Note a small but important change of wording in the post-surgery video: the reporter says "the little boy WHO HAS HARDLY SLEPT since the day he was born"...she doesn't say "never" slept. I still bet I'm right: that he lapses into an open eyed sleep-like state occasionally, long enough to keep him from dying but not enough to live normally.

I don't think the family or the doctors are mis-led, I think this is engneered by the news organization.

I think the news station saw the huge potential pageview difference between "LOCAL BOY SLEEPS VERY RARELY AND POORLY", and "LOCAL BOY NEVER SLEEPS". If they'd been scrupulously honest and gone for the former, there'd be no BB thread about it, now would there? All the news stories have been very brief and very, very vague about how exactly the malformation causes him to "not sleep". I suspect that's because a full explanation would make the condition seem far less freakish, and thus far less interesting.

Brief news stories are known for gross oversimplification, especially in cases where an incredibly rare and complicated medical problem is being described. I would bet that it's not strictly, literally true that the kid "never sleeps".

BUT, is it possible that, when he does sleep, the kid never lies down still and sleeps like most humans? Maybe he only sleeps while walking around/talking, etc, and sleeps far less than one generally needs. Perhaps instead of lying down and conking out he merely lapses into periods of an open-eyed sleepwalking/sleeptalking state?

That would explain both the alleged "not sleeping" for three whole years, the abrupt changes in personality and mood, plus it explains why he would need someone awake and watching him round-the-clock.

Holy crap, is boingboing monitoring my life?? I am reading this right now. Even if it wasn't assembled out of sentences from British women's magazines of the 1950's it would still be brilliant, it's the uncensored screenplay Hitchcock never got to write. The story is sort of a cross between "psycho" and "strangers on a train".

In some places you can tell by the typeface that he's pulling whole paragraphs out of articles or "true romance" fiction stories almost intact. I would love to read the source material--there seem to be a few definite themes: descriptions of terrible car accidents, ads for pork sausage, and tips on how to avoid ruinous passions during courtship that can derail a woman's chance for happy marriage.

And somehow he manages to make a totally perverse cross-dresser murder-mystery out of it. So cool and fun. It's all cut and pasted, down to the page numbers. I'm amazed that it only took him five years to assemble.

one year the senior prank at my (boarding) school was the "kidnapping" of the headmaster's twelve year old son, with the kid's gleeful help and consent. They spirited him into a dorm room, gave him pizza, and hid him in a closet when adults came by. I think he even stayed in the dorm overnight before giving up the ruse. He was in my graduating class, and considered his "kidnapping" to be, hands down, the awesomest weekend of his whole life. His parents had no clue where he was for 24 hours. They were pissed, but no one even got a detention.

Try that now and you'd go to prison.

I'm sad that someone else beat me to the Space Merchants/Chicken Little reference.

The best part is that if they succeed in making an actual "La Gallinita", all we'll need are some dog whistles and then we'll have a place to hold our secret revolutionary meetings.

anybody ever eaten Quorn? they call it "mycoprotein", aka, a vat-grown fungus.

I saw an onstage interview with Komar and Melamid years ago, after seeing a short doc about the most wanted/unwanted paintings project. They are hilarious. They also pointed out that there's a big difference between "most hated" and "least wanted".

Anytime anyone mentions labor day I get the Most Unwanted Children's Choir as an earworm.

Laaaabor day! Laaabor daaaayyy!!

This book is packaged shrink-wrapped. In our store we take the plastic off a sacrifice copy and let people put their grubby fondling hands all over it. then they buy the pristine wrapped copy. everyone's happy.

When my grandfather was five years old, in the 1920's, he went to Coney Island with his older brother and they got separated. My grandfather wandered around lost for a while, and eventually a man noticed him and asked if he was lost. When he said he was, the man asked, "do you know how to get home on the subway?" my grandfather said, "sure!" The guy gave him a nickel. And my five-year-old grandfather got himself home to Brooklyn from Coney Island on the subway.

Judging from the man's reaction, I'm assuming it wasn't unusual, or that big a deal, for a kid to do something like that. However, history has not recorded the hiding that the allegedly "in charge" older brother got for losing a 5-year old on Coney Island.

We grew up hyper-sheltered and protected, asthmatic and allergic to everything as a result. My brother's kid is free-range, spends half her day playing with bugs and lizards behind the shed. But they live in Australia where free range kids are the rule rather than the exception. It's a great thing, and inspiring to me.

I lost my big toenail as a direct result of the insane crowd at a Gogol Bordello show. The tiny chick in front of me kept pogo-ing directly on my sneakered foot in boots with, like, wooden heels.

But watching Eugene Hutz crowd-surf while standing on a big bass drum made the toe grossness more than worth it.

