Down the rabbit hole
One of my most hopeful daydreams as a kid was to discover a secret compartment in our house, perhaps in a wall or under the floorboards, containing a cache of old papers that would set me on the trail of a long-hidden secret. (Since the house was built in 1970 and we were the first occupants, this was about as likely as finding a dinosaur fossil in one of the metamorphic rocks in the woods around our house; but it took me a long time to give up on that search, too.)
A few months ago, my friend Barry Isaacson actually did find a cache of old papers hidden in a secret compartment in his house. The real-life horror story they revealed is enough to give any child, or parent, nightmares.
Here’s Barry’s story as he wrote it for the LA Weekly.
Really old journals
My college classmate Alex Epstein tipped me off that someone has been posting Samuel Pepys’ diary, 343 years later to the day. So my old journals aren’t so old.
Little Big Planet
…is beyond amazing. It warps my mind to even begin to imagine some of the things people are going to do with this.
I did spend a good hour last night playing a strange new form of Tetris. It’s even more fun with two players.
An Albanian motorway
This tunnel is part of a highway being built through a mountainous region of northern Albania, connecting the Adriatic port of Durres to southern Kosovo.
I showed my sketch to a Turkish engineer who’d been watching me draw. He studied it briefly, then shook his head and handed it back to me with one comment: “You drew that pipe crooked, but in reality, it is straight.”
I couldn’t help thinking it would have been a great setting for an episode of Ops.
