delights

I have this memory -

I've had this memory for years:

I remember a review in Musician magazine about the first Crowded House album (and so the only Crowded House album). I remember reading that review. I remember it saying, basically, "You should buy this album." The album was that good.

So I did. I bought it.

I've been reading Lost Japan and really enjoying learning about the places the author (Alex Kerr) has lived and all the ways he's experienced his life in Japan.

I especially enjoyed reading about his home on the grounds of Tenmangu Shrine ... and it occurred to me that I could easily look up the town and the shrine, to see if there were any photos of the place, and the grounds, which sound enchanting.

Reading some old Ask MetaFilter questions about podcasts, I found several recommendations for New Books Network, which is a huge consortium of podcasts featuring author interviews: "Covering 100+ subjects, disciplines, and genres, we publish 70 to 100 episodes every week."

Here are some of the sites I'm visiting the most this month:

Kwiziq Spanish and Kwiziq French

I don't do a lot of the quizzes (although I could be doing more than I am, I should do that), but I find the grammar explanations and the example sentences really helpful. Some sites have example sentences that seem like things that no one would ever say, or that don't really illustrate the grammar point very well; Kwiziq does a really good job here.

I came across this great comment by dutchrick over at MetaFilter recently:

I was watching one of my favorite Explore webcams, the Africam Tau cam, when I saw these amazing tall white birds with long, thick, yellow beaks.

They reminded me of Garfield Goose.

Board Game Geek is a website, database, and forum covering "not only board games but also dice games, card games, tile-laying games, and games of dexterity." It's a remarkable achievement - impressively thorough and detailed. Each game lists facts about the game - how many players, average playing time, age range, game designer and other credits, alternate versions and expansion options - along with community input including ratings, comments, and player reviews, both written and video. There are extensive photo galleries, which are wonderful ways to get a sense of each game.

Over on MetaFilter, beagle posted an appreciation of languagehat's blog, which has been running since 2002; beagle notes that there have been "posts on a daily basis virtually all of those twenty years."

languagehat is one of my favorite members of MetaFilter, and I am always happy to see his name appear as I'm reading threads there.

Somehow I completely failed to know that he had a blog.

It is, unsurprisingly, wonderful.

I was never all that interested in space as a kid. I enjoyed reading The Martian Chronicles and some other sci fi classics, but I was barely aware of NASA or the science of space exploration.

That all changed for me on the Fourth of July, 1997, when I watched the Mars Pathfinder land on the red planet.