bookofjoe

Cave House in Cappadocia, Turkey — For Sale: $96,000

Pretty amazing.

You can move in next week if you've got the money.

It's a fully-restored cave house

among the historical Cappadocian residences

that hark back to Biblical times.

It went on the market in May of this year

so it's not as if it's a hot property or anything.

But then, it never appeared in a forum like this before,

complete with photos (above).

Own Eric Clapton's Guitar

In 1970 Eric Clapton built a guitar, which he called "Blackie" (above), from the parts of three Fender Stratocasters.

He played it until 1985.

In 2005 Guitar Center stores purchased it for $959,500 at auction.

The company has created 185 copies and started selling them this past Friday, November 24.

Don't dally, Sally.

$24,000.

Inquire within.

[via Ben Sisario's "Arts, Briefly" feature in yesterday's (November 25, 2006) New York Times]

What Peggy Noonan and Steve Wozniak have in common

Now here are two people you don't normally think of in the same sentence: Ronald Reagan's star speechwriter and the co-founder of Apple Computer.

Here's what's alike about them:

1) Both are disarmingly frank and honest, to the point they often say things that are politically incorrect and dismaying to more rigid fellow believers

2) Both write clearly, without cant or ego

3) Both are humble far beyond what one might expect of people of their extraordinarily high level of accomplishment

4) They're almost exactly the same age (56), with Ms. Noonan's birthday recorded as either September 7 or 15, 1950 and the Woz having appeared on August 11, 1950.

The penny dropped yesterday when I finished Woz's autobiography, "iWoz," followed shortly afterward by Ms. Noonan's weekly "Declarations" column in the Wall Street Journal.

Full disclosure: Peggy Noonan emailed me back a year or two ago after I featured one of her columns in bookofjoe; Steve Wozniak actually commented on a post about him that appeared here. Now that was really, really cool.

Toxicheck.com — 'What's in your groundwater?'

Long story short: It's a website that provides property buyers

with information on a property's pollution and related problems.

Much better to find out sooner rather than later, what?

A conversation with Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba.com

Alibaba is China's largest business-to-business commerce site.

Jack Ma (above) is a piece of work and I have nothing but the highest degree of admiration for him.

In addition to which, though he's a tech industry mogul, he's a complete, self-admitted TechnoDolt™ who decides if something is any good by whether or not he can figure out how it works without reading the directions.

My man.

The Financial Times recently interviewed him and then buried the interview deep inside its hopelessly dysfunctional website.

Luckily for me and you, my crack research team had nothing else to do this weekend than spend it on an all-out hunt for Ma's interview; they succeeded in digging it out from under many obscuring layers of arcane and abstruse web pages.

Watch it here.

Medusa Lamp

Designed by Venezuelan artist Claudia Carrasco, a member of the Barcelona-based design collective Exposed.

From the website:

Medusa

Medusa was conceived and made in Spain.

So-called because of its elegant marine namesake (medusa means jellyfish in Spanish).

Made from laser-etched Corian®, which perfectly captures the sleek form of the aquatic creature, the Medusa's swooping curves and celestial light conjure images of drifting effortlessly along with the sea's currents.

A flexible element of coloured light can be added, facilitating dynamic ambient luminescence and a complementary mood change.

• White Corian — coloured bulbs alter lighting effect

• Six laser-etched designs [below] available

• 20cm x 15cm (8" x 6")

....................

£240 (€354; $464) and up.

Want one?

Email them: info@exposed.eu.com.

Or call +34 934 590 845.

In the UK, +44 07940 702 165.

MacBook Marionette

No hanging chains?

No problem.

[via slashgear, dasAutomat and MAKE]

Put on your game face — No, not that one, the one with the funny round ball

Robert J. Hughes, in his "Weekend Advisor" feature in this past Friday's (November 24, 2006) Wall Street Journal, called my attention to some football on TV early today I'd have otherwise never known about via my usual sources of sports info (New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post and Charlottesville Daily Progress).

At 11 a.m. Eastern Time Fox Soccer (DirecTV Channel 613) is broadcasting (live) a huge English Premier League match between second-place Chelsea and No. 1 Manchester United.

The game features two of the greatest goal scorers on the planet, Man U's Wayne Rooney (in red up top) and Chelsea's Didier Drogba (in blue).

Bonus for me and the other 17 people who'll be watching: the broadcast features the same British announcers broadcasting the game there instead of the doofus Americans who ruined the recent World Cup on ABC.

Hey, less than two hours till game time — gotta go, my game face needs work.

Here's the newspaper item.

A Big Weekend for Football

Growing Audience to Watch U.K. Soccer Showdown

This football weekend is stuffed with big games including the Chicago Bears at New England Patriots — a possible Super Bowl preview. Then there's the other kind of big football game — between leading English Premier League soccer teams Manchester United and Chelsea Football Club.

Televised soccer in America likely will never match National Football League viewership, but the sport's popularity is growing. Ratings for this summer's World Cup set a U.S. record for a soccer event, Nielsen Media Research says, with 12 million people watching the final between Italy and France on ABC and more than five million on Spanish-language broadcaster Univision.

Of course, that's small change in Super Bowl terms, but still represents a big increase from the 2002 World Cup: a tripling of the audience for ABC, a 75% increase for Univision.

Fox Soccer has seen growth, too. Formerly known as Fox Sports World, which launched in 1997, the premium cable channel became Fox Soccer in February 2005. Since then, it has added about eight million U.S. homes, making it available in a total of 28 million subscriber households, according to Alan Gutierrez of Fox Soccer.

In this weekend's big soccer match airing Sunday at 11 a.m. EST, second-place Chelsea, the two-time defending champion in Barclays English Premier League, is trying to unseat Manchester United from the No. 1 spot. Among other things, two highly regarded strikers will be battling to score goals. Manchester's "boy wonder" Wayne Rooney has been playing since 2002; viewers can decide whether Chelsea's Didier Drogba, who's having a strong season, was worth the new four-year contract he just signed.

During the World Cup, sports Web sites received hundreds of complaints about meandering narration by ABC's American announcers. Fox Soccer relies on the announcers used in the British broadcast for most of its audio track: "The only time you'll hear our commentator is for the opening, at halftime and to close the game," says Mr. Gutierrez. Besides showing the English Premier League, Fox Soccer carries games of the Italian Serie A, Argentine League, Mexican League and Major League Soccer games of the U.S.