Not only a little dangerous for pedestrians...check out the photo of the cockpit. There isn't a padded surface in sight. But it's and undeniably cool machine.

Takuan,

My point was that it's not a keffiyeh. I can't walk up to Rachel Ray and ask her, but I don't need to, because it's obvious. I wrote my comment because comments like 16,17,31,32,49, and 51 seem to accept the ridiculous notion that Ray's scarf is a keffiyeh. But as I look back over the comments, it's clear that the overwhelming majority do not accept Malkin's claim. I particularly enjoyed learning paisley's link to Scotland from #8.

So can someone clarify if the girly, fringed, paisley scarf Ray is sporting even qualifies as a keffiyeh? It doesn't look much like the garments you see in pictures of Palestinians to me, other than the two-toned color scheme...but many of the comments here seem to assume that it is a keffiyeh.

"Night Soil" --learn something new everyday. I'm such a pampered westerner.

Newspaper story says:

"There is, in fact, no city law that bans the display of male chests. In fact, the exact same image can be spotted -- with nipples aplenty -- on Lynx buses.

Comparing the two pictures is like playing a disturbing game of "Spot the Differences."

What happened, said a similarly uncomfortable city spokesman, Carson Chandler, was that city staffers asked the WWE and folks to create banners that weren't too provocative. And somewhere along the way, the nipples were airbrushed out before the giant sign reached Orlando.

Yes, airbrushed . . . which at least means they didn't involve hubcap-sized pasties."

Here's the link to the original newspaper story linked to by the blog Where's My Jetpack, which was linked to by the blog Sociological Images, which was referenced by the blog Boing Boing:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/custom/wrestling/orl-maxwell2808mar28,0,3325425.column

For those who missed Jeff Kay's experiment documenting fast food products (ad photos vs his photos), it's amusing. The "KFC Famous Bowl" is the worst offender:

http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

"Collectors aren't the one's determining value or greatness, especially not just by investing."

That brings up another interesting point...when Crumb and his peer group got into collecting 78s, it was still a hobby that required little cash and more sheer dogged determination, combing through thrift store bins, going door to door in Black neighborhoods looking for the old people who had records they hadn't played in decades, etc. I know Harry Smith had done the same thing 15 years before, but his Anthology of American Folk Music didn't, by itself, create a big market for old 78s from the 20s/early 30s. The collectors like Crumb in some ways did determine value/greatness simply by listening to stuff otherwise regarded as quaint trash and inspiring record labels like Yazoo to reissue it. It wasn't about wealthy people distorting a market with their questionable tastes, it was more about nerdy hippy types rediscovering forgotten masters and restoring them to circulation. That is in a way determining value, though not by leveraging large sums of cash.

"CRUMB calling other people "maladjusted"? hello, pot, collect phone call from kettle..."

Ah, what makes you think Crumb isn't critiquing himself along with his fellow record collectors? Read any random Crumb comic and you'll see he's his own harshest critic.

And though he does mention art collectors, he seems mainly to be making generalizations here about vinyl and shellac record collectors, not people buying up metal lunchboxes from their youth or vintage cars or what have you.

Every collecting specialty, from stamps to guns to Beanie Babies, seems to attract a slightly different personality type, broadly speaking. Pre-War record collecting is a world Crumb knows very well...I'm sure he's been in a few of those basement rooms full of rare blues, country, and pop 78s from the 1920s/early 30s, and analyzed the characters he meets in them and at collector gatherings.

"how can he copyright his voice? Lots of people sound like he does....That fact that other people exist to make a commercial with a guy who has a voice similar to his, sort of disproves his whole argument."

It's not as black and white as you indicate. Tom sued Frito Lay for creating a work so similar to his own "Step Right Up" in both form and sonic texture that an average listener might reasonably assume that the work was by Tom and that Tom was thus tacitly endorsing Frito Lay. And the issue is trademark/"right to publicity", not copyright.

That said, I'm not sure how I feel about sound-alike lawsuits and "stylistic trademarks," because they can end up stiffling speech and creativity. Everyone, including Waits, steals from/"pays tribute" to those who came before.

I wonder if Frito Lay had shown onscreen, say, a fat black man delivering the lines, and thus clearly disassociated the pitchman from Waits, if it would have allowed Frito Lay to win the lawsuit? These things are hard to draw lines around.

Buckley came in for some posthumous criticism from at least some on the right, too. Mickey Kaus, quoted below, dredged up the following...

