Various and Sundry, August 19

I'm not getting anything done right at the moment, so I might as well blog and entertain myself by sending scads of random articles your way.

Let's see here...[shuffle, shuffle] We seem to be heavy on the social media geekery this week. Just shows where my mind is at.

I LOVED these social media propaganda posters, which you can buy separately or in this all-in-one version here. h/t Design Fetish for bringing these to my attention.

I also thought this infographic on the Psychology of Twitter was terrific. If you like that sort of thing. Which I do. Obviously. Because I'm being nice to you, I'm not copying the infographic here because I suspect some of you might have other ways you want to spend your time than learning what makes people retweet a tweet. Yeah, never mind I'm moving on now.

Gardens! And garden snakes! Isn't that better? I loved these photos from Phillip Oliver over at Dirt Therapy who "got quite a jolt when I walked up the side gate to water the portulaca and saw this -"

Yikes! I enjoyed following the snake around the garden through the safe distance of these gorgeous photos.

In the obits (since the Week in Death feature seems to be overkill, so to speak), I would like to draw your attention to Nat Allbright, Voice of Dodgers Games He Did Not See.

Mr. Allbright, who died last month, went on to be a master of what is now a lost, almost hard-to-imagine art. Like a young radio broadcaster named Ronald Reagan, he took bare-bones telegraph messages transmitted by Morse code (“B1W” for Ball One Wide); embellished them with imagination and sound effects; and then broadcast games that sounded as if he were in the ballpark hearing, smelling and seeing everything, from steaming hot dogs to barking umpires to swirling dust at second base.

Apparently, there were "rain delays" when emergency repairs were needed. An impressive example of carrying on, I say.

And finally, if you are in the Portland, Maine area, please stop by the store Ferdinand tomorrow. Why? It's celebrating its 10th anniversary. And it's my sister's shop. Pretty awesome. Way to go, Diane!