Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

We’re getting ready for Thanksgiving – which for the first time will include vegetarian choices. That got me thinking about the vegetarian body – is it built differently from the meat-eating kind? This link has the answer, even though it can be a bit of a time suck.

I often look at Szymon Błaszczyk’s blog when I’m looking for inspiration. But it also works when I want a time suck. He led me, for example, to this great image of a phantom bike.

I’ve tried to convince myself that wasting time is a fine way of seeking inspiration. But for that to work, you have to convince yourself that you’re wasting quality time. You need a really high-pressure vacuum time suck.

Letters of Note is the place to read original letters by the likes of Van Gogh and one by Kurt Vonnegut written when he was a private in the US Army, captured by Wermacht troops and imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf. On May 29, 1945 he wrote a letter to his family describing how he regained his freedom when his German guards simply walked away. If you’ve read Slaughterhouse Five you’ll recognize that scene – it’s straight from true events described in Vonnegut’s letter.

If you like stories, Reddit.com has something called “IAmA” – you get to list what you do and invite questions and comments about it. For example, you can read a Q and A about what it was like to be a agent for the Chinese Public Safety department doing domestic surveillance.  If you like failure, there’s the popular Fail blog.

Moving on to some eye candy, there’s a store in the Netherlands with a website you can’t stop watching. All the products in the catalog move and interact with each other, and if you care about Flash animation, you might just have an online nerd-gasm.

ffffound.com is another feast for the eyes. Once you start looking, it’s hard to stop. It’s got a tennis court that would be pretty hard to play on.

By now you’ve realized that we’re on a road leading to other roads leading to still more. Want a map? Peggy Orenstein wrote a piece in the New York Times titled “Stop Your Search Engines.” It was all about stopping what has spun out of control here – linking one search to another until you find that darkness has fallen, nobody has made any dinner and it’s somehow already 2010. Orenstein suggests an application called “Freedom” that actually blocks your access to the internet so you can get things done.

Restriction = freedom is actually a yogic concept, but no way I would be able to write anything without distractions.

I looked at a little application called MyTexts that takes away everything on your screen but what you are writing. It’s beautiful if you like the feeling of turning your $3000 computer into a $50 typewriter. The same company, however, makes a blog editor that I’m using to write this, and its simplicity does help.

Seeking simplicity at an information banquet can be tough. As Peggy Orenstein puts it, “The promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same.”

Is it Friday already? Time to make a turkey sandwich.

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