Ah, it's the old rice on the doorstep trick. I got this email this morning. I wonder if you can actually mail rice to the White House. I think it would be classified as "suspect" and diverted to a secret, undisclosed, underground rice depository somewhere in Maryland. More about it here: Inboxer Rebellion (Rice for Peace).

No Shirt, No Shoes, Nonantum.

The State of the Union Address Drinking Game: Every time he says "Nukular?" One drink. "Evil doers?" Two drinks. "Don't mess with Texas?" Finish your drink, hit yourself over the head with the bottle, and do a jig.

Maganda.org: paper is the new media.

The 2003 Floggies are here. "Biz Stone and New Riders contributed ten signed copies of his book Another Silly Book About Blogs ... If someone wins more than one of these categories and gets a duplicate book, they will be forced to eat the duplicate copies in front of a sizable audience." My book was printed on 50# Husky Offset Smooth paper. Ouch.

Cool, my blogging book is featured this week on the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf. Lots of free previews of various chapters and sections.

New Scientist: "Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs."

GI Party: Military Voice is a group of bloggers who are or were at some point affiliated with a military branch. A nicely done group blog site. Television producers take note: group blogs like this are pretty much "web pilots" for reality TV series. Cheaper too. Thin media. Good stuff.

I'm working on various things of various sorts and kinds. Hope everything is good with you. Take it easy. Hit the showers. Have a good one. Nice.

Last night I had a dream that Google launched a Personals service and this was the logo. Then I realized I could fly and started a whole new thing. But I remembered the Google part. Weird.

They didn't use futuristic potato snow for the snowmaking during Mona Lisa Smile at Wellesley. They made it the old fashioned way: pushing iceburgs through a wood chipper. Good times*.

I've been stuck on a phrase ever since last summer. I was reading craigslist and someone new to the Boston area asked if anyone had advice on neighborhoods. Somebody took the time to post:

Mattapan is beat.

I thought it was so funny because it seemed like the person was thinly cloaking some personal issue with feigned advice for the newcomer. I think the phrase "Mattapan is beat." has the potential to become another "Rocks Natick."

Free Money: "Every time you drop a coin into a slot, you are losing money needlessly. There is at least one foreign coin that is the same size or close enough that will do the trick for less than a penny. The following are some of the foreign currencies that will get you that Coke, call or subway ride."

Amazon Light 2.0 "Over Five Million items - on just one page." Nice.

I taught a Blogging 101 class at Wellesley College and Elizabeth is already an avid blogger. Nice! When they interviewed me for my job at Wellesley they asked me, "What if you never get to do anything with blogs here?" I said, "It's not like I'm a 'blog missionary' or anything." Um. Yeah. Blogging? I can stop any time.

PBS: Welcome to the Blogosphere.

Cool, there's a Blogpatrol!

Branded Blogs "Branded blogs are for companies, communities and clubs that want to offer a blogging service to their own community, without any hassle." This seems very close to the Blogger-in-a-box or Mini-Xanga I've been looking for.

Peter Scott showed me 'Zonsearch: "The better way to find CD tracks at Amazon." You type in the name of a song, and the results are all the artists who have covered it with links to the album at Amazon. Good stuff.

Griffin Technology iTrip. Nice.

I was watching Alias last night and suddenly saw the strange man people who live in Los Angeles may have spotted from time to time in Farmer's Market--the man European woman long to meet, Doug Kruse. Nice Doug! Gonna do more episodes?

BlogFodder is a daily email for weblog authors. It's usually a single line of text that could ignite a post on your own weblog. The site is an archive of those ideas, and a place to share their (somewhat related) results.

No blog for you! "Journals hosted at Blogspot.com and other blog providers have joined a growing list of sites blocked by Chinese authorities."

Livia is 100% fine but she super-crashed the car. Someone stopped short in front of her on one of her 3 hour commutes through the snow. She hit the breaks. The car caught a piece of snow bank, ramped up it, rolled onto the roof, slid, tumbled, and crashed back down on its wheels.

