Miles was the baddest cutest little Sheriff for Halloween, finally getting some mileage out of the cowboy outfit I brought back for him from Texas earlier this year (SXSW). Seen here with friends Sako, Patrick and Jackson at school. Went out with him tonight and he cleaned up (of course), even though he’s still so closed-minded about food that he refuses to try candy (what he doesn’t know is great for him!) His dentist is offering a buy-back program, giving kids $1/lb for the candy they collect, so he was mostly interested in racking up the weight (though I confess to having stolen one of his Abba Zabbas).

Unrelated: In the car on the way to grandparents house over the weekend, Miles suddenly says, apropos of nothing: “Sometimes life feels like a bonk on the head.” Followed shortly after with “I’m not listening to you because you have worms crawling up your nose.”

Five is golden.

The Red Hot Chachkas are an eclectic Bay Area klezmer group who, once upon a time, played at Matthew and Stacia’s wedding (Matthew is our dearly departed friend whose life was cut short by an inattentive driver in 2003). Soon after the wedding, Matthew joined the Chachkas as a basisst, and played with the group until his death. The Chachkas have written a song for Matthew: Suite Matthew.

I’ve spent the past few nights converting Matthew’s memorial site from Movable Type to WordPress, getting comments going again, fixing old links, re-embedding media, and just sprucing up the place in general. Working on it has made me miss Matthew all over again. He used to send the most hilarious links by day, then make the most intense music by night. He used to give the best hugs. He used to cook the best chicken. I miss you, Matthew.

Twelve years ago, at a party in Boston, I found myself in a friendly argument about how to complete the lyric “Blinded by the light…” Seemed like everyone at the party had a different idea about what the real lyrics were. When I got home that night, I posted the list of responses I had written down to an early version of Birdhouse and invited people to send theirs. Amazingly, responses started to roll in via email faster than I could post them (manually). I opened it up to mishearances of other songs, and before long I was experimenting with publishing HTML out of databases.

I registered the domain kissthisguy.com and, over the course of a decade, went through a bunch of homebrew Filemaker and MS Access solutions before finally learning PHP/MySQL. The site’s been a great platform for learning about and experimenting with database and templating systems, and has always been good for a chuckle (though weeding through the volume of crappy submissions has always been a chore, mitigated only in the past couple of years by the current public voting system). The site’s been tremendously popular for something I work on only in spurts separated by long periods of inactivity, and I even lived off its ad revenue while writing the BeOS Bible. But the volume of submissions - up to 200 per day at points - eventually became a Sisyphysian task I knew I’d never get out from under. And I’ve known for a long time that without a lot more TLC, the site wasn’t maximizing its potential.

Half a year ago, I was contacted by an entrepreneur / investor / music fan who had been following the site for years, who was interested in buying it. The decision was tough - it had always been my baby, and I was proud to have done a lot with a little. But I’m also increasingly realizing that my life is like death by a thousand paper cuts - a zillion small involvements keep me permanently spread too thin, and I’ve been feeling like I want to clear more time for living. So we negotiated for a while and came up with a fair deal that would leave me as partial owner, but without further maintenance responsibilities. A few months ago, I sold kissthisguy.com and began the long process of cleaning up code, converting ad spaces, documenting the back-end, and getting the site ready for its next incarnation. A new company has been created to back the site, and some really solid backing is appearing to push the site in all kinds of directions I never foresaw.

I’m really proud to have created kissthisguy, and it’s been a great ride. But I’m also happy to let it move on in this way - I know that with my schedule, the site would just have lingered in the “lightly maintained” way it had been for years. Now it’s got new life and an inspired new owner. We haven’t said anything about this on the site yet, but check back in the coming months to see where it’s all going.

PC World tests Windows laptops for raw speed, and gives the nod to … Apple’s MacBook Pro.

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

From the minute I first set up Windows under Parallels, I swore it was the fastest Windows I’d ever used — including boot time — so I’m not shocked by PC World’s finding. But it is just a wee bit ironic.

Former J-School students Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones are traveling the world as backpack journalists, and shot this image of the Dalai Lama on a sticker on the dashboard of a taxi floating around Darjeeling. Sage advice to keep surfing those cosmic waves.

Jonathan recently wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on how American Idol’s Indian counterpart Indian Idol has become a platform for rivalry between many of India’s 2,000 ethnic groups.

This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of or despite their badness, and lodge there for keeps, like grains of sand in your Juicyfruit. There are elements of awe and sadomasochism at work here. It’s not just that these videos are “so bad they’re good” (though there’s plenty of campy indulgence); we’ve come to genuinely love these “bad” music videos, and offer no apologies. In Vol. 1, Roger and Scot subject themselves to South Indian breakdancing music, the bizarre-but-relevant soul stylings of Tay Zonday, a troupe of angry geriatrics covering The Who, an airborne David Hasselhoff, the worst Star Wars theme song cover ever taped, and Leonard Nimoy’s foray into Hobbiton.

As a customer just coming out the tail end of a week-long ordeal with Comcast and their army of incompetent technicians and telephone bank operators, I feel more than a twinge of sympathy for Mona Shaw, a 75-year old woman, frustrated to the point of insanity by Comcast’s “customer support,” who walked into the local Comcast office and started smashing computers with a hammer. Washington Post:

Shaw’s opinion of Comcast? “What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles,” she says. This was after the company had scheduled installation of its much ballyhooed “Triple Play” service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services, in Shaw’s brick home in nearby Bristow. But Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but left with the job half done. On Friday morning, they cut off all service.

My situation: A seemingly simple request to upgrade to digital cable with HD channels, and to have a dual-tuner cable card installed in a Series 3 Tivo. Long story short: Installation tech appears, says he’s never worked with a Tivo before. Installs card, checks out a couple of channels, and leaves, thinking he’s done. I realize that night that we’re only getting 10% of the channels we’re supposed to be getting - and far fewer than we got before the upgrade. Each attempt to call for support earlier than midnight results in being put on the call-back system, my calls being returned at least 90 minutes later. The two times I was put on hold, got disconnected after 20 minutes. Empty promises that they could fix it by sending “a special signal” to the cable card to “wake it up” (electroshock therapy?) They asked me to wait three days for that to happen, then to call back if no change. Waited, no change.

Tried to schedule another house visit and was told there wasn’t a tech available for two weeks. Raised hell and, magically, an appointment opened up for the next morning. The tech never showed. Called in, waited for callback, and was told the visit was actually scheduled for the next day (bull - we were going camping that day). Finally was able to schedule a visit during the work week, between 10 and 2. Should I work from home that day or not? Yep - tech didn’t arrive until 1. Armed with an array of multi-stream and single-stream cards, she babbled at length, placed endless calls to her own tech support system, tried to mix single- and dual-stream cards, placed them in the unit in the wrong order… She finally got a single-stream card working and got up to leave. “You’re going to leave me with a single tuner?,” I asked. “You have another tuner in the Tivo.” “But not one that’s connected to your service.” “Why do you need two tuners anyway?” She places another call to her tech support to confirm that I’m not lying to her. Kid you not. Issue finally resolved after two hours of in-house visits, uncountable time on the phone, and bottomless frustration. And oh yeah - at every turn, operators tried to get me to bolt the Comcast phone service onto my order. Right, I’m going to put our phone service into the hands of a company this clueless, brand new to the phone game. I won’t be walking in to the local Comcast branch with a hammer, but it’s not hard to see where the impulse comes from.

So was Mona Shaw a crazy lady?

From what we can tell, Mona Shaw is not, actually, a raving lunatic armed with construction tools. She is a nice lady who lives in a nice house. She and Don are both retired from the Air Force (she was a registered nurse). They have been married 45 years. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church.

Get more than your fill at ComcastMustDie.com.

Tip: Comcast lookups for seldom-visited sites going slow? Reconfig your router with DNS servers from OpenDNS.

Music: Sonny Rollins :: Strode Rode

A friend of the family has been involved in an interesting startup for the past few months, which just launched in beta mode today. TasteBook.com lets users pull together their favorite recipes from Epicurious.com, combine them with their own favorite recipes, and have the collection published as hardbound, fully customized recipe books. Tangible, baby.

The site looks great, and gets more Ajax-y the more you dig in. Their Flash-based book preview function is super slick. The whole site seems like a good idea that was waiting to happen, and it looks like execution is going to be superb. Congrats to the crew at TasteBook!

More at c|net, with an interesting (but lonely) comment on the question of whether recipes are covered by copyright law.

Music: Fred Anderson & Hamid Drake :: From the River to the Ocean

Interesting piece at Machinist on Comcast’s underhanded attempts to shape network traffic by blocking certain kinds of customer-generated traffic without their knowledge. Accessing a given, non-copyrighted resource such as the King James Bible via BitTorrent from a Comcast-connected computer may fail, while accessing the same file from a non-Comcast host may work fine. What’s going on? Comcast is apparently running bots on its network that masquerade as P2P client machines, which send false “hang up” messages to both ends of a P2P communication. In other words, Comcast is not treating all network traffic equally - they’re controlling and managing the activities of their users however they see fit - and they’re doing it without letting their users know. This sums up the paradoxical position that providers like Comcast are in:

Providers … have an incentive to reduce peer-to-peer traffic on their networks. But they can’t do so openly because, remember, a lot of people only pay for services like Comcast in order to use peer-to-peer programs.

If consumers ever needed a clear example of why we need net neutrality written into law, they need look no further. The free market isn’t going to shake this out - not when you’re dealing with things like cable companies and their virtual monopolies.

Music: Cibelle :: Train Station

Miles and I occasionally rent a kayak from the Berkeley Marina and paddle around the bay, to catch a little sun and see what we can see. A few months ago we put together a waterproof geocache in an Otterbox, with the intention of planting it somewhere that would be accessible only by boat. Finally got around to it today. Had our eye on the dilapidated end of an old pier (at left in the image above; circle on right is where we took off from). After working our way through 1.5′ swells and oncoming wind, finally made it out there and started exploring… only to find there was not a single nook or cranny we could stick the cache in (without standing up in the boat, anyway, which wouldn’t be safe for us or for future finders).

Gave up and headed back in. Middle of the bay, something pink floated by, strangely familiar. “Miles, it’s a rose!” I shouted. We turned the boat around and chased after it. Sure enough - a single, lonely red rose on a long thorny stem, bobbing in the waves. Scooped it up and brought it home to Mommy. Amazingly, it seems to be doing OK. But what was it doing out there? A memorial to someone, tossed into the sea? A flower from dinner aboard a yacht, blown from its vase? A conciliatory gesture from a boyfriend, thrown away by an unpacified woman? So strange.

Even when caching days don’t go as planned, seems like there’s always some strange magic.

In the beginning, there was Hermenaut, an excellent ‘zine out of the Boston area from the mid-90s. Hermenaut hit it pretty big, as zines go, because it was packed with excellent writing and funky topics (issues had themes like “False Authenticity” and “Vertigo”). My old Liberace piece was originally written for Hermenaut’s “camp” issue. Fast forward a decade. Some of the original Hermenenaut authors, including Boston Globe writer Josh Glenn (who was one of Hermenaut’s founders) participate in a free-form (but closed) mailing list for around a hundred writers and gadflies.

Eventually, the “Hermeneutic Circle” realized that many of its subscribers maintained their own blogs, which gave rise to the idea of a “planet” web site that could be used to aggregate new posts from all of the individual blogs (without requiring writers to post in two places). Glenn signed up with Birdhouse Hosting, we registered hermenaut.org, and went looking for a solution.

The rub was that Glenn wanted more than simple RSS aggregation. He wanted posts from scattered blogs made into actual posts on the Hermeneutic Circle, so people could comment directly on the site. Somehow we needed to consume RSS feeds and produce new entries on the new blog, rather than just links. Eventually I stumbled on FeedWordPress - one of the coolest WordPress plugins I’ve tried in a while. Hand it a URL and it will discover all embedded feeds and ask you which one to subscribe. Each new author found in the feeds is made into a genuine author in the local WP system. Each category found in a feed becomes a genuine category in the local WP system. A nice API gives you a new set of template tags you can use to control whether commenting happens on the original author’s site or on the local site. And so on. Really nicely done (and yes, we tipped the plugin developer).

Hermenautic Circle went live today in starter mode; we’re off and running. And once again, I’m just amazed at the amount of work saved by the rich plugin landscape surrounding WordPress (I really thought I was going to have code this by hand).

One of the J-School’s multimedia student teams is putting together a package on geocaching, and Miles and I got to take them out to Redwood Regional Park last weekend. Didn’t go as well as planned - the dense redwoods made getting a signal lock almost impossible for much of the day. But we did manage to find two caches.

At the bottom of the valley, the ferns and moss and fungus grow thick, and the ancient trees rise up impossibly to the sky, gorgeous.

The highlight of the trip, as usual, totally unanticipated: Came across a patch of low weeds about 30 feet long absolutely dripping with ladybugs — tens of thousands of them, clinging from every tiny branch, several bugs thick in places. You could hear them dropping to the forest floor as they lost their grip on each other; they sounded like quiet popcorn. We scooped them up in our hands and let them crawl over our skin. Many inevitably found their way into our shirtsleeves and pant legs, into our hair and ears. It was magical, and we lingered with them for a long time. So this is where bugs are born.

Didn’t take my camera, but the journalists did share a handful of shots with me and said I could post them on Flickr.

I know that some people shower a lot, but was surprised by the results of this poll showing that 23% of people shower more than once a day, and that an additional 55% shower every day or almost every day. Several people in the comments on that page also mentioned wanting a clean towel for each shower! Even though I bike daily and hike on the weekends, and Amy works in the garden almost every day, we’re both light showerers - we average 2-3 showers/week each, and neither of us take showers lasting more than 10-15 minutes (how long does it take to lather up, shampoo, and shave anyway?) Miles gets one or two baths per week, depending on what he’s been up to. Neither of us have ever been accused of stinking, nor do we feel dirty. I can’t help but think that personal perceptions of cleanliness don’t correspond neatly to cultural standards of cleanliness (in other words, people don’t consider us “dirty” based on our appearance or smell, even if they think daily showering is necessary for cleanliness).

According to one person’s calculations, the average 10-minute shower costs $1.12 and uses 26 gallons of water - they don’t come free! If you’re using low-flow toilets, reducing your lawn watering, or taking other water-saving measures for environmental reasons, you could cancel out your efforts pretty quickly by taking long or frequent showers. YMMV.

Curious whether Birdhouse readers have similar showering habits to the population at large, so I’m reproducing the poll here. Votes are 100% anonymous.

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

New Stuck writer Zoe Krylova on “freak folk” standard bearer Devendra Banhart: This is the Soft Voice of the Evening.

We’ve been gifted with a gorgeous, strong, shining cabinet of drawers to open and marvel at. It is made of recycled wood. It has been refinished. There is mother of pearl inlay. And each compartment holds some news.

Also: Roger Moore on guitar guru Henry Kaiser’s musical expedition to the South Pole: Henry Kaiser in the Sweet Sunny South. The video of Kaiser using the steel marker that is the exact south pole as a guitar slide is required viewing.

Pretty amazing optical/brain trick: Is this dancer rotating clockwise, or counter-clockwise? “If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.” Apparently most people see her turning counter-clockwise, but Amy, Miles, and I all saw her turning clockwise. Unlike many optical illusions, this one hits you with absolute certainty - your senses don’t lie that profoundly, right? Amy: “Anyone who says she’s turning counter-clockwise is just wrong. Just wrong.” Then, 30 seconds later - “Wait! Now she’s turning counter-clockwise!” Took me a bit longer, but then suddenly she changed direction for me as well. I could not will her to change direction - she just seemed to reverse at random. But she stayed clockwise about 80% of the time, no matter how much I stared.

How this plays into left-brain / right-brain differences is a matter for psychologists - unfortunately there is no real article to accompany it.

Last month, my Wired subscription came bundled with an add-in magazine: Geekipedia, claiming to be a complete compendium of “people, places, ideas and trends you need to know.” Whatever. Corny premise, but it’s actually a pretty good read, covering topics from artificial intelligence to the Hadron collider to Zillow.

Coming to the “F” section over a plate of curry the other day, was surprised to find an entry titled “Faith Smackdown,” wherein ex-atheist Francis Collins (former head of the Human Genome Project) and biologist Richard Dawkins (”aka Darwin’s Rottweiler”) go head to head on a few key logic points.

Round 2
Collins: “God is outside of nature, at least in part. Science is only really valid in investigating nature. So science is essentially forced to remain silent on the subject of whether God exists or not.”

Dawkins: “Here we have a beautiful explanation for how life comes about… and then Francis Collins and others want to smuggle God back in and say, ‘Oh, well, natural selection was God’s way of doing it.’ He chose the method that made him superfluous. Why bother to postulate him at all, in that case?”

The inclusion of this embarrassingly brief summary of theist/atheist arguments in the Geekipiedia seems to imply that the recent popularity of public conversation about atheism is somehow attached to geek culture - something I would not have guessed (I thought it was more a Salon thing). Wired has reduced the discussion even further by hooking up a hokey JavaScript voting mechanism that lets readers click the thinkers’ heads to vote on who won each round. Puh-leeze.

Interesting debate - but would love to see it extended to a few thousand words.

Does it mean anything if one of your ears is warm while the other is cold? Even if you’ve been inside for hours and haven’t been wearing a hat and can’t think of anything you might have done that could have caused such a thing? Does this mean I’m going to die? Or just that my left brain is running hot for some reason? Ah well - I’m going to die eventually anyway.

William Shatner - “You’re Going to Die”

Excellent infographic from Good Magazine: The total floorspace of Wal-Mart (18,810 acres) is now larger than the square footage of Manhattan (15,000 acres).

When baald and I stepped into a Wal-Mart store last weekend, we both had the same realization: It was the first time either of us had ever set foot in one. Funny how something that has occupied so much of the popular imagination (what other store has as many movies, books, and blog posts written about it?) can be so far off the daily radar of millions of Americans.

via Kottke

Been itchy for some reason to totally scrap the WordPress theme I’ve been using and start from scratch. Tweaking occasionally on versions of the previous theme (which I called “Cheap Thrills” but have never released) for about five years, came across this Darkwater template a few weeks ago and it’s been pecking away at my subconscious since. Made a few tweaks last night and put it up. Just a few more kinks to work out. I’m also going to gradually start using the tagging features built into the WP 2.3 core.

Funny, I’ve been wanting to simplify simplify simplify. Darkwater actually is less complicated visually than Cheap Thrills was, but isn’t exactly the stark white thing I thought I wanted. Ever since reading Joseph Campbell back in college I’ve thought of watery scenes as metaphor for the unconscious. Which is maybe why I found this one irresistible - kind of a dreamtime descent.

Let me know what you think - be honest.

I’ve released the simple shell script I use to batch-upgrade dozens of WordPress installations at once, both on the Birdhouse server and at the J-School. It requires that all WP installations you want to track be subversion checkouts. Probably not useful for very many people, but the topic came up on the uwebd list, so thought I’d put it out there.

Get it here.

Whoa: 4-year-old painting prodigy Marla Olmstead creates abstracts on canvas that are so expressive, and so visually penetrating, and so comfortable with themselves… her mind is exactly where so many artists want to be - connected directly to her inner life, but completely unburdened by expectations of the art world that’s falling all over itself to buy her work.

Watching her paint, she’s got this rhythm, this ease. All four-year-olds are un-self-conscious in the adult sense, of course, and all are in touch with their “inner child” (whatever that means), but Marla is working on canvases larger than herself, and creating works that stand on their own against paintings done by people who have been painting for decades, trying to achieve something like what she does in pure play. Her paintings have been compared to “legends like Pollock, Miró, Klee and Kandinsky and had sold for first hundreds and then thousands of dollars.”

OK, except Marla is now seven (still painting) and a new documentary film about her gift has just been released. I haven’t seen it. But it gets tricky: Salon’s My Kid Could Paint That looks at the controversies unearthed in the making of the film, which have some people wondering just how “pure” Marla’s paintings really are, how much coaching she might have received, etc.

I have two thoughts:

1) No amount of “coaching” or “direction” given to a 4-year-old is going to affect the kind of artwork they make in any substantial way. In small ways, sure, but the fact that her father apparently sometimes gave her certain kinds of encouragement while painting does nothing to change the fact that her gift is genuine.

2) Whatever the truth behind Marla turns out to be, her amazing creative gifts are being permanently affected - possibly marred - by mass media attention and the self-consciousness that will bring.

