Via memepool: the New Yorker cartoon bank. Yippee!! Now I can search for old James Thurber cartoons — although I haven’t made the leap to actually register yet so I don’t know how well the service works.

Is the 70’s style rock’n’roll gig t-shirt back? Seems it’s appearing at the fashion shows in London. That means it’ll be coming to a teeny bopper near you. I never had any myself. I do own a few concert tees now, mostly from the nineties (Bowie’s Sound and Vision tour, Peter Gabriel’s Secret World tour — awesome show). I haven’t gotten around to writing about those yet (if you haven’t seen it, I have my own t-shirt web site).

(Warning: it’s childhood nostalgia day here at GirlHacker!) While doing my usual used bookstore perusal of the children’s section, I came across three old volumes by Thornton Burgess. I had forgotten about his books. My father used to read them to me at bedtime. I adored the loveably flawed animal characters he created. I think Grandfather Frog was my favorite. And he wrote many more books than I realized! 171 on this list.

EM.TV, a German company, has acquired 100% of The Jim Henson Company. “EM.TV is the world market leader in family and children’s programming and the European market leader in merchandising.” I guess I feel much nostalgia to be “losing” Kermit & Co to a bigger fish. But I’m sure the Hensons are probably thrilled to pieces over the $680 million deal. I watched The Muppet Show every week it was on, went to all the movies with my best friend, and sang along with the albums. How many of you sang “The Rainbow Connection” in plaintive little kiddie voices during elementary school choir? One of my favorite sketches is The Rhyming Song. Why? ‘Cuz it doesn’t rhyme. Ha!

Win a trip to Powell’s! Being a used book (or just book) freak, Powell’s Books is a mecca of mine. I hope to make a pilgrimage soon. As they aptly put it “Visit the best bookstore in the world.
How you cope with ordinary bookstores thereafter, well, that’s your problem.” And they say they’ll fly you from any major city in the world, so everyone can go for it. Heh…maybe I’ll win since I’m such a small hop away.

Seth (who, as Steve and I have remarked, would be an excellent weblogger but instead sends weblog-worthy email to his logging friends) sent me a link to the Stumper’s List. It’s “an email-based resource where reference librarians can help each other find the answers to difficult questions.” Very cool!! They have searchable archives, an informative FAQ, and, amusingly, a guide to why wombats have special meaning to the list. Wombats are the subversively unofficial mascot for my alma mater (yes, Go Wellesley Wombats!) so I enjoyed that part. (Seth found this on Computists Weekly.)

I was thinking about the space shuttle mapping the earth from orbit, the NEAR images of the asteriod, and the beautiful pictures we’ve gotten from the Hubble. All of this perspective on our planet and its place in the vast universe made me wonder about my own microcosm and its relation to the greater world and other people. I’d love to have an (invisible) camera recording my life from a third person perspective. I only have what I see from inside me. Wouldn’t it be fun and educational to play back portions of my life from an external perspective? I’m sure some of it would make me uncomfortable, but it’s good to get comfortable with how other people see me. I have such a skewed view of how I must appear to other people — I’m sure we all do.

Mary Flanagan, assistant professor of media studies at SUNY Buffalo, is creating a web-based adventure game for girls ages 9-11. Her hope is that the game will make science and math learning fun for girls as they navigate the various scenes. In testing, she found that “girls would jump to narrative sections and linger there, while the boys would race to the end for a prize.” Yup. No surprise there. The National Science Foundation is helping to fund her efforts. My hope is that more corporations will fund efforts to create girl-empowering and gender-neutral software. Progress has been made in this area, but, as with most endeavors to create “best-sellers” and “hits”, the bottom line always gets in the way and incorrect compromises are made, dulling or lessening the effect. If I learned anything from my time at Purple Moon (now property of the evil pink empire), it’s that, even with the best of intentions, running a business is still, well, running a business. And it’s hard to alter the perceptions of the guys holding the purse strings.

This one’s for my ex-officemate Eric: Build your own stormtrooper armor. (via /usr/bin/girl)

I’m now the owner of a fountain pen, my first ever. It is a blue Waterman Carene with an 18 karat gold fine nib (here’s a photo of it without the cap so you can see the gorgeous top finial). No more drooling over Levenger catalogs (OK, I’ll probably still drool over them anyway), wondering if I should join the ranks of the pen elite. I was never really sure if I wanted one; I love roller balls (Uniball Vision is my one of my faves) and consider them to be a major improvement over fountain pens. My only “real” pens until now were a blue Cross Classic Century Ladies’ ballpoint that I use for writing checks, a beautiful, squishy grip Venetian Blue Sensa which takes Fisher Space Pen refills (I got black, blue, purple, and gold) that I use for journaling and other personal writing, and a brilliantly metallic purple rollerball pen with my name engraved on it which I got when I worked at Brio (of course it has the company name on it too). A good fountain pen is so pricey, considering I’m perfectly content with a $2 roller ball. But there’s something tremendously appealing about the beauty of a quality fountain pen. I’ve been using mine for all sorts of innocuous things at work all week: drawing class diagrams, sketching potential design patterns for web-based UIs, editing requirements documents, underlining key phrases in technical articles, and, of course, doodling during meetings. I suppose I should sit down with it and try some serious writing. But, wait, don’t I do that on the computer now? ;-)