Eugene Hutz as co-star, and the wall to wall Gogol Bordello soundtrack, is the only reason to watch "Everything Is Illuminated".

Seeing 2001 *in* 2001, on a massive screen, in a massive theatre in Times Square that literally did not have more than 15 people in it, all of us clustered in the middle of the 2nd and third rows:

That was the experience that made me love the movie. IMHO, if you haven't seen it on a screen larger than your apartment, you haven't seen it.

A relative of mine is a psychiatric nurse who once had a voluntary patient who exhibited no symptoms whatsoever. Eventually he confided that he wasn't crazy at all, he was just hiding from rogue CIA agents he'd somehow pissed off.

Unlike a normal delusional person, he didn't write 100-page treatises or talk for hours about his "delusion". If pressed about why he was in hiding, he would simply say he wasn't at liberty to discuss it. In other words, he behaved exactly like a man hiding from rogue CIA agents by pretending to be crazy would behave.

My relative, for the first and last time in her long career, came to believe that the guy was probably legit, he really was hiding from somebody. The reality was so improbable that it was automatically assumed to be delusional.

I suggest trying this trick the next time you're being chased by rogue CIA agents.

My grandfather (90 years old) is constantly asking me to "come over and fix the goddamn email": he would love to be able to use email, but for some reason the entire interface completely confounds him. He's never been able to send or check an email without me over one shoulder giving instructions. He can read his bookmarked websites (god bless you, History Channel) but can't "do the email" or "the google" to save his life.

Now it's "come fix the goddamn cell phone". The buttons are too tiny for him to push, he can't see the screen or hear the ring tones, the scrolling menus and things are all too much. This looks perfect. And to the commenter above who worries that the elderly person would be insulted: at least in this case I know he wouldn't be. His reaction will likely be "finally! a phone that a NORMAL person can figure out, without all the goddamn crap!"

next someone needs to design a browser and email client that also has a stripped-down, big-button interface.

Don't forget the Plan Toys "Chubbie".
Makes interesting sounds and encourages manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. (snort)

If your Doll Family lives in a Doll House, does it then follow that you keep your Ethnic Family in an Ethnic house?

Remember a couple years back, there was a multiple murderer/carjacker/jail escapee who turned himself in after a night of talking about Jesus with a woman he was holding hostage. All of that is true. It ALSO happened to be true that she was a drug addict who shared her meth stash with him.

What I'm saying is, it's within the realm of possibility that a total douchebag also did something good for a mugger. Or, that he's exaggerating and the real truth is somewhere in the middle.

# 8:
You're thinking of the Ed Rosenthal case. The state gave him permission to grow medical pot. The feds, angered that they let him do it, swooped in and charged him with multiple felonies, and disallowed the jury from hearing that he had state permission to grow the pot for medical use. When the jurors found out after the trial, they were livid, and said in many public forums they would not have found him guilty if they'd been told the truth. After two trials and many appeals, he eventually served one day in jail.

And more coverage from here, case was dismissed last year as "vindictive prosecution":

"Rosenthal was recently re-indicted after his 2003 conviction was overturned in April 2006 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After finding out that medical marijuana evidence had been excluded from the 2003 trial, a majority of the jurors that convicted Rosenthal recanted their verdict. Rosenthal was sentenced to just one day in jail. The government was relying on the new charges of tax evasion and money laundering to justify the second prosecution of Rosenthal. The court has now confirmed that this continued prosecution is suspect."

There's your precedent, and here's another in Texas. My guess is that marijuana laws are going to start falling like dominoes after this.

Wow it's a good thing that shirt's a turtleneck!

And it's also great that the sale of this garment has nothing at all to do with overblown fears following a mass mall stabbing in Japan recently!

WAAAAIT a sec...!!

Check out all the human emotions and judgments attributed to the squidlove that NO ONE HAS EVER ACTUALLY SEEN: male squids are "amorous", females are perhaps "not keen" or "irate", and the males "accidentally" injected themselves, and their smallness is referred to as "inferior size."let's parse this out: the small males with giant penises have to "violently" inseminate enormous angry females while keeping their junk away from the scary "chomping beaks": I think we just learned a lot more about the mating habits of squid scientists than the actual squids.

we looove to anthromorphize teh critter secks, but who KNOWS what the hell is goin' on in those squidbrains and what the hell they're trying to do down there.

As an asthmatic dependent on breathing aerosol chemicals out of canisters in order to live, I would totally buy the one of the inhaler superimposed with I LOVE THE MODERN WORLD. That is, if I didn't have to spend several thousand dollars a year on inhaler prescriptions.

This is the best possible thing that could have happened for this guy's career, because the book SUCKS. Fuck you, TSA, for making a bestseller out of something that should have immediately sunk out of sight.

