August, 2006

  1. Make Monsters Weblog

    Make Monsters is a weblog dedicated to Dick Smith’s fabulous Do It Yourself Monster Make-Up book. Published in 1965, the book included detailed instructions for doing movie-style monster makeup effects, geared toward kids. I remember getting my hands on a copy of this book sometime in the late 1970s, probably through the public library. Great…

  2. The NYT’s Version of a Moderate Muslim

    On June 18, The New York Times ran a profile, U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground, that profiled Sheik Hamza Usuf and Imam Zaid Shakir who, according to The Times are “leading intellectual lights for a new generation of American Muslims who can help them learn how to live their faith without succumbing…

  3. Sharp Reader

    A couple years ago I recommended Newzcrawler as my preferred reader of choice. Newzcrawler was/is a good program but the developer tried to do way too much with the software and it had a number of nasty gotchas which ended up, well, getting me. For the past few months I’ve been using Sharp Reader 0.9.7…

  4. Mini Mag Stands and Displays for Action Figures

    It’s a problem all of us run into eventually — one day you wake up and that small 100-200 action figure collection has bloomed to 600 or 700 figures. Okay, maybe I’m the only one with that problem. Anyway, how the heck do you display all these action figures without spending more on display cases…

  5. Comic Book Reading Software

    I wish there were a comic book reading program for Windows as slick as Comic Book Lover which, alas, is strictly OS X. For Windows users, the choices boil down to Comical, CDDisplay, or PyComicsViewer (which requires Python to be installed). For the most part, I use CDDIsplay which is great for what it does,…

  6. Are Swim Tests Finally History?

    The Associated Press reports that the final holdout colleges and universities are finally getting rid of their swim tests. Swim tests are an early 20th century anachronism when a wave of interest in physical fitness combined with the two World Wars, etc., led many colleges and universities to require students to demonstrate that they could…

  7. GPS Coordinates Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number

    Hundreds of years after Adam Smith demonstrated that free trade between nations enriched both nations, mercantilism is alive and well even among those who are smart enough to know better. It is very odd to see someone like Rogers Cadenhead argue against outsourcing on this sort of basis, I don’t begrudge Seal’s people taking their…