bradandkathy.com

A Little Luck

2010-11-04T06:13:47Z

One of these days, I'll write a few posts about our big trip to Iceland and Denmark back in August. For now, you'll have to be satisfied by the pictures I've been posting on flickr. Which brings me to the point of this post. As I was selecting and editing my photos to post to flickr, I eventually got to our brief stop in Solbjerg.

Solbjerg is on the island of Mors in the Limfjorden. In my last bout of serious Danish genealogy research a few years ago, I found out that my great great grandparents, Heinrich Frederik Ludwig Mohr and Ane Marie Sørensen, were married in Nykøbing on Mors and that Ane Marie was born in Solbjerg. I also settled, once and for all, the question of Ane Marie's maiden name. Or so I thought. If you're not interested in genealogy, stop reading now.

You see, my grandfather's name was Clifford Frandsen Luck Mohr. Frandsen was his mother's maiden name and his father was Thorwald Luck Mohr. Back in Denmark, it was spelled Lÿkke and the story was that it had been Ane Marie's maiden name. For years, I'd recorded her name as Ane Marie Lÿkke. But as I started researching this part of my family, the evidence quickly began to mount that this was not the case. Thorwald's christening certificate, as well as the corresponding record in the Danish church books, gave her name as Ane Marie Sorensen. Then I found a couple of Thorwald's sisters in the California Death Index. Both listed Sorensen in the "mother's maiden name" field. Next up was Ane Marie's death certificate, which listed her father's name as Anders Sorensen. Once I knew to look in Solbjerg, I found her birth record in the church books:

There it was, plain as day: Ane Marie Sørensen. Not Lÿkke. Sørensen. And her father? Søren Andersen. Not quite what her death certificate said, but close. This was in the brief period of time in Denmark when patronymic¹ names were still in use, but only the "male" versions. A generation earlier, she would have been named Ane Marie Sørensdatter. A generation later, Ane Marie Andersen. With that settled, I tried to work my way back a bit further, but I couldn't find her parent's births, nor their marriage. I was getting genealogy burnout, so I set it aside for a while. I had hoped to get some more Danish research done just before our trip, but that never happened.

So that brings us to last week, when I was culling, editing, and captioning photos from our trip. I fired up Reunion to check on Ane Marie's birthdate and a note I'd made about her father's name caught my eye. I thought I'd double-check her birth record and when I did, I noticed something I'd never noticed before:

This is the Parents column of Ane Marie's birth record. It lists her parents as Søren Andersen and Maren Andersdatter, both of Solbjerg. But what's that text right at the beginning of the second line? Lÿk? Could it be short for Lÿkke? Off I went to find out...

Fortunately for me, Denmark's National Archives (Statens Arkiver) has made it very easy to do genealogy research from home. First, there's Arkivalieronline.dk, which has scans of virtually all of the existing churchbooks for every parish in Denmark, from the 1600s through 1950. They're not indexed, so using Arkivalieronline is just like using microfilmed church books: pick the parish and date range, then page through until you find what you want. Arkivalieronline also has scans of Danish census returns (Folketælling) accessible the same way. The other piece of the puzzle is Statens Arkiver's DDD: Dansk Demografisk Database. The DDD contains extracted and indexed census returns, as well as immigrant and emigrant registrations. Best of all, both sites are completely free.

When I last worked on this stuff, the DDD records were woefully incomplete outside of Copenhagen (even now, they're a work in progress). This time around, I searched for "Lykke" and "Lÿkke" in Solbjerg and turned up a Søren Lykke, an Anders Sørensen Lykke and a Søren Andersen Lykke, along with their families. Another search for the same names without the added "Lÿkke" turned up the same households in different census years. Sure enough, Ane Marie Sørensen's father was Søren Andersen Lÿkke. His father was Anders Sørensen Lÿkke and his grandfather was Søren Lÿkke. The census records identified siblings, parents, birthplaces, and ages. Back in Arkivalieronline I was able to find all the related birth and marriage records in the church books and go back three more generations from Ane Marie in just a few hours of work. Arkivalieronline plus DDD is much more useful than either resource alone. Cool!

