I have always been struck by this painting of a business man hopping on a pogo stick with his briefcase in hand. Some days when I am walking from the metro to work I think “It would be so awesome to do this on a pogo stick, just like in the painting.” But then I would have to wear a suit everyday to heighten the outrageousness of the idea. People generally don’t expect suit-wearing, briefcase-toting business folk to be hopping down the street like a 12 year old kid. That’s what makes it interesting.

Of course most of my commute is spent underground in a train that has a premium on space and managing a pogo stick would be a big hassle. I guess if I ever get a job where I can walk the whole way to the office I will trade in my sneakers for some wing tips and a pin stripe suit to go along with my visual gag.

Prints of this painting are available at egoodwinart’s online art store.

I got my hands on Seth Godin’s yet-to-be-released book titled Meatball Sundae. I was really impressed with what Godin had to say in his last book, The Dip, and I can’t wait to dive in to his latest work. According to Seth, Meatball Sundae is about “the internet and new marketing and the fourteen trends that change everything.” Sounds like every other book he has done. I’ll keep you posted once I get into it more.

*This was post was solely to make me feel special.

Richard Scary’s The Best Word Book Ever is a childhood classic. But as culture and political correctness change, so must the book. A guy went through his own 1963 version, page by page, noting the differences between the 1991 version of his kids and sharing side by side photos in a Flickr set. The changes are pretty much what you expect; adding a female character in a few places and including the father character in more family activities. My favorite is the airline scene which featured a “pretty stewardess” and “handsome pilot” in 1963.

Apparently the airlines were wild and crazy in the 1960’s.

A 20GB Xbox 360! Though it doesn’t include an A/C adapter, A/V cables, or controllers, it was a good deal at $125. After purchasing the most expensive thrift store purchase in my life, I took it to a friend’s house to test it out. It powers up just fine and even included a game, though the game was heavily scratched. Now it is off to eBay to buy the few things needed to get this thing up and running.

This took place at the end of last January but I just found out about it today. A rare species of shark which resembles an eel with a mouthful of needle sharp teeth has been captured and photographed after rising to the surface off the coast of Japan. The creature was identified as a female frilled shark which usually lives 2,000 feet or more under the ocean. Humans can’t tread that deep hence the documentation of the fish has been scarce. Apparently the shark has changed very little since prehistoric times making it a sort of living fossil.

Die-hard Photoshop users will get a kick out of this. David at IronicSans.com wanted to make an image that looked the same in the histogram view. For the laymen in the crowd, a histogram is a bar graph representing all of the tones in an image. Most pro-sumer digital SLR’s come with a histogram view so photographers can check for clipping of colors. In Photoshop you can see the histogram of your image by going to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. He didn’t get a very interesting image from that as you might imagine.

Then he got the idea to try and create an image in the histogram view. After some tedious tweaking by hand he came up with this rather dull image.

But if you look at the histogram then you will see this.

The explanation of how it was done boggles my mind, although at the heart of it, it is just math. This reminds me of the Aphex Twin song that when viewed on a spectrograph (a way of visualizing sound) you saw a creepy face.

Oh the irony…

Someone who goes by the name of the Etch-A-Sketchist likes to make his art on the classic childhood toy. He doesn’t just do software interfaces recently posting sketches of Master Chief from Halo, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and even some from his own imagination. This guy truly has some unique artistic abilities and probably a lot of free time.

A local armless artist who paints with his feet is being questioned after headbutting a neighbor and killing him. Investegators say William “Rusty” Redfern charged across a street and head-butted 49-year-old Charles “Keith” Teer of Snellville, Atlanta. Teer collapsed and died moments later. Teer was probably better off due to the guranteed ridicule from his friends for losing a fight with an armless man.

Dramatic Headbutt Recreation (minus missing arms).

It was later revealed during an autopsy that Teer suffered from coronary artery disease and probably died from a heart attack. Apparently the two were arguing over a former flame and/or furniture.

The guys who brought you Mozilla have added some new shcwag to their store. I really like this spanking-new t-shirt.

And every order over $10 comes with free stickers. Woopee!

Here we are at the last post in this series of My Favorite WordPress Plugins. If you missed the important, information, or article tool ones, check them out. And now on with the best tools for keeping your readers looped in.

Syndication Tools

Feedburner Feedsmith – Everyone should be using FeedBurner for their RSS feed simply because it makes it a cinch to gather statistics. The Feedsmith plugin will automagically detect every possible way for someone to access your feed and redirect them to your Feedburner feed. This takes all the guess work of setting up the redirects yourself and now you can easily track your RSS subscribers. Screenshot »

Google (XML) Sitemaps – Give Google a hand and alert them to whenever you post new content. This plugin will automatically generate an XML Sitemap file that the Google Spider-bots use to find new content to index. Everytime you publish a new entry this plugin will edit the sitemap file and ping Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com to give them a heads up that they should send their spiders over for some new content to munch. Screenshot »

Twitter Tools – Everybody loves sharing what they are doing all day long, why not let them know when you have new posts to read? Twitter Tools will automatically create a tweet whenever you publish a new entry. You can also do the reverse and post a blog post for every tweet you make on Twitter. That seems like a silly idea to me but they also have the option to publish a daily digest of all your twitter postings which sounds more digestible and less annoying for your readers.. Screenshot »

Wordbook – Wordbook is a Facebook application that will alert your Facebook friends when you have a new blog entry. It adds a new event to your Facebook feed so everyone can keep tabs on your blog even if they have no idea what an RSS feed is.

WP-SEO – This isn’t really a method of syndication but this plugin offers a host of search engine optimization tweaks to help the search enginge spiders find your content easier. There are too many little tweaks you can fiddle with but the main ones include rewriting your description and keyword meta tags for each entry as well as adjusting the title of your post. SEO stuff is kind of a black magic that is hard to measure results. At any rate, this plugin makes it easy to optimize. Note: The site is german but there is a link to an english version of the plugin right on the homepage. Screenshot »

So there you have it. 20 excellent WordPress plugins that are the cream of the proverbial crop. If there are any ones you think I missed be sure to let me know in the comments section and I hope you found this brief blog series of value.