Links to cool places or things.
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Raleigh’s own laugh factory, ComedyWorx, is holding a special fundraiser tonight for The Children’s House of Raleigh, a Montessori-based school MT.Net readers know is dear to my heart. ComedyWorx is an improv comedy group along the lines of Whose Line is it Anyway? but funnier because Wade is in it.
The show starts at 7 PM and the tickets are $20 (tax-deductible as they go to support the school). Come out and enjoy some industrial-strength laughs tonight. Do it for the children!
After watching the inevitable train movie for the kids this morning, I found a handy list of steam locomotives in NC.
Did you know a locomotive was buried in 1933 under an intersection in Garysburg, NC? That must drive the old guys with metal detectors crazy.
Make Magazine’s blog linked to an amusing story on famous physicist Richard Fenyman’s experiments with ants. LanBo, the distributor of the gel-based ant farms, posted the Fenyman nuggets on its website.
Hallie has one of these ant farms on our kitchen counter. I hope she’s half as curious about ants as Fenyman was!
(Via the Make Magazine blog)
It was Kelly’s “day off,” so the kids and I headed south to explore the New Hope Valley Railway’s “double-headed thunder” steam trains this weekend. For this weekend and next, the NHV has a sister steam engine to its familiar Number 17 on loan, the Flagg Coal Company Number 75. Together, they’ll be pulling the tourist trains in a double-header configuration (my kids would call it by its modern name, a “consist”).
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The kids were asking to see a train video tonight, so I searched YouTube for ‘train’ and came up with a remarkable video of an incident one week ago in Greer, SC. A woman got lost driving at night and got her car stuck on the track. A policeman gets her out seconds before an Amtrak train turns her car into a fireball. Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt.
Watch the video filmed from the patrol car here.
Looks like Raleigh’s downtown is set to be invaded by the undead. The group Scientists Targeting Undead Preservation, Intelligence and Domestication reports that a gaggle of zombies will appear in Moore Square at sunset (6:26 PM) the night of Saturday, October 27th. The brain-eating zombies will make a circuit around downtown, turning willing participants into zombies along the way, then gather to wash their brains down with a tasty malt beverage or two.
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On my way back from the Ohio Linux Fest, my friend Bill mentioned that iRobot is building a new Roomba-style robot to provide “presence” to remote users. It’s called the ConnectR and provides a remote user (say, a dad traveling on business) the ability to move around, see, and talk to others (say, a family who’s dad is traveling on business).
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The N&O’s Crosstown Traffic blog reports that Raleigh will be hosting the conference Summit For High Speed Rail on the East Coast. The conference, sponsored by Women ‘s Transportation Seminar, is scheduled for Monday, 22 October in the Fletcher Opera Theatre at the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts. Transportation bigwigs, including congressional representatives, will be there to discuss the status of the project.
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Jason Ray is still touching lives. The UNC student who performed as the UNC mascot Rameses (and of whom I wrote about before) may have died in March but parts of him live on. Ray’s organs have been distributed to over 80 people, according to the Charlotte Observer this morning.
Tonight ESPN will air the story of Jason Ray, called “Ray of Hope.” I hope his story inspires more people to become organ donors.
I’m an organ donor. Are you?
I had a little fun on Craigslist this morning:
Wanted: Desalination Plant – $1
Reply to: sale-446914297@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-10-12, 8:41AM EDTWilling to trade lightly-used lawn mower in good condition for large desalination plant. Must have capacity for several million gallons per hour.
Will throw in weed whacker and accessories for water pipe that can reach the coast.
* Location: Raleigh
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interestsPostingID: 446914297
Of course such a thing does not exist, as the biggest dasalination plant in the world, Dubai’s Jebel Ali plant, produces 300 million cubic meters of water per year according to Wikipedia. I toyed with changing “millions” to “thousands” but I thought it was funnier with millions.
