Beards, the machine gun for your face

10 very good reasons why you should grow a giant beard.

It may be a viral for a dating site, but I love it! Click the image for more.

Youngme/Menow

Saw this on Boing Boing, and it’s too good not to pass on.  Color Wars 2008 has a post called YoungMe/MeNow where people take pictures of themselves as children and try to recreate them as adults. Link

Old Man’s War

Tor is launching something new on their website (which is being kept secret for now), and if you sign up for their newsletter, they are giving away a free (as in beer), non-DRMed e-book once a week.  This week it’s Old Man’s War, a book written in complete awesome by the awesome John Scalzi (John’s blog).  I understand that reading it may make you more awesome, just by seeing the words.  You never know!

Behold, the power of art!

Public schools were out for a professional study day today, so I decided to take the day off of work and take the eldest to the National Gallery of Art.  The current special exhibition at the NGA is a selection of J.M.W Turner paintings.  Mr Turner is one of my top five favorite painters – Renior, Rembrandt, C.W. Peal, Turner, and a tie between Alexander and Ross for keeping my saturdays entertained – so this was to be a treat to myself, as well as an excuse to run the hyper one tired over the course of a morning/mid afternoon.  We’re about halfway through the Turner exhibition, when I hear a voice I vaguely recognize behind me.  It turned out to be Simon Schama, who just happens to be one of my favorite authors.

I’ve read two of Mr. Schama’s books:  Rough Crossings, and Power of Art (Turner is featured in the latter, in fact) so far, with plans to read more as I can get my hands on more of them (A subtle hint for those who may be looking for birthday/christmas gift hints, wink wink).  Today, Mr. Schama was leading a class of his through the exhibition, so I waited until he let his students loose in the room, and walked over to him. I got to shake his hand and was able to talk to him for a few minutes before Li got too itchy and we had to move on before she started to act out.  Naturally I was not able to ask him all of the questions I would normally ask a favorite author, and was not able to get a picture of the two of us due to the stupid restrictions on taking pictures in the exhibit (both of which he’s probably grateful for ;) ), so no extras for this post.

Anway, today == win! That certainly doesn’t happen every day.