Of course, the whole purpose of this post is to reveal the mystery of Lÿkke or Lykke². Why did Ane Marie's paternal ancestors use both patronymics and "Lÿkke?" Why didn't she? Well, it turns out the Lÿkke name was passed down from father to first born son. Daughters never took the Lÿkke name, nor did later sons (with one exception³). In this case Lykke is what's called a tilnavn in Danish—a taken or added name. There's no rhyme or reason in the world of added names. They're neither patronyms nor true surnames and their use was unpredictable from generation to generation. Sometimes they would appear for a generation or two and fall out of use again. Other times, they would stick around for generation after generation. What do they mean, though? Who knows! Some added names came from the farm a family worked or the occupation of some ancestor. Some were related to geography or the physical appearance of an ancestor. And some were taken for no apparent reason at all. Maybe they just wanted to imitate the nobility, who had fixed surnames long before the common folk. As for Lÿkke, it's still a mystery. It can be translated as "luck," as it was in my family, but it can also mean "happiness." Maybe old Søren was particularly lucky or perennially happy. There was a noble family in medieval Denmark with the Lykke name; maybe an ancestor of mine worked for the noble Lykkes.

So, it seems my great great grandmother wasn't Ane Marie Lÿkke as we'd thought. On the other hand, Lÿkke was her family name after all.

Patronymic names were once common throughout Western Europe. In Denmark, sons would take the father's name with "-sen" added and daughters would take the father's name with "-datter" added. So Søren Andersen's son would be, say, Hans Sørensen and his daughter Karen Sørensdatter. Patronymics are still used in Iceland. ↩
You may notice I'm using Lÿkke in some places and Lykke in others. Spelling was a rather more fluid affair back then and some records include the umlaut and others don't. In modern Danish, the word is spelled Lykke. ↩
Ane Marie Sørensen's eldest brother took the name Anders Sørensen Qvist rather than Anders Sørensen Lykke. Qvist was an added name used in their mother's family. Ane Marie's younger brother was Anders Sørensen Lykke. ↩

Stub-o-rama: Suzanne Vega

2010-09-30T20:30:59Z

Let's fire this ol' weblog up and see if she still runs, shall we? What's this? An already-written post waiting in my "drafts" folder? Excellent...

Ah, yes. Suzanne Vega. My freshman year at RPI, I lived in "The Quad." They were the oldest and most run-down dorms on campus (two years later, they would undergo a huge renovation project), but they were also the most centrally-located. Most of the academic buildings were nearby and the Rensselaer Union was right across the street. In the center of The Union is the McNeil Room: not a bad venue for acts too big to be playing in a bar, but too small for the Field House.

I'd already seen a couple concerts there by the time Suzanne Vega rolled into town in March. I'm pretty sure I'd seen BoDeans there as well as Treat Her Right (Mark Sandman's pre-Morphine band). I would have seen They Might Be Giants there, too, but as the sign on the door said, "They Might Be Canceled." And they were.

Oh, but I was supposed to be talking about Suzanne Vega, wasn't I? I honestly have no recollection where I first heard her. I do remember having a cassette of her debut album—an actual pre-recorded store-bought cassette, one of only a couple I ever remember buying. This was before her big breakthrough with "Luka" and "Tom's Diner." The concert was a low-key folkie kinds of affair. Even the smallish venue of the McNeil Room was only about half full, which gave the show an intimate vibe.

Tab Sweep 22: Special "Where The Heck Has He Been?" Edition

2010-04-24T00:23:04Z

Glaciers! Deltas! Dunes! It's Pathological Geomorphology! (via MeFi).

Mmmm... electrons. Tasty, tasty electrons. Hydrogen Wave Function Cookies combine science and food. Yum.

Speaking of food, Cooking Issues—one of my favorite geeky cooking blogs—has done a great two-part primer on Sous-Vide cooking (Part 1, Part 2) with more yet to come. When the Sous Vide Supreme comes down to about half its current price, I'll jump.

My DC-area readers probably already saw this, but the Washington Post Magazine did a big feature on the 9:30 Club recently. Ah, memories... (via MeFi)

Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Let's Have A Ball. Merlin Mann posted a great video the other day of Pixies playing "Gigantic" live. I miss the old Pixies (as opposed to, you know, the old Pixies). Come to think of it, though, one thing I always loved about them was that they looked like me and people I knew. They weren't hipsters or Huge Rock Stars, just regular people.

I vaguely remember posting this once before, but I can't find it at the moment... It's worth another link, anyway: In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson. "Just choose from the array of probable outcomes that will manifest themselves upon your decision to perform surgery, and make the one most favourable to yourself into reality."

