When the Soviets Attack

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Town of Lawrence, after a nuclear war. As it did with Reagan, The Day After left a significant impression on me. I was eight years old, and knew nothing about the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, or John Lithgow. (Although I recognized him later as the bad guy in Santa Claus: The Movie.) Watching it with my parents, however (with running commentary from my mom about atom bombs, radiation, fallout, and hair falling out) signaled the start of my fascination with things like nuclear explosion photos and hydrogen bombs. With those images in my head, I joined the rest of the world in morbid awareness of just how close we were to utter destruction in the days of the Cold War.

(Aside: So The Day After was directed by Nicholas “Wrath of Khan” Meyer! I did not know that.)

When Amazon Reviewers Attack

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Star Wars – Amazon ratings stars, that is. Why can’t more Amazon reviewers be like Henry Raddick or John Fracisco? (For that last one, scroll down to his review for The Story of Ping.)

(Link via Kottke, who, in the middle of a redesign, will no doubt inspire thousands of other bloggers to start on their own incremental redesigns, following suit in this latest trend of reintegrating all blog content — sidebar blogs, review blogs, photoblogs, metablogs, metametablogs, etc — back into a single column. Heh. Good luck.)

T9 Pain

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Weather forecast of hail and pain...

That was supposed to be “rain.” This is why I don’t like T9 Predictive Input for my text messaging.

scroll(DC)

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If you like Washington, DC, and don’t mind an 800KB download and a few frames and popups, try the Flyby Tour of Downtown DC. In truth it’s really just an isometric pixel-art map in PNG format, scrolled through javascript. If you prefer, you can just view the raw map PNG here. (Found while hunting for a map of Maryland.)

MegaScovilles

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In the “Learn Something New Every Day” Department, peppers have a Heat Scale, in which the quantity of the chemical capsaicin is measured in “Scoville Units.” That’s right: Scoville Units. And according to this gardener, some siling labuyo varieties can reach 100,000 Scoville Units. I can vouch for that, having accidentally bitten into a whole fresh sili in my chopsuey when I was in college. And I’ve known people who eat sili like potato chips.