Nobody stopped to help.

A trooper happened by moments afterward by chance and called in an emergency crew to extract her. They expected to pull her twisted remains from the car. She was inside wiping up spilled coffee. They couldn't believe it. We're getting her checked out by a doctor anyway but she is unscathed. No one was hurt.

New Scientist has an article about Gadget Printers, Ink-jet technology that "prints" three dimensional objects (like a TV remote control) by building up smart polymers. Very futuristic. Now, this is what I'd like to see: a home unit that is also capable of recycling the finished product if you don't need it anymore. That way we don't have to fuel our disposable society.

I just finished reading a faculty/staff posting at Wellesley that said Mona Lisa Smile will be back to shoot winter scenes at Wellesley later this month and I'll have to endure the sound of giant machines manufacturing fresh new "movie snow" to cover the snow we already have on campus. Then I clicked over to read megnut and saw that Meg is currently dodging Mona Lisa Smile crew outside her apartment. Nice, this movie gets around.

Note to self: Just because you are excited about the similarities between ant colonies and the blogosphere proposed by John Hiler doesn't mean your students are. Other than that, Blogging 101 is good stuff so far.

Apple - Safari is one of the many amazingly cool new products announced at Macworld. Wow.

I'm starting my Blogging 101 class today at Wellesley College so if you're at Wellesley and you've got nothing better to do: Pendelton E. 129 at 4:00. A good time will be had by all. Maybe.

Penn to airport security: "You wanna grab my crotch, please ask."

Gizmodo : A video iPod? "There's speculation that next week at Macworld SF Apple will introduce an iPod with a color screen that will play video files," Nice! I want royalties.

Jacquies Rant Page: "I've managed to read a few chapters of my new Blogger book...Biz Stone's book and like it a lot! I have a few ideas already ;-) Thank you, thank you Mr Stone for a thoroughly readable book." You're very welcome!

The Pinhole Photography of Thomas Hudson Reeve: "The modern camera is a wonderful thing, but it's nice to remember how simple the mechanism can be. You can strip away the technology until there is little left but the abstraction on which the machine is based. A simple manipulation of space, a few materials, and a couple of hand tools and the magic (physics) is at your fingertips without sophisticated engineering. To simplify these cameras as much as possible I made them out of the 11x14 inch photo-paper itself."

It's snowing like crazy and I'm inside looking at old photographs of snowflakes by "The Snowflake Man" Wilson Bentley.

My thoughts on baby teeth from March of 2001. Its fun to have archives.

Does anyone else use the Google Spell Checker to spell check blog posts? Sometimes I find it quicker to just type how I think the word is spelled into Google and wait for the red "Did you mean?" to show up and give the correct spelling. I wish this was part of my mac version of BlogThis! As a matter of fact, a feature-packed 'GoogleBlogger' would be a nice thing to have. I'll have to bring that back to the lab.

There are crazy squirrels in my walls.

Mass Office of Consumer Affairs Do Not Call List Registry.

I saw Adaptation yesterday. Nick Cage's hair was funny. Good times.

AOL to Offer Blogging "It's natural that the blog and the home page would combine. And when you remember that AOL has the largest collection of home pages in the world, it kind of gets interesting." Look for the software release as early as next month.

Liz in Nepal is the on-going blog of a peace corps volunteer.

Hey, it's Nikolai Nolan's Third Annual Weblog Awards. Go vote! I'm giving away free signed copies of my book to some of the winners.

The Ticketstub Project is a site where you can upload scanned images of your saved stubs and tell a story about the event. Expertly built by Matt Haughey. Good stuff.

Giant sea monster fossil unearthed in Mexico. It had an impressive array of machete-sized teeth and jaws powerful enough to chew through granite. But, experts say, it didn't eat granite.

Want to work for Meg and Nick on The Lafayette Project? Do you have an interest in personal publishing and weblogs? You need to write a blurb to apply.