If you have Chrome installed, you NEED to check out this amazing use of HTML 5, Google Maps, and music. Really cool stuff from Arcade Fire, Google, and Chris Milk.

“So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”

Not bad for 1999…

via kottke and Douglas Adams.com

A long time friend of mine recently joined a social network and I got an email requesting network inclusion.

In the request he said that hell had frozen over.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new campaign that in effect extends their presence over the entire internet (that’s what that “like” button is on the bottom of this post).

What are these buttons doing on the site of a guy who will flip if you use your cel phone at the table?

I’m still working that out…

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There’s a tiny amount of hullabaloo regarding this image below, which was supposedly taken in 1940, in Canada, for the re-opening of a bridge:

Note the hipster wearing modern clothes, sun-glasses, and perhaps a small camera.

So some people are saying: “look, look, proof of time travel” and other people are saying, “no no, he’s just the 1940′s equivalent of hipster run-off (Beatnick-Amble-Yonder?*).”

And everyone is asking why a hipster or a time traveler would be at a bridge re-opening, but that is not the subject of this rambling.

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Even though I don’t use facebook or twitter, I do keep track of it, as far as Hoodturkey is concerned.

Recently I’ve learned that “hoodturkey” is being used as slang (at least among three kids).

Which is interesting.

People often ask what is up with “hoodturkey” and the simple answer is that, when I started this site, I needed a domain name, and wasn’t yet in a position where I felt comfortable putting all of this stuff under abrahamingle.com.

Hoodturkey was unique, it was weird, and for a very brief time was kind of like a pet name.

Now of course it has a completely different meaning that has out-sized it origins, and I’m often surprised when I recall where it came from.

So what happens if the slang takes off, if the definition of your name changes to mean something that belongs in a dirty south hip-hop video.

(then again, I’ve often thought that I belong in a dirty south hip hop video)

Do you wait it out, or do you roll with the fluid nature of associations and find a new name?

CNN unleashed a fully user-panable 360 degree video of a scene in Haiti.

Now imagine this in Afghanistan, in NYC on 911, etc…

Sorry TV, you’re screwed, this is the future of news.

As I was waiting for Cory to call me about our weekly Old Man Breakfast Invitational. I was absentmindedly considering finding a replacement toaster. I had accidentally thrown out my old one a few months ago (I had glued eyes on it- many of my kitchen have eyes, it was a Pee-Wee Herman thing). I was hoping to find either a really old one or a nice one or something. And then I found this:

“Hotdog Toaster – $20 (NW Portland)

The Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker.

Operating much like a pop-up toaster, this unique kitchen appliance lets you easily prepare two hot dogs (complete with heated buns) in minutes. Its 660-watt electronic heating coil has time settings for heating hot dogs and buns to your taste preference. Crumb basket removes for cleaning. “

I have been obsessed about this thing all day! I don’t want to buy it, but I want to read the manual. Some guy had to try and not be dirty when he wrote about how to put hot dogs in the hole. Also, can this be remotely sanitary? Don’t you have to clean things that you cook meat on/in extremely regularly?

A stranger offered Frank James a $200 donation to a charity of her choice in exchange for cooking a vegetarian dinner for the stranger and a guest.
pretty great!

“When dogs go chasing waterfalls