and SLUrls make a hunt more approachable, offer a deeper interaction, and incline current hunters towards being future clients.

And let me briefly divert to the botanical, and introduce you to Silene stenophylla, a very nearly Pleistocene-era plant. (It's not purely that old, but it was grown from very, very old stock indeed.)

Sadly, I have a very sad, very enraging close to this evening's festival of links and oddity. Namely, that the upcoming film The Lorax is now being used to sell SUVs. If you know anything about the environmental story behind the original book, you know how baffling, angering, and confusing that statement is, and I only wish I were kidding.

...No, I can't end there. That's just too depressing. Because really, irony is now officially dead. So here's Neil Patrick Harris in a toga fighting ninjas.

You're welcome.

(And if that didn't help, have some baby kittens. There you go.)

And on the next post, I'm going to try to untangle the new TPV policy.