3 April, 2000
My favorite April Fools' effort of the year: the Surveillance Camera Players in Washington Square Park. (See also: the NYC Surveillance Camera Project.)

I'm probably not going to have a chance to add to this today, but I did manage to finally get March tucked into bed in the archives. I should be back on track tomorrow.
4 April, 2000
I'm dying to read the new book by Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History -- especially after this last year of devouring anything I could find about water issues in the American Southwest. Bringing it on home, in a way. In the meantime, I'm finding what's on the web, and the New York City Water Supply from SUNY Stonybrook is my first find.

Ooh! A Town Called Olive, part of A Retrospective on the NYC Water Supply, is a wonderful page by Camilla Calhoun, the Education Director for the Westchester Land Trust and also a descendent of many people who actually built the canals and reservoirs that deliver the water to NYC. The slideshow is great, too, with some fantastic old images depicting the damming of rivers, the construction. It's a really lovely site.
7 April, 2000
My love of Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is no secret, so you might be able to imagine my surprise at finding (via More Like This) a Wisconsin Death Trip site. Lots of text many images from the book.

You know, I have to confess that I've no idea what the "Wassup" thing is. Every time I find a clue, it's some Flash thing and I'm neither interested nor patient enough to see it.

Mmm. The Noam Chomsky Archive.
10 April, 2000
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Short Stories as Autobiographical Gauge of Mental Illness, by Kathie Tovo.
12 April, 2000
BurningMan is dead! by Dr. Cliff. I feel a little sad to have never made it out to the Man... but the choice between spending my precious desert time alone or with a few thousand other people has been an easy one. (And the right one, based on what Dr. Cliff's got to say.)

I wrapped up The Tipping Point and just loved the extensive section on Sesame Street. I can happily admit that I was a Sesame Street baby -- born around the same year as the show, to a mother with a degree in education and an obsession with the Montessori system. She sat with us for the one hour each day we were allowed to watch television. And it was always Sesame Street. If this was your childhood, too, take a nostalgia break and check out the Sesame Street Lyrics Archive.

Wes Clark's Avocado Memories: Growing up in Burbank, California in the Sixties and Seventies is a collection of photographs depicting the author's childhood home from 1966 - 1980. It's a wonderful little time capsule. The dedication is especially sweet.
14 April, 2000
Why I Like Math by Matt Stone. On BlueLawn.

Peter's so rocking my world right now.

I never knew exactly what a Ponzi scheme was. Fortunately for me, it's all spelled out on the Charles K. Ponzi Website, "The Remarkable Criminal Financial Career of Charles K. Ponzi" by Mark C. Knutson. Pretty interesting.
17 April, 2000
RIP, Edward Gorey (1925-2000). See the Uncommon Gorey Gallery for some wonderful illustrations you might not have seen before -- none of them appear in any of the Amphigorey books. And The Wonderful World of Edward Gorey has links to other sites with full Gorey works online.
18 April, 2000
The Mystery of the Nazca Lines, like the Maree Man (see last August 24), mysterious line drawings. They were discovered in the 1930's and have not been "explained". Read Alan F. Alford's thoughts, or check out these amateur aerial photos. Whoa -- if you're into this stuff, I just found the motherlode: 80 Nazca Links.

The Mysteries Megasite. I could blow more than a few billable hours here.

My absolute favorite company, Kiehls, has sold out. This is so depressing to me... I'm really uncomfortable with the cosmetics industry (their profit margin and advertising budgets, specifically), and Kiehls was a perfect alternative. Their products are just the best, and they never advertised. It was worth every penny I spent there to know that nothing was going to animal testing, nothing was going to stupid and excessive packaging, and nothing was going to page after page of ads in Glamour and Cosmo. But this week, the 146 year old family-owned and run company has been sold to L'Oreal. Bah. (The link to the NY Times story requires free registration. Use login Illuminatrix password illuminatrix if you don't care to register.)
19 April, 2000
It was on this date in 1943 that Albert Hofmann first intentionally ingested LSD. His book, LSD: My Problem Child, is in the public domain and available in its entirety for your reading pleasure. Some of the sections contain "notes while tripping" and are by far the most interesting.

And I suppose if you like that, you'll also appreciate The Houseboat Summit of February, 1967, in Sausalito, California. Featured participants: Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts and Allen Ginsberg.

20 April, 2000
A web site based on a book based on a movie. I'm sure it's been done before, but this is still kind of cool. Powers of Ten is a series of 42 images, each showing a view ten times wider or ten times narrower than the previous. Start at the limit of our knowledge (an image representing 1 billion light years of space), and work your way down through the Milky Way and our solar system, all the way down to a picnic in Chicago's Lincoln Park, deep into the pores of human skin, and finally the end: quarks. This is a cool little ten-minute diversion for a Thursday morning, don't you think?

(And if you don't, maybe you just haven't celebrated 4/20 yet.)

When I'm 76 years old, I want to be just like Marta Becket. Wow. I can't wait to see the movie about her and her little dream in the desert, either. God, I love this stuff.

21 April, 2000
If you get a chance to see a rebroadcast of Charlie Rose interviewing Robin Williams, do it! I think it's the most delightful and genuine thing I've ever seen on television.

Things are going to be a little quiet around here for the next week, while I spend time with my sister who'll be visiting from Telluride. We're going to shop, enjoy a few Incidents, and make a little trip down to DC. Things will be back to normal by the end of the month.
March 2000 May 2000