News You Can Bruise for 2002 April 22

Joshua Barratt, if you read this please send me email. A friend of yours from UCLA is looking for you. Is it true that you have defected to Canada? Please advise.

I suppose I never realized it because he spends all his time messing with CSS, which to me has always seemed like the "square" activity that computer programming seems like to the public at large, but Todd Fahrner is a really funny guy. One of his recent commit messages:

internal reorganization into functional modules to facilitate growth, change, overrides, etc

My mother hits the big 5-0 today.

FHW: Gates Takes Stand in Antitrust Case. He's against it.

Susanna is here and healthy.

Susanna's showing me her souvenirs from Romania, which I can't describe because many of them are gifts for people who read this weblog. For four months she's been using as a laundry bag the grocery bag from the time I took her grocery shopping just before she left.

Also, I found this from WIGU: Amy Hughes makes amazing things out of Lego, and it's Lego-scale stuff, not hugely outsized Lego equivalents of bitmaps or whatever. Like Jeffrey Rowland before me, I make no apologies for loving this stuff, because 1) it is incredibly cool, and 2) I'm spending all my spare time writing a spellcasting system for Inform.

Photo roundup (I found that these links go stale after a month; I need to figure out what to do about it):

• "That's right, Tony, lower your roscoe. Just like I'm lowering interest rates."
• Before and after: I used to be a scrawny, balding elder statesman. Now, I'm a handsome military dictator!
• Walk like an Egyptian...
• What this country needs is a good $500 hammer.
• The awesome megamouth! Of which more anon.

The megamouth (megachasma pelagios) is, by any objective measure, the most awesome shark in existence. Rawr! They're very rare; the one that was found recently is only about the 17th specimen found. I remember (as does Susanna) the preserved megamouth in the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. It's in a big wooden box with a glass top, and if you're a little kid you don't know what's inside until you step up on the step and then there's this HUGE SHARK with a HUGE MOUTH looming beneath you! Quite an experience.

There's a whole book about the megamouth, and various cute megamouth drawings on the web. Megamouth!

The mighty megamouth will be your antidote to this picture. If you click, the Terrordactyls will have won!