Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: OK, I'll admit that I tend to treat this series occasionally as less a repository for weird linkage and more a repository for "quick hits" linkage, i.e., stuff I want to link but not talk much about. It's a fair cop, but that's how I roll.

In that spirit, here's an interesting feature on the concept album in music. I like how the author points out that rock artists claim to have started the concept album idea when Frank Sinatra was doing it in the Fifties, but surely the proto-concept album was the song cycle, which occupied the minds of composers all through the 19th century. Heh!

(And Pink Floyd's The Wall is a great album.)

:: It strikes me as odd that a tool exists for the aiming of your car's washer fluid jets. You need a tool for this? When a safety pin, a thin probe, or -- if you work that kind of job -- the pin of a nametag can do the job?

:: Have I linked There, I fixed it yet? Probably...but this one had me wondering if we've just caught a glimpse into Steven Den Beste's car.

(Actually, I'm not sure SDB even has a car -- he seems to talk about walking everywhere as opposed to driving, but he doesn't use air conditioning and claims that on very hot days, blowing a fan across some blocks of ice actually does lower his apartment's temperature a bit, to bearable levels. The principle is certainly sound enough; it would provide some cooling, albeit not as much as an actual pressurized coolant inside a compressor-driven cooling system. But the ice will absorb heat energy from the warm air passed over it, and it'll reduce humidity as well as moist air condenses on the ice. SDB's method probably works longer, though, given the lower surface area of his giant blocks of ice; all those little cubes in the bag in the car will melt faster. And I know that SDB doesn't like unsolicited advice, but it's always seemed to me that he might save some money if he was to keep a few gallon milk jugs around and, when hot weather is in the forecast, fill them and freeze 'em for such use. It would probably be cheaper than buying large quantities of ice blocks -- but this also assumes large amounts of freezer space, which he may well not have. Probably just answered my own question.)

More next week.