Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. VI

[NickFitz]

Another week, another selection of things I've stumbled across online over the years:

• I Spy - an American goes for a stroll in Beijing, takes a wrong turn, and finds himself in the middle of a top secret aerospace complex: "There comes a moment in the back of any police van when your thoughts turn to the chain of events that has brought you to this moment in your life…"
  
  
• The Windows Shutdown crapfest - Moishe Lettvin describes the management structures and processes that resulted in the Windows Vista shutdown menu taking a whole year to implement. (That's just the shutdown menu, not the shutdown process.)
  
  
• Crash Blossoms - a neologism denoting headlines which have been so shortened as to create ludicrous ambiguity, such as the famous Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.
  
  
• How to Perform Strong Man Stunts - scans of a 1952 book with explanations of How to Tear a Telephone Book in Halves, How to Support 1000 Lbs. of Living Weight with Ease, and other useful feats.
  
  
• Fashion tips for women from a guy who knows dick about fashion. There's lots of other good stuff to be found at The Best Page in the Universe.
  
  
• Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974 - "These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it's hard to tell what's dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they're unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane."
  
  
• Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? - classic 1982 article explaining how De Beers created their diamond cartel. (It's seven pages long, so you may want to save it for a lunchbreak or a long compile.)
  
  
• How to Remove Tourists from Your Photos - a potentially useful technique.
  
  
• Silly Tube Maps - the one with an anagram for every station name is particularly neat (e.g. "Tottenham Court Road" = "A Retard Cottonmouth"), while the "It's quicker to walk" one is actually useful.
  
  
• Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Richard Milhouse Nixon - a savage rant: "…the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum."
  
  

Happy invoicing

Previous episodes:

1. Volume I
2. Volume II
3. Volume III
4. Volume IV
5. Volume V

[Xenophon]

Epic as ever, NF.

[Andy2]

[OwlHoot]

Excellent as ever.

The way that guy who knows "dick about fashion" rants about crocs, I imagine he would go into paroxysms of rage when he got started on Uggs.

Anyway, crocs aren't that bad in the right context, like the beach, or on a boat.

[hyperD]

Brilliant Nick - that weightwatchers recipe one was pure Frankenstein foods! Absolutely hideous!