Dave Winer: Things of Beauty

I went for a hike yesterday with Paul Andrews up by the Stanford Dish, we caught a rainbow, and he took a picture of me in front of it. Why did I put my hands up like that? I thought maybe the rainbow would fit between them.

Implant Achieves Female Orgasm. A device used to treat back pain has a pleasing side-effect, causing women to have an orgasm. A doctor-inventor has patented the device which would work in tandem with a remote control.

Adam keeps plopping cool stuff into my enclosures folder. This morning I watched a short movie called The Battle of the Sexes. A guy is wanting to take a sexy babe home with him. She smiles innocently and excuses herself. "I'm going to the ladies room," she coos. He smiles. She smiles. The camera follows her into the bathroom, where all hell breaks loose.

I looked for "plotz" in several online dictionaries, and it's not there. It's such a big word. Let me try to define it. Plotz is a verb meaning "to faint in surprise or disbelief." There's an element of hysteria in there. When I was a kid if I got straight A's on my report card (never happened) my mother would have plotzed. Like all Yiddish words, it's overdone, with humor. We often feign plotzing, and everyone has a good laugh.

I forgot that Bob Denver played Maynard G Krebbs, the good-natured teenage beatnik on Dobie Gillis before he was Gilligan. (His picture is to the right.) Dwayne Hickman, who played Dobie, has a website, of course. "I have been in show business since I was six years old but my true love has been art and architecture."

I keep seeing that headline from Salon everywhere I go. I like the idea. Makes me want to go to Amsterdam.

Sprezzatura takes it all off for the New Year.

Joel took pics of the snow in NY. Now I know why I'm bummed. I'm not there! Snow is so cool.

Jimmy Carter: Make This Natural Treasure a National Monument. "The reason the Alaskan coastal plain is home today to a pageant of wildlife is that there have been both Republican and Democratic presidents who cared about the environment."

Vintage computer ads. A lost art.