In the auld days afore Facebook, the web was crawling with personal sites low on design but high on awesome. Now the majority are gone . . . but a few remain.

Here’s one such: a site with dozens of bagpipe tune scores (89 of which are not Amazing Grace!), together with lyrics and surprisingly-realistic MIDI renditions. Why you would care unless you love bekilted men or play the pipes (which, of course, you should) is beyond me, though — so here’s another musical link from Web 1.0 for the rest of you: a line-by-line explanation of the lyrics of American Pie.

Maybe you’ve already seen this.  Maybe not.  Either way, you need to watch this music video of Oren Lavie’s Her Morning Elegance . . . ex-cellent live-action stop-motion!

How good are your optical organs?

Find out with the Eyeballing Game, as you attempt to make perfect parallelograms, rigorously right angles, and capital convergences!  Put your spacial skills on the line!  Risk all with daring guesswork!  Beware the killer-beam of the evil cyclops!

Umm . . . except that last bit.  It’s a tough game, but no cyclopes.  Still, I managed a margin of error of only 2.30 on my first go.

Yes, that’s a dare.

Staple-style.

Also, yesterday (or does it count as today?  2 AM is an ambiguous time to classify), after seven hundred and twenty-six digital deaths over the course of the summer, on the 727th descent into the caverns, I completed Spelunky!

What’s that, you ask?  A devilishly difficult cavern-exploration/gold-collecting/troglodyte-killing/trying-to-stay-alive game, that is in a way a homage to both Indiana Jones and NetHack (which, incidentally, homages Indy itself).  With randomly generated levels, bullwhips, well-armed shopkeepers, golden heads that defy abduction, and permanent death, Spelunky‘s a blast — but hard!

I think I can truthfully (and mostly unashamedly) say that this is my second-greatest accomplishment of 2009.

(Oh, and I see Spelunky also apparently is modeled on a game called La-Mulana, which in turn is a tribute to the games that ran on MSX computers in the Greatest Decade.  Hmm, I’ll have to look into this . . .)

A person named McLovin discovered a curious thing:  as he or she saved new files to his or her laptop, his or her laptop appeared to be weighing more.  Or was it he or she that was weighing more?  Could all that McLovin’ have negative health effects?

Nope.  No.  Definitely not.

So McLovin decided to ask the internets (or, more particularly, the Microsoft Answers website): what is the GB/oz. ratio?  The answer is astonishing.

. . . Out of canned goods and water bottles!

Every year a contest is held somewhere in North America.  Teams of engineers build enormous sculptures entirely out of cans of food.  They compete to build the best structure.  And then they donate it all to local food banks — ten million pounds, and counting!

World Records have been made!

Today, Zac Sunderland (age 17, with decidedly cool hair) completed his solo sailing-trip around the world — becoming the world’s youngest circumnavigator!

And not today, though fairly recently, I think, Agatha Christie set a world record as well; despite being dead and all.  It’s actually her third.  Now, besides having sold more books than any other novelist, and having written the world’s longest-running play, she’s the author of the book with absolutely the most pages!

Which also happens to be, quite possibly, the only book that’s wider than it is tall.

. . . Had his 153rd birthday today.

Seriously.

If it weren’t for this amazing, inspired, amazing, misunderstood, amazing man, life would be very different today.

If Nikola Tesla hadn’t invented alternating current, you probably wouldn’t have electricity in your home.  If he hadn’t invented neon lights, Budweiser wouldn’t have glowing signs in every bar window in America.  If he hadn’t invented the radio, we wouldn’t have . . . the radio (really)!

Nikola Tesla invented the 20th and 21st Century. A ‘discoverer of new principles,’ Tesla was the sole inventor of the alternating poly-phase current generators that light up every town in the world today. He was the original inventor of the radio, and placed his ideas in print and demonstrated them before the public 5 years before Marconi. By the turn of the century, he had discussed the feasibility of television; he created an atom smasher capable of evaporating rubies and diamonds; he built wireless neon lamps that gave off more light than today’s conventional bulbs provide; he built precursors to the electron microscope, the laser and X-ray photographs. He sent his shadowgraphs to the discoverer of X-rays in 1895 as soon a Roentgen published his famous pictures. Tesla also created Kirlian-like photographs 75 years before they became famous. All of this took place before 1900!

— Harry Imber; ‘Nikola Tesla: The Man Who Fell To Earth’


Also: free energy, electro-gravitic propulsion, and death rays!