Wes Phillips

When I was hired to sell hi-fi almost 20 years ago, I figured I knew my stuff and I knew audiophiles. How hard could selling good gear be? I wondered. Phenomenally hard, it turned out. I began to learn how to sell and the crux of it wasn't trickery or fast-talk, but actually listening to what people wanted (and, granted, sometimes hearing stuff they weren't actually saying).

Get Internet Explorer! ROTFLMAO

Artnatomy is a really cool tool—for learning to draw faces, of course. I can't even draw a stick figure for Hangman, but stuff like this makes me dream about unleashing my (extremely) inner artist.

'Fess up—you've always wondered about that butter side down thing.

This online dialog between Neal Stephenson and the readers of Slashdot isn't new, but I'd never read it before. There's good stuff on money, copyright, and his three deathmatch battles with William Gibson.

San Francisco's wonderful Jon Carroll points us towards Regret The Error, a compendium of error correcting slugs that have run in newspapers and journals.

I link to this review of David Crystal's How Language Works not so much because it is deeply informative—I'm pretty sure I want to read it, but the review doesn't make that compelling a case—but rather because of my admiration at the way John Humphrys manages to work one of my favorite grammar jokes into the review.