Posts about Fun

If you want to make your own, Michael Perkins provided a chart of the design and an explanation:

Just create a knit hat with an even stockinette block of at least 30 rows high by 25 rows wide. I knit 12 rows of k2p2 ribbing and then about 40 rows of stockinette, then decrease (k2tog) every other round in 8 parts for the top until half the stitches remain, then decrease every round until 4 stitches remain.

My hats are knit on #6 needles for the brim and #8 for the body. 88 stitches around. Yarn is Vanna's Choice Worsted Acrylic by Lion Brand Yarns.

Just like the traditional game, you see with a set of words with blanks where the letters go, and can type letters to guess them. Pick a letter that's in the phrase, and it appears everywhere it's used; pick one that's not 5 times, and you lose.

With 86 stations, an even more fun way to play this game is to try to guess the answer without guessing any letters at all. There are a few combinations that satisfy more than one station (like _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ or _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _), but most only work for a single station, including the one in the image above. Can you figure out the station it represents without trying any letters or looking at a map?

Jantzen gave this game the same brown background often used on the Metro, and when you get a word right, you see diagonal arrows like those on the faregates. The Hangman game also has (differently-colored) other word sets, including Broadway shows and Paris Métro stations, both of which are a little harder to guess without trying any letters unless you are a real expert in those domains.

Metro has a reputation as tame compared to the daily wildness of New York's subway. There are relatively few buskers, panhandlers, or other attention-seekers on trains in DC. Nevertheless, during the holiday season and the colder months of winter some public characters do emerge. The caroler is one of my favorites.

Here he is making his first appearance of this season.

This map probably wouldn't be very helpful posted in railcars, but it offers a unique—and twisted—look at the region's most recognized map.

Reader Andrew Bossi came up with the idea after seeing a bus ad in Trondheim that resembled a transit map but in the shape of a spiral.

When discussing the map contest results, we debated the merits of a truly geographic map versus one that's a more stylized diagram like the current one. Many geographic features get distorted for simplicity.

This map takes distortion to an extreme for stylistic purposes, but in doing so reminds us that while we call a transit map a "map," it's really not.

Also, notice how none of the station symbols have to jump over any lines. Fort Totten and Chinatown do connect the red line on one "arm" of the spiral to the Green Line on another, which is the only topological cheat necessary to make this work. For how many of the world's larger transit systems is such a thing possible?

This contraption is a great addition to the Legosphere. What's amazing is that it wasn't built from a kit, but was designed and built by Lego enthusiast Esben Kolind.

Here's another of my all-time favorites: