The Great Geek Manual

Film

• According to Vanity Fair, Heath Ledger hoped his performance as the Joker would be so far-out he’d be fired.
• GiantFreakinRobot pleads Transformers 2: It’s Not The Fanboys Fault, in response to Ebert’s recent review.
• Heckler Spray counts down the Top 20 Movie Monsters.

Internet

• Switched wonders if E-mail Made the Thank You Note Obsolete?

Literature

• Free Fiction: Jeff VanderMeer is offering Finch as a podcast.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “On the Banks of the River of Heaven” by Richard Parks.
• Free Fiction: Read Homeostasis by Carlos Hernadez at Futurismic.

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…and in the information age, that may be all a person could ask for.

Source: Ashleyniblock

1874
After much preparation at home and abroad, the Philadelphia Zoo, the first zoological gardens in the United States opens to the public with several hundred native and exotic specimens on the grounds of Solitude, the last estate in the area owned by the Penn family, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was originally chartered by the Pennsylvania state legislature on March 21, 1859 as the Zoological Society of Philadelphia whose core purpose is to oversee “the purchase and collection of living wild and other animals” and “for the instruction and recreation of the people.” Rumors of a civil war make it a difficult time for private undertakings, and delayed the opening. In 1875, this zoo will become the first US zoo to exhibit a male Indian rhinoceros.

1881
The first international telephone call is made between Calais, Maine in the United States and St. Stephen, New Brunswick in Canada.

1886
The first Linotype machine to be put into commercial use in the US is installed at the Tribune newspaper in New York City. It will be immediately successful. By the end of 1886, a dozen of the machine will be put to use by the Tribune. Within a decade, thousands of Linotype machines will be in use around the world. With a Linotype machine one keyboard operator can cast a line of type at a time, doing the work of the three men required to hand-set the type of other printing presses. It is because the machine sets type one line at a time that Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, gave the Linotype its name. The machine was invented, patented, and improve by Ottmar Mergenthaler.
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