I love hearing from fans of the show. I get incredible letters from all sorts of unexpected places, and sometimes, they let me know that I’ve been spotted in unexpected places.

One of the most recent messages was from Bethany Boles, a fan from Connecticut. She was recently visiting New York City and while in downtown Manhattan she spotted me as part of the Magic Hat ad campaign. (for those who don’t know, I lent my image to Magic Hat Brewery for a series of commercials and print ads run throughout the country)

Naturally I was flattered that someone even noticed me amidst the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, and I was thrilled that Magic Hat had placed ads throughout the city. What I didn’t realize was the extent of the presence!

Nigel Hardman, a 40-year-old “illusionist” from England was recently charged with eleven counts of cheating the benefits system (aka collecting unemployment, for those in the States) after his “act” brought him to the attention of authorities.

Performing – and I use that term very loosely – under the name Prince Razaq, he is said to have presented “death-defying” stunts such as sword swallowing, fire eating, walking on broken glass, escapes from straitjackets and standing on a bed of nails. Investigators apparently became curious regarding his claims of “too ill to work” - for which he was collecting benefits - after seeing him perform on the television show The Big Breakfast, clearly demonstrating that he was, well, not too ill to work!

A collection of persistent mistakes and fraudulent facts from the world’s most popular reference work.

How many times have you found yourself in a lovely yet heated discussion, feeling that you might be making some headway with your argument, only to hear the following dreaded phrase - “Weeeelll, according to Wikipedia…” - followed by a stream of apocryphal facts and sources?

Forget for a moment the questionable prudence in citing an encyclopedia as a source – after all, we all turn to it as a quick reference now and again – but with mistakes so rampant, bias so pronounced and (despite Wikipedia’s best policy efforts) the actual real world practice of scholarly correction so spotty, how can we in good conscience trust the trivia that comes spewing forth from the Grand Collaboration?

side note: I have direct experience with the sketchy nature of Wikipedia. A good friend’s well-researched entry was once removed with no explanation and replaced with a poorly written and terribly inaccurate 14 year old girl’s entry (still active), while one of my own original entries became a marketing platform for my competitors – still uncorrected years later.

How to view your website in 53+ browsers on 3 major platforms in mere minutes with zero effort.

Though current statistics indicate that almost 62% of web users are surfing the web with some version of Internet Explorer (reaffirming that I always find myself in a minority) with Firefox coming in a distant second at around 28%, web designers need to be aware that users will be viewing their websites in a huge variety of web browsers each running on a wide cross-section of platforms. Safari and Opera are the only other browsers to regularly make the top stats lists, but there are literally dozens of browsers and platforms available.

A bit old according to ‘net standards – being from October, 2007 and all – but just picked this up from Casey’s blog and it got me to thinking…

TwitterWhere is an application that allows you to view Twitter Tweets by location via RSS or XML. Along with other Twitter-based apps (such as TwitterVision and TwitterMap, mentioned even on the TwitterWhere page) it’s a cool little extension of Twitter that gets geeks excited simply by being a neat remix of data.

My first thought upon seeing this was “cool, I can watch and anticipate flash mobs and the like by location!” which made me stop and consider - “Hey, anyone can watch and anticipate flash mobs by location!”

Undoubtedly some savvy government type entrenched in an office somewhere – Homeland Security, local police, et. al. - also had this “duh” moment, and maybe even wrote their own app eons ago.

I’ll be on the road for the next seven weeks and will be making some public appearance stops along the way. Here’s one to watch out for:

Roderick Russell : Sword Swallower
Appearance and Book Signing
Borders Books and Music
300 Lycoming Mall Circle
Pennsdale, PA 17756

DATE: April 12, 2008
TIME: 1 pm

I’ll be on hand to sign copies of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not : The Remarkable… Revealed and will be giving a close-up performance, a brief sword swallowing demonstration and a Q&A session to follow.

Hope to see you there!
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