Links too good not to post, but which don’t have much in common:

• Not really all that thrilled about taking a “staycation”? (Oh, and if you EVER use that word in my presence, I WILL kick you in the gonads) Maybe you’d like to visit some of the most famous man-made ecological disasters in the U.S. GOOD Magazine lists a whole bunch of them just ripe for tourists. For example, the subterranean coal fire in Centralia, PA which has been burning since 1962, or what’s left of the Salton Sea. It’s got to be better than sitting on the front porch at night listening to Grandpa fart while you watch “I Survived A Japanese Game Show” on the old portable TV.



• Remember Max Headroom? Well, if you’re older than 30, you probably do. He was a big deal for a while back in the late 1980s. He had a TV show, did commercials for New Coke (which you also have to be older than 30 to remember), and was a genuine pop icon of that decade. Well, it’s been 20 years, but he’s back. Britain’s Channel Four has brought out some new channel promos featuring Max, looking a big older (like the rest of us). Even though today’s advanced CGI animation could probably whiz up a fully-animated version of Max, Channel 4 actually brought back Matt Frewer to play the talking head once again. Here’s Max today:




graph via Dave Sifry

• Nobody can say with 100% certainty, but the best estimate of the total number of blogs online today is in the range of 115-120 million based on an estimate of 175,000 new blogs launching every single day. Realistically, though, the vast majority of blogs go ghost after a pretty short period of time. It takes a lot of time, effort, and imagination to hang in there for the long haul. The eighth anniversary of this blog is only a few weeks away, and with the notable exception of the six-month hiatus I took in the second half of 2005, I have never taken more than a few days off here and there over the years. Some blogs, though, never get beyond Post #1. Maybe the author got writer’s block, maybe they realized they just didn’t have it in them, maybe they were abducted by Martians and were anally probed, who can say. This website “collects” blogs that never made it beyond the first post, calling them “one-post-wonders” (via). They all seem to be Blogspot.com blogs, but I’ll bet you could find just as many at any other hosted blog service.
• Blogging buddy John Tolva has been working on an interactive website of the Forbidden City in Beijing for a long while now. He’s one of them super-smart computer guys that do cool stuff at IBM, don’tcha know. Yesterday he had this interesting tidbit: he superimposed a map of the Forbidden City on a Google Map of Downtown Chicago (a.k.a. The Loop) to demonstrate that the Forbidden City is almost exactly the size of the traditional boundaries of the Loop. Frankly, I had absolutely no idea that the Forbidden City was so vast, and relating it to a place I could visualize was very effective. Looks like the site won’t be done until sometime in the fall — probably not in time for the Olympics, eh, John? I can hardly wait to see it.