We're Back And Sillier Than Ever

Hello, readers, it has been far too long. How have you been? Things have been busy here, what with visiting home for Thanksgiving and wrapping up our new issue of the YR, plus, you know, the normal end of year school stuff. It's become clear, though, that the more or less every other dailyness of collating and commenting on interweb materials is a rather rewarding activity. One to be abandoned at much risk. Which is to say that when you find something you love doing, don't stop doing it, unless what you love doing is sprinkling dead people's ashes at the Jane Austen Museum, in which case, the museum curators politely ask that you please refrain from said activity.

Apparently, in the same manner that sailing enthusiasts might want their remains scattered off Puget Sound, it turns out that die-hard Jane Austen enthusiasts often ask to have their ashes dumped in the garden of the Jane Austen Museum. More and more of late, mounds of human ash have been discovered about the grounds by staff and gardeners, as well as some visitors, who have been known to remark, "Verily, I was much disconcerted." The staff themselves, though, seem to take a more practical stance towards the bits of dead people left on their garden, saying "[i]f it enriched the soil we wouldn't mind so much but the ashes have no nutrients at all." [via Maud]

In other somewhat absurd news, Shaken & Stirred put up a link today to a weird little add-on for Firefox. It's called Tumbarumba and it proposes to insert sentences from stories into your web pages as you view them. If you discover the sentence and click on it, then a whole story will spring to life in your browser. I've yet to try it, mainly because I'm on a public computer at the moment, but the whole thing sounds a little strange and pointless and therefore wonderful.