On September 21…

The invisible man visits the Hobbit in the dark tower, and Galileo has, until its end, cost (converted) many pound sterling

(This time – kind of continued from August 13 – one sentence combines two dates of birth of authors (1866, 1947), represented by famous works, a book being published (1937), the end of a space mission (2003) and an event in economic history (1931). :) )

Rush with speed, blogs!

screenshots of BLOGspeed and BlogRush Does automatic link exchange with other, allegedly topically related blogs really generate a noteworthy amount of traffic, i.e. new readers? Even though – or because? – these link fields don’t really match your own blog’s design?

Update: At BLOGspeed, you can now pick the colors freely, and BlogRush now offers 13 “flavors”.

Well, it’s worth a try, especially when it’s new services (which hopefully will become more configurable). So I registered with the German BLOGspeed (found at Datenschmutz) and the English BlogRush (found, among others, at Daily Blog Tips), with only the one corresponding to the currently selected language being displayed, of course – near the end of the sidebar on the right.

I picked the category “Entertainment” which seems least inappropriate for my blog “about anything”. We’ll see what kind of links will show up there… hope it’s not too much celebrity gossip.

If you want to register, too, why not do that via my referral links, so that I get a few “credits” (for more displays of own links on other blogs): :mrgreen:
for BLOGspeed (for German blogs)
für BlogRush (currently for English blogs only)
(or click the link at the bottom of the link field).

The devil wears kinky diapers

excerpt from Codex Gigas

At least that’s how it looks on this picture from the Codex Gigas, the “Devil’s Bible”, one of the largest medieval manuscripts from the 13th century, according to legend written by a monk who wanted to evade being walled up alive – in one night, with the help of the devil, “of course”…

This giant book (90x50x22cm) will be shown from today until early January in the Prague Klementinum.

At the National Library of Sweden, where it is normally stored, you can browse through the entire book in high resolution (that’s also where I got the image whose detail is shown above).

How silent is the Chinese Mafia

Seen earlier on frischgebloggt.de (which lists new posts from many German blogs), about a gunfight among Chinese in Neuss (German):

clipping: Tiraden in Deutschland

Headline translation: “Tirades in Germany?” (to the ENJOY blog (German) – corrected in the mean time)

Of course there are tirades in Germany! Way too many, especially from politicians! :mrgreen: I doubt, however, that the Triads are that verbose. Regardless of how much – or how little – the police knows about them (and, yes, doubting their presence in this country is quite naive).

(Please don’t be mad, Rai – I don’t mean to be evil or insulting at all when I show small writing mistakes or foreign word errors; even large newspapers find themselves e.g. on Zwiebelfisch (German).)

Music Robot

Okay, it’s apparently available for about a year, but I just read about it in the new issue of the Bild der Wissenschaft¹, and it was new to me: miuro, the iPod dock and WLAN client that can dance and follow his master!

Official site: miuro.com (Japanese)

Without further investigation: I suppose the name results from “music robot”, or rather the re-transfer of its pronunciation from Japanese to Latin letters.

:rocks:

Oh, and I should mention a little disadvantage: the price of about 1000 € (e.g. at arktis.de)…

¹ Strangely, they spell it “Miouru” – did they get that from a French source?