I was alerted to this group via Laughing Squid.

Faces in Places is an awesome flickr group that collects photosgraphs of those serendipitous faces that pop out at you from the world of inanimate objects.

I made a mosaic of all the images in the group, shown above. You can play with the interactive version over at my coverpop website.

While you’re there, you might enjoy the mosaics of Stick Figures in Peril and Spirals, among others.

Via BoingBoing, MissMonster demonstrates how she made this excellent werewolf costume, using a lot of fake fur, hot glue, old gloves, and other stuff.

Check out MissMonster’s website to see some of her other great costumes & creations, as well.

A few recent excerpts from “The Daily Word,” a feature which I’ve been publishing the past few weeks mash.yahoo.com (in the module of the same name). Most of these were written by Mike Davis, who has an innate talent for lexicognition..

Craig Kaplan wrote to tell me about some newly available high-res scans of seven complete works of (my hero/obsession) Athanasius Kircher, made available by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel.

UPDATE: I’ve corrected the above since my first post. The Bibliothek site is posting seven complete works, not just the illustrations excerpted on the bibliodyssey blog. You’ll find links to the complete works on the bottom of the post. The same blog earlier pointed to a complete scan of “Musurgia Universalis” at the University of Strasbourg.

I had a great time seeing Max Maven last night at the Center for Inquiry West.

Maven is one of the rare performing magicians who bills himself as a mentalist, a once common specialty that has vanished in recent decades. An intimidating presence in black suit and goatee, Maven is a master of the eye roll, the raised eyebrow and the withering glare, particularly when his audience members reveal ignorance of the names of Hungarian mathematicians and other obscure references. He performed a series of increasingly baffling mind-reading effects, all as part of a larger narrative in which he stressed the importance of not knowing in making our lives meaningful and wondrous.

You can see Max Maven on Saturday Nights at CFI, in Hollywood for the next three weeks.

Via Drawn!, David at Ironic Sans, demonstrates an amusing technique of embedding images, such as skylines, in the images histogram, so that when you view the levels in Photoshop, or similar software, you get a big surprise!

I like to do crossword & sudoku puzzles, but I have this odd notion that puzzles which are printed in today’s paper are more fun than puzzles which are collected in books. I don’t know why.

I thought other people might suffer from this same ailment, so I set up a Daily Sudoku page, where you can download a fresh set of eight puzzles that have today’s date printed on ’em.

The puzzles are guaranteed to have been constructed on the date they were issued, which means they are highly topical. Or at least as topical as I can make a numeric logic puzzle…

Enjoy :)

Here’s Yahoo!’s Ian Rogers lecturing some music industry folks about the problems that plague online music distribution. My favorite quote:

…If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB?

A few folks have written asking for more easy sudoku puzzles, so I’ve added two new sections to the site:

More Easy Sudoku

More Intermediate Sudoku

Each section contains 800 new puzzles.

Enjoy!

Somewhere there is an email wormhole that is causing me to receive emails like the following one.

Hello sir/madam
Hello Goodday My name is Bob Smith.I will like to know if you sell banners.If yes.I want you to get me the 30 by 60 inhcesbanner with the color white,the art work should be (HAPPY BIRHTDAY)I will like you to get me 100pcs of that.And also i want you to tell me the method of payment you accept.Kindly get back to me as soon as possible.
Thank you
Bob Smith.

I have been getting 2 or 3 of these emails a week. They are always asking to buy a banner, with some specific dimensions and message (religious messages are especially popular). The writers of the emails generally appear to be Internet novices. The emails are never addressed to me personally (the “to” address varies), but they somehow wind up in my in-box.

Pretty much every time I get one of these, I send a reply back, explaining that I don’t sell banners, and asking the sender to tell me what website he is using, but I rarely get a reply, and if I do, it is only a request for more printed banners.

I have a few theories as to what is causing this.

1) Somewhere there is a spam blog, which contains some excerpts from my Coverpop website, which contains the word “banners” in a few spots. This blog also contains excerpts from some other website that sells printed banners. Internet Neophytes are somehow pulling my email address from this blog, or filling out a form which is getting routed to me. This would explain why the senders of the emails generally come off as novices (who might be unable to tell a spam blog from the real thing…).

2) Somewhere there is a legitimate business that sells banners, and they have a customer feedback form, and a sneaky, malicious computer geek has rigged the email system to forward all the inquiries to me.

3) A worm hole is causing all banner related inquiries from clueless newbs to end up in my inbox.

Got a clue for me?

UPDATE

As of February 2008, I’m still getting these emails. Today, I received a message from Rita, a printer who has responded to a few of these email. Apparently, it’s a kind of scam! Rita goes on to say:

I can only tell you that after careful communication with these so-called potential customers, I find that they want you, the seller, to do something with their “special payment method” or or use a certain freight company that I never heard of…and it is usually to a foreign country. Also their order is always a ridiculous and very expensive order. That is my first clue.

The last two, wanted me to use a frieght company…that I beleive was “bogus”. The customs and taxes would have been $2000-$3000 alone! If I had been suckered into it, I would have lost money, as the shipper. When I told these “customers” that I would only ship with a reputable company like UPS or FED_EX, they ignored that. Then I said I would only ship to them directly in the USA (as they claimed to live here) and they could turn around and ship to the foreign country, themselves,…then I did not ever hear back from them.

This also explains why these folks rarely email me back when I ask them questions about how they got my name…