(And, not that it matters in any way, but he ain't no faggot, he spends much of the book talking about all the chicks he's banged.)

My favorite part of the book, actually, is the interview with his mother in the back. Because imagine what it would be like to have Britney Spears or Paris Hilton as your mother, only more British-- and you have Mrs. Horsley, admitting she was wasted drunk and partying throughout her pregnancies. I'd read a book by HER before him.

put an actual toilet camera in the Ritual Coffee Roasters bathroom and all you'd see is dude after dude stuffing his skinny jeans, adjusting his fedora, waxing his rollie fingers 'stache, then practicing his "I swear I'm just here to work on my novel, not to check out chicks or surf myspace" face.

the *blog* is NSFW (which is why it says "contains adults-only material", natch) but the flickr page is totally SFW and sweet.

I think there are probably plenty of valid criticisms about how he's chosen to do business...BUT. Keep in mind: If he hadn't bought them, they would have gone in the trash. End of story. The reason why comics/baseball cards/stamps even HAVE collectible value is because the majority of people throw them in the trash.

The options were either: the family gets Chuck's $1800, or the family throws it out and gets $0. If he was really unscrupulous, he could have done what Emily says: told them the stuff was worthless and taken it off the curb on trash day.

Bicycles then?

I've only known one person who tried to ride a bicycle through Hunter's Point. He emerged with a broken eye socket and no bicycle.

I also once experienced a rock fight *inside* a moving SF Muni bus, with kids throwing rocks and other objects both at fellow passengers and at people on the street. Holy shit. So scary.

For years there have been occasional incidents of kids getting SHOT riding buses through the wrong gang territory on the way home from school. Only NOW are they proposing that cops ride the buses? My theory: it's only because the new buses are expensive enough to warrant protection. Not because they care about riders.

San Francisco solution: ignore rampant crime in the southern half of the city. Fail to solve most murders, create jobs, or build livable housing for the poor. Wait until some white people over by the park are late for work because kids in Hunter's point shut off the buses, then, ZOMFG NATIONAL NEWS!!

@21: THANK YOU for noticing that this flowchart is a total bite of Chris Onstad's Achewood flowcharts.

Nah, I don't buy it.
PKD has spoken, for 30-odd years, to stoners, acid casualties, schizophrenics, and disaffected teenagers. Which sounds like a perfect storm of prospective book thieves to me.

On top of that, for the past two decades there's been a major hollwood film based on a PKD book every couple years, which does a hell of a lot more to spark interest in a book than anything Jonathan Lethem says. To say there's been a rediscovery would mean he was "lost" at some point, and really he never was.

Or even more to the point: what if the house already smells like noxious smoke?

It still seems like the other alarms for deaf people that already exist (beds that shake violently and/ or strobe lights) would work better.

I know, beastmouth, you think he would have been proud.

/dick jokes

I work at an independent bookstore. That list of the most-stolen stuff sounds fairly accurate to me, (we have a special Hank section up front, too) as does the clueless behavior of the would-be thief. We had a guy come in, ask where he could find Philip K. Dick books, and then cheerily saunter out five minutes later, setting off the alarm. He sheepishly removed three Dicks from the front of his pants, gave them back, and ran away.

We are an old, eccentric beloved indie bookshop in our city. And I would bet that we get hit by shoplifters far more often than the big corporate chains. Everybody who grew up in the neighborhood has a story about stealing from us when they were kids. Every now and then we get an anonymous letter in the mail that has a few bucks tucked in it, apologizing for a theft 10 or 20 years ago.

Borders-type stores are designed as panopticons, with clear sight lines down all the aisles, cameras everywhere, and sensors in all the books. (If you go in a bookstore and they *don't* do a bag check: smile, you're on camera.) They have full time employees who do nothing but loss prevention. Plus if they catch you they will certainly prosecute.

Our store has weird nooks and crannies, comfortable spots to sit and read for hours, and no cameras. We generally treat customers like people instead of potential criminals. Unfortunately, our reward is that we get fucking reamed by shoplifters. Doubly reamed, since we also have to pay more per copy for books than chain stores do, because we buy in much smaller quantities. Most of the thieves just steal for personal use, and justify it by saying we asked for it by not installing cameras. Following that logic, we are all free to commit any crime we want anytime we are not being surveilled, I guess.

If you need to steal a book, steal it from a chain store. I'm also in favor of stealing textbooks from campus stores. Textbook pricing is absolutely unconscionable. Borders and your college are not going to be driven out of business by the theft--it's a victimless crime. But stealing from a beloved neighborhood indie bookstore just makes you a douchebag, and makes the world a little bit colder.