One word:

MYST

And next week, Sigourney Weaver will present Mr. Bornstein with a bucket of homomorph mouth-slime leftover from the shooting of Aliens IV.

In other news, Lincoln's own corpse will generate electricity by spinning around in a sarcophagus fitted with generator coils.

In other sad news, the Greater Chelsea Whale Oil company announced that they are suspending deliveries of their "Spermacetti Gold Illumination Fuel" as of December 31.

The last of the five buildings in Manhattan that still used whale oil are switching over to kerosene this month.

The goat cart that Greater Chelsea used to deliver glass carboys of whale oil will be donated to the Museum of the City of New York.

Seven eyes, Anonymous.

Seven horned goats are a sign of the "eh" of times, when people just don't give a darn.

Hmmm. Google Ads are offering Goat Ringtones and "Watch Goat Videos."

Now I need a unicornse chaser.

I can't believe that none of the copy uses the infamous term "hard to reach places."

* * *

Sometime in the mid 90s I got my hair cut at a barber shop on the outer fringes of a shopping mall. (I got the impression that it was mostly patronized by mall personnel. It was "in" the mall but only reachable by the outside.)

The barber was a Russian guy. Did a competent, lightning fast haircut, and then broke out a noisy electric massager (most similar to the "rocket engine") and gave me a really good neck-and-shoulder shake up. Totally unsolicited, just part of the service. Felt great. Next time I'm in Hicksville, Long Island I should see if the place is still open.

The entire "Atomic Rockets" site is a treasure. Lots of great instructional material; I just hope the copyright cops never give him grief.

The author -- Winchell Chung -- was a high school kid when he did the illustrations for Steve Jackson Games' "OGRE" game.

Philphil beat me to it. That video is hilarious!

Big group projects are a regular feature at high-power meets like LDRS and Plaster Blaster. A group of guys work all year on something giant, like a full-scale Patriot or the X-Wing, and then unveil it and let it rip.

#5:

Here's a nickel, kid:

$.05

Go buy yourself some fresh straw men.

#11: "They're driving out their competitors"

Like the Sparkly Lamb, which has the mixed advantage of being highly visible at night.

What I want to know is, what is the age of consent for a bicycle?

Oh, man, that stuff is great!

I'm I the only one who has this daydream that there's some uber-anal-retentive IT GOP-HQ guy who is sitting on a complete back-up-copy of the White House mail archives?

And the second he turns over the tapes Cheney will have to relocate to Dubai?

Of course, neat shit like that never happens. If it looks like the emails are going to be recovered we'll have a convenient war with Iran or something.

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is among the virtues of science that it equips the future for its duties." == A. N. Whitehead

Yes, that foot is pinning my Bummer Meter. The fact that it's poking out of viscid brown spew is a nice touch.

How will we know who our superior mutant overlords are if doctors keep snipping off those extra digits?

All hail Jeshuah!

An interesting contrast would be to put this picture side-by-side with a snap of the world's largest frog sitting on a manhole cover.

Tsk, tsk . . . more PC bias by Boing Boing!

It's your fault, Not a Doktor.

The magnetic field from your TV set makes your window look like a welcoming, magical bird's nest.

These people are making mountain out of a molehill and were just asking for trouble.

I mean, look at them! Would you let someone dressed as a Weber grill into the country?

I loved those PopSci cartoon/columns . . . Pantomime DIY!

Once I got to knew Doty's style I was able to spot his work in other places. I recall one from "Consumer Reports" showing a bunch of toddlers admiring an under-sink cabinet full of deadly chemicals.

Chances are H-S is way overcharging. Like Joel says, contact your local hobby shop.

I have, or had depending on how you look at it, one of the older "Oracle" Estes movie cameras. More expensive and larger. 30 second capture time, with a time trigger (press button, run away, launch rocket within 10 seconds). Lousy frame rate. No sound. But pretty remarkable for a consumer tech-item.

For its fourth flight, I put the Oracle camera on a two-stage model. The second stage didn't light. Came in hard. To really rub it in, the batteries popped out, so I lost the crash footage. I think I could put it back together, by splicing in a generic plastic cone over the splintered remains of the old one.

Several months from now:

"Ooooy, WILDGIRL213, where did you get that cool baby squid?"

"Uh . . . found it?"

Mark shot a cute little innocent doe-eyed unicorn that was in his house?

I feel like projectile vomiting.

#3 Bah! That list won't do it.

Anthrax, Red mercury, Reptoids, 23, Venusian condor men, 23, Area 51, DILUTE! DILUTE! OK! ALL-ONE!, 23, INTJ, Eschaton, Project Aura, MK-Ultra

There. Now that list will get you into a Halliburton relocation camp when they start preemptive detentions after the bunker busters start falling on Iran.

How does it run on older machines? I rescue machines from dumpsters and fix them up. I have a nice Dell PIII-600 MHz / 512 Mb system right heyah that might want to be a Linux box . . . will Ubuntu run well on it?

I wish JW would put together more FRANK comics. I guess he makes his bucks painting / inking art for prints, but I'm really jonesing for more Unifactor tales.

That's not a beach clean up facilitator . . . it's an alien sex toy!

"Snoff-QUAN! The plain green-wrapped package has arrived! Assemble the clan and let us have an eight-way!"

My MythTV box gets its listings from Schedules Direct, which charges $30 / 6 months. They're trying to reduce that to $30 / year.

Schedules Direct was hastily set up after Zap2IT labs stopped offering free listings due to too much unauthorized commercial reuse.

I think $5/month for listings is an OK deal, given how much nicer it is to find and schedule programs using an interactive grid than a newspaper listing.

Oh. For what it's worth, the sphere-on-a-cylinder thing in front of Garriott is a miniature Vostok. The first manned spaceship.

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_spacecraft

I met Garriott at a trade show once. I was a lowly booth monkey in a bad suit, demonstrating lousy CD-ROM software* to clueless appliance-store buyers, but he stopped to chat when I recognized the name on his badge.

It's so cool that Garriot, and other game designers and software entrepreneurs who made it big, are into cool stuff like this. Put another way:

Geeks make better millionaires.

* Back when being on a CD-ROM made the software special!

When I was a few weeks old, my parents took me to my grandparents' restaurant in Greenwich Village.

One of the beatnik patrons told them to "Raise him as a death-ray repairman."

So, I guess the whole career in software development was a temporary thing until this turned up.

Destiny, man. You can't avoid it.

You message was posted, Amy.

* * *

So, where does the bowl-off fit in Lore Sjoberg's Geek Event Hierarchy?

[subliminal_command command = sleep]
I for one welcome our pod-spawned overlords.
[/subliminal_command]

#33: Cripes, what hell hole are you from Hamish? Even the U.S.A. only elected Bush once.

Atlantis. Mu. Lemuria. And now, Polystyrania!

The bulbous thing on the next page is one of the "nuclear pulse" propulsion types. The spherical part would be filled with thin gas, and a very small atomic bomb would be detonated inside. This would heat the gas, which would shoot out the rear creating thrust.

Contrast with "Project Orion," which would detonate little nukes behind a sturdy steel pusher plate. The nuke would be coated in a material which would vaporize and PING! off the plate, transmitting the kinetic energy to the spaceship.

