Places I Visited on the Internet Today #12

There's a lot of stuff on the Internet. Here's what I got around to looking at today:

• A brief article on the history of cartography and errors in mapping. I had to go put the author's book "On the Map" onto my "Too Read" list on GoodReads.
• An article on Civil War cartography that sounded like it would be interesting, but then turned out to have very little actual information.
• The Portland Tribune profiles the guy who does Portland Transport has put together some homebrew transit trackers for different locations. They refer to these as "inventions", which sounds quaint and out-of-touch.
• Speaking of out-of-touch, the Oregonian kicks off an article about the Portland Art Museum digitizing their archives by putting the word digitizing in scare quotes. 
• The National Parks Service restored some graffiti that was created during the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island, which is something that I had completely forgotten about.
• There are plans to build a Walmart-sized retail store on the site of the ruins of the Thunderbird Motel. The Fire Bureau has declared that the fire that destroyed the motel was "suspicious". I'd thought that the Mayor had proposed that the site be turned into a public park as part of his West Hayden Island plan, but maybe that fell through when I wasn't paying attention. 
• If you were wondering what the structure being built at the East side of the Hawthorne Bridge is, here's your answer.
• Somebody thought the reflection of light's inside an airplane's cabin was a UFO, so they filmed it.
• Shillapoo Wildlife Area is just across the Columbia from Sauvie's Island. I was checking it out because one of my themes for 2013 is exploring Washington.
• Dave's Killer Bread has traded in half its ownership to an equity firm. I prefer Franz, myself.
• This squirrel.
• The BBC does a year in review about archaeological discoveries. I followed the link about the discovery of King Richard III's body, since I'd only heard about that in passing.
• Portland Afoot has an article about someone making their first grocery shopping trip by bike. I read it and just felt bad for the cashier.
• Shawn Levy has a pretty great Tumblr.
• Paul Krugman writes about the people who fear budget deficits.
• "Paperwork studies".
• A bunch of state parks are having group hikes on January 1st.
• A Salon article briefly explores women and gun control/gun ownership.
• A bunch of photos from the early 1900s depicting different parades in Astoria.
• Bob Stacey is adjusting his tactics in combating the Columbia River Crossing. 
• We were considering going to the Grotto's Festival of Lights (because it has a petting zoo, duh) but then I saw that admission was nine bucks.
• Wikipedia links:
• Ridgefield National Wilderness Refuge (Heather and I went here today - it was really nice!)
• Great Egret
• Cooper's Hawk
• Nutria (I'd never heard of a nutria until around 2002, and back then I wasn't too sure if they were real. I saw a bunch of them today.)
• Ridgefield, Washington
• Red-Tailed Hawk
• Stork
• Felida, Washington

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #11

Another day spent reading the everything that I can on the Internet. Here's all the places that I went to:

• I started my morning off by watching this GIF for a full minute. It's a lady's head revealing Arnold Schwartznegger and I think it's from Total Recall and it's ridiculous and hypnotic. (via @_lucky)
• Tiger cubs at the Minnesota Zoo get a bubble machine! I really wish that there was a video of this!
• Yesterday, I remarked that I didn't like the xkcd comics, although I like the guy's charts. Here's one of his comics.
• If there is some sort of stupid Gen X nostalgia show on TV, I bet that this sequence from the pill addiction episode of Saved By the Bell is part of its opening credits. 
• Beverly Cleary school gets a mosaic for one of its entrances.
• The Old Church needs an interior paint job, and as part of its fundraising efforts, you can get your picture taken with a "Victorian Santa". 
• More info on Map-21's treatment of city streets as highways, and what this means for non-automotive transportation.
• New research indicates that early detection of Alzheimer's disease may be possible.
• I'm embarassed about these "Liz & Dick" related links I went to, but here they are anyway:
• Salon comments on the "movie".
• The most memorable parts of the show.
• Another review - why did I waste my time reading this stuff??
• I've read the play of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", but I've never gotten around to seeing the movie. I did watch this clip and this clip, though.
• Reading stupid "Liz & Dick" stuff led to me reading about the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. You know, so I can stay current with what's going on in the world. And then I watched that Brittney Spears performance but had to stop after 45 seconds because I forgot how truly terrible it was.
• A review of "Killing Them Softly", which sounds like a lot better of a movie than I had expected.
• Carson and Colin will be signing copies of Under Wildwood at Reading Frenzy's Portland Bazaar booth next weekend!
• The Department of the Interior designates 27 new National Landmarks.
• Burgerville.
• The Oregon Encyclopedia's entry on the Salvation Army in Portland, written by @alderllc.
• Going to university is growing increasingly unaffordable.
• Someone freaks out when a couple of whales come hang out with their canoe. I want to hang out with a couple of whales! I won't even hyperventilate.
• Some reminiscing about the Nirvana era of Sub Pop records.
• Baby elephant video!!
• "House of Circles" by Mr Gnome. I am not as impressed as Ned Lannaman; it may be that it's just not my aesthetic.
• This blog post is called "No More Indiana Jones Warehouses" and I was intrigued, but it is just an article encouraging historians to get involved in digital humanities. It did, however, lead me to the Urban Simulator Team's virtual representation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and this project where a class mapped the movements of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
• An article about a program that allows foreign real estate investors to get green cards through investing a bunch of money.
• The New York Times reports that tax rates are lower now than they were back in 1980 (except for the poor), and then talks to a bunch of crybabies who don't want to have any taxes raised (except for the one rich guy who thinks the poor should pay even more taxes).
• Bike Portland has a list of transportation grants that the ODOT is applying for.
• Walk Score now has a pretty cool setting where you can see a map of the places that you can travel within a certain amount of time.
• An article on NYC's version of bus rapid transit that isn't that great.
• A positive review of The Ethics of Big Data, written by @KordDavis.
• Acorn Host - I was providing someone with advice on Internet hosting, and I really like this company.
• Jerry Saltz buys a couple of knock-off Gerhard Richters. And then I read another article he wrote about Glenn Beck "making art" by putting an Obama figurine in a jar of urine, which just sounds like something that was too crazy to actually happen but I guess it did. Oh, and here is his top 10 art picks for the year.
• A cool series of turn-of-the-century photos of pubs in London.
• A recap of this week's episode of The Office.
• Police blotter:
• When your Green or Yellow-line MAX train is out of commission for the next couple of days, you can thank this drunk-driving chump. Of COURSE he was driving a Hummer.
• Here's how to get arrested: grab some weed, open a drink, drive to 82nd and Sandy and fire a gun from your car. Bonus points for not having a valid license or insurance.
• Police recover stolen head of baby Jesus. I really want to know what kind of an asshole goes out of their way to vandalize religious statuary.
• The cops need help on a cold case from 2010.
• Questions on Quora:
• Why hasn't Microsoft been able to solve the problem of Windows getting so slow after about a year of use?,
• What are some tips, tricks, and gotchas when using KnockoutJS?
• Why does Superman wear red underwear over his costume?
• Wikipedia pages:
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• Steele Mackaye (I was looking for information on the Spectatorium.)
• Andres Serrano
• Piss Christ
• Chris Ofili
• 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
• Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting
• The King's Speech
• Colin Firth

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #10

I started a new job this week and, as a result, spent very little time on the Internet over the past five days. Thank goodness for Saturdays that allow you to catch up on everything:

