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Friday night after a long week...Saturday night may be a good party night now and then, but Friday night is a good night to retreat into your cybercave and see what the web has to give you for diversion.
There is a summary of the referenced links at the bottom of this and every page of this site. Just scroll to the bottom if you'd like to skip the comentary and just surf the links.
I subscribe to a few rather boring newsletters, but I look over them just the same because now and again I find something interesting enough to want to re-visit sometime. Tonight I found such a link that is interesting for a couple of reasons. It's not exactly interactive, but it gives you the opportunity to try something new.
When you visit the link, you will find that it is an ancillary page to a hobby site that has antique stereoscopes and antique 3-D photographs, called "stereographs" or "viewcards,". The cool thing about this link is that it tells you how to view the stereographs witout a viewer. Of course the author of stereoviews.com will be happy to sell you a viewer if you find this exercise too challenging. If you'd prefer not to shell out the kind of cash that an antique stereoscope demands, you can pick up some cheap ones by the dozen for under twenty bucks at another site.
The fascinating thing is to see the pictures and the stereoscopes themselves, or at least the web images of them. The stereoscope exercise teaches you how to see the 3-D images without a viewer (with practice). It has been said that in the 1850's there was a stereoscope and viewcards in American every home. There was a time when stereoscopes were a Saturday-night mainstay in rural American homes, during a time when most American homes were rural. They were as much an entertainment feature in the late 1800's as the Atwater Kent radio became in the 1920's, and the television in the 1950's. As always, free time found reading, pictures, and gadgets to be favorite pastimes.
Nineteenth-century courtship ritual centered around the family photograph album and cartedevisite collections in much the same way as the twentieth-century the movie theater, the drive-in, the television, and the video-cassette recorder.
I also stumbled upon a pretty cool weather site while looking for news about the Leonid meteor shower due the weekend before Thanksgiving. Besides astronomy updates, this weather page from Accu-Weather is customizable for your locale. It not only gives you the local weather forcast like you get on television, but it also has a gardening weather forcast for your area, the sports weather forcast, the health forcast, all arranged with tabs across the top of your page...22 of them. It's not a bad little gadget and it's really pretty useful.