The early Sugar Bear shown above is drawn in a mode similar to the earnest, cutesy style of Soviet kitsch:

http://www.mazaika.com/postcard/big/hny0470.jpg

I'm not a WOT reader. I don't I've read anything by Jordan.

But I'm interested in how the series will be completed. I've read that Jordan left behind notes and outlines. Will a single writer do the job? Chosen by the family or the publisher?

I can imagine megabytes of fanfic coming out of this. Alternate last novels, altered final scenes.

Should be interesting to watch.

#47: Yes, there's some really sloppy scripting going on there.

But, you know, it's hard for Conservative websites to get good help; all the really good web commerce coders were snapped up by Hate America First Ltd. and Dhimicrats for World Islamofascist Domination.

Ultima II included a space flight sequence!

As I recall, Uranus was populated by court jesters.

Why bother with HD-DVDs? Sure, the show was filmed on . . . film, but it was designed for broadcast television:

"Gosh, that set really looks crappy."

"Man, you can really see the seam where they glued on Spock's ears."

One, Two, Three, Four, Five . . .

Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten . . .

Ten tiny turtles on the telephone,

Talking to ten grocery men . . .

(la la la la)

Sesame Street premiered when I was in second grade. Because it was aimed at toddlers, no one in class would admit that they voluntarily watched it, but we all said we did "because mom wanted my little brother to see it." And then we'd start blathering about the great goofy stuff like the guy (Jim Henson!) falling down stairs carrying a load of cakes.

In one of David Brin's early SF novels, personality profiling results in large numbers of people -- "probationary personalities" -- having curtailed rights; a repressive regime based on the practice is overthrown when profiling reveals that the regimes' principles are all untrustworthy nuts.

Ooooh, neat!

I hope BB-TV sends a reporter to the Klingons vs. Furries paintball battle. (No, that isn't a real event, but now that you're big media you can MAKE it real!)

#7: OMG, live action Tintin movies from the early '60s?

I remember the '60s vintage cartoons. They were serialized on American TV. But I never knew about the live action movies. Dang!

So, are they going to outfit a dog in a motion capture suit to animate Snowy / Mileu?

Evolve into two species? Piker:

"The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
...
When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the question "Can man play God and still stay sane?" will lose some of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local deities and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane, and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of us will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth. Sanity is, in its essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.
...
The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into new dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million forms."
-- Freeman Dyson

I really can't picture our military or intelligence services As They Currently Exist being able to nimbly or effectively counter this sort of thing.

They might be able to put up walls, mind you, and wire the entire country with telescreens, but they systematically unequipped to wage 21st century information war, or cybah-war.

The brilliant but (hiatus-enjoying? burned out? got a real jobbing?) Patrick Farley wrote an utterly amazing alternate-history Afghan War called The Spiders. In it, 9/11 happened on 9/12, on President Al Gore's match. He puts the country on a war footing . . . an open-participation cyberwar that has civilians controlling little robot spies. Through their eyes we see Taliban draftees and oppressed Afghan woman being subverted by a savvy information campaign. One spider finds Osama bin Laden complaining about inflamed hemorrhoids to his son.

Nyahhhh, kids these days, with their dice rolling programs and virtual environments.

Back when I played you had to whittle your own polyhedra dice, draw your own graph paper, and paint miniatures with pigments you made from berries and ground up chalk.

Homer Price, where art thou?

"Sumi, an animal guardian spirit, has the hat of the orca whale, the wings of the Thunderbird and the legs of the black bear."

Orca whales have hats?

As others have pointed out, the real goal isn't telecomm immunity, it's the White House buying the silence of witnesses to impeachable offenses.

Stop being afraid, start getting angry.

"Just what does Bush have to do . . ."

Got really drunk, stumble up to the zoo, and rape a bald eagle in front of a crowd of screaming Snowflake Children?

If it weren't for Cheney's mind-control powers keeping him from going "off-message" Bush would have been consigned to Home for the Extremely Nervous years ago.

A teenage Ron Howard plays a science nerd. There's a funny scene where a tentacled monster he creates slithers down a sink drain.

Rob Cockerham should have his own damn TV show.

Or maybe an occasional segment on Boing Boing TV?

[If you've gotta ask, you're never gonna know]
Or maybe the Foundation wants people to send their cereal boxtops to them.
[/If you've gotta ask, you're never gonna know]

Do you need to insure and register this 'rod?

For sure, you'd need a garage for it. This thing would draw vandals and thieves like crazy.

'you promise to stop all the "ZOMG! FACIST DICTATOR!!!" stuff?'

Only if the next guy (or gal) isn't a authoritarian twit too. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

If Bush wants to leave office in January 2008, hey, he should go for it. He doesn't look like he's having much fun, and most of his old Texas buddies already bailed. Pretty soon it'll be him, Cheney, and a bunch of sycophantic staffers way in over their heads.

"A cake that's meant to bake for one hour at 200 degrees will not be just as good if you give it 15 minutes at 800."

Yes, but that act would go a long way to smashing the hegemonic paradigm that divides baked goods from charcoal. Vive le revolucion!

TERESA! #6 looks like a test of a robo-poster. Who creates an account with the name "registered user?"

HMS High, where the Jocks learn takedown and taser techniques, and the nerds design telescreens and death rays.

Books like this used to make me horribly jealous as a kid. I didn't fly on a jet until I was out of college and able to pay for it myself.

I've been flying a lot lately; visiting family back east, and a business trip.

Somewhere in there, I got to see a kid "Gordon's" age turn green and vomit after the plane had landed and parked, as he was walking towards the exit.

Jetway sickness. Don't let it happen to you!

The Look Around You parodies manage to be funny even if you've never seen the original program. Uh, programmes.

Cannon, hell! That thing is a first-generation Dalek!

If you could induce this sensation, you'd have a great brainwashing / indoctrination tool.

(Recall that scene in Real Genius where an annoying character is surreptitiously fitted with radio-receiving tooth fillings, and the Voice of God orders him around...)

Cripes! The deep fried pile looks even more turd-like if you view the enlargement.

You can buy, at almost any Dollar Tree store, compressed towels.

I bought a dozen of them one year as stocking stuffers. I kept one for myself and tried it out. Compressed, they're about the size of two Oreo cookies stacked up. Expanded, they're a little bigger than a washcloth and decorated with kiddie designs.

In addition to compression, there's some glue-like binder involved. You want to give them a good rinse before use.

They cost, um, a dollar.

Michael:

Bozo was once a franchise. There were Bozo the Clown shows all over the country. The Chicago Bozo was (is?) the last survivor.

A savvy marketer named Larry Harmon (who did not create Bozo, merely turned him into a big business) was responsible. Under his management there were Bozo toys, a Bozo TV cartoon, and at least one Bozo needlepoint kit. (The finished, framed result hung in the Stony Brook SF library for many years.)

There was a Bozo on a NYC station when I was a kid. In 1969 we went on a trip to Little Rock, AK. They had their own Bozo, on a different set. Man, that freaked the hell out of me!

I have an actual late-40s Johnson-Smith catalog stashed somewhere. My brother plucked it from a trash heap. It has many of the items from the reprinted 1928 J-S catalog, plus many that I recall from an early-70s catalog.

