The internet is full of (20 years' worth of) stuff

[shewhomust]

1. It was twenty years ago this weekend Seargeant Pepper Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first web page (it looked something like this).



2. nineweaving visited Edward Gorey's house. Wait, you can visit Edward Gorey's house? I need to bookmark nineweaving's post so that I can look at her photos when the perfect storm which is currently afflicting her LJ / my internet connection abates.



3. Man arrested in Sweden for trying to split atom in kitchen: Eddie Mair on BBC Radio interviewed him, deadpan, and eventually asked the question that had been bothering all of us: where had he got hold of his radioactive material? "From Germany, on eBay." of course. Also, out of an old smoke detector.



4. The fiasco that is the Durham Marketplace and Vennels improvement scheme has gone very quiet about the work that was supposed to be done on the vennels. They seem to have managed these things better in Edinburgh, where artist Martin Creed has clad a flight of steps each in a different shade of marble, to the delight of the Guardian's Jonathan Jones, who called it "the best art at this year's Edinburgh festival". (This, too, ran over schedule, but at least people seem to have liked it once it was finished).



5. No, sorry, that's all I've got today.

Comments

[sovay]

where had he got hold of his radioactive material? "From Germany, on eBay." of course. Also, out of an old smoke detector.

Somehow I had missed this piece of news. Awesome.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

One who shall be nameless, an acquaintance of firends, used to keep an Atlas missile (acquired piecemeal) in his garage. And that was long before eBay, long before anything but ARPANET.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Google does not know the tale of Junior Tom, who built his own atomic bomb; that, and that one of the components was "one slightly bent uranium atom" is all I can retrieve from my own memory.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

If you visit, I would joyfully take you to Edward Gorey's house.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yet another incentive to visit!

We may have to be in California next year - I suppose I'd better look into visas...

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

1. Har. And my brother hung in there, right from the start. I remember him telling me, one day I would sit at home at a private computer and be able to communicate with other people on earth connected to mine, the same way he spent his evenings at the Big One at school (the parents got worried he was out on bad business when in fact he was preparing his later career). I said, I would never do anything of the sort!

2. Is that so? I am jealous!

3. I suppose, it´s good to know where to get the stuff in case one feels the need? Like for impressing one´s adored one by building an atom bomb in the kitchen (trying the plutonium out on the cat´s coiffure) to threaten the government with so as to make her most beloved band come and play in town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiy%C5%8D_o_Nusunda_Otoko although one member of the band is a junkie, later in life to announce, he has stopped taking the drugs "because they just don´t work anymore".

4. I shall not again mix up your local and illocal politicians due to embarrassing lack of knowledge, I shall not..! Here, they are just replacing the most lovely old lamps on the marketplace around the gothic basilica&tower-ensemble with the most horrid ones they could possibly find. People tell me, they protested for over ten years and now it is being done all the same. Will cost lots of money, too but this seems more important than keeping schools intact, etc.

5. Ah, well. Not bad. Bigger than my day´s contribution, anyway!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, well done that brother! I am so jealous not to remember the days of the Well and newsgroups and such. Although I love sharing my photographs on the web, I am secretly nostalgic for the days when the internet was all about text!