Le U

I found an interesting Web site with some very cool kids' drawings, like this one.

Translation: "U is a horseshoe on his foot."

Rogue & Poet

New Web site centered around the arts in the Rogue Valley. Good luck to them.

"Plastic, not axes, threaten cork forests"

Interesting story on how synthetic corks are dooming the world's cork forests:



The Quercus suber, or cork oak, which grows on both the European and African sides of the Mediterranean, provides the raw material for practically all the 20 billion wine corks used every year.

The way cork is harvested -- shaved off the sides of trees like the way a sheep is shorn -- means forests continue to thrive as they give up their valuable bark.

In Sardinia, the only region in Italy that produces cork, the forests are a haven for wild boar, a species of hawk native to the island and Sardinian deer.

The highly endangered Iberian lynx roams the cork forests of Spain and Portugal, the global leader in cork production; in North Africa the forests provide a habitat for Barbary deer.

News From Ferghana

At Ferghana.ru:

Ferghana.Ru news agency was established in the fall 1998 when Ferghana Community web site was set up. Ferghana.Ru news agency is one of the most popular resources dealing with the life of Central Asian countries of the former USSR. With correspondents in every major city of the region, Ferghana.Ru news agency offers its clients the latest information.

News from Ferghana, Uzbekistan, and Central Asia. Available in English, Russian, and Uzbek.

Old Advertising and Educational Films

The Prelinger Archives:

Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films.

Via Boing Boing.

NYC: Illegally Parked Cars Shown on Web Site

The debate about them here, and the Web site here.

It's pretty funny. One story, with photo, at the site: "If you look closely at the 2nd photo, you can see the officer eating at the Chinese restaurant in the window."