Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

A few things that have interested me lately:

• "Experimental" font Optica. I'm not sure if this is genius or idiotic. Apparently it's easy to read at gigantic sizes seen from some way off. (It says "Tres tristes tigres", if you can't read it at all.)
• Natural Harvest, a new book which can I think safely be described as a seminal work. The comments are quite amusing -- they read from the bottom up. Possibly NSFW.
  
• Atlas of True Names, which will be self-explanatory when you click through to it. It's a bit silly in places (OK, York = Wild Boar Village, but New York was named after the then Duke of York; and I'm not sure about eg. Lake of Victory either) but interesting and entertaining I think.
• The ideal Christmas present, a statue of your face. Send them two mugshots, they do the rest. Also available: your face at various ages, different races, genders, etc.
• A fun adaptive spelling bee spun off from the Visual Thesaurus. You have to pay to get your score registered, alas. Good article here about the way it learns.
• If you're interested in web design you probably already read Smashing Magazine. This article sampling some nice favicons is a recent example of how it makes you think and explore. Any of you done any favicon designing?
• On a related note, article from Yahoo about speeding up your website. Take with several pinches of salt, as Yahoo's interests are not the same as your own, but some tips (eg: putting stylesheets in the head element, which doesn't actually speed up page load but does give the user a speedier impression) are useful.

On a non-tab-closing note, I finally got to see the RL World Cup final from the weekend. Australia were I think 10-1 on to win at kickoff, but New Zealand made a nonsense of that with a terrific display of teamwork and concentration. Really good to watch, and realy good for the sport as a whole I hope. It seems invidious to single out players, but Cayless's tireless captaincy and the massive performance of Smith at loose-forward will stay in the mind for a while. His ankle-tap on Thurston, with just a handful of minutes to go, was surely the moment of the match. You have to feel a little for Lockyer, who had a brilliant game -- the Australian handling was mesmerizing at times -- but the better team won on the night. Hooray for them!