Links for May 21st through May 23rd

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on May 23, 2010). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Sometime between May 21st and May 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All: "The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist."
  • Cripple Crab Crutch: "A two-disc album of spoken word mash-ups. Source materials ranging from the paranormal, the historical, the literary, the scholarly, the philosophical and religious, film excerpts, strange old recordings, radio shows, comedy, and an old Disneyland attraction."
  • The Swinger: "The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect."
  • 10 Days in a Carry-on: "Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, demonstrated how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on."
  • The Pirate Bay | Cracked.com: "The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent website in the world. According to the RIAA, it rates somewhere between Nazi Dinosaurs and The League of Extraordinary Evil on the Global Threat Scale." I'm not a huge fan of Cracked — their humor tends to rely a bit much on foul language for my tastes — but this infographic is great.