Be prepared to gain seven pounds

Japan offers the Windows 7 Whopper?

I'm still not sure this isn't a joke.

(Via The Food Section.)

A near deadly game

This fascinating story is from last fall, but until Not Martha linked to it, I hadn't seen it.

Apparently a group of Microsofties and other smart folks set up a spy-type game in the real world, running around acting out a mystery.

And then it turned almost deadly. This could seriously be a movie, but sadly for the man who was permanently injured, it was real.

It's just going to get awesomer from here

Yes, this is a Microsoft-produced video. But it's still funny! An Internet history.

Bill Gates owns this book! He wants it! Give it back to him. He will tell you.

Kind of a funny story about a former classmate of Bill Gates' who wound up with his intro to programming book.

The classmate, now a business editor at the Seattle Times, kept it for years, and then didn't sell it on eBay, but had a business reporter give it back to Bill during an interview.

Funny bit, but...I'm sure Gates didn't want it back. I would have sold it on eBay, or donated it to the Microsoft Museum or something.

The truth behind famous photos

I love this story, because I, too, have looked at the pretty nature images that come as computer wallpaper and wondered where they were taken, and I've also idly wondered about this specific yellow-leaf-draped road. I always assumed it was in Vermont, since it screams of Robert Frost, and "two roads diverged in a yellow wood."

A writer for Vanity Fair took on the nigh-impossible task of tracking the exact spot down, and thanks to hard work and, believe it or not, an e-mail from Bill Gates (well, from Bill's people), he figured out it is in Ontario. The article also presents a photo of the same scene in winter. Awesome detective work, and a great little article.

Speaking of stories about famous photos, here's another great one, this one about the famed Dorothea Lange picture of a migrant mother in the Dust Bowl.

Apparently the mom in question, Florence Owens Thompson, wasn't too thrilled about being the subject of the picture, a picture that would eventually influence Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." She was just in her 30s when that iconic image was snapped, and she lived till 1983.

It's hard to look at her 1936 face and envision her still with us in the 1980s -- she seems such a part of that moment and only that moment, but she did live a long time. Her gravestone reads "Migrant Mother--A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood." So perhaps she found peace with the photo, at long last.