10K Monkeys & a Camera: Good Links

It's feeling a little holiday-ish today. The kids in the neighborhood have been on spring break and the thump-thump-thump of basketballs out in the street has been making it sound almost summery all week. And now even G-Dog is taking the day off (well, the morning, anyway). I'm going to have to get some work done at some point, but first, I'll pass along a few links that have caught my eye...

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

WhatWasThere is a really cool web site that overlays old photos with recent Google Maps versions of the same location, along with a toggle to fade from one to the other. They post a daily photo to facebook, often a "today in history" sort of thing, if there is something appropriate for that day (today's is a shot of Niagara Falls, because once -- on March 29, 1848 -- it actually froze over). But yesterday's took us back to 1979, and the scene of the worst nuclear accident in US history. And then when I flipped over to my rss-feed reader, I ran across these images from the now-abandoned Fukushima Exclusion Zone Town Namie-machi. It was a sobering reminder that we humans play with a lot of very powerful toys, and we are still struggling to to accept the capriciousness of nature and our own limitations in planning for the unexpected.

But on a lighter note...

I thought Joe McNally's instagram from atop the world's tallest building was bad (seriously, just looking at the photo gives me vertigo), but at least he was standing on something. Now a Ukranian guy who goes by the moniker "Mustang Wanted" is dangling from things. Yikes.

Thug Kitchen is probably the most awesome food blog ever.

The Oatmeal illustrates some quotations.

And finally, keep your mobile devices safe.