Gnomes, Folly, and Gods

October 23, 2006 8:24 AM

Harper's connects everything. Connections is an impressively thorough timeline of news stories and strange facts from the past six years organized into entertaining catagories like Human Attributes (my favorite, folly) and Supernatural Beings (featuring both gnomes and gods as subcatagories). And, though similar in concept, it is unrelated to this fondly-remembered Connections.
posted by blahblahblah (11 comments total)

http://www.harpers.org/Entertainer.html: missing Kevin Bacon. This oversight is simply too obvious. Though perhaps it was simply too much data to handle.
posted by GuyZero at 8:31 AM on October 23, 2006

Nice one, blahblahblah.
posted by donfactor at 8:36 AM on October 23, 2006

Burke was an idiot. His show should have been called--"Totally Trivial Things That Connect Two Historical Personages But Tell Us Nothing About Either."
posted by Ironmouth at 9:00 AM on October 23, 2006

Ironmouth, that was the point of the show... Showing how seemingly trivial things connect thru history. It was not supposed to be an exauhstive lecture on any one subject.
posted by WhipSmart at 9:17 AM on October 23, 2006

Also, filed under "folly":

"A former Iraqi prisoner described being sodomized with a nightstick; another said he saw a prison interpreter raping an Iraqi boy as a female soldier took pictures."

Hm. Perhaps they should cross-link that one to "understatement".
posted by GuyZero at 9:19 AM on October 23, 2006

From "hierarchy":

Leaders of the Jewish Reform movement recommended that parents remove their children from the Boy Scouts because the Scouts continue to insist on banning homosexuals—this despite the traditional schoolyard opinion that Boy Scouts are somehow inherently gay.»

Am I supposed to take this seriously?
posted by dreamsign at 9:34 AM on October 23, 2006

I'm pretty sure this was entirely built (though probably not populated) by our own Paul Ford.
posted by gleuschk at 10:11 AM on October 23, 2006

No tags?

(kidding, kidding)
posted by Firas at 11:32 AM on October 23, 2006

The thing is though, with my web app hacker hat on, I'd shake my head at a proposal like this and say there's no way the data will stay updated and relevant. I suppose if a publishing house is behind the affair they can come up with the right amount of discipline...
posted by Firas at 11:35 AM on October 23, 2006

The site was created by Paul Ford, author of The Weekly Review. I believe there were plans at one point to make the CMS that drives the site a public application, but it never happened. Which is a sad thing, because I think it's totally awesome.
posted by endquote at 12:15 PM on October 23, 2006

I approve of this webpage.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:17 PM on October 23, 2006