Sometimes you just want a quick couple sheets of lined paper or graph paper, and you don’t want to take a trip to the office supply store. For those situations, you can download a pdf file from printable paper and print your own. Considering the price of ink, this isn’t a good solution for creating a whole notebook, but if you need a specialty paper that you don’t normally use such as music or ledger paper, it could come in pretty handy.

With the growing popularity of MP3 players, iTunes, and other music downloading services, the audio CD market is quickly shrinking to nothing. But for the time being, most of us have CD players in our cars and stereos, and almost all of us have some CDs that we’re not planning to listen to ever again. That’s where lala.com comes in. It’s a social networking site which includes a tracking system for CD trading. List the CDs you’re willing to trade, and you’ll get a request when another users wants one of them. Send it out, and when they verify its arrival, you’ll receive a credit which gives you the opportunity to request an album that you want from another user. The cool part is that you can find users who like the same type of music and take a look at their collection to find new music that suits your taste.

You may have seen an email forward in early 2008 claiming that pictures of frozen waves came from Lake Huron. I’m always skeptical of claims like that, so I had to check it out. My favorite urban legend debunking source, snopes.com, verified that the description is completely fake. However, the pictures are real. They were taken in Antarctica at a base called Dumont D’Urville in 2002, and you can see more pictures from the series at a CalTech website.

There is a famous poem by William Carlos Williams called “This Is Just To Say” which reads like an a half-hearted apology a husband may have left on a scrap of paper on the kitchen table.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I heard about this poem, and the many spoofs of it on an episode of This American Life. There is some information about it on Wikipedia, as well as some examples of spoofs that they talked about on the show. There is even an online Mad Libs style generator so that you can easily create a “This Is Just To Say” poem of your own.

The Falkirk Wheel is a unique and innovative way to get boats from one canal to another. The official site describes the history. “The Forth and Clyde Canal is 35m (115ft) below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals had been joined at Falkirk by a flight of 11 locks that stepped down across a distance of 1.5km, but those were dismantled in 1933, breaking the link. What was required was a method of connecting the two canals by some means of lifting two boats down the 35m drop as quickly and simply as possible.” I found some good pictures of the contraption at a russian blog, and there are some YouTube videos of the wheel in action.

If you can gather 22 people interested in a unique experience, you might want to travel to Belgium for a chance to have dinner in the sky. Starting at 8,650 Euros ($13,600), it’s not a bargain, but if you like a little excitement without the fear of skydiving or bungee jumping, dinner in the sky might be a good alternative. For an extra fee, they will even raise another platform large enough for a grand piano or a small band to provide entertainment. This might not be something that normal people would be able to do with their friends on any given weekend, but for a company trying to give their customers a memorable outing, this may be just the thing.

For the most part I don’t really like ecards. They take the same sayings you find on paper cards and add some stupid flash graphics of fireworks or popping champagne corks. Then, along with an unwanted card, you find that a bunch of spammers put your email address on their list. I can’t help but like some of the cards available at someecards.com, however, because the writing is pretty clever. So if you want to send a greeting for tax day, check them out.

Most of the errors Jeff Deck comes across involve missing apostrophes, misplaced commas, and misspelled words. He has been making his way across the country with a typo correction toolkit consisting of white-out, different colored Sharpies and stickers which he uses to correct many of the mistakes he finds. It’s a strange hobby to be sure, but it’s also a good excuse to travel, and it’s brought him some notoriety as well. The Typo Hunt Across America has become a very popular blog, and I first saw his story on ABC news, so there has been plenty of media coverage as well. If you start to notice signs around town which have been corrected by hand, then there’s a good chance that Jeff’s typo hunt has come to a neighborhood near you.

As a youngster, I remember having a Simon. I think I even played it all the way through a couple times. Frankly, I always got a little bored with it’s repeating patterns, but it was kind of fun to challenge your friends to a session of Simon. Now you can relive the lack of excitement and tedium online with the Simon flash game website. Try it once for the memory, and then put it back on the top shelf of the virtual closet next to the other board games that you never play anymore.

Faith is an inspirational dog. She was born missing a front leg, and her other front leg began to atrophy and was amputated when she was 7 months old. Her owners considered her part of the family and nurtured her as she learned to walk on only her hind legs. She has become a canine celebrity, traveling around the country spreading a message of hope and overcoming adversity. See a nice collection of pictures at oddity central, and visit Faith’s official website for more information.

Body piercing and tattooing have become a common form of expression in our society, and it seems like people are continually going to greater lengths to be unique. Pauly Unstoppable, a man from Toronto, is pushing the boundaries with his eye tattoo. Metro.co.uk describes the procedure. The tattooer injected ink into the eyeball using a needle, until it was completely blue. It took more than 40 tries before the eye was filled with ink. The blue substance used was mixed with antibiotic eyewash to prevent infection. Pauly himself declared: “I really have to emphasize again that the procedure was extensively researched and done by people who were aware of the risks and possible complications and that it should not be casually attempted. Now that this experiment has been started, please wait for us to either heal or go blind before trying it.” Read other stories at inventorspot and asylum.com.