Lizards on boats

Upcoming shows, stick figures in peril, etc

Life is, at times, so beautiful. There are treasures everywhere you look: two beers, interesting maps, cheesy hors d'oeuvres, God’s infinite light, challenging-yet-doable crossword puzzles, gentle Reddit threads, dogs in shoes, the International Banana Museum.

Things you might like

• The Rafting Hypothesis: Some scientists think monkeys legitimately took a raft to South America from Africa, which sounds ridiculous until you learn that 15 iguanas took a raft trip to the island of Anguilla as recently as 1995. The image of lizards having a tropical boat trip is enough to make me cry tears of joy!

• There’s a huge “what’s special about this number” page from Erich Friedman, the retired Florida math professor who keeps updating his personal webpage with Central Florida Mini-Golf Reviews and Movie Ratings and charming top 10 lists. I think this is what the internet was supposed to be, just single-operator HTML sites by web design-averse boomers. See also: Sheldonbrown.com, kleinbottle.com. This is my retirement plan!

• I am besotted with the new NYT Games release called Connections, but it’s really just a ripoff of 18-season BBC game show called Only Connect, a show that’s conveniently been uploaded to YouTube episode by episode. Also, Ken Jennings's original run from 2004 can be watched for free, on demand, on Pluto TV. In case you were wondering.

• You need to play metazooa.com, which is animal taxonomy with the Wordle-esque sheen. You use taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) to get closer to the correct answer but, crucially, you do not really need to be “good at animals” to win!

• Hawaii is soon retiring its iconic rainbow plate of McLovin fame. But if you want find other license plates to love, check out “LICENSE PLATES OF THE WORLD” HTML site by one guy named Michael Kustermann. There’s also another called “License Plate Mania”.

• Wikipedia’s list of unsolved problems will remind you that we’re all clueless. The field of linguistics doesn’t know what language is. No one knows the scientific origin of life or what the deal with dark matter is or how to define “disease.” The whole world just looks rosier when you remember that humanity cannot agree on the definition of “word.”

Links that are so goated in my eyes

What’s behind our drive to collect useless items? WikiVoyage has a travel guide for the moon. The Internet Archive has 6800 free Lego instructions. There’s a book of Antarctic slang. NYC restaurants by decibels. 69 as “funny number” dates back to 19th century! Flickr category “Stick figures in peril.” NYT article about The London Zoo weighing all 14,000 of its animals. The female politicians from Minnesota have all been posting with the shirtless State Fair firemen I cried laughing at this Normal Gossip podcast episode. Ed Droste from the indie band Grizzly Bear is second cousins with another guy named Ed Droste who founded Hooters. The world’s only giraffe without spots was just born at a zoo in Limestone, Tennessee.

Wiki wiki what

I just got back from Wikimania, the international convention of Wikipedians across the globe, which took place in a Singapore conference center that was also hosting conventions on coin collecting and cosplay. I had to weave through crowds of sixteen-year-olds dressed as Harley Quinn and numismatists carrying briefcases of rare money in order to get to the Wikimedia sessions and I had the time of my life. Now I’m back to spending most of my time writing the Wikipedia book at my desk alone (no cosplayers, no nurismatists, but still relatively enjoyable).

you are gettting sle e p y ꩜ and you want to buy tickets s o o b a d l y ꩜

Because I’m not ashamed to ride my fifteen minutes to the very end and I want to avoid getting a real job as long as possible, I’m doing a bunch of Depths of Wikipedia live shows all over the country. I think they’ll probably be fun. You should get tickets (if you want). Use depthsofwiki.com (if you want) so you don’t accidentally fund scalpers. And you should pass on the message (if you want) to your friends in Gainesville and Appleton and Cleveland and all 30 of the other cities I’m gonna visit. If you are a Wikipedia contributor, reply to this email and I will give you tickets for free!

That’s all I have to say. Please tell me what you’ve been up to lately or if there’s anything I should see on my big fall road trip. The tour still feels a little crazy but I’m trying to lap up life’s joys!

Love,

Annie