• It got a lot of play during Superstorm Sandy, but don't forget about this great wind map of the US! By the way, isn't it great that climate change gives us new vocabulary words like "superstorm"?
• A lot of states don't use the federal money that is available to them for public transit.
• Mary Miller has now joined Videogum. Her Tumblr, Rats Off!, is pretty great. Also from Videogum: 
• Corey Feldman and Teddy Ruxpin (I totally forgot about the terrible 4-frames-per-second Teddy Ruxpin cartoon)
• This week in TV shows
• This week in GIFs
• This week in movie trailers (I watched half of one trailer before I got bored of looking at these.)
• Some outtake from the local news about - I have no idea what this is about.
• Gabe's thoughts on Liz & Dick and Lindsay Lohan.
• And finally, a registered sex offender who teaches you how to cook using a microwave (working link for the video here).
• The headline tells you all you really need to know, but on average the Rolling Stones are older than the Supreme Court.
• From Vintage Portland, here's a view of SE Grand and Morrison from 1919, a 1975 photo of John's Landing, and an absolutely fantastic 1963 aerial view of downtown.
• Here's an xkcd chart about Christmas music. I'm a fan of this guy's charts and graphs, but I don't care for his comics at all.
• The new tax on landlines passed unanimously at City Hall despite robocalls from anti-tax activists. This is the tax I referenced back in this post - it's a very, very small tax, so it's kind of fascinating to see the amount of energy that Tea Party types put into trying to defeat it.
• In completely unsurprising news, we could safely close down Guatanamo Bay and relocate the prisoners to stateside prisons. Which totally won't happen because of all the fear-mongering that Republicans will do about it.
• Some details on the city's plans to be the earliest adopter of electric vehicles. I went out to the Washington Square Mall last week (I was out near there getting a pre-employment drug screening and I was killing time waiting for a bus), and they had a showroom with a couple of Tesla Model S's on display, and - as a guy who is not into cars - I have to say that those are some slick looking vehicles. And super-expensive.
• Via @ArmbrustCo, I learn of OpaqueStrategies, an online version of Eno's Oblique Strategies.
• A story about the Mayor's facial hair. Remember back when Tom Potter grew a Saddam Hussein beard during the end of his term in office?
• Via @OrHist, a picture of NW 23rd and Burnside from 1888.
• Somebody from the Mercury went to a taping of The Price is Right.
• It's that time of year when we start seeing top 10 albums of the year lists.
• If you never ever want your website to go down, Netflix has the library for you.
• A historian comments on the historical accuracy of Lincoln and whether it matters or not that all of the details are right. As someone that makes art that deals with history, I think about this stuff a lot, and it's important to me. My personal feeling is that while I am more of an artist than a historian, it is important to get as many of the historical details and the general nuance as correct as you possibly can and that it's important not to tweak the narrative or introduce non-existent or composite characters for storytelling purposes. I also think about this stuff to the point of inaction - I've only finished two pages of the graphic novel that I've been working on for seven years...
• I get Glen Campbell confused with Glenn Miller a lot. After reading that link, I had to go play "Wichita Lineman" and "Rhinestone Cowboy" really quick. [Update from ten hours later: "Rhinestone Cowboy" is stuck in my head.]
• Some people got bent out of shape because this TV newscaster went to "Geek Trivia" and was condescending towards the audience. I thought he just seemed more out of touch, like all TV newscasters, except for when he referred to the entire audience as "losers". And here he is being out of touch at a Mark Russell and David Walker signing.
• On the Retronaut, Bauhaus stage costumes. Bauhaus the art movement not the goth band.
• Minnesota has its own online encyclopedia, and here's a resource listing the other state and territorial encyclopedias (I'm surprised there were so few - I thought every state would have one).
• LAIKA is hiring.
• They found the unicorn lair in North Korea, guys.
• Paul Krugman is not that much of a Decemberists fan.
• Drones everywhere all the time. I had no idea that there was such a thing as the "drone caucus" in the US House.
• A new version of Wordpress is going to be released this week and I made it 35 seconds into this video before I closed the tab.
• Via @_lucky, a brief history of Anton LaVey's house. And another link to the same story.
• Bike Portland reprints an ODOT press release about the high number of pedestrian traffic fatalities there have been this year. I read the original press release the other day and was really bothered by the focus on tips for pedestrians rather than motorists. I was trying to think of how to articulate my feelings about this, but then I read the comment "It's always struck me how similar the attitude there is between these kind of pedestrian safety ideas and the stop-rape-by-dressing-less-sexy camp" and that pretty much sums it up perfectly.
• Here's a computer and projector that screws into a light socket and converts the display area into an AR canvas. This is one of those ideas that seem really obvious after someone has put it out there - I can see all sorts of uses for something like this.
• CHEETAH CUBS!!
• BABY ELEPHANT!!
• And some bummer Oregon Zoo news: Coco has been euthanized.
• Dungeons & Dragons news.
• LIDAR and Crater Lake.
• From Oregon State Archives: a cool old Wanted poster and a picture of the Oregon Pony, the first locomotive in the Northwest. The Oregon Pony used to be parked outside of Union Station, and it's featured in a drawing that's hanging out in my dining room. It lives in Cascade Locks these days. (Facebook links)
• Police blotter:
• An endangered man goes missing from OHSU.
• A couple of robberies happened on Lombard. Then they caught the robber. It was a lady robber!
• Cops arrested a vandal in my neighborhood. Check out the crybaby's mugshot.
• Here's a surveillance photo of a guy who robbed a Kohl's back in October.
• A guy held up a movie theater.
• A tweaker is arrested after a car chase and subsequent crash.
• An armed robbery in the city's most desolate neighborhood, South Waterfront.
• Some guy is going around to elementary schools and stealing computers.
• Some asshole has vandalized statues at the Grotto.
• Someone was stabbed under mysterious circumstances.

Postscript: I spent so much time on the Internet today that I neglected my homework! I was putting it off anyway and probably wouldn't have done it, but my public service message to you is: don't put off things in order to look at the Internet, because it will be there tomorrow (except if you live in Syria or had an Internet outage like I did last night).