Wise men say only fools rush to blame the Great Fire on the Christian minority.

Wow. That point about the TV channels is crazy - will have to check if any of those uniform light changes actually made it into the movie.

Wait a second: why is Ian Banks offering commentary on Ian M. Banks' Culture novels?

#20: Beat me to it! I walked past that shop every day on the way to work for years.

#28: There's an alternate Kiss logo which is used in Germany to avoid legal issues. Compare this with this.

Only 106 short now, although imagine with all of the doubling up and the like he's been well over the twenty-six grand mark for a while.

The thread gets pretty meta once random people start hawking their "low-cost solutions" to this issue and posting dodgy links (I know there's a colloquialism for this practice but it eludes me at the moment).

In all seriousness, as a vaguely moral being with at least an ounce of scruples and dignity I've no idea if this is common practice in spamming circles, but it looks frakkin' hilarious from the outside.

Am I the only one who knows these dudes? Rafi and Dallas write two of the best hip hop blogs out there.

It's like the "fist in jar of mayo" sound from South Park, with a slightly more sodden undertone.

Fantastic stuff - looking forward to the next installments.

Allen-related dickery aside (I categorically refuse to set foot in the EMP), the SFM gave me plenty to drool over: the Queen Alien/Powerloader stand-off, plenty of Blade Runner props, and loads of original Golden Age manuscripts. Ackerman's lent plenty of his collection to the museum, so it's not just one mega-rich Boomer's idea of what SF is. Like Artbot says, what more would you want?

Keeping up with Stross' output is exhausting. He's writing them faster than I can get to them, but I've yet to be let down by anything I've picked up (although I'd really love to see a third Eschaton book soon!).

Oops. "are any worse".

#5 & #6: No one's saying that the people who did this aren't any worse than the examples you cite. People are upset because Ian's music had a substantial impact upon their lives and his legacy being disrespected in such a callous manner bothers them. This coverage this story's getting isn't any more incongruous than that given to any other story about any aspect of an artist's life apart from their work itself.

It's all about Motörhead's "Killed By Death" for me.

99.75, eh? During a brief stop-over in Vienna, I found a memorial dedicated to "the brave Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to liberate Austria". Seemed a tad disingenuous.

I'm imagining things took a turn for the better once Professor X hired a more capable PR firm.

Bibliobliterophilia?

I used to work at a recycling depot, where local libraries would drop off books that had become too damaged or that were leftover after their sales. It was my job to rip off the covers (in the case of hardcovers) and chuck them into a giant grinder.

I ended up taking home anywhere between two and ten books a day, and was able to find plenty of good homes for ones I already had (and yes, I remember at least two copies of "Farenheit 451" coming through), but I'd be lying if I didn't get a perversely potent charge out of reducing the innumerable copies of Ayn Rand paperbacks that came through to confetti.

#10: Alright, who gave Rob Liefeld a job in genetic engineering?

I've never been duped into opening one of these, but on one occasion I did get some legitimate news I was both unaware of and very interested in via these subject lines: the reunion of My Bloody Valentine.

#10: You must not have gotten out of Vancouver proper very often during your stay, then. I grew up in the Fraser Valley and hunting trips were (and remain) commonplace there (albeit not for me).

PS: Not to be a wet blanket, but given the region's recent issues with dismemberment related murders, I'm perturbed that someone from the area thought that the discovery of another foot would be hilarious. I'll cop to having laughed at some of the puns that have cropped up in these threads, and I can see why outside media's treating this as a "news of the weird" story, but still...

In addition to sending a letter to Prentice, I sent an e-mail to Angus encouraging him to keep pursuing the issue in parliament. I'm not sure that he needs much encouragement given the coverage C-61's received, but rephrasing "what the hell's the deal with this bill" as "I'm concerned about copyright legislation and I vote" can't hurt.

PS: "Let the market decide"? Then why on earth would we ever require any legislation regarding standards for products sold in Canada? Malware on the new Hip CD? The market'll sort it out. Lead paint on children's toys? Someone'll put together a boycott eventually.

I'll second what Pipenta wrote. I'm actually trying to wrangle both Murphy and Emshwiller into my thesis right now. Boing Boing is normally a guilt-free bastion of procrastination, but this reminds me of what I'm actually supposed to be doing right now...

The variant on this that was done at my school involved staging a gory car wreck just outside the front door, then announcing it as fact over the PA with a stern caution to remain inside and not go gawk at it - the thinking being that we'd do just the opposite. However, all but two or three kids stayed inside. I guess we were all decent-mannered Canucks with no desire to rubberneck at someone else's pain.

Some songs have a special meaning for a man in regards to a woman, but this can backfire because maybe the song had deeper meaning to begin with, but now it's been cheapened. "We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a better life so let's keep on givin'." "Remember that song, baby? The night I fucked you in the pet cemetery? That's our song!"
-Mitch Hