Muss My Hair

The Packwood Administrative Site is located in downtown Packwood, Washington on U.S. Highway 12. The property is approxiamtely 20.50 acres and contains 2 individual tax lots with 22 buildings.

No bids yet, but minimum is $250K, auction closes 3/3/2010.

A nice and allegedly-updated comics anthology website with work by John P., Jordan Crane, and many other talented folks. I like Sammy Harkham’s stuff–never seen him before or if i did I mistook him for Kevin Huizenga (whose comics I really dig).

The New York Times has a good interactive graph showing Obama’s proposed budget. It might take you a bit of time to find NASA… so why are we cutting them?

The Keong Mas is the only IMAX theater in Indonesia. It looks like a golden snail, after the famous Indonesian legend.

A short atmospheric game about exploring.

via JayIsGames.

I had a dream on Tuesday night in which someone explained to me that before records and wax cylinders, snakes were a choice recording medium. I don’t know how you’d use or play them back, maybe like a wire recorder? Anyhow I recall looking into a basket of snakes and each one was a different song. I think a label on the basket lid told you which was what.

It wasn’t this.

One mile west of Tillamook Head on the Oregon coast sits a lonely rock with an empty seagull-poo-splattered lighthouse. This is its story.

On October 21, 1879, four laborers were put on the rock. The rest of the crew followed five days later. Putting men on the rock entailed stringing a 4 ½” line from the U.S. Revenue Cutter, Thomas Corwin, to the rock. The men would then use a “breeches buoy” to cross the line. With the cutter rolling and pitching in the swells, the line was never taut, and the transported fellow was often drug [dragged?] through the icy water.

The first two weeks of construction found the crew totally exposed to the elements. Barren of caves, overhangs or ledges, the rock could not even provide minimal shelter. The workers chipped, chiseled, and blasted away. And then it hit.

January 2, 1880. A dying Nor’easter*. The seas crashed above the crest of the rock. Rocks flew as breakers tore off chunks of the rock and tossed them at will. The perilous storm pounded the rock. The storehouse was swept away taking most of their tools and provisions. Then the water tank, the traveler line and the roof of the blacksmith shop were ripped away. Clinging on for life, the men stayed in their shelter, the safest place on the rock. Hungry, soaked, and with no place to go.

The lighthouse is now a decertified columbarium (the site is broken, but has a great picture).

[The Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board] said the owners have not kept accurate records and, because urns sit on boards and concrete blocks and not in niches, the lighthouse does not even qualify as a columbarium.

* (squidocto points out that this couldn’t have been a nor’easter, as they are, well, in the northeast (USA). A little digging reveals that this was The Great Gale of 1880, which doesn’t sound so bad (“gale” just doesn’t sound so scary) until you read about the damage it did.)

because i have five minutes to kill, here is my cat.

Maybe these Squidocto was channelling these guys when he dreamt that song.

I dreamed a song this morning, and just as my eyes opened I realized it was They Might Be Giants playing the song. Their distinctive sound and voices were playing this refrain:

There’s a kaleidoscope on fire
It’s indefensible the way these lenses tend to burn

So my question is, is this a real song by TMBG, or did my brain make it up? It’s so loud, it feels so real… please make it stop….

These detourned jokes are awesome and sad.

A Democratic congressman walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” The Democratic congressman whimpers, “You’re right, I’m sorry, I never should’ve come in here, it’s all my fault, boo-hoo, please, bend me over, I’ll do whatever you want because I’m a little punk.” The bartender says, “Jesus Christ, you people are pathetic.”

…would you choose to make a blog entirely devoted to screenshots of Commander Riker?

Ah, what mischief can be done at Dekalb Avenue with only a sharpie.

Surely one of the 20th century’s oddest visionaries, Art Clokey, has passed on.

All too true.

John Roberts makes some funny videos mocking his Jersey mom: My Son is Gay, Christmas Tree, Mother’s Day, and The Phone Call.

Brooklyn’s best bar. http://www.spuytenduyvilnyc.com/

Museum of the Phantom City is a free iPhone app that catalogs and maps the unrealized grand visions people have had for New York City in the past 100 years. Put another way: Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder designed the Phantom City iPhone app to “transform the city into a living museum of speculative proposals for the city of New York.”

The sites include well-known projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Midtown Manhattan … as well as less famous proposals like Fuller’s “Mini-Earth”—a miniature globe that would have been suspended by cables across from the United Nations building….

You can only read about the locations you are near; white dots represent locations you are too far to read about, and pink dots represent entries you are near.

iTunes link, the creators talk about their app; via urbanomnibus.net