It's been far too long, hasn't it? (Rest assured, i have been continuing my walk along the Blyth and Tyne railway — just at a rather glacial pace…)

• W. H. Smith bingo
• On Radio 4, Tynemouth Sea and Song: “Folk singer Jez Lowe uncovers the traditions of seafaring and song in Tynemouth and North Shields and hears why music is essential to this landscape, its people and its history.”
• The Diamond Geezer risk log: Makes me think about the risks to my own blog.
• Why are links blue?
• The origins of the dialectal words of the north — I was quite surprised to see how many are from Romani
• English counties explained, by Jay Foreman — good heavens, it’s a mess
  • See also Wikishire and their excellent map of the historic counties of Britain and Ireland.
• Three odd canal crossings
• How to see the republic of Ireland from England
• It is fascinating, fourteen years on, to watch the reveal of the original iPhone. How many things we take for granted now that were revolutionary back in 2007!
• Absement, the opposite of velocity
• Genes reveal how and when Polynesian sailors reached the remote isles of the Pacific

• Gazing at the tubes:
  • The story of Ralph Bakshi and his troubled 1978 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. An hour’s watch, but well worth it.
  • I fear that even writing the title of this video will cause psychic damage to anyone reading it, but this is the music they play in hell
• Wikipedia wanderings:
  • Gli, cat of the Hagia Sophia
  • Nutellagate
• The innovative ways gay South Asian couples celebrate their marriage, blending old and new
• The tiny Channel island of Sark, where cars are banned, has hosted a lawnmower race instead
• Steve Bruce up your wedding
• Richard in a Hat, a blog where a passionate collector of hats posts photos of himself wearing said hats — this is what the internet was made for, i feel (via the ever-excellent, but unrelated, Language Hat)ⁱ

• Recreating the original Thomas the Tank Engine model railway
• The holy war over Larry Landtrain
• An atlas of the underground tunnels of Washington, D.C.
• The Institute of Illegal Images, home to the world’s largest collection of LSD blotter art
• The moose of New Zealand: did they die off in the 1900s, or do they still roam the South Island in secret?
• How fast can you type the alphabet? Best i can do is 3.162 seconds.

• Ranking all 43 US presidents by looks
• There’s a statue of Hermaphroditos in Den Haag. I might have to pay a visit next time i’m back home...
• Oh, to be a lesbian crofter sustainably farming with my wife in the highlands of Scotland
• In 2008, the mother of a gender-non-conforming son started a gender-non-conforming summer camp — 14 years later, a photographer with the New York Times revisits the attendees
• Pacific islands face more complex climate issues than just sinking

• How to spot a good fake ID [in the state of Massachusetts]
• The race that only finishes when there’s just one person left running
• Paralysed man’s brain waves decoded into sentences
• Whatever happened to IBM’s Watson after Jeopardy? The New York Times answers
• The cosmic importance of interplanetary quarantine (via bldgblog)
• What went into giving Kamala Harris a name in American Sign Language…
  • …and in BSL
• The Jessica Simulation: the story of a man who used a chatbot to simulate his dead fiancée (via waxy)

• Via National Geographic, The campaign to (theologically) abolish hell
• Why is central London suddenly full of US-American sweetshops? (via lmg)
• The search for Ban Tran, forgotten video game pioneeress (ditto)
• Exploring London’s forgotten tram tunnel (via things)
• Miniature models of old Hong Kong (ditto)
• A Royal Military Police video shown to first-time travellers along the corridor to West Berlin through East Germany in the ’80s
• As the US withdraws from Afghanistan, the locals are taking back the Pokémon Go gyms

• A hundred 3D animators put their own spin on the same basic scene. Awesome stuff… the human ability for creativity will never cease to amaze me.
• A digital museum of art depicting scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. A lot of it is in untranslated Italian, but hey, visual art is visual art.
• Keeping on the subject of digital museums: an extremely in-depth and extremely 2008 museum of toasters. Would that every website still looked as good and functioned as well as this!
• Artwork by eccentric artist Madge Gill (and Myrninerest?) has appeared around the Line, a sculpture trail in eastern London.
• The battle over the future of the U.S. Libertarian party. Low, low stakes here — even our Green parties are more relevant than them...

• A profile of Chris Barrett, the ‘pizza pusha’ who sells pizza laced with cannabis on the grey market
• ‘Field Notes: Miami’, a nice little profile of what makes the city of Miami special
• The Shortcut
• The man who jumped into Lake Michigan every day for a year (Certainly one way to spend your quarantine…)
• Walking from Land’s End to John o’Groats to celebrate being rid of one’s boring civil service job
• Influence: a fun little territory-capture game; each move not only captures a single space but a little bit of the spaces around it
• Guy makes airline food at home for some reason
• Rest in peace, Clive Murphy

• Stanford University’s Orbis, like Google Maps for the Roman world
• Yan Tan Tethera
• Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” — a little bit of everything all of the time
• National Geographic have (gasp) finally recognised the Southern Ocean as a distinct ocean

• Ofcom maintains a list of every swear word in the English language by severity. Taxpayer money at work!
• ‘The Michelangelo of Middlesbrough’: Man spends twenty-seven thousand hours on a scale model of the destroyed St. Hilda’s district
• Blue Abyss: Plans to build the world’s deepest pool in Cornwall
• 50 Years of Text Games covers Silverwolf, one of many games made by St. Bride’s School, a *checks notes* lesbian Victorian schoolgirl cult
• New Chvrches song just dropped, featuring Robert Smith of the Cure
• The Youtube rabbit hole:
  • Blade Runner but Mr. Blobby is there [30 seconds]
  • Incredible million to one train shot [1 minute]
  • Can you really move the French–Belgian border by accident with a tractor? The twist at the end opened my fourth eye [9 minutes]

• The Berglas Effect, the greatest and unexplainedest card trick of all time — the comments speculate that he has 52 pre-shuffled decks with a card in each position; perhaps they’re on to something
• The London Blossom Garden
• Uberduck.ai — finally, you can get a synthetic Jeremy Clarkson to cuss your friends out
• Topotijdreis — compare survey maps of the Netherlands from 1815 to the present day [NL]
• Similarly, the National Library of Scotland lets you compare satellite photos, modern-day maps, and old Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain
• Down the Youtube rabbit hole:
  • The Challenger disaster (24 minutes)
  • The double pendulum fractal (4 minutes)
  • A playlist of 1,000 musicians all performing classic rock songs at once

• The Crossrail omnishambles: “There were times when there was no design for anyone to work from.”
• “Oerknal: now that’s clear language”: an appreciation of the disappearing scientific words of Dutch [NL]^α
• The Netherlands could become the second country where you can be legally unreachable in your free time^β [NL]
• A third thumb, controlled by pressure sensors in the foot: okay, now where do i buy one of these?
• The North Paw: an ankle bracelet that vibrates to tell you which way is north. Intriguing, but no longer in stock — and wearing it would probably make you look like you’re meant to be on house arrest
• River Runner: Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up — absolutely entrancing, nine-year-old me would have loved this