My Fingernails Taste Terribly Bitter

A few highly random links:

• On of Eyezmaze has a new Grow! game. I haven't played it (will remedy that shortly), but JayIsGames sez, "This is without a doubt On's greatest work-to-date."


• Jelly Battle is a simple and madly addicting online multiplayer game of homicidal gummi people. Jump from button to button to engage lasers, nukes, and the dreaded Jelly Rage.


• The top 20 bizarre experiments at the Museum of Hoaxes: dogs with two heads, remote-controlled bulls, and remote viewing through cats' eyes. (As far as I know, none of these are hoaxes.)


• The Iron Man trailer is making me drool. Most importantly, they got the rights to the Sabbath. \m/ \m/

Out and about

I biked thirteen miles today, which took under an hour and a half—and that includes a side trip to Trader Joe's, where I bought a loaf of bread to replace the loaf of bread I bought yesterday, which was discovered to be moldy today. The second loaf fell out through a hole that tore in the bag they gave me, so I had to backtrack and collect it from the middle of a parking lot. I am reconsidering the idea of Trader Joe's bread.

Anyway, witness my route! I stuck to the south side of the Charles outbound, then crossed the Harvard Bridge (the longest bridge across the Charles, the one measured in smoots, the one with the "Houdini escaped here" plaque affixed to the south end) and returned on the north. On the way, I passed one of the oil containment floats we dug out of the dunes in Louisiana actually being used for its intended purpose: keeping oily traffic runoff from entering the Charles. (It's visible in Google Maps.) On it stood a black cormorant with one wing held awkwardly outstretched, and a shaggy-feathered great blue heron, standing on one foot and apparently asleep.

My other great accomplishment of the last twenty-four hours was crafting a new spoiler tag policy for Wikipedia that actually seems to come close to satsifying all parties. This is fairly astonishing, as a wildfire flamestorm has been raging ever since a few determined editors deleted all 45,000 spoiler tags in May. Currently, the Talk page gives you the message "This page is 221 kilobytes long. It may be helpful to move older discussion into an archive subpage" when you try to edit it, and there are nine archived pages of vitriol already. If I've actually been able to end this n-way Mexican standoff, I will pat myself quite firmly on the back. (To any uninvolved Wikipedians who would like to take a look at my draft: please feel free!)