Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

I just got email from Elizabeth Thomson at the MIT News Office…it seems she just got email from Odd Minde of Kiruna Sweden….

From: Elizabeth Thomson
Date: February 25, 2005 9:29:27 AM EST
Subject: Fwd: DNA from Wilczek

Betsy and Frank!

Received the following note, and EVERYBODY over here has thoroughly enjoyed it. Ultra-bizarre! Just noticed that bidding has now stopped, and the winner is….betsythedevine. Betsy: did you indeed recover the glasses?

Do tell!

Elizabeth

>Hello!
>In connection with your article:
>MIT’s Wilczek wins 2004 Nobel Prize in physics
>Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
>October 5, 2004; updated October 6, 2004
>I suggest you to look at:
>http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6149217230
>Best wishes
>Odd Minde
>Rymdgymnasiet
>Kiruna
>Sweden

My reply:

Hi Elizabeth–yes, the package from Sweden arrived yesterday!

The Rymdgymnasiet students had packaged each glass in layers of bubble-wrap with labels “Betsy Devine” and “Frank Wilczek”. I hesitate to un-bubble-wrap them now, and maybe the bubble wrap is part of the story.

As you can see, I put the bubble-wrapped glasses over our fireplace, where some of Frank’s robots and Lego constructions seem to be happy to see them.

All best,
Betsy

p.s. Do you mind if I include your nice email when blogging this?

Look what I just got! The unique Nobel-Prizewinner-and-spouse DNA-containing glasses I
won on eBay, where they were being auctioned by Swedish Space High School students.

So, whose DNA will be seen on eBay next? Could this be the magic bullet blog-revenue model? Just traces of genius DNA should do the trick…

• …a mousepad once used by Scoble?
• …a press release touched by the hand of Steve Rubel?
• –a ski pass thrown away by Halley?

Maybe Dave Winer could auction his Dave Winer glasses….

One thing I’m pretty sure of–eBay plus Airborne Express will not replace the good-old-fashioned method of DNA transfer.

There’s a bloggy full moon rising tonight. I caught sight of it yesterday in JR’s Duly Noded*. I’m using Feedster right now to follow the full moon rising over our blogs… The first “full moon” I saw was in Pondicherry… As the full moon rose over the Indian Ocean, first red with the last light of the sun, then bright bright as it rose higher and higher….

Moonshine over London last night sent LiveJournalist liquidhotmegs off for a wild and happy ride…

the moon was so full it threw long shadows across the road and within seconds I was in my element, a little Honda civic, standard of course, pumping the clutch, the music loud and urgent, and despite the cold we thrust back the sun roof and I saw a familiar road and idly commented that Dundalk was that way and before I knew what was happening we were gunning it towards grey county…

And over at Flickr, just look at the photos tagged “moon”…

Here it comes, up over the horizon, right into my blog and maybe into yours…”The moon like a flower in heaven’s high bower,” said Blake, which in mellowspeak would be “Oh, wow, look at the moon.”

* Hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your moon, JR, I just thought it would look great in this professional skyscape by Dennis Mammana. But decide for yourself–do you like the moon there or don’t you?

Happy birthday to George Friedrich Handel, seen here looking pierced and modern, who was born February 23, 1685. You’ve probably sat through his Messiah oratorio at least once (“Hallellujah! Hallellujah! Hallellujah! …” I’m sure you remember.) I’ve always loved Handel’s kind of music, as well as this complete diss of it, penned in 1765:

the Pleasure Artists feel in hearing much of that compos’d in the modern Taste, is not the natural Pleasure arising from Melody or Harmony of Sounds, but of the same kind with the Pleasure we feel on seeing the surprizing Feats of Tumblers and Rope Dancers, who execute difficult Things… Many Pieces of it are mere Compositions of Tricks.

That (and much more) was the very scathing opinion of Benjamin Franklin.

Great site I found via del.icio.us:
Lots and lots of movies of plants in motion–just what my eyes need to rest up from snow and/or computer-screen blindness.

I could spend hours here watching the flowers blooming, especially these star lilies. This movie condenses 8 days of slow awakening into one feel-good minute.

If only we could do that to the rest of February!

These movies were created by Roger P. Hangarter of Indiana Universty, and are “intended to serve as a resource for non-profit educational use.”

So don’t forget to look for those vine nutations, which are filed under nastic movements…

Mojtaba and Arash are two Iranian bloggers who got thrown in jail for blogging about Iranian bloggers getting thrown in jail.

Thanks to Rebecca McKinnon and Tim Jarrett and BoingBoing and others for reminding me that February 22 is the day for the rest of us to help pressure Iran to set Mojtaba and Arash free.

Did you realize that the AARP (American Association for Retired People) was secretly trying to kill US soldiers and/or force them into gay marriages? Thank goodness USANext is on the job, running ads like this one. Just the kind of hard-hitting, on-topic informative message about Social Security reform that you’d expect from the PR team that fronted the Swiftboat Vets…. Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link. p.s. Today, February 22, is George Washington’s birthday. I wonder what he’d think of this kind of politics…

Update: Josh Marshall says they’ve taken this ad down and so they have, replacing it with a same-size graphic that says “14 facts the AARP doesn’t want you to know.” The graphic links to the same exact USANext page as before–a page that doesn’t have 14 facts on it, and in fact doesn’t have the number 14 on it–but facts clearly aren’t the strong point of these campaigners….

Hop on your own mental motorcycle for a great Sixties/Seventies spin with free spirit MontaukRider’s brand-new blog…

You too can

• Share that first hit of motorcycle mania with 15 year-old Ogunquit surfer “Ernie Tanaka” (who got re-christened to match the name on his secondhand surfboard)…
• Follow MontaukRider’s Triumph 650 (“bike of legends”) through Seventies Europe, the Mideast, and India…
• Enjoy photos of classic motorcycles, not to mention a meteor shower and Jack Kerouac…

What’s this blog about? The tagline explains it this way:

The chapters of a lifelong love affair with motorcycling, touring, travel, and fascinating people along the way. That fact that the chapters are autobiographical is purely accidental and intended.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs formerly known as Google!

Steve Rubel, Dave Winer, and Dan Gillmor have the real story about Google’s new”AutoLinks“–which turn out to be the same idea as Microsoft’s idea for “Smart Tags”–and were apparently dreamed up by the same person who made up Smart Tags to start with.

The piratical plan behind both AutoLinks and Smart Tags
is to use
near-monopoly power to shanghai web traffic away from smaller players, and into sites you control. Example:  Gary Price went shopping for books at the Barnes and Noble website–and discovered that
every book’s ISBN number had been Autolinked to a sales page over at Amazon. 

Maybe they could just Smart Tag or AutoLink “Don’t be evil” to a page more fitted to their new business model. Arrrrr!