"Am I the only person left in the world who worries about spilling his coffee on his laptop?"

2 years ago.

ADDED: I ran across that after reading the colloquy between AllenS and Meade in the comments to the post about Brett's fuzzy penis:

AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...

Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.

AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?

But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.

The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:



That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:



Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:



That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).

And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.

"Do you guys TRY to not get laid?"

"I love it when you talk dirty to us, Althouse."

The ultimate in link-whoring. And yes, I am ashamed. But not of my position on sex: It is less of an effort than watching a BBC TV drama.

Also: "I'm a virgin ... as relates to BBC dramas. I respect myself too much let some limey have his way with me."

The most unusual book in your house.

Here's a little project that everyone can get in on, which I got the idea for reading this comment from AllenS in The Glad Hand Café:

I have two of my grandfather's books. Automobile Electricity -- Starting and Lighting, and The Automobile Storage Battery -- It's Care and Repair. Anybody remember when you had to check the water in your battery? There are pictures of a visit to the battery factory. Looks like young boys were used in the cutting and grooving exide wood separators. Some of them are wearing ties. Almost everybody in the factory are wearing caps. The very back of the books is where you can order wiring diagrams for cars. Such as the Brisco, Cole, Glide, Pullman. Hard to believe how many different car manufacturers there used to be.

So what is the equivalent thing in your house (or apartment)? It needn't be old, just odd. Find your most unusual book or two and tell us about it, either here in the comments or separately on your own blog (with a link in the comments or emailed to me). A photograph of the cover or a page or something would be nice. I haven't figured out what my book(s) will be for this project. I got rid of all the books I didn't really care about a couple of years ago when I almost moved out of my house, so there's nothing that's just bad. I'm not really looking for bad, just unusual, like "The Automobile Storage Battery."

ADDED: My book is "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross," by John M. Allegro. This 1970 book puts on a big show of scholarship to make the point that Jesus Christ was really a psychedelic mushroom.