brian boyer

My dear friend Agnes has begun blogging. Yay!

She’s also a wonderful photographer, so it makes me very happy to know that she likes my photo.

The Y is the municipal device of the City of Chicago. It appears all over the city, mostly on public structures, but often on private property.

It represents the point where the Chicago River divides into it’s North and South branches, just west of the Loop and Magnificent Mile. Check it out: maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&g eocode=&time=…

See www.chipublib.org/004chicago/chiy.html for a little more detail.

Taking pictures of the Y has been a little project of mine.

I’ve posted my Y photos to Flickr.

i didn’t save my recipts!!

the firefly is a replacement lid for your nalgene (or other standard 63mm lidded vessel) that turns your beverage into a reading lamp!

the falkirk wheel is totally sweet. it lifts boats from one waterway to another. from the link:

The wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres, consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle, and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double-headed axe. Two sets of these axe-shaped arms are attached about 25 metres apart to a 3.5 metre diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water-filled caissons, each with a capacity of 80,000 gallons (302 tons), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes’ principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in less than four minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (kW) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

gah! awesome!

omniglot has pictures of alphabets. lots of alphabets. actually, abjada, alphabets, syllabic alphabets, syllabaries, complex scri…. writing systems!

i’ve loved this site for years. so sad that i’m only sharing it now. burmese is too cool!!

from the link:

In Rob Corddry’s Wednesday report on the Daily Show entitled “Racist Like Me”, he ends his report saying people might say of him that “he’s a pretty decent guy, unless of course, you’re on of these things. In which case I hate your guts.

including:
Mohawk Indian
Hindu
Mary Kate & Ashley
Puerto Rican
Gay
Bisexual
Lesbian
Bicurious
College Lesbian

Rob Corddry Hates You | Dead-Frog - A Comedy Blog

this is freaking ridiculous… from boing boing:
Two students at our school, the University of Michigan, dressed up as Pac-Man and the Ghost respectively, ran through the UGLi (the Undergraduate Library) and the Fishbowl (a huge computer lab on Central campus) during finals week. Pac-Man screams in horror as the Ghost chases him yelling “Waka Waka Waka.” This video has spread like wildfire on our campus, and killed the original hosting site’s bandwidth.

Link to *.mov

another neat thing worth posting that doesn’t involve me being really angry at anyone. neat!

Generally Funny - The Simpsons House