Misty (Lydia’s Elephant friend) is on the right and Dulary (the new girl) is on the left.

Dulary was all alone at the Philadelphia Zoo so they sent her to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee where she now has huge amounts of space and lots of friends. She can do whatever she wants now, and Misty gets another companion.

My favorite slide-shows of Dulary:

Dulary making and rolling in a mud hole
Dulary meeting the other girls
Tarra convincing Dulary to leave the trailer upon her arrival

You can read about Dularys Arrival and see all her slide-shows at Dulary’s Diary.

Photographer Tod Seelie captures incredibly dynamic images of underground scenes, such as local rock shows and in this case anarchist biker rallies. Recently, Tod captured some amazing shots of Slaughterama 4, an annual event in Richmond, VA.

Cycle Slaughterama is a bike meet-up where people drink a lot of beer and then do dangerous stunts on bicycles, but more importantly. people bring and show-off and share incredibly creative bicycles. They hack apart and weld together parts of bikes into brilliant human-powered contraptions. It’s about the creativity and the community, in addition to the party and do whatever you want even if it’s really, really stupid.

Another blog gives pretty good description about Cycle Slaughterama and his experience attending it. My Bike Co-op in Oberlin OH did this sort of thing and it was incredibly powerful. I could never relax though because I knew somebody, eventually, was going to crack their head open.

Anyway, you should check out Tod’s pictures. His blog Sucka Pants has some pictures but he posted more Slaughterama 4 photos on his photography website. The BMX roller bike blew me away:

I first came across GeoCaching in a story written by Chris Klimas:

The principle behind geocaching is simple: someone hides a waterproof container somewhere in the great outdoors, and records its latitude and longitude. Then they post the coordinates on the Web and other people go out and find it. In the container is a logbook, which you sign in and write love-letters to the people who hid it, and a collection of… well, gimcracks. Little toys and gewgaws that aren’t worth much, so if someone stumbles upon the geocache accidentally, there isn’t much incentive to loot it. You get to take one of those things, but you must replace it with something else you brought with you.

There’s something beautifully symmetrical about it. GPS threatens to remove one of the most enduring mysteries of the planet Earth: geography. There are no longer any unknown parts of the map, and you can locate yourself exactly. Geocaching continues the cycle: people embed mystery in what’s already known.

I love the concept here. With Google Earth we can have absolute conceptual knowledge of geography, but lack physical comprehension on a human scale. Communication and mapping on the internet facilitate physical experience of a place.

I also love the way this author interacts with GeoCaching. Chris’ story, Going to Ground, documents his GeoCaching adventures. Its not literature, more sort of rambling reflections. When Chris and his father are together there is a sense of shared discovery; the game is just a casual, grown-up father-son diversion. I like that.

You can participate/learn more at geocaching.com. An interesting variation is the trackable items game. Someone caches an object with a special trackable tag; they alert the ecommunity; and then someone else comes along and caches it elsewhere. The object travels around the world, and if one comes into your area you can interact with it yourself and even share your story about your adventures with the object. For example, Prince Fugly, has been all over Sweden and K’s Curious George is racing across California.

I love how cool things like Katamari Damacy (an exceedingly brilliant and wierd video game) inspire normal people to do silly things. Someone is selling this knitted katamari with magnets in it to pick up random metal objects. Somebody else knits hats that make your head look like the weird characters in Katamari Damacy. Too fun. I want one/both.

(I kind of stole this post from BoingBoing’s Katamari Craft-off. Essentially I filtered and expanded their post, so it’s ok. Cory Doctorow would be proud of my remixing, so that’s enough about that. Other favorites from their Kraft-off are the Electronic Katamari Toys and Playdo reenactment.)