Oh hell yes. Tickets to see Bjork at the fabulous fox theater are mine. This is huge!

One person died and 26 were injured after a steam pipe burst in midtown Manhattan Wednesday, causing a transformer to explode and sending thick plumes of steam and ash into the air near Grand Central Terminal, New York officials said.

How frightening to have been involved in this. It is sad that the one person who died had a heart attack. Probably due to the fact that they thought it was another terrorist attack. Unhappiness.

Transformer explosion rattles Manhattan - CNN.com

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax...”

I agree whole heartedly. While I am in most respects an American one aspect of me which will always and forever be Canadian is my taste in chocolate. My two great disappointments upon moving to the United States at the age of nine were learning that your Cheerios are made with whole wheat, and learning that basically all of your candy bars suck. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I've travelled to, from France to Hong Kong, has English chocolate like Smarties and Aero Bars on the shelf. For a long time I'd thought the reason Smarties weren't available here was due to a trademark conflict with the rolled up sweettarts popular at halloween, but this doesn't explain the fact that no other English candy is available, or if, like Kitkat, it is available, the recipie has been screwed up. Something is deeply wrong with American taste buds.

I'm disappointed that this article, while finally putting the honest truth in print in the United States, fails to delve into the details of why. However, I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure when candy bars first became popular but there are only two possibilities:

1. They became popular before the revolutionary war, in which case Canada and the United States should have both inhereted the same taste in chocolate from England.
2. They became popular after the revolutionary war, in which case you'd think Canadians and Americans would have started eating chocolate manufactured in the same way, and that while English tastes might have diverged, Canadian tastes would have tracked American tastes and not English ones.

Neither occured. So, my hypothesis is that in the beginning, American and Canadian tastes in Chocolate tracked English tastes, and then this funny thing called World War II happened. During WWII Hershey got a contract with the US Army to distribute Hershey bars to American GIs. These bars were designed to have a high melting temperature so they could be handled by Army logistics easily, and be sour enough that soldiers wouldn't eat them when they weren't supposed to. Soldiers came back from the war with an endearing relationship to Hershey, and a taste for flavorless bars, and so now everyone in the country is eating the chocolate equivelent of MREs.

I have no idea if Canadian soldiers were issued chocolate during WWII, but as these flavorless candy bars were an American invention its likely that whatever they had, it was different.

The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course - New York Times

eye trickery

Akiyoshi's illusion pages

LED Pumpkins? Oh hell yes! I have already pre-ordered this bit of fun:)

Boing Boing: Make's special Halloween edition

Freakin rad!

GRAY MATTER Pretty Penny - Popular Science

By the end of the month, bulldozers will raze Atlanta's most famous — and infamous — party district.

I hadn't heard about this until now. I don't spend a lot of time in "Buckhead" proper, because I feel much more akin to bars in Decatur. Hopefully Fados won't get bulldozed....it was my favorite bar down there.

It's last call for Atlanta party district - Los Angeles Times

Sparklers seem innocent enough, as delighted children twirl them about, creating light trails in the warm summer darkness.

But in truth, they are extremely dangerous.

I find this humorous since I burnt the f*** out of my foot yesterday with a sparkler. Its so sad given the amount of time I have spent lighting "dangerous" fireworks in my lifetime that the firework that finally injured me was a bloody sparkler. But a word to the wise...don't burn the cheap sparklers with wooden sticks. The ash falls off the end and if you are unlucky (like me) it will fall right between your flip-flop laden toes. Ouch.

When It Comes to Fireworks, Leave the Shows to the Pros - Forbes.com

The couple is among the thousands looking to get lucky in love who are expected to flock to Las Vegas to tie the knot on a very propitious date -- 7-7-07 -- which comes along only once a century.

Just remember you are unique....just like everyone else.

Couples rush to marry on lucky day - CNN.com

It takes about 30,000 genes to make you such a wondrously complex lifeform. Those genes can be credited for your enviable physique, your sparkling eyes and those heartstopping dimples.

Okay, let’s cut the flattery and hotfoot it to the other end of life’s spectrum. Here, it may take fewer than 400 genes to build a basic lifeform. This is what Craig Venter, the buccaneering American biologist who was instrumental in spelling out the human genome, is attempting to do. His plan is to sew together the minimum number of genes necessary to create an off-the-shelf, living microbe.

More on the Craig Venter story

Life is just a bowl of Petri -Times Online