James's Lipton's beard has a series of commercials trying to get you to think before you text.

...dot com.

I met a friend of hahathor's this weekend who's working a cool documentary about humor in families, and she asked me to spread the word, in case any of you come from funny families -- they're apparently still looking for interviewees.

JokesMyGrandmotherToldMe.com

Documentary Description:
Some of us were fortunate to have grandparents who were wonderful joke tellers. They delighted in spreading their humor to all who would listen. Now, in this digital age, humor is more often delivered by email and through the media than in person. Regrettably the oral joke telling tradition of prior generations appears to be disappearing. Jokes My Grandmother Told Me is a short documentary that hopes to celebrate, commemorate, and perhaps rekindle this rich tradition of humor-filled interaction and connection, without which the world would be a poorer place.

Get Involved:
We are searching for people from families in which intergenerational joke telling was an important means of bonding, facing difficult situations, and/or cheering people up during hard times. If you are a person who remembers jokes that your grandparents, great aunts/uncles or even your parents told you, or if you tell your grandchildren jokes and are willing to be videotaped by us, please let us know. Although we will be filming mainly in New England and New York, we do occasionally travel to areas around Washington, DC, and are willing to travel longer distances if necessary. Thank you - jokes@niftyarts.com is our email. We have started filming as of November 2007 and hope to wrap up filming by summer 2008.

We Haven’t Got There Yet, by Harry Turtledove. Williams Shakespeare sees Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

messageSling. Free online voicemail; you can have you phone voicemail automatically forwarded here. It emails you when you get a new message, with an MP3 attached, or you can manage messages online, or check them via any phone. You can record personalized greetings for any contact. I like it mostly because I don't always remember to look at my cell phone, and if I have the sound off, I may miss messages for days.

From gdaniels:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html
On classical music and one-buttock playing.

If you haven't checked out the TED talks before, you really should. They are, as they say, inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers. Bet you can't watch just one! :)

OK, that's really cool. The Iditarod has equipped racers with GPS devices this year, and you can track their progress live. There are lots of nifty options on how to view, such as aerial vs road view, and mushers or checkpoints. (Sounds like the mushers are having fun with them; apparently at a rest point, one guy took the tracking device off his sled, handed it to a pilot, and asked him to fly around for awhile.)

They don't have enough work to keep me busy at the job I'm working today, so I've been surfing web games, and found one that's cool enough to share. It's called Fish Eat Fish. It's pretty simple, although it took me a while to get the hang of gameplay, and I'm finding it oddly addictive. To play, you use the Mouse to draw a path, trying to get only fish of one color in it. When the path is closed, the bigger fish will eat the smaller ones. You're trying to end up with one fish of each color. I haven't come even close to getting my name on the high score list -- I can't imagine how people do it, especially since the game is finite!

Insanely gorgeous photos of smoke. Colors are photoshopped in afterwards, but the smoke itself is real.

A two-minute illustrated summary of the Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket, narrated by Tim Curry.