Wondering how best to brew your next cup of coffee? Brew Methods has you covered (via cleanhotdry).

A couple recent searches for old maps have led me to the David Rumsey Map Collection. The collection "has over 22,000 maps and images online." All high-res and free.

How big (and empty) is our solar system? A little perspective always helps. Or perhaps you'd prefer The Known Universe. It's like an astronomically accurate Powers of Ten (via Kottke).

DIY Film: "Plastic and goop go in one end and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking." (via Boing Boing)

Who wouldn't want a 7.5 hour HD video of a train ride through Norway? Get your copy here. It's only 22 GB. Or you could go for the original HD file, which weighs in at 246 GB. (via Boing Boing)

The campaign against The Elements of Style has begun! None too soon.

This is not a spiral.

Stub-o-rama: 1999 Women's World Cup

2010-02-27T03:42:24Z

Ah 1999. Kosovo, Columbine, Euro, Jar Jar, Dow 10K, Y2K fears, and the ~~toilet-seat~~ clamshell iBook. What a year. It was also the year the US Women's Soccer Team won the FIFA World's Cup.

Back then, Kathy's parents lived just south of Silicon Valley. We had a visit planned that summer and just before we left, Kathy found out that one of the semi-final games of the Women's World Cup was being held at Stanford while we were there. Best of all, the US had just beaten Germany in the quarter finals, so the game would feature the US team against Brazil. She bought three tickets so her sister could go with us and off we flew to California.

As it turns out her sister chose not to go with us, so her mom did instead. On July 4th, we drove over to Palo Alto, fought through the traffic and headed up and up and up into the stands. You might notice the ticket says Row 80. Yeah... 80! We were waaaaaay up at the top of the stands, but at least we were at mid-field.

I thought the game was pretty exciting, though the New York Times described it the next day as "largely uninspired." Maybe it wasn't the greatest game ever, but it was great to just be able to see that team play... Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Brandi Chastain, Brianna Scurry. A US women's soccer team full of household names? How strange. Was this how it would be in the new century?

Obviously, the US won the game—Wikipedia tells me it was 2-0—and went on to play China in the final six days later. They won that game, too, when Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal and famously ripped off her shirt in celebration. 1999.

9,633

2010-01-12T05:57:33Z

I haven't done one of these in a couple years...

Wow. We took a lot of pictures last year! I had a renewed interest in photography even before the 7D arrived, but the new camera really lit a fire under me. Late in the year, The Daily Shoot came along and threw gas on the fire. Why do I care how many pictures I've taken? Well, I don't per se. But to quote the Daily Shoot site: "Photography is an art and a craft. Getting better at both requires practice—lots of practice."

Sinusoidal Depleneration in Nofer Trunions

2009-12-17T00:55:04Z

Last month, I tweeted a link to a very funny YouTube video, the Chrysler Turbo Encabulator. Anyone who has ever had to wade through technical jargon will likely find it funny, but to an engineer like me, it was hilarious.

Today, my dad sent me a link to a very similar video, the Rockwell Retro Encabulator. It seems to be somewhat more recent than the Chrysler version, but other than a few minor changes, the script is substantially identical. Interesting. So which came first, Rockwell or Chrysler? Or was there a Proto Encabulator that predated them both?

Wikipedia to the rescue! It turns out the Chrysler video was created in 1988 and the Rockwell one in 1997. But the term "Turbo Encabulator" and much of the script dates back to at least 1946, when it appeared in a Time Magazine article, Science: For Nofer Trunnions. It appeared again in a General Electric data sheet (PDF) in 1962. The classics never go out of style, do they?

Stub-o-rama: ???

2009-12-16T08:39:31Z

There's not much to go on here. Some mysterious concert at a place called the State Theatre. What could it be? I seem to remember a State Theatre in Albany... did I see a band there? Hmm.

After some thought, it occurred to me that this was a place in Portland (Maine). It was a beautiful old theater on Congress Street that had fallen into disrepair. By the time I moved to Maine in 1989, the place had been subdivided into smaller theaters and was showing porn flicks. Sometime in the early 90s, the theater was purchased by a group of investors and restored to some likeness of its former glory. Which brings me to this stub.

Soon after the theater reopened, we had our first chance to see a show there. Los Lobos were coming to town! What a time to see them, too! They'd just definitively removed themselves from their La Bamba pigeonhole with the release of Kiko. Wow. Kiko. At once rootsy and wildly experimental, it would define their sound for the next couple albums.