Now I'm keen on digging it up and looking up what it offers in the way of masks.

I like the Gabe and Max thing. Creating something that LOOKS cheap and bad but is actually funny takes a lot of work.

Good episode. Things are slowly getting slicker and more confident.

I'm glad to see that Mark has his geek specs back on! I'm due to get a new pair of trifocals . . . do I go for the black hornrims?

What #18 sez: createsimplicity.com is really annoying. I clicked through and was very disappointed. I feel like Ralphie on "The Christmas Story:" "It's a lousy commercial!"

This happened to me at a Mexican restaurant in Ontario. (The LA suburb, not the city in Canada.)

They only added a couple of dollars, and it was a business lunch I turned into accounting, but it was sure an eye-opener.

#6: That's mundane, human-made glitter. Unicorn-chow grade glitter is made of happy dreams and the giggles of little girls, processed in a solution of lye, sodium benzoate, and brominated Dichromium FunStuff(tm).

#8: To repeat my comment at the site: Unicorns who eat glitter crap sparkles. Rainbow sparkles.

If you gather them quickly and treat them with glycerin, the sparkles will stay bright and colorful for months.

Many ice cream shops sprinkle these rainbow sparkles on their ice cream cones.

You don't want to know where brown ice cream sprinkles come from.

The mottled gray background represents the ash heap of history that the legacies of these arrogant bozos will be archived in.

Can anyone make sense of the name "Young America's Foundation?"

Is that a misspelling of "Young Americans' Foundation?"

Or was the group founded by and for a guy named Young America?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Taco Bell's magic ingredient; an exotic chemical which causes amnesia:

"Ugh! This stuff is horrible! You could make a better burrito out of cat food and Wonder Bread. I've learned my lesson and I'm never going to go to Taco Bell ever again."

Three months later:

"Hey, a Taco Bell! I haven't had Mexican food in a while."

* * *

The closest Taco Bell is also a "Long John Silvers," which sells deep-fried vaguely-seafood crap. It also has the secret amnesia ingredient. I'm thinking of getting a Momento-style tattoo which reads "Taco Bell and Long John Silvers serves crappy food."

DCULBERSON beat me to it.

We're dealing with folks with an Orwellian mind-malady akin to "doublethink."

Think tanks and corporate shill journalists cook up a factoid or finding; the puditocracy distributes it; the scared stupids who don't want to deal with a changing world snap it up and cling to it.

Like: "Solar panels never generate enough electricity to make up their manufacturing cost." Um, maybe, if you're talking about first-generation solar panels. They're getting sturdier and more efficient all the time.

Another: "People who buy hybrids will never make up the fuel savings; therefore they're doing it for romantic, emotional reasons."

You know, there might be a grain of truth in that, but:

a) it's a temporary thing; hybrids will get cheaper (economies of scale, economies of learning) and gas will get more expensive, and

b) it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black. How many people really, honestly need an SUV or giant stretch pickup? A lot of people commute, alone, in the damn things. They bought them for emotional reasons.

I'd love to see a thriving SUV rental industry. Going on wilderness vacation? Sure, you might very well need an SUV. Rent one, and let someone else worry about hosing off the mud when the long weekend is over.

The spinning cars video should be turned into a public service announcement. Voiceover: "Do you really think you could do better?"

Basenjis hate rain and yodel.

Moles eat Drake's Yodels and don't care about rain.

#2: "He was also a significant character on the old Linus the Lionhearted cartoon series"

AAHHHHH! I haven't thought of that show for (google google) . . . well, it looks like forty years or so. The only memory I had of it is the closing sequence, when a raccoon character swept up.

And whaddayaknow, Sugar Bear is there in the opening sequence on YouTube.

"which had nothing to do with cereal"

Actually, EVERYTHING to do with cereal. "Linus the Lionhearted"'s characters were all cereal mascots. Apparently the FCC asked ABC to pull the show because it was essentially an advertisement.

BB is presumably offering up this nice, wholesome, fairy-tale unicorn to help us forget the squicky avatar-impregnating cyberspace unicorn of the previous post.

"Mad? I'll show you mad!" -- Petey Pate

In case you're not quite close enough to Qualcomm Stadium to personally drop off a carload of Sharpies, Depends, and Sunscreen, the Red Cross has established a link to benefit those affected by the fire:

http://www.redcross.org/news/ds/profiles/disaster_profile_CAWildfires.html

Oliver Sacks will give a lecture about this subject in Portland, OR on October 18th:

http://www.isepp.org

Sacks is an interesting speaker. A bit of a introvert uncomfortable with public experiences; he doesn't do signing or after-talk shoulder rubbing.

I'm trying to remember which episode of the Little Rascals. I have it narrowed down to:

Little Rascals make a fire engine; end up going to a real fire.

Little Rascals make a race car; compete with dorky rich kid.

Both involve a slapped-together vehicle. I suspect it's the latter adventure, which features a wild down-hill race.

To judge from the photos, furries have two orientations: Pantsed and pantless.

Fnarf, that's entirely uncalled for.

A 12" screwdriver would work just fine.

I shop at Fred Meyer, and am greatly disappointed that I never "discovered" Butter It's Not myself.

There is, or was, a long-running investment scam centered around a claim that someone had invented a self-chilling soda can.

A friend in college was ready to invest. He handed around a photocopied sheet that described the invention: A gas-filled cylinder is hidden in a soda can; open the top and the cylinder is pierced, slowly releasing the gas and cooling the soda.

It describes how many retail outlets could offer cool soda without the expense of refrigeration.

It noted that the cylinder displaced 1 oz of soda in a typical 12 oz can.

Maybe it was a real invention with real possibilities at one point, but I suspect it mutated into a scam somewhere along the way.

#4: "Accepts" is less blatant than "requires," I guess.

I'm trying to picture what a one-ticket ride is like:

* A flight of stairs to a slide with a smelly bum you have to squeeze past.

* Two attendants stuff you into a burlap sack and roll you down a hill.

* A ball pit, only instead of balls it's full of puppies. Hey, maybe that would be two tickets! At least if all the puppies are alive.

The "Car Guys" had a laugh about this one last weekend.

They suggested it would be a good thing to slap on a car you were trading in.

How about decals that make your real headlights look like fake NASCAR headlights?

The Onion once ran a story in which Mayor Guliani proudly announces the distribution of "Infant Only Dumpsters." The picture shows the bins have a decal of a mother teddy bear tossing a baby teddy into the trash.

I vaguely recall reading about a similar story, this one involving a loony who was offering up (non-existent) children for adoption.

#1: Maybe some exposure is just what "Jaana" needs to push her into getting some actual help, rather than starting the cycle again with a fresh victim.

"The Best of . . ." would make a nice Christmas gift.

But when is the next actual MAKE coming out? It's been ages!

The "Mars Snooper," here, was turned into a model rocket, here.

I recently digitized a couple of RUSSIAN kids' albums. I found them at a thrift store.

One looked like it might be a version of Pinnochio. The other showed a boy (with a surprisingly contemporary haircut) looking at a sort of chubby elf with a propeller on his butt. They had two and three 33 1/3 rpm records apiece, respectively.

