I really did an embarrassing amount of nothing today, slept in, way in, as I couldn't sleep last night and ended up chatting to people from York until nearly 4, leading to not getting up properly until about noon today, and then we spent the day watching TV (Hawaii Five-Oh), and An Inconvenient Truth (mostly Peter, I was listening but not really watching the shows), submitting a query, finishing the Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, etc. Hitomi went home around five, and eventually I made pancakes for dinner. That's about it though; never got out of the house, and really, accomplished very little :s.

However, here are some interesting things I've come across recently, which are way more exciting than anything I might come up with -

First of all, is The Buried Life, which I might have posted about before, but I can't remember... Some guys I know from GNS and their friends went across Canada in a borrowed RV last year crossing off their list of 100 things to do before they die, including running a major corporation (Ebay; for a day), touching the Stanley Cup, and getting a tattoo on a whim. Since Johnnie, who has always been into making movies, is part of the crew, it's being documented on their website as well. Check out their trailer here.

Here is the story of a complete nutter, (OK, endurance swimmer), who is swimming the length of the Amazon River. He's already gone an incredible 4000+km, breaking his former world record. He's not particularly young, either, at 52, he is fighting off tons of dangerous things (crocs and sketchy Amazonian diseases, anyone?) to complete his quest, which he plans to do in the second week of April. Now, clearly, this particular problem wouldn't pose a direct threat to me, however, I don't know about you, but it still made my skin crawl when I read it:

"A real risk is the toothpick fish. They can enter the body by swimming up the penis and can only be removed by surgery."

Ewwwwwwww!

For all of the post-it lovers out there, courtesy of boingboing.net, the great repository of stuff online, comes a link to Arash and Kelly's Genius Table, a Table made up of a block of one foot square post-it notes. So, so cool! I love post-its, as my desk and border of my computer monitor will attribute too - how cool is this, doodle to your heart's content, on your desk, and then slap the whole shebang up on the wall behind you. Great!

Just because Flash Mobbing is cool (and came up in conversation yesterday). Here is a podcast about it, which I haven't downloaded yet, but might be interesting...

Ummm and finally, I don't think I can post a link to this, because it's a facebook group, and therefore not strictly public unless you're a member of Facebook, but anyway, as part of my doing nothing today, I was surfing around and looking for gymnastics groups, which, predictably abound, and I found a whole bunch of memorial groups to a 19 year old, who died, just after Christmas from double lung cancer. (She was a gymnast, which is how I got linked over to her). It struck me as really interesting that people were making such personal sites like that, and I'm sure, usually they're only visited by someone who knew her, but every once in awhile someone like me will stumble over it, and its like accidentally turning up to someones funeral or something. There were tons of pictures of her posted, and very personal messages. I felt a lot like I was interrupting something extremely private within the realm of this most public of spaces. I backed out of there quickly and went back off in search of giants and backtucks.

Interesting.

D