"And now for another view of William F. Buckley: Since Buckley can no longer defend himself, it seems bad karma to even link. But try to stop reading it. The ruptures on the Right over immigration long predate John McCain, it turns out."

http://www.vdare.com/pb/080228_buckley.htm

Fashion designers have been making a lot more noise in the past couple of decades about copyright and "lost revenue" due to low-priced knock-offs (not trademark-infringing fake merchandise, but knockoffs marketed under other brand names). Slate ran a pretty good piece on this in 2006:

http://www.slate.com/id/2137954/

Here's the crux of the argument made by the author, Henry Lanman (should appeal to Creative Commons proponents, methinks:

"It is also fair to ask, though, whether fashion's current freewheeling system helps even those it sometimes hurts—that is, whether those designers who are occasionally copied are also themselves frequently copiers—and whether this open system ends up producing a more robust creative market than could exist in a regime with stringent design protection.

Given the unusual role played by status and exclusivity in fashion, this may actually be the case. Kal Raustiala, a law professor at UCLA, suggested in the New Republic Online that, because much of the appeal of high fashion for those who are able to wear it is the mere fact that others can't, free copying may not be a bad thing for the industry. As Raustiala put it, "Once a style ends up on ordinary suburbanites getting on the 5:45 to Asbury Park, fashionistas want nothing to do with it. Indeed, they've already moved on—to the next look." The fact that cut-rate manufacturers can freely copy designs, the argument goes, reduces the time it takes for those highbrow designs to show up on the 5:45, which in turn makes early adopters move on to the next new thing. And the quick repetition of the cycle benefits all in the business."

@RigVeda

"Is it a blogging site with classifieds or a discussion board with other informative / interesting features?"

It's neither. It's a directory of, uh, hold on a sec, oh yeah, a directory of Wonderful Things.

I think it's the only directory of its kind on the Internet (though other directories do exist, such as http://directory.google.com). But blogging and discussion are involved, definitely, inasmuch as they help illuminate the Wonderful. Hope that clears up some of your confusion.

A lot of guys must be bummed that this skill, which they no doubt worked very, very hard to master, has been made obselete:

"Calling a phone sex line"

I believe the particulars involved the custom grips and unique postures required to successfully manipulate the various pieces of equipment required for these transactions. This wasn't just dialing Granny to say hello, after all.

He is very 'Dwight K. Schrute'. On the other hand, there was that Omaha, Nebraska mall rampage that left 9 dead last December. But...he's VERY Dwight K. Schrute.

When did the Expositions/World's Fairs project jump the shark (in North America)? I submit the 1974 Spokane fair because I'd never heard of it, it looks underwhelming in the articles about it online, and by the time the 1982 Knoxville fair rolled around, the United States was clearly bored with the concept.

Tobias Wolff’s 'Bullet in the Brain' is a great little short story that was also read on This American Life several years ago. I can see it making it's way into lots of college and high school literary anthologies (if it hasn't already) because it's quick, vivid, and has a little zinger at the end (not exactly an O'Henry ending, but a memorable ending). I'm not a dedicated fiction reader by a longshot, and this is the third time the story has come across my path in the years since it's publication. I'll have to listen to T. Coraghessan Boyle read it, though I think it's better appreciated on the page.

But nobody could foresee the AMC Pacer, ABBA, Chico and the Man, feathered hair, leather daddies, or bowls full of cocaine on the coffee tables of America.

At Slashdot yesterday, there was a discussion about ISPs (Time Warner in particular) moving toward Per-Gygabyte pricing, and how this might affect kind souls who leave their wifi networks open.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/05/1322213

Hey, here's a piece of ephemeral video from Black America circa late 1930s...it's a quick color clip of Cab Calloway (in red swim trunks!) diving into a pool in Raleigh, NC

http://videos.newsobserver.com/index.php?a=player&id=1671944

That is so much cooler than a youtube video illustrating the same thing. I wish the "web photo comic" would catch on, as least as a supplement to all this crummy (and usually unnecessary) flash video that has overtaken the web. Maybe even certain boingboing tv topics could get this treatment...

I guess he also goes by (went by?) "Cory Linden". That's how he's named in the article linked to. The Lindenlab company bio page does list him as Cory Ondrejka, so I'm assuming that's his legal name. Anyway, I'd never heard of him so it was confusing to me.

'More noise please!' as Steven Jesse Bernstein said.

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~zealots/sjb/noise.html

Cory, you and a million other people use "showstopper" as a synonym for "deal breaker".

It's an interesting instance of a word starting out with one meaning and ending up with an opposite meaning.

I'm still hanging on to the definition of showstopper as something wonderful, a performance so powerful that the resulting applause literally stops the show? In technology circles, it seems to only mean something so horrible that it scuttles a transaction.

I guess this is grammar day on BoingBoing, in light of the comments on today's RIAA thread on the misuse of "begs the question" (which I was completely ignorant of!).

Scandalous!

I...I bet they didn't run that clip in my native Southland.