I do want to see the film though - sounds like it raises some interesting discussion:

As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla’s story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

Interesting that every single painting in her online gallery is marked “sold.” But I try to put myself in her parents’ shoes. If I had a kid who could paint like that, what would I do? Shield him/her from the world? Keep the talent a secret? Is what I think I would do what I would really do?

Walking out of the Lawrence Hall of Science with Miles today, after enjoying the brand new Wild Music exhibit, all about sound and the environment (M liked the hydrophone tank the best), we stopped at the fountain to throw in our pennies and make some wishes. Miles volunteered that he wished that he would “grow up to be a great thinker.” This took me totally by surprise, since I had no idea this noble goal was even on his list (his previous career ambitions have included garbage man, artist, and daddy).

Five minutes later, driving home in the car, he suddenly says, in a kind of sad little voice: “But wishes never come true, right Daddy?” Great, my kid’s a closet nihilist. Of course we had a conversation about working hard for what you want, etc. But in the course of our little talk, it became apparent he was talking about something else entirely. By “wishes never come true,” he was referring to the physical act of throwing coins in a fountain, not wishes in the abstract. He just meant that our coins had nothing to do with whether our wishes would come true. Turns out he was just mythbusting in a five-year-old way, not being a sadsack after all.

Faith restored, and a good chuckle.

After several years of trying in vain to ignore the Facebook phenomenon, I’ve finally given in and created a profile. Way to go early adopter! After having done the LiveJournal thing for years, and experimenting with Friendster and Orkut and every other new social network that emerged, finally came to the same conclusion pretty much everyone else did - after the thrill of each new SN wore off, it started to feel like there was no there there, and the whole pursuit started to seem pointless. Not to mention the time suck. But I’ve got to admit that Facebook is a different kind of beast. The UI is incredibly clean, the API is wide open and there’s a thriving ecosystem of interesting plugins and custom widgets going on. And it seems to have a staying power the others didn’t have. No guarantees I’ll remain active there, but enjoying playing with it for now, and have already hooked up with an old high school friend I hadn’t talked to for years (classic story, eh?)

Just installed the WordBook plugin for WordPress, which installs a WordPress importer into your Facebook profile. Didn’t seem to pick up any existing posts; let’s see whether it picks up new ones. [Later: Ah yep, creating a new post caused the FB profile to pick up the last 10 or so from Birdhouse - nifty.]

Interesting piece at Newsosaur describing the glacial pace of change toward digital media in the newsrooms of mainstream media organizations. The “institution” knows in which general direction it needs to travel, but is either intimidated by new media or doesn’t know how to accomplish it. So MSM hires younger, more web-savvy journalists who could help pull publications in new directions, but who promptly become frustrated by the organization’s resistance to change.

… the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

Some of the comments on the story, many posted by younger employees within MSM who choose to remain anonymous, are crushing.

There’s a story circulating about how the AME of online didn’t know you could type a URL directly into a web browser… and there was that discussion on whether to include a blurb above a story describing, “what the blue underlined words were for”.

Enough to make a grown geek cry.

Thanks grabs

Think you’ve seen all the fascinating pictures of trippy creatures living at the bottom of the ocean there are to see? The current issue of Smithsonian Magazine has an amazing photo spread full of truly mind-blowing photos of the gelatinous dwellers of the deep. The article is actually a review of a coffee-table book titled The Deep, comprised of more than 160 photos taken by bathyscaphe researchers from around the world. Most are proof of just how “head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon’s head and googly-eyed glass squid.”

I love this shot of Grimpoteuthis, a type of Dumbo octopus that grows up to 5 feet in length and looks for all the world like a Robert Crumb drawing of an alien jelly wearing a pair of hiking boots suitable for trekking the Marianis Trench.

The deep sea is the largest ecosystem on earth, plunging to more than 37,000 feet below sea level at the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. It accounts for 85 percent of the space where life can exist and holds an estimated ten million or more species. “But we’re still trying to figure out what’s out there,” says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Unfortunately, the web version of the piece has different - and less amazing - examples than the print version, and it’s tricky to find the slideshow (click the small round dots after clicking the main image). Pick up the dead tree version next time you’re waiting at the dentist’s office.