They're probably Soviet era -- there's a CCCP on each box -- but I couldn't find a date.

I should scan in the covers so I can have someone translate the titles for me!

I find myself totally uninspired by this news.

Not because Burton is involved. Because I think Alice is getting to be a total yawn. The century-before-last's idea of whimsy and cheeky satire.

I'd love to see Burton take on an adaption of a graphic novel. Something NEW gardamnit.

And it comes in EIGHT COLORS!

Bah! What we really need is a contest to design a rocket capable of reaching orbit that fits in a biscuit tin.

Lest anyone think that "Intelligent Design" has anything to do with the pursuit of knowledge:

Go look up a document called "The Wedge Strategy." It's the Discovery Institutes's game plan for pushing intelligent design.

Not because it is a better theory, but because it fits their political goals of re-secularizing society.

Also, syntha-critters like Pleo make me feel a little sad, because I know that in a few years they'll be lying in a bin in the Goodwill Thrift Center, looking pathetic and abandoned.

I wished there'd been a dozen items like the last one, rather than the Pleo demo. He's a product from a big company, ingenious but not a DIY sort of thing.

RE the notion of blasting the stuff into the Sun:

It would take a huge fleet of rockets and an incredible amount of propellant to do that.

It would take far less energy to gather it up and turn it into inert blocks. Or recycle it into something useful.

This could be the ascent pod of a laser launch system, or a maglev catapult. No onboard propulsion necessary!

You could simulate the catapult by placing the loaded capsule on the hood of a pickup, driving really fast on a road leading up to the lip of a cavern, and then braking at the last second.

The idea of a North American Union is really scary because I'd hate not to have a Canada to flee to in case of a fundamentalist / neo-conservative putsch.

Be sure to check out the older series of bauxes; I love the "Salt of the Month Club."

Even more fun than putting a crappy gift in one of these would be putting in something really cool and appropriate, and including an envelope with the gift receipt inside "in case you have one already." Then when the giftee brings the unopened item to the store for an exchange they'll get to try to explain why they're returning a USB Toaster with a receipt for an iPod. And hopefully figure out what's going on before things get nasty.

It's a prairie squid!

Huh. Lots of receipts for deliveries of liquid nitrogen. What are they for?

[/joke]

By his strands and balls you shall know him.

Ramen.

#14 B88 appears to be channeling Lore Sjoberg's Geek Hierarchy:

The Geek Hierarchy

Some of my college friends were "anthropomorphic art fans" -- proto-furries I guess. When I ran into them in later years they took pains to note that fur suiters were a different crowd. So maybe there's a hierarchy thing going on there too.

Oh, Jeeze.

This story is going to give "SciFi" enough fodder for a whole trilogy of shabby TV Movies.

RAPTOR VII: The Burrowing

When the $%#@ did we become the $%#@ing Soviet Union?

Instead of earnest attempts to be straight-up and do things right for a change, we get this stage-managed ass-covering spin.

The Ron Paul campaign should be paying Bush and company to keep it up; they're a perfect example of corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent government.

(No, I'm not a Ron Paul groupie.)

Yes he was, Moon. But Ironic Appropriation is the ultimate up yours. It's like slapping a Kick Me sign on the back of Darth Vader's cape.

The family gathers around the gleaming Chrifsmas Pot, and the youngest waves the Colander. In the corner, a favorite uncle is dressed as a pirate, guarding against the cold of winter.

Father hooks a strand from the pot, and bites. "Al dente, al dente!" he cries, "He is Ready!"

Well, about time! Between this and the Raytheon Pain Ray we'll finally be able to put those hippies and peaceniks and treehuggers and, well, everyone we don't like into their place.

Chrisfmas colors:

Marinara red and Alfredo beige

Chrisfmas decorations:

Silly string, painted styrofoam balls, illuminated light strings.

Chrisfmas dessert:

Red licorice whips, jawbreakers.

#3: Duh? FOX.

"The Medium is the Massage" is a hoot. An illustrated pop-culture version of McLuhan's dense prose works.

Inside is a picture of an egg with a logo printed on it, a technology that was apparently a predecessor of inkjet technologies.

There's a trippy record album roughly based on the book. Well worth looking for.

I'm having a tough time imagining what an "intelligent dialog" about an act of incredibly crass, ignorant, partisan lipflappery would be like.

I'm also having trouble imagining Beck's comments as something we merely "think" is mean.

The CIA agent who led one of those taped sessions is going to be interviewed on ABC. He said himself that he considers waterboarding torture.

He thought at the time that it was justified, but he's not so sure now. But he considers the technique torture.

Waterboarding is torture. Period. End of story.

Major brain fart / sign of vision problem:

When I saw the post's subject, I read it as:

Wired founder starts chocolate economy

And I figured that the little brown packet was going to be the unit of currency.

I think I need a vacation. Or maybe the prescription on these new trifocals is for shit.

Make one, Mark!

You could probably score the head at Goodwill.

It would be hard to get the shavings to come out of the mouth, but having them drip out of the neck would be almost as creepy.

LA Times gallery of photos from the front.

There's some really dramatic stuff in there.

Too bad you have to buy the coffins in an Economy Family Pack.

I once found, in a small kettle on a shelf in the family cabin^H^H^H^H^Hshack, a sad little mouse skeleton. It struck me that the shape was much like that of a medieval oubliette; mice fall in and can't get out.

I didn't like the sparkly special effects laid over the running motor. It obscured things.

#28: I'm surprised how bored that cat was with Pleo.

I'm pretty sure that my dog would gleefully chomp, shake, and disembowel Pleo. That's the fate of any animal-shaped toy she can get her jaws on. And almost the fate of a cat she got her jaws on. Canines have such different rules...

You know what really bites?

"Conservatives" and blowhard populist pundits will blame it on high taxes, Clinton, "welfare moms" and mexicans, and they'll get away with it. They'll convince everyone that Social Security has to be done away with, and that worrying about the environment is a effete liberal fad.

The bastards responsible for all this will sail through it while bitching about their account in the Caymans only earning 2%.

Once in a while, I drop by the "Goodwill Thrift Outlet" in Hillsboro, OR. It's a warehouse-like setting where stuff that didn't sell in Goodwill's thrift stores is dumped in bins and sold by the pound.

Occasionally, a cyber-pet turns up in the bin. Creepily lifelike animals (cats and dogs, mostly) with slightly unkempt fake-fur coats, lying stiff among the old phonograph records, broken Christmas ornaments, and orphaned jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

The introduction of faux-sapient pets like Pleo are going to make discoveries like that even sadder and creepier.

#9: James Lileks once described an encounter between his dog and a Aibo-knockoff robo-dog.

Live dog was very afraid of the robo-dog, but eventually sniffed it under its coiled faux-metallic tail. And looked _spooked_. Lileks suggested a human might get the same feeling from shaking someone's hand and discovering that their flesh is room temperature.

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#1: "How does John keep a straight face when telling these stories?"

Facial paralysis. It's a long story, involving a Tesla coil and the unnamed 701st Hobo.

I don't know if I'd call this DRM as a really stupid business model.

Take a look at the pudgy boy character in this photo. He has a propeller on his back; I believe that's a stack of toys on the shelf above his hand.

I mention this because I have a Soviet-era phonograph album with this character on the cover! I digitized the records (there were three of them) but haven't taken a picture of the cover yet.

Nice gallery, Daniel! I wonder how easy it was to actually get those products.

There's a fascinating film, "Goodbye Lenin," about the final days of Communism in East Germany and the months following as people gleefully adopt Western products and styles.

In it, a loyal busy-body schoolmarm witnesses her teenage son at a protest rally. The shock leads to a heart attack, which puts her into a coma. By the time she wakes, the GDR is gone and her kids have renovated their apartment, getting rid of the dowdy old furniture, enjoying new foods, and outfitting the grandkid in Pampers.

Mom's doctor warns that the slightest shock could kill the bed-bound woman, so the kids recreate the GDR in their apartment, desperately hunting for old communist-era products and faking bland, baloney-filled news broadcasts with a camcorder and a cardboard set.

Isn't totally ruling out studio shots limiting?

Maybe you can get some cool Googie diner to host segments where you sit down with people. Or build weird stuff. Building a robot on a diner table would rock.

I don't see any mention of the Rarebit Fiend film short.

It features a guy being chased through the streets by a giant animated lobster. Very freaky.

And, by gosh, there were SEVERAL Rarebit Fiend films made:

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q;=rarebit+fiend&x;=0&y;=0

According to imdb, McCay was involved with all of them.

"He noted that government employees face up to five years in prison and $100,000 in fines if convicted of misusing private information."

Uh, right. The key weasel word here is "misuse."

Creeps like Ministry of Information Director Kerr will see to it that legal uses will include anything they see fit to do.

#1: Oh, come on! These guys not only know about 1984, probably have wet dreams of being the rat wranglers for Room 101.

You may say to yourself "This is not my KONSUL!"

You may ask yourself "My God, where is my allen key?"

Cripes, that was seriously strange!

I bet these are a royal pain to keep clean.

Also, that Cruella DeVilla bidet is just totally in bad taste. What were they thinking?

That's good to hear. Bruce Sterling posted a list of ribbon winners and they sounded very interesting.

Offices have used florescent tubes for decades, and have time-tested procedure for dealing with old and burned out units:

Remove tube from fixture.

Carry to dumpster.

Drop tube in dumpster.

I'm surprised that the concern trolls that have come of the woodwork to freak over CFLs haven't mentioned that.

#7: Of course, there still could be currently secret passeges in there. Maybe connecting the bathroom and the shuffleboard deck.

Hey . . . MINI SUBMARINE POD! Maybe there's a secret silo with an escape rocket?

#37: Scoff if you wish, but those who follow NHS advice can at least claim they aren't full of sh*t.

Wow, no comments?

Anyway, nice episode! I like the day in the life of Santa.

Somewhere along the line, every advanced civilization invents the Holodeck, and that's the end of them.

No, seriously!

Zolf beat me to it.

Some attributes of western Christmas were repurposed for the New Years celebration.

The Santa-like fellow is "Grandfather Frost."

Many years ago, the Boys' Club in my town showed a bunch of Christmas cartoons. One of them was a Russian (well, Soviet!) film. It was about a boy who wanted to visit, or get gifts to, his father, who was stationed in an Antarctic base. Grandfather Frost showed up in a plane or rocket made of stardust.

My absolute favorite was inspired by, or inspired, the one Mark chose to illustrate the post:

http://www.mazaika.com/postcard/big/hny0470.jpg

I showed some friends this a few weeks back. One noted that the young cosmonaut's expression as he looked at the rabbit was looking awfully strange. "What's Russian for 'hassenpfeffer?'"

#9 "It's very depressing."

So . . . you're feeling blue too?

(Sorry.)

I think Mellowknees nailed it.

Silver as a antibiotic is a sort of chemotherapy. It worked . . . but then, so did the mercury cure for syphilis. (To use an extreme example.)

Some folks appear to be using it as a sort of vitamin, thinking it will boost their immune systems. (This was the reasoning of the Libertarian pol; he was worried about the collapse of medical care after Y2K and thought he'd make himself immune through silver treatments.)

I like that the person shown wearing them is a young dork wearing a tie on his head.

For extra fun, buy four boxes and outfit yourself as a many-breasted cat person.

" . . . it is illegal for any two animals to have sex in public , . . "

So a three-way would have been OK?

While you've been figuring this out, we've inserted a nanite meme-insertion complex into your brains. Earth will soon be ours.

Someone should port that to the Wii.

I mean, think about it.

Why was one Santa's face blurred out?

I'm figuring:

a) That Santa was shy and didn't give permission.

b) His or her face had some kind of obscene design on it.

For cripes sake. $49,000 will buy a college education.

The same site offers a pirate ship playhouse for $52,000.

How does that saying go? This stuff is for people with more money than sense.

It's been an awful long time (when was Worldcon in Orlando?) but I remember enjoying TCOP ironically.

I recall that the final set had a crummy Olivetti PC on it.

#8: Without googling: That's the code you enter in DEBUG to start the low-level format program on a Western Digital hard drive controller card.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers.

* * *

I'm going to guess that the video mode used is the present but never advertised 160 x 100 pixel, 16 color mode of the CGA card. I don't think BASIC supported it, so you had to use machine language tricks. There were a few games that took advantage of it.

If you put aluminum-foil stencils on your butt and thighs before sitting down on one of these, you could leave messages for the next customer!

Hmmm. In addition to letter stencils, you could make little phage diagrams.

I've (finally) started seeing PSAs explaining the digital turnover. Not bad, but they still have their jobs cut out for them.

I still have one analog set left. I plan on hooking it up to an antenna and watching the last broadcasts go off the air.

One thing is for sure:

This situation is going to turn up on an episode of CSI.

#27: A hidden room with a seated dummy wearing a hockey mask and a chainsaw in its lap would be even better.

This is next year's Christmas gift for my friends.

#8: Heh-heh, does the book have the strip about the little girl and the bunny watching clouds?

#7: Genetically engineered lemur people, who service the vast network of pneumatic tubes that link each desk in the airport skyscraper with the city's dry goods stores, banks, and tele-vision theaters.

Another thanks to Simon @ 6.

Why do people assume that everyone in the developing world is listlessly sitting by the side of the road with an empty bowl on their lap and flies walking on their faces?

You could make a good argument that a solar- rechargeable LED light could provide more economic benefits to more people, by allowing folks to do work and study after sunset, but if a charity was set up to distribute those, I'd donate to that too.

Me, I bought TWO XO laptops via the Give One/Get One program. To judge from the reaction of people at work to my sample, the manufacturer could sell dozens to my cow-orkers alone.

Oblig fiction reference: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, 1938, in which our universe turns out to be the Nth in an (almost) infinite series of steadily more perfect works of art.

So Vampira was inspired by the Chas Addams character who was later named "Morticia Addams!"

You could poke an eye out with that thing!

A hobo tried to light me on fire once.

Well, he might have just been a bum.

What J.Black said. Any fetish-tang is way overwhelmed by the techno-artisan aspects.

Great stuff! And there's a bonus appearance by Mark lurking in a doorway at 00:45.

OK, BBTV has now had all of the regulars except Cory in the anchor seat. Why ya camera shy D-man?

Is there an emoticon symbolizing a joke whizzing over someone's head?

Wow. You were lucky. We had to pretend we had a refrigerator box when I was a kid.

And that was so we could pretend we were in the cockpit of the Space Angel, so we could only move our lips.

#10: Hey, I like it!

MAKE Magazine should have mystery box contest. The boxes would do something -- whine, vibrate, move -- until opened.

What are its anti-zombie properties?

Urban gardeners are always fighting bugs, Takuan.

But now she can hurl them into the Gowanus Canal.

Good story.

I'm still not clear on why the European crowd bought Boris' kiosk . . . market research?

Is there a crust under there? Any cheese?

Maybe this should be referred to as a flattened gyro rather than a pizza.

A fitting tribute would be to hunt up old Wham-O TV commercials on YouTube and such.

Also, throw a Frisbee up on your roof.

"The" superball may be discontinued, but close replicas can be had in any dollar store.

I was just looking at the Wham-O site. "The Original Superball" is available.

Who came up with the notion that it was banned?

Cripes, that Wheelie Bar looks insanely dangerous.

* * *

The Wham-O site has a lot more than the Hacky Sack, Hulu Hoop, and Frisbee. Besides the Superball and Super Slide, there is all sorts of sports-related stuff.

Nothing really strange and geeky, though. It's kind of a jock toys outfit now. I doubt they'll every come up with an insanely popular fad toy again.

* * *

I think I remember the Wham-O slingshot. A sturdy Y-shaped wooden handle with slots to thread a really thick rubber band through.

Ah, yes, here it is:

Wham-O Slingshot

Both #4 and #17 creep me out, but #17 creeps me out far more.

Bert has been known to hang around with Osama Bin Laden.

According to his blog, SF author David Brin has some screen time during the series.

One of his novels (actually, a trilogy) is set on a colony world that was deliberately abandoned and its cities left to rot; the illegal current inhabitants have to live in a way that won't leave traces for future legal colonists to discover.

#8: Some Islamic nations require nanny goats to wear underwear, to cover up their naughty bits.

Makes you wonder if this is a) just some clerical authority taking things to a silly extreme, or b) a reaction on an actual problem.

#8: "Fuck art"

Yes, you can find plenty of that in Manhattan, but why ask for it here?

Joel is a great host, but I think both of those topics / visits deserve their a longer post of their own, with more introductory material.

Having just red Candy Freak, I wish I knew more up front about Candy Expo, for example!

Only eight years?

When was the early pre-blog BB started?

As I recall, the same 'card' provided an alphanumeric code reference for the area.

I think the standard of visual design and world building in SF film and TV is getting slowly better. Not consistently, but on average. There's an awful lot of geeks out there, and they're having an effect on what makes it on the big and little screen.

I remember, as a barely-teenager, being really offended by a detail in the movie version of Logan's Run. Logan, bored, tunes in the holographic girlfriend channel, and eventually chooses a chick who . . . walks out of the TV set. It's a teleporter, evidently.

Huh?

They have teleportation technology, but all they use it for is arranging one night stands?

Sloppy, sloppy!

Nowadays, you sometimes get neat, consistent stuff thrown into a film that's on-screen for mere seconds, but it helps set the mood. Like the cereal box in Minority Report that has animated characters running all over it.

That rocks!

William Gibson's poem "Agrippa" was originally printed as a limited-edition book that self-destructed as it was read.

I forget the details, but as I recall there was a printed version that smudged up and became unreadable, and a floppy disk version that scrolled the text past once and then scrambled itself. Of course, that version was swiftly hacked and the poem is now floating about the web.

Swanwick's bottle stories, despite being lower tech, seem much less hackable.

Manufacturer's coupons, which come in slick booklets bundled with (in my area) Sunday newspaper, are usually good for a month or two.

Coupons from specific grocery stores do indeed have a one week life.

Another "secret:" The two types of coupons are compatible. If you match up a store coupon and a manufacturer coupon, you can get some great deals. Especially if the store offers "coupon doubling."

Last fall, I took advantage of several great sales on cereal and a clutch of coupons. I ended up with three dozen boxes of cereal; average price, perhaps $1.50 a box. The shelf life of the stuff is a year or more, so why not? I'm down to a dozen boxes, and starting to collect coupons again.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

For a short time, mid/late 90s, I was painting stuff that looked good on a gaming table. Nowhere near show quality, but the characters had eyes and there was some shading and such. I'd steal unpainted plastic minis from classmate's monitors and desks and return them painted.

A few years later I thought I'd finish painting a a bunch of Star Guard minis, just so I'd have complete units to sell when I finally grew up and decided to shed all my geek stuff. And I couldn't even manage to meet my average efforts. My eyes and coordination had gone south.

Now I hear that most gamers don't paint at all anymore. They buy pre-decorated collector packs.

It's nice to see that some people still do their own.

Mark, is there any way to learn about Lollipopland without signing up (?) for this iGoogle thing?

What's the deal with that, anyway? Will the header show pictures from the series?

Another thumbs up for "Down and Out in London and Paris."

"Burma Days" is a total bummer, but a good antidote for revisionist trogs who think life in the Subcontinent under British rule was just peachy.

Getting dropped keys and coins out of that thing would be a total nightmare.

I bet it talks in an annoying, high pitched, juvenile anime-character voice.

Now trucks and vans will have to be built with a shiny anti-counterfeiting strip. And corporate logos will have to be changed every couple of years.

Or maybe law enforcement personnel can get some kind of special symbol, like a magical lens or something.

#10: In addition to getting guys over the border, there's the business of delivering them to various destinations once they're in country.

I just read a newspaper story about this side of the smuggling business. A broken license plate lamp led to a traffic stop, and the arrest of a bunch of illegal immigrants and a couple of "coyotes." The van had a delivery list . . . where each guy was heading.

Great poster!

Interestingly, many of the people calling about Babygirl aren't interested in adopting her, but in getting her extra limbs.

Mmmmm, cat legs.

Somewhere on Lilek's site are a series of cartoon-style adverts for a coffee substitute. Each strip shows an invisible, jet-pack-wearing demon tempting people into drinking too much coffee, turning them into short-tempered bastards.

After they switch to Postum (or whatever) and patch up their personal lives he flies off with a "curses, foiled again!" type exit line.

#28: Phlogiston.

Choose carefully; all proponents of the theory that loses will be condemned to scamper along that runway conveyor belt forever, BWAH-Hah-hah! FLY fools, Fly!

I was a little space nut (and, uh) and loved this sort of space tie-in stuff. My family used Tang on camping trips, but my mom thought (probably correctly) that Space Food Sticks were pricey junk.

However, I do recall a cousin and I polishing off a box of the butterscotch (?) variety during a car trip.

Bob's comparison to a slightly less chewy Tootsie Roll is pretty dead on from what I can remember.

Tolchocker beat me to it. $17.95 was pretty damn steep back then. Was this guy the equivalent of a Pleo . . . unaffordable unless daddy had deep pockets?

I know that things like chemistry sets and model railroads sets could be pretty pricey back in the day, but they had educational and hobby value.

A co-worker keeps a dozen or so laying hens. He claims that their egg shell color matches the color of their exposed skin (on legs).

He brings in the extras. Usually they go to paying customers who want fresh organic eggs. I've gotten a few dozen that were still around after a few days. As others have noted, they come in a variety of colors.

This story has been the basis of a "Law and Order" episode. DUHM-DUHM!

You know, you couldn't come up with a better name for an corpse-raiding bio-fraudster than Mastromarino if you tried.

#8: No, sorry. The unicorn died and . . . well, you don't want to know what they did with her horn.

Let's just say Dick Cheney's new dentures sure are golden and shiny.

#13: Maybe something to do with missing nutrients, or a miserable life in a sunless box?

Or maybe factory hens are bred to produce consistent product?

#19, #21: "It's alright to prick your finger, but never finger your prick!" -- George Carlin

Another thumbs up for Coraline. It's short, really well written, and can be enjoyed by young and old.

I was indifferent to Neverwhere. Well written, neat premise, but . . . I dunno, not my cup of baroque tea. I like American Gods quite a bit more, but still not a knock-out for me.

How far back to you have to go before you get primers that tell girls to wait things out in a hut in the woods? ("Bring plenty to read, catch up on your sampler, and don't bake any cakes.")

I can imagine the late-nights terrors of a kid given this book . . . waiting in dread for that fateful day when her eyes would turn into eerie spirals.

#2: I love sonipitt's description of the exercise.

I will pass on the advice given to my parents by a beatnik patron of my grandparents' restaurant, on seeing me when I was a few weeks old:

Raise her to be a death-ray repairwoman!

Congratulations!

I recall that there's a copy of the card on display in the Smithsonian Air & Space museum, with some other astronaut memorabilia.

I'd love to see a cutsey stuff-toy-rat version of this featured in CRAFT.

#6: No wonder they're hard to find these days!

New homes in the SWestern US should all be being built with cisterns.

But that one is fug-ugly. It looks like the ceiling has a horrible tumor.

I was manning a booth at the CES where WIRED had its second premiere (they were at an Apple conference the week before). We asked for and got a "dump" to give out copies of issue 1.1.

It was pretty darn mind blowing at the time. I grabbed about a dozen copies. I left some in the airplane magazine rack on the way home, some I mailed to friends.

I still have maybe a half-dozen copies, some still sealed in plastic.

Very late 60s' or even early 70s'.

My cousins had this game, although I never actually played it or saw it in operation. It came with a clear plastic face mask. It wasn't clear to me what use that was; wasn't the pie-ing supposed to be a surprise?

Ah, ok, reviewing the video cleared that up. You got behind the mask when your turn came up.

I think I remember another commercial, one where a whole family played and there wasn't an elaborate cardboard frame for the mask.

While I can believe this starch and fat pile is the least healthy, it's not the "worst" food. There are unhealthy foods that are also disgusting.

I remember, after maybe 24 years, a microwaveable hamburger -- the "Big 'Un" -- that I bought at 7-11. Loathsome, with bad quality chili and bad quality cheese and an unhappy gristly meat patty. I finished it only because I was desperately hungry poor college student.

And a "crispy" "spicy" "seafood" "wrap" that I bought at Long John Silver's. The "crispy" part came from 1" long rice crispy like bodies. The spicy part, a runny, caustic yellow-pink fluid. I managed to eat half of it, then threw the remainder out the car window. (I-79 on the way down to Pittsburgh.) I belatedly apologize for littering, and beg forgiveness from the Most High for the agonizing death the consumption of this wretched choad might have caused any unsuspecting wild critters that thought they'd lucked out when they found it.

Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, has for years been running war games with Lego pirate ships at conventions.

He recently announced:
"... I'll be spending a full day running a new Lego game that's not Pirates. It's SPACE Pirates, based on the Triplanetary movement system. Except the ships will be Lego!"

Comfort yourself in how safe we'll all be from . . . uh . . . how ahhh . . . hmmm.

You know, even if we can't sue or try the bastards, we should make the CEOs of these firms admit everything they've done to a national audience. And publish their home addresses so we can keep an eye on them and make sure they're safe.

Next thing it needs: A kitchen in a crate. Assume a sink, fridge, and range/oven.

The slick coupon booklets that come in the Sunday newspaper have, toward the rear where the rates are lower, advertisements for realistic doll babies. I always wondered who bought those things. Now I know.

(The supplements also have adverts for collector plates for various icky little dog breeds, and unbelievably tacky Thomas Kinkade religious kitsch.)

This reminds me a little of animal hording, but far less destructive to one's physical health and the cleanliness of one's home. And, of course, there's not animal suffering involved.

I dunno. If the tot's name was on a no fly list, I'm sure if it was for a reason. :-(

Bob the Angry Flower triumphs over the Pirates and Looters.

Wait, wasn't there going to be free ice-cream?

If you google around a bit, you can find on-line recipes for some of the dishes that Horn & Hardart put in automats. Also, a book full of automat trivia and more recipes.

My mom took my to an automat when I was a little kid. I don't remember what we bought, but it was for the novelty value, not because we were getting lunch. I do recall the sad little ceramic bowls of baked beans, and a coffee spigot shaped like a dragon.

The dispensers took actual coins at the time. A few years later, the NYC automats were reduced to tourist novelties and the machines took pricey tokens.

I visited my parents in Florida last week. I booked a frequent flyer program flight with a stopover and lots of waiting.

So, I brought my XO laptop ("One Laptop Per Child") with me, to check email and use as an ebook reader. I loaded it up with classic books from Project Gutenberg, and looked up how to turn off the WiFi so I could use it on the plane as well.

It was great. The screen, with the back lighting on, was brilliant and crisp. With the back lighting turned off, the text was perfectly clear and readable under the light of the planes' reading lamps. I read E.E. Doc Smith's Triplanetary and most of Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus with it in that mode.

The no-brainer network searcher found and connected the Orlando, Las Vegas, and Portland airports' free WiFi. I was able to check my AOL and Comcast email accounts. (The browser had trouble with my work email.) The keyboard is a bit too small for touch typing, but I knocked off three or four email messages as well.

And . . . folks . . . the thing attracts geeks like a cute baby in a stroller attracts cheek-pinching old ladies. I was approached by at least six people, on the plane and in the terminals, who were utterly entranced by the thing. I demonstrated it, let them fondle it, and explained the OLPC project. (One couple not only liked the computer, but photographed my home-made case.)

They all wanted one.

I'm considering stenciling LAPTOP.ORG on the case, so I can tell people where to find out more about the project and the XO.

There's a post on Bruce's blog with a longish video of Bruce and Jasmina examining an XO laptop and the OLPC project.

She thinks it would have been great to have during the siege and bombings several years back (sturdy and portable and power-frugal), and the educational equivalent of having a personal spaceship for poor kids. Bruce loves it as a gadget but had great doubts about its political acceptability.

Penn & Teller are not journalists; they're entertainers, and their show caters to an audience looking for a brand of entertaining truthiness that disses regulation of any sort.

You can find "experts" who can authoritatively support any position you pay them to.

I recall using one of these in either NYC or San Francisco. I don't recall any problems, but these units seem to generate controversy where ever they're installed or proposed because of the vandalism and misuse problem.

The real solution:

Old-style public restrooms, updated to be handicapped accessible and easier to clean, with an attendant to handle security and cleaning. You could put a community policing booth between the womens' and gents' wings. Yeah, it would cost money, but your city would be cleaner and more attractive to pedestrians.

Or why not bow to the inevitable and let companies introduce coin-operated privacy booths? No sanitary plumbing, just a dimly lit, self-cleaning place where junkies can shoot up and johns can get serviced. Then the pressure would be taken off of public toilets.

"They bring German Shepards (also in uniform) on their patrols with them."

Consequences of reading through bOING bOING story summaries too quickly:

I mentally conflated the previous story with this one, and for a moment imagined those German shepherds in a girl's school uniform. (Would that make the dogs more or less intimidating?)

Yeah, but because the value of the dollar is plummeting, that $3,000,000,000,000 isn't anywhere near as high a figure as it seems!

Hah, hah, our troops sure love their high-spirited fraternity-style hi-jinks! I bet the prisoners had fun too!

[/heartsick snark]

From Salon, a few years back:

Planet Autism

Mark, I wasn't able to view your Flikr set until I signed in. Also, I was told that these pictures of thrift stores and restaurants fell outside my filter limits! :-)

You might want to check the permissions / settings so more folks can enjoy them.

. . . in bed!

#17: "I've also found extra money in my pocket at the end of the week, so that's a bonus."

Dude. I put that there.

Now that you've kicked the soda habit and lost that weight, I'd like it back so I can help someone else.

Maybe the studio should put a slot in the fence labeled UNSOLICITED SCRIPT DEPOSIT.

The slot would very obviously feed into a heavy-duty paper shredder.

The shredded paper would then be laid out on the bottom of a large cage, labeled UNSOLICITED SCRIPT EXAMINATION DEPARTMENT, which is full of piglets.

The XO comes with a single (folded) instruction sheet, much of which shows how to open the unit.

I hope John Rogers reads this, and writes a script about mall ninjas.

One of my college friends is having his ninth birthday today. His wife is putting on a Star Wars themed kiddie-party, with an R2-D2 cake and a Death Star pinata.

In a few years, his son will have had more birthdays than he . . .

Just two photos? Is there a link missing? (Well, there's a link to the map-it thingie, but no Flickr group or what-not.)

There is no God.

It's been years since I've been to an SF convention, but I recall that centaurish creatures were a subset of furry art. Maybe inspired by those John Varley novels set on Saturn's artificial moon?

I never understood the attraction / fascination.

As for the car, shouldn't they find a way to take advantage of those two extra feet? Selectively breaking right and left wheels for added control, maybe?

Oh, I remember fuxes. Because each author was free to fill in the details, the stories in the collection had all sorts of slightly different variants on them and the other aliens.

Little known fact:

Frederick Pohl wrote a whole novel (JEM) set on a slightly-changed version of Medea.

Wow, great stuff! Especially part II.

Ahhh, fuck. I knew he had health problems, but god damn.

Rob Cockerham should have his own TV show. Or guest spots on BBTV

Back in Jr. High School (~1978), I carefully wrapped my D&D; books (the original three-brown-book set) with paper covers, so I wouldn't have to explain what the hell they were if someone saw me reading them.

The notion of a game you played with pencils and paper and in your imagination was so totally out there that I knew no one would understand. (Being interested in reading was bad enough.)

Now, not only is D&D; a household word, but a significant portion of the population has played RPGs, if only the computerized kind.

Gygax & Arneson's creation has truly battled its way into popular culture.

What's the saving throw vs. venereal maladies?

Another blog?

Uh . . . Mark? How many of you are there? Does cloning hurt?

#11: No, hip geeksters!

Hey, Donkey, Koford has a casting call out for a sequel to his latest documentary. Why don't you go for it?

#21 "Who would actually buy fake viagra from a spam email?"

People with wood in their heads instead of their pants?

As an early Boing Boing contributor, I claim Chief Winkie Guard (the one who says "You . . . you killed her!" and "Hooray for Dorothy!" and "OH-EEEH-Oh, Oh-EEEEEH-Oh!").

A friend just pointed me to:

Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against!

by Ulrik Pilegaard

"It just may be impossible to exhaust the creative potential of LEGO bricks. With an active imagination as your guide, there are endless possibilities-provided you follow the LEGO Company's official (and sensible) rules. This means no cutting or tampering with bricks, creating models that shoot unapproved projectiles, or using non-standard parts with any LEGO product. After all, those little precision-molded ABS bricks can be dangerous in the wrong hands! Well, toss those rules out the window.

Forbidden Lego introduces you to the type of free-style building that LEGO's master builders do for fun in the back room. Using LEGO bricks in combination with common household materials (from rubber bands and glue to plastic spoons and ping-pong balls) along with some very unorthodox building techniques, you'll learn to create working models that LEGO would never endorse. Try your hand at a toy gun that shoots LEGO plates, a candy catapult, a high voltage LEGO vehicle, a continuous-fire ping-pong ball launcher, and other useless but incredibly fun inventions.

Once you get into the spirit, you'll want to try inventing your own rule-breaking models. Forbidden Lego's authors, share tips and tricks that will inspire you and help you turn your visions into reality. Nothing's against the rules in this book!"

American Science & Surplus used to sell a replica coyote skull for under $20. (Other places still sell them, for a lot more.)

I had one on my desk for a few years. I never thought of "hacking" or decorating it.

#10: Yes, there's a link on the linked-to site which says just that.

Great little video. Very dry but funny.

Teller did several pieces for National Public Radio years ago.

Sam:

If Vin Diesel gets in there, so should Stephen Colbert and Patton Oswalt.

Have you seen the Geek Hierarchy?

http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchart.pdf

I saw a "Father Ted" in which a really, really low-rent carnival visits the village. Pretty funny.

"even when I haven't been drinking milk"

Cool . . . if you can outfit your nostrils with a nipple you can take a turn at nursing duty!

The Areas of My Expertise rocks. And he does the 826 storefront stuff too? Neat.

Oye . . . I'd expect that noise from, I dunno, a suspiciously ill-maintained Soviet-era thrill ride found in a carnival touring rural Estonia.

One with chipped paint and scary characters to sit on.

My solution to Too Many Books is Powell's. They give me money. Or store credit.

For a while, I was carefully picking up and evaluating all of the PCs discarded in my apartment complex. People throw away a lot of working computers. Alas, most are so old that even the local computer recycle / reuse program will only scrap them. Now I only pick out the truly useful machines. (And sometimes they are amazing finds, like the box I turned into a MythTV system.)

#8: A wench is a serving woman; she has a job other than providing sexual services. For a tart, that's her career.

The 21st century is going to require frequent New Sin updates.

Remember that BB story about "people" in Second Life having virtual sex with unicorns in order to give birth to virtual pet unicorns? That's gotta be a sin to these guys. (Maybe not as bad a sin as actual sex with a unicorn, which won't be happening without some serious advances in genetic engineering.)

#3: You forgot boot camps for the offenders.

[crotchety old geezer voice]
Fah! Back in my day we trained on CLAYTABLETIAC.
[/crotchety old geezer voice]

Yeah, I hate when that happens.

So . . . how long before this gets adapted for CSI, ER, or Law & Order?