bookofjoe

Yogi Bear — The first episode (January 30, 1961)

Those were the days, my friend.

I don't recall watching it back then but I'd bet good money I did.

Boy, I loved that show.

Chewing gum kit — "A chemistry lesson you can chew on."

From the website:

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Make your own chewing gum with chicle, the sap of the Sapodilla tree that grows in the rain forests of Central America.

Everything you need is included in this kit.

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$13.95.

[via MeWanty!]

Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages

Charles Dickens' last complete novel, published in 1865, is the focus of a new website: Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages.

Here are excerpts from Jennifer Schuessler's April 5 New York Times "Arts, Briefly" item about the site.

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Globe-trotting admirers of Charles Dickens can celebrate this year’s bicentennial of his birth by brushing shoulders with chimney sweeps at a Dickens World theme park in England, taking in lectures and amateur theatricals at a scholarly "Dickens camp" in California, or attending any of the festivities being held from Bologna, Italy, to Colorado Springs.

But those stuck at home with gout or other quasi-Victorian ailments are not entirely out of luck. They can now enjoy unlimited virtual access to Dr. De Jongh's Light Brown Cod Liver Oil, Kaye Wordsell’s Vegetal Tablets and other medicinal concoctions available in Dickens's day, thanks to a new Web site introduced on Thursday by the Dickens Project, a research consortium based at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The products are all featured in a gallery of advertisements [exemplars above] from the 20 monthly installments of "Our Mutual Friend," the last novel Dickens finished in his lifetime and the focus of the Web site, titled Our Mutual Friends: The Scholarly Pages. The advertising sections — a full 320 pages in all over the course of the whole serial, which began in 1864 — also sold jewelry, insect  powder, umbrellas, croquet sets, telescopic field glasses and billiard tables, not to mention portrait medals of Shakespeare and editions of Dickens's earlier books.

Jon Michael Varese, the director of digital initiatives at the Dickens Project, said in an interview that the ads reflect the rising consumerism of Victorian England as vividly as anything in the novel itself. "More and more stuff was being made, and Dickens, four years after 'Great Expectations,' was the most famous man in England, if not the world," he said. "Where better to advertise your goods?"

Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages is a revamped version of a site first presented in 1998, when the technology of the Web verged on Victorian by current standards. In addition to the advertisements, the site includes links to maps, letters, reviews, illustrations and biographical material, with essays on subjects like Victorian sanitation, education policy, poorhouses and wooden legs. (There's at least one in almost every Dickens novel, the scholar Adrienne E. Gavin notes.)

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More? 

Your wish is my demand.

How about the complete December 14, 1865 New York Times review of Dickens' then brand new book?

Still not enough?

OK, then, here's the novel in its entirety.

Free, the way we like it.

Fair warning: there goes the next week.

What is it?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Hint: smaller than a bread box.

How Mark Zuckerberg celebrated his billion dollar acquisition of Instagram

Wrote Nick Bilton in a New York Times "Bits" blog post Tuesday: "Beast, Mark Zuckerberg's dog, had his moment of fame on Instagram Monday. The Facebook founder shared a picture [top] of the shaggy-haired mutt late in the evening after his company announced it was purchasing Instagram for $1 billion."    

"It was only Mr. Zuckerberg's fourth post since signing up for Instagram in October 2010. (That's $250 million a photo.)"

All four photos below.

Cheap at twice the price.

Picnic Pants

Is that a picnic in your pants or...?

Never mind.

Don't get your baggies in a twist, so far just a concept.

Though the pants were designed in Italy, so they must be fashionable.

From the designer's website: "Picnic pants take advantage of the usual cross-legged position to become a comfortable surface useful for consumption of a meal outdoors. Laterally pants have an orientable pocket for drinks."

Apply to: info.picnicpants@gmail.com

[via MeWanty!]

Solar Eruption in 2048p

Got a new iPad?

'Cause if you do you can watch the video up top in its native ultra-hi-def resolution. 

YouTube caption:

On October 25th and 26th, 2010, a twisted filament of magnetism on the sun decided to untwist. The result was a spectacular eruption recorded in full-disk detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

At its peak, the twister — or rather, untwister — towered more than 350,000 km above the stellar surface. It appears to have hurled a fragment of itself into space, but not toward Earth; the blast was not geoeffective.

Now that the filament has relaxed, it is unlikely to erupt again. 

[via Cult of Mac]

Custom Face Pillow

Those boyfriend's arm pillows

are so last year.

"Great for Mother's Day."

$30 (includes shipping).

[via MeWanty!]