“America Writes Home” is a website with a wonderful collection of some existing pre-1920s letters, giving a flavor of that time before iPhones and email.

Read about our On The Cheap sites in the news.

As my livelihood is all about not writing convoluted anything, my ears perked up and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this.

I am not a picky eater, but cilantro (also known as coriander) tastes to me like something that has spoiled and should immediately be thrown away. I also would not be able to stand the wearing of this cilantro hat.

Unexpectedly cool photos.

The demicolon is a versatile (if a bit showy) punctuation tool.

I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …

I wrote about vog recently and the article is out in the current (August 2009) Honolulu magazine.
Here’s how it starts:
It comes on the Kona winds—the dreaded yellow-brown haze of vog that makes eyes burn and lungs protest. On the Big Island, of course, it has done far more damage. How bad could it get? And what do we really know about vog and its effects?
Three-thousand, eight-hundred people lived on Miyakejima, a small island off Tokyo, until one day in September 2000, when the Japanese government ordered the island evacuated because …

I’m sure Twitter can be used stupidly, and that’s where some people are stuck; they only know that reputation.
But it can also be used splendidly, and there isn’t really any way to understand that unless you get in there and see it for yourself.
Here is a word cloud of the people who “follow” me at Twitter. It’s made from the bios of people who are following me (I created it by inputting my Twitter name at TwitterSheep.com). ”Following me” means they receive my “tweets,” the 140-character or less messages that I …

Look where I landed! 

Online mogul Guy Kawasaki describes his alltop.com this way:
The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the …