ABCNEWS.com : Parrots Take Over Seattle Park

Chunky chum Scott Chaffin points me in the direction of the lost parrots of Seward Park. I’m thinkin’: now that’s a fine use for a city park. I’m off.

CHICAGO READERS PLEASE NOTE: There be parrots in your fine city too. Arrr.

(grmbl, counterintuitive trackback UI, grmbl)

The New York Times on the Web gets a new layout, I think. I may be wrong.

It seems like I’ve lived this day before…

Local film awarded Sundance’s top prize, headlines the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I’m sure Harvey Pekar will grouse justifiably that the paper didn’t even bother to share the name of his film with their readership. Of course, it’s American Splendor, and I’m happy not only because the unalloyed pleasure I take from both reading Pekar’s inspired, reflective rants about American life and seeing him hold forth in person.

I’m happy because the prize fairly guarantees national distributorship. The inside question, naturally, is “Will Letterman invite Pekar back on his show?”

If he does, I’ll tune Dave in for the first time in uncounted years, ’cause I’m reasonably certain it’ll be ten car pileup, with no coarse language or fisticuffs involved.

I really can’t even begin to express how happy this news makes me. Go Harvey (and the film people who made the project possible) !

An Introvert’s Lexicon via jimfl at Everything Burns.

Semi-accurate. Biased against extroverts. Appears to exclude the possiblity that one might be capable of both behaviors (like me).

Referrer storm should subside somewhat today. Unfortunately, although bellerophon made it through OK, the system locked up at least three times, which is really unacceptable.

This morning’s freeze, at around 7:00 am, also produced an instability in the actual apache binary, which means I really have to do some disk maintenance again, so expect further long outages – it takes a hella long time to run disk warrior on a 40GB drive if the machine is a 300mhz G3.

More maddeningly, the freezes impede logging, so tracing the problem is gonna be tough.

Textpattern: web writing tools: is this a partial answer to Matt’s needs? Some initial viewers seem to think it may be simpler than MT for content management. I’ve yet to go deep on it.

Via Todd Dominey, who today also highlights Aizai, a sort of aggregate cable-access for the web.

Uh, if you’re using OS X, Allan, Eric, and Paul. And Melissa. There’s my 10% right there.

Rough Days for a Gentil Knight gets a makeover.

Increased legibility, decreased business, bigger type, cooler colors.

Looks nice, Allan. Now you need to find a pic of that Kelmscott Chaucer to fade under the upper left there…

Glacial Erratics is Mr. Chris Dent’s contribution to the blogosphere. Mr. Dent has already brought Warp, a wiki variant, into the world, and generally brings interesting thoughts into his interactions.

I have, sadly, missed the portion of Mr. Dent’s life wherein copious wild oats are sown, which is another way of saying we’ve never exactly gotten drunk together. But someday, I’m sure we will.

I met Chris through the estimable, or perhaps inestimable, Eric Sinclair, and met the ever amusing Sabrina of PouPOU via Chris.

Good company the lad keeps.

[typos edited, as they were bad enough to impede legibility]

Digital Card Models is one of many mom-and-pop sites dedicated to providing paper plans for scratch-built models to be constructed from paper.

DCM provides the kits as PDFs, as in the sample kit Bristol Scout and Fairey Swordfish. One of the interesting features of the earlier planes in the kits is that roughly through the end of WWI, plane designs were actually engineered in miniature. Thus the thin-section wings on most WWI planes. Small-wing airfoils are more efficient in thin section; it turns out thick section works better at actual airplane scale. This error means that small models of these designs are frequenty quite flyable as gliders. Of course, it’s important to carefully balance the plane, but it’s quite do-able.

With proper care, these kits can look nearly as convincing as those old plastic Revell kits persons of my age grew up making. Mind you, that’s with proper care. Any impatience whatsover will ruin the build and require starting from scratch.

There are a ton of other interesting resources on cardmodeling, which is by no means restricted to planes, or even machinery – I’ve built kitted birds, such as this hawk (which I’m currently working on).

Here’s the Cardmodeling FAQ. Here’s Fiddler’s Green, another airplane house but one of the oldest and largest of the American companies supporting this hobby. Info about conventions is at the cardfaq.org site (the bird pic is from shots of the ’98 convention), and this scanned catalogue for a British supplier, Marcle. Some of the European models can be obtained via Oregon’s Paper Models International, and the Europeans sell the PMI kits too.

Long-time readers will be pleased to learn that there are a variety of decent models of dirigibles

I would respectfully submit that having designed and built my own flying scale card models of both a Fokker triplane and a Nieuport 17 might possibly make this an even more geeky entry than one previously cited by one of my readers as the geekiest thing he’d ever read. All that remains to be noted then, is that I do hope for a comprehensive, in-depth series of careful, exegetic reviews of the entire ouvre of Dave Sim from that correspondent.

Unqualified Offerings notes and quotes one of my many, many “Cinescope” pieces.

I chuckled as I wrote the cutline, yes I did.

Pepys’ Diary: now a blog.

Starts the run on January 1st. I’ll be checking in on plague-haunted London with this well-known protoblogger for the next whiles. Thought you might wanna join in too.

Via BoingBoing.