A few of my favorites:
Why don’t North Americans play cricket? And what does this have to do with rebuilding Iraq?
Saucer-Men from Saturn, the WPA Guide to Smallville, everybody loves robots.
Gilded age memetics, intellectual history as improv jazz, and the secret of the sphinx revealed.
The Golden Age “Getting Things Done.”
“A flannel curtain has descended across the continent.” The second of five alternate Canadian histories.
Most recent posts:
Here’s a second concept course, though the idea is neither new nor mine, and maybe it’s not really a concept course if several people have done it. Still, I would really like to try this someday.
The Backwards Survey
Every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events prior or contemporaneous … […]
Last fall, Bill Turkel had a great blog entry calling for “concept projects” in academic history: like concept car prototypes or catwalk fashions, these would be imaginative efforts that need not prove wholly workable or utilitarian, but that might serve to get ideas into circulation, push the boundaries of the form, or, a la Thoreau, […]
Peeing dogs, Donkey Kong, lesbians, sitcoms, and gin.
Spybots invade English village.
Beards, bots, and were they hot?
In loose Borgesian categories:
Martyn at Old Roads: “There is always an ‘old, weird [insert nation here]’ history waiting to be written.” Old, weird France. Ancient, mysterious Germany. Old, weird Uganda?
Tags: Old Weird America · Asides
Interwob links to confound and bemuse:
The SITI Program
The Search for Intelligence on the Internet: My man Mark Rayner plugs the numbers into the Drake equation, predicts that there should be 2.7 intelligent blogs in cyberspace. Keep watching the skies!
The Tank
Tom Englehardt posts Chalmers Johnson’s review of Alex Abella’s new history of RAND.
Note To Self: Ia Fhtagn
What appears to be H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: creepy images, story ideas, and games he’d like to run. (Via Felix Gilman.)
High Tech Noon
Do not laser-shark me, oh my darling: isn’t everything better with rayguns?
Men In Tights
It’s been well linked (Barista assumed it was taking the piss but I think he underestimates Chabon’s geeky earnestness) but it’s worth it: Michael Chabon on the superhero unitard. PS How good is All-Star Superman, am I right?
The Cardboard Internet
Paul Collins on the Mundaneum, a networked encyclopedia on fifteen million index cards (shades of the Memex?). Plus index cards as (literally) the U.S. War Department’s killer app.
Google Maps of Sci-Fi
BLDG BLOG’s Geoff Manaugh on mapping the fictional onto the real.
More Dick
You heard it here first:* Moby Dick is awesome! (*No, you didn’t.)
Au Clair de la Lune
Feast your ears on the oldest known sound recording–from 17 years before Edison’s phonograph. (Via Corn Chips & Pie.)
The Pickle King of Islamistan
Khalid (née Bertram) Sheldrake, the “power hungry, toothbrush mustachioed, British ninny” who somehow failed to convert western China to Islam.
Invisible elves make our site go:
© 2001–2007 Rob MacDougall
5 responses so far ↓
1 Foxtown // Dec 18, 2007 at 8:55 am
The amount of corporate and mercantile history in this otherwise sleepy and currently insignificant city is astounding. Also the name is pretty cool.
I grew up there BTW, and coupled with the my town (Niskayuna) I used up all of my spelling brain cells.
2 Rob // Dec 18, 2007 at 9:05 am
I did not know that.
I am very warmly inclined towards upstate and western New York, the whole Erie Canal corridor. I don’t know if it’s because of my Buffalo housemates, or all the time I’ve spent driving I-90, or the evident similarities to southern Ontario, or the musical names–Schenectady, Utica, Herkimer, Cheektowaga. I want to make a D&D fantasy world using only place names from upstate and western New York.
3 Foxtown // Dec 18, 2007 at 3:41 pm
The funny thing is that people would so not notice, since you could also use:
Polad, Russia, Troy, Mount Vernon, Rochester, Alexander, Alexandria Bay, Argyle, Attica, Babylon, Boonville, Canajoharie, Cleveland, Cuba, Delhi, Fishkill, Fultonville, Homer, Jordan, Naples, Nassau, Oswego, Ossian, Pleasant Valley, Rockland, etc…
Some of these I remember from driving through Upstate a lot as a kid and some just sound neat.
Also I ran into this interesting site while checking my facts verses my memory:
http://yorkstaters.blogspot.com/2006/01/whats-in-name-no2-origins-of-classical.html
4 Adam // Dec 21, 2007 at 10:15 am
Old, weird Pangaea. 1/4 billion yrs ago, all land forming a supercontinent, would have been plenty old, and plenty weird.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea
5 Long Island Divorce Lawyers // Feb 11, 2008 at 7:20 am
Hey Foxtown… I also remember being a back seat passenger as we travelled around and saw all these names. Cuba? as a kid I was confised in geography class Ted http://nassaucountydivorcelawyers.com
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