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A few years ago I lived in the city of Lake Forest (formerly El Toro) for a bit. One of the interesting things about Lake Forest is its collection of streets named after characters and places in Lord of the Rings. (And yes, these were around long before the movies were made.)

I still drive past Gondor Drive on my way back from the comic store, and I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the street sign for a while. It turned out to be too hard to shoot without actually aiming, so I turned onto a smaller street where I knew I could catch Elrond Lane:

Corner of Elrond and Ridge Route

Other Tolkien-inspired streets include: Buckland Lane, Bywater Road (and it is at least near water), Rivendell Drive, Shadowfax Drive and Brandywine Lane.

While checking the Thomas Guide for some of the ones I missed, I just discovered a neighborhood with Sesame Street, Muppet Lane, Big Bird, Oscar, Grover, and Cookie Monster. And Kurmit [sic], though I suppose that could be a typo.

And then there’s Dana Point, which has the Street of the Green Lantern. Of course, it has about 20 named Street of the fill-in-the-blank Lantern — Blue, Amber, Golden, Silver, Violet, etc. [Update: Here are some Green Lantern Street photos.]

Update Sep. 24: Here’s a blurry picture of the Gondor street sign:
Gondor Street Sign

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Microsoft responds to Apple’s contention that portable video isn’t a big market:

“Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, ‘Hey, would you like to have your videos there?’ My kids would,” Gates said. “I guess Steve’s kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch ‘Finding Nemo.’ I don’t know who made that, but it’s really a neat movie.”

Yeah, who was that?

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Via Weblog about Markup & Style:

Dive Into Mark provides an excellent example of why a browser shouldn’t second-guess file types.

Safari content sniffing for XHTML

It’s a screenshot of Safari looking at a text document… but the first line mentions XHTML, so it’s decided that’s what it must be. I’ve had lots of trouble with Internet Explorer doing the same thing, and Safari’s been aiming at bug-for-bug compatibility in order to “break” as few sites as possible.

[Edit: After the source blog was taken down, I grabbed the screenshot from archive.org and uploaded it here.)

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While leaving the apartment this morning, I noticed something strange: All the grass which had (presumably) grown from seed had dew on it. All the grass which had been installed as sod earlier this year did not. There were big squares and long rectangles of bright green mixed in with the shining greenish-white lawn.

(Sorry, no photos. Maybe if the same thing happens tomorrow.)

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Via The War on Spam and The Spam Weblog:

Hackers hijack federal computers. Apparently the DOJ discovered, during their crackdown on cybercrime, that hundreds of Department of Defense and Senate computers had been turned into zombies.

Nice.

Can we really be sure they were only used to send spam? After all, zombies are generally the result of viruses, worms or trojans that install backdoors, so that the attacker can run anything on the system. Setting up a distributed and disguised spam-sending network just happens to be the most profitable application right now, but you can bet there are a lot of people out there who would love to take over — or just look through — US military computers.

I don’t know about you, but I find this really disturbing.

“Would you like to play a game?”

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Via WebWord:

Do You Speak American? is an upcoming documentary about the many dialects that make up American English.

Some interesting observations include:

  • Major cities’ dialects are actually diverging, not converging as people predicted with the spread of TV and travel.
  • Another “great vowel shift” is underway in the Great Lakes region.
  • Most Americans consider the midwest accent closest to “normal” English.
  • Southern is the largest dialect group in the country.

And for local flavor, the writeup mentions that they interviewed teenagers in Irvine, obtaining slang terms like “uber” and “tight.”

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While looking at website referrer logs, I came across an article at Radio Heroes detailing Gorilla City (Or, What if Grodd Was One of Us?)

The site is all about “reviewing—well, okay, making fun of” a series of audio-drama comic books, and this one tells a tale of Batman in Gorilla City, and how he uses trancendental meditation to defeat Grodd, the Super-Gorilla!

No, really!

I haven’t listened to the sound clips yet, but the write-up is great!