Like many of these older concerts, I know I enjoyed it, but I don't remember much of the show itself. I do remember being impressed that a five-member band (or was it six) could be so tight. They could go off on wild tangents and all come back together in perfect sync in a single beat. Many of the Alt bands I was seeing at the time almost reveled in their sloppy wildness (The Replacements and The Pogues come to mind). Los Lobos could be wild without being sloppy. Good Stuff. I'd love to see them again.

Stub-o-rama: R.E.M.

2009-12-07T08:15:20Z

Last year, I wrote a weblog post about my discovery of R.E.M. A few months after my eyes were opened, I found out R.E.M. was coming to DC. Actually, I found out the night before the concert. I spent the next day at school trying to convince anyone to go with me to the concert. Despite having all the zeal of a new convert, I didn't have much luck. That afternoon, I was working in the yearbook office—yes, I was on the yearbook staff—still singing the praises of R.E.M. when another staff member came in the room asking "is someone talking about R.E.M. in here?" Bingo. Kelly's older brother had returned from college bearing new music. She was hooked, too. That night, off we went to George Washington University's Smith Center.

We arrived fully expecting the place to be packed, but I guess I wasn't the only one having a hard time convincing friends to come. Smith Center isn't that big (Wikipedia says it holds 5,000) and the general-admission crowd didn't nearly fill the floor, let alone the seats. I'd guess there were no more than about 1000 people there.

The opening band that night was The dB's. They were introduced as "the best band nobody's heard of." They were full of wild energy and jangly guitars and I loved every minute of it. Their "big" album Like This had just come out and it really seemed like they were finally going to break out. Alas, that wasn't to be, but their performance won me over into their small band of loyal fans.

As for R.E.M., can I barely remember their set, but for a feeling I had. I felt like I was watching a door open into a secret new world. Concerts can be like this? It was so different than the slick, organized production that the Billy Joel concert had been. It wasn't really anything new; I'd imagine it's the same feeling people had watching punk for the first time. It sure felt new to me, though. This was gonna be big.

Stub-o-rama: Rick Springfield

2009-12-05T08:47:30Z

Rick Springfield? Really? How did he fit into my new alternative WHFS musical world? Well, he didn't. The summer after high school graduation, my sister found out about this special concert sponsored by Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) and a local radio station. It was super-cheap ($5) and was meant to celebrate the year's graduates, or something of the sort. The headliner was Rick Springfield. Even $5 was too much to pay to see him, as far as I was concerned. But we heard the opening band was supposed to be 'Til Tuesday. Five bucks for Aimee Mann and "Voices Carry" sounded great.

We headed down to DAR Constitution Hall—the same place my high school graduation had been a month earlier—got in our seats, and waited. Right on time, the lights dimmed and out out came... Rick Springfield. Wha? Where was Aimee? We didn't made it through more than a song or two before we headed home. I don't think we ever figured out whether 'Til Tuesday were ever really on the bill. Ah, youth.

Stub-o-rama: Hands Across America

2009-12-04T08:38:51Z

I've got something a little different this time. No tale of newly-discovered music today. In fact, no music at all!

Yup, it's true. Kathy and I participated in the great coming-together that was Hands Across America. Mocked by The Simpsons, called a failure before it even began, Hands was a huge benefit to fight hunger and homelessness. Whether it actually made much money is up for debate, but it certainly was a spectacle. It was an era of fundraising-as-spectacle: Do They Know It's Christmas, Live Aid, We Are The World, Comic Relief. It's as though a bunch of celebrities woke up in the 80s with the realization that, hey, Jerry Lewis might be on to something with that telethon thing. Now, of course, we help the world by buying stuff. But I digress...

We showed up at our allotted stretch of Route 355 a little while before the scheduled 3:00 start time. I seem to recall a that a lane or two had been closed off for the event. There was music (the "Hands Across America" song was so memorable, I'd completely forgotten about it until I looked up the event on Wikipedia today) and a general sense of expectation. There was also a lot of self-mockery for taking part and a thorough lack of organization. As 3:00 approached, we linked hands and stood there for a few minutes (was it really a full 15?). Then it was over. People milled about for a bit and dispersed. "That was it?" It reminds me of the whole Y2K thing: there was so much hype leading up to it and then... nothing.

Stub-o-rama: The Pogues

2009-12-03T08:59:32Z

Ah, The Pogues. Clearly I had moved on to something a little different than Billy Joel by this time. My Billy Joel fandom ended in large part because I switched from listening to top-40 radio to "alternative" radio. Sometime in about 1984, I discovered WHFS, a legendary alternative station in the DC area, and my musical tastes were changed for good. I've written before about how R.E.M. kicked it all off. They were the spark, but HFS was the rocket fuel. I remember one particular night hearing Alison Moyet, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade, and Kirsty MacColl all for the first time on HFS. What does this have to do with The Pogues? I'm getting to that...

You see, I rushed right out and bought whatever music I could find by Alison, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade and Kirsty. That'd be Alf, nothing (Sade's album wasn't out in the US yet and there were no imports to be found), a 12" single of "Since Yesterday," and a 12" single of Kirsty's cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England." Kirsty is probably best known in the US for her song "They Don't Know," which was covered by Tracey Ullman, and for (drum roll...) "Fairytale of New York," her duet with Shane MacGowan that appeared on The Pogues' album If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

Because of some recording-contract ridiculousness, Kirsty MacColl was pretty much unable to release a new album for most of the 80s. I always kept an eye out for her, though, so when I saw a blurb in a music magazine saying she was recording an album with The Pogues, I thought I should check them out. The next time I was in a record store, I bought their album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash. Like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures before it and Pixies' Surfer Rosa after, I'd flipped past it many times in the record racks before deciding to buy. The Pogues' wild mix of Punk and Celtic Folk was something new at a time when I was getting a little jaded by the whole Alt scene.

By the time I saw The Pogues in 1989, their masterpiece If I Should Fall From Grace With God was all over college radio and they were pretty well known in the US. It was also pretty well known that the quality of their shows varied depending on Shane MacGowan's lucidity. It would be a couple more years before he'd be thrown out of the band for his drug and alcohol abuse, but going to a Pogues show was a bit of a crap shoot. We lucked out. He was obviously neither clean nor sober, but he careened his way through the performance with Punk aplomb. A great show.

If I remember right, proto-Queercore musician Phranc opened the show, mostly to slack-jawed disbelief.

Stub-o-rama: Billy Joel '82

2009-12-01T22:57:24Z

I'm not sure why or how, but sometime around the release of Glass Houses in 1980, Billy Joel became my favorite musician. My friend Peter and I made it our quest to track down every last bit of his music. I remember searching every record store I visited for a copy of Cold Spring Harbor (which didn't become widely available until its re-release sometime later).

Amid this teenage fandom, we learned that Billy would be coming to DC. We convinced Peter's mom to take us to the concert and off we went: a pair of fifteen year olds at their first big rock concert. It was a blast. The Nylon Curtain had come out earlier in the year and I seem to recall he started the concert with "Allentown."

My biggest memories of the concert have nothing to do with the performance, though. The first was the smell. I'd smelled pot before—though naively had no clue what it was—but this was a full-on assault of pot smoke. Pete's mom clued me in. Clearly Nancy Reagan's advice didn't resonate with Billy Joel fans. The other big memory is of the last song played over the PA before the concert began. As the band came on stage, they kinda danced their way to their instruments to the sound of Sam Cooke's Chain Gang. The Pretenders' Back on the Chain Gang had just come out and I remember afterwards trying to describe the song to friends: "no, not The Pretenders' one. The old one, from the 60s" I guess it would have helped if I'd known who Sam Cooke was at the time.

Stub-o-rama: Camper Van Beethoven

2009-12-01T00:26:50Z

A couple months ago, it was briefly all the rage on Facebook to make a list of all the bands you've seen in concert. By the time I got around to making a list, the moment had passed, so I never posted it. It got me thinking, though, about the pile of old ticket stubs I have tucked away somewhere.

I managed to find that envelope full of stubs and took a couple hours to scan them all. Starting today and continuing until I run out of stubs, interest, or motivation (whichever comes first), I'll post one ticket stub every day and try my best to remember the corresponding event. The stubs are in no particular order and absolutely none will be omitted for reasons of propriety or changing muscial taste.

First up is a ticket from a Camper Van Beethoven concert circa 1990. I was living in Portland, Maine at the time and Kathy was in grad school at U Mass Amherst. I seem to remember driving down to Portsmouth to pick up a friend, then picking Kathy up in Amherst before continuing on to Troy for the concert. Kathy remembers completely stressing out driving us all (in my car) from Amherst to Troy in the snow. Ah, yes, the snow. I seem to recall that weekend involved even more driving than just Portland to Troy and back, but can't remember the details.

Thanks to the snow, we got to the concert late. I think the opening band had already played, but CvB was just going on as we arrived. As for the concert itself, I don't remember much. Camper Van Beethoven was on what would be their last tour before breaking up just a couple months later. Key Lime Pie had come out the year before and I remember fearing they wouldn't play enough of their older stuff (but they did—including Take the Skinheads Bowling!). I have absolutely no idea where we stayed that night. Maybe at Pete H's place down on Lark Street in Albany? Good times...

When all of the sudden – BOOM!

2009-11-29T23:40:30Z

When I was a kid, one of the things I loved about our almost-annual summer vacations out West was the chance to experience thunderstorms in the Wide Open West. We had thunderstorms in Maryland with alarming regularity, but they always seemed to me to be something entirely different from the ones in the West. A thunderstorm in Colorado or Kansas or New Mexico is a sight to behold. I remember sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove through some pretty spectacular lightning shows, comfortable in the knowledge that a car is one of the safest places to be in the thunderstorm. I often wondered just what it would be like if lightning did strike our car.

Well, Cliff Mass, my very favorite source for all things weather-related here in Seattle, has a truly amazing story on his blog today. It's the story of Judy Lew, whose car was struck by lightning as she drove across the 520 bridge a few weeks ago:

The girls and I were just chit-chatting in the car when all of the sudden – BOOM! We heard a loud explosion and I saw a flash of red light outside of the corner of my eye and all of the sudden my driver side window dropped down and a rush of cold air and rain came in. I screamed (as did the girls) but I had no idea what had just happened.

It's quite a story. There are pictures, too!

Tab Sweep 21: The "Long Overdue" Edition

2009-11-28T20:32:36Z

So it's been seven months since I've swept out my open tabs here on the ol' blog. Many a tab has gotten old and moldy since my last tab sweep. Those 4th of July tabs just don't seem too relevant anymore. Nor do the back-to-school ones or the Halloween ones. A few of these are starting to grow a little fuzz around the edges, but I'm posting them anyway. Just cut off the moldy bits; I'm sure they'll be fine...

Hobbit 419: Were dwarves the Nigerian spammers of Middle Earth?

Have you ever thought it would be cool to be able to swim with jellyfish, if only they didn't have that horrifying, potentially-deadly sting? There's apparently a place in Palau—appropriately named Jellyfish Lake—where the jellyfish have lost their sting. (via mental_floss)

Way back in August, GenealogyBlog pointed out a great tool on dynastree.com that lets you see the geographical distribution of a surname. There are versions for eleven countries including the US, Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Where was that movie filmed? FamousLocations.com has the answer. (via Lifehacker)

Speaking of maps and locations, 2719 Hyperion has a tour of Walt Disney's life in Kansas City.

I'm sure Kathy will be happy to hear that her favorite oatmeal won the Golden Spurtle.

Now here's a particularly moldy link (just file it away for next year): How to Make Candy Corn at Home.

It just wouldn't be a tab sweep without some Lego links. Amiright? How about this incredible pop-up temple. (via Giz) Or how about the original design patent for the Lego Minifig? Or a cool Lego/papercraft combo from Muji (Japan only, alas).

Looking for a really cheap iPhone? iPhoneDummy.net has got you covered.

It's been a while since the last one, but British Columbia is now up to seven Mysterious Severed Feet. One more to complete the set.

Back in October, Gizmodo had a great summary of the confusing state of power plugs around the world. The article arrived too late to help Kathy for her trip to Germany, but she had the right adapter anyway.

Earlier in the month, The Auteurs Daily had a round-up of links about one of my favorite movies of all time: Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (Der Himmel Über Berlin). There's so much I could write about this movie; I may have to spin it out into a separate post. If you've never seen it, what are you waiting for?

Drawn! points out that there's now a less expensive edition of Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life. I saw it in the bookstore the other day and it looks just as gorgeous to me as the original $200 edition.

Mmmm... waffle iron cookies.

On the one hand, Canadians are crazy. On the other hand, this would make an awesome addition to the Winter Olympics.

And finally... our long national nightmare is over: there's now a twitter client for Mac OS Classic. Grackle68k works on System 6 through Mac OS 9. (via Gizmodo)