Tuesday, March 27, 2007


The Bubble Wrap Wedding Dress

Bubble wrap turned fifty this month

It was invented by accident in 1957 when two engineers tried to make textured wallpaper. They soon incorporated Sealed Air, now worth millions. Bubble wrap is also an irresistible stress reliever. For digital relief there's the original Virtual Bubblewrap. Me, I prefer UK Yahoo's version, especially the Fresh Sheet function. Bubble wrap may have turned fifty; but fans of the British Science Fiction show Red Dwarf know that it will be another 150 years before Fred "Thickie" Holden invents the Tension Sheet (nothing but a square of bubble wrap painted red) and becomes the richest man in the universe. For you fpdimages sells Tension Sheets. So do you prefer the finger single pop, the crushing multi-pop, or the wrap yourself rolling-pop? For the later there's BubbleWrap BodyWear.

Bubble Wrap Brand Packaging - Sealed Air

Virtual Bubblewrap

bubblewrap.swf

Tension Sheets!

BubbleWrap BodyWear

Wednesday, March 21, 2007


I am so totally going to win an invitation to his birthday party

Search Me

Almost all the major search engines these days are powered by Google or Yahoo: MSN, AOL, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, HotBot, Lycos, and Netscape to name a few. I gave up on Google a few years ago due to their ubiquitous advertising and propensity to keep track of your search history indefinitely. This week I found instructions on how to delete your search history from Google. But for the past year or so I've been using Ixquick Metasearch, based in the Netherlands. It searches Google, Yahoo, etc. and picks the top results. Best of all Ixquick's policy is to dump all histories. For those times you have trouble finding results, Dogpile is one of the top rated metasearch engines. Dogpile also has SearchSpy, if you want to voyeur what other people are searching for. Recently I've begun playing with clustered search engines (Clusty, Mooter, and Grokker) which attempt to group results for you. Still can't decide? The venerable Search Engine Watch has more than you'll ever want to know about search engines and includes listings and rankings for mainstream engines and those for news, shopping, multimedia, specific country, and other specialty engines. But my current fave is Search With Kevin.

How To Delete Your Search History From Your Google Account

Ixquick Metasearch

Dogpile

Dogpile - SearchSpy

Clusty

Mooter

Grokker

Search Engine Watch

Search With Kevin

Monday, March 12, 2007


Message in a Bottle

Don't keep yourself all bottled up

Messages in bottles were first tossed in 310 B.C. and Queen Elizabeth I even had an official "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles". Breadonthewaters has some message bottle stories and mysterious links to missionary bottle information. Benjamin Franklin may have begun the practice of using "drift bottles" with messages to chart ocean currents and for over a hundred years the US Coast & Geodetic Service used drift bottles. In 1966 the switched to SafesSeas biodegradable non-toxic wood drift cards. The USCGS estimates a return of only 3% but there have been some remarkable message bottle recoveries. In 2005, an abandoned boatload of Ecuadoran immigrants were rescued off Costa Rica after their bottle was recovered and a partially finished bottle message from the sinking Lusitania was once recovered. Bottle Messages have been featured in a song by The Police, in a couple of Star Trek episodes, plus a nineties romance novel and film; arguably, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ms. Found in a Bottle" is the best literary treatment. For ten years Stuart Conway has operated the Message in a Bottle Server in Brighton for free. He has launched 6,000 messages and his site lists dozens of other bottle services worldwide. Conway reports a recovery rate of about 3% also. Oceangram claims to be the first virtual message in a bottle service read the FAQ first) and at The Spoon Bottle you can specify the recipient's e-mail. There's lots of online suppliers of plain or themed bottles for sending messages by post. An early one is Bottle a Message Gifts. If you opt to launch your own Conway says to use a laser printer for moisture resistance and pay attention to the tides and long range wind forecast.

Message Bottles In History

Safe Seas

Ms. Found in a Bottle

Message in a Bottle Server: Brighton UK

Message in a Bottle Server: World Index

Oceangram

Spoon

Bottle a Message Gifts

Tuesday, March 06, 2007


Twinkiehenge at Burning Man

The Twinkie Offense

"Twinkie, Deconstructed" comes out this month, it reveals and traces the origin of the 39 Ingredients in America's archetypical junk food. For me its that slippery feel of Cellulose gum. Twinkies turn 77 this year and Hostess makes 500 million of them a year. San Francisco had the "Twinkie Defense", Minneapolis had "Twinkiegate"; but Chicago has the Twinkie factory and is the American city with the highest per capita consumption of Twinkies. The White House selected the Twinkie to be preserved in the millennium time capsule and while they're marketed as having a shelf life of about a month, there is a more than 30-year-old Twinkie in a Maine high school science classroom which (while brittle) has never spoiled. A favorite experimental subject, check out the proposed grant at Twinkie Torture or the haiku at the more elaborate T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project. You can find Twinkies earrings, charms, costumes, soap, toys, and bake sets if you search the net or eBay. The official Hostess Twinkie Shop is being reconstructed right now but I did find some Twinkie Lip Balm. Twinkie the Kid is after my time, but I do remember Hostess Comic Book Ads. In Chicago you can get deep-fried Twinkies at Swank Frank or perpetrate your own with deep-fry.com's recipe. There's also an official Twinkies Cookbook and NASCAR's Hostess Race Diva Danica Patrick's Speedway Shortcake Twinkie-Style recipe.

Twinkie Torture

The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project

Hostess Twinkie Shop

eBay Twinkies

Twinkie Lip Balm

Hostess Comic Book Ads

Deep Fried Twinkie Recipe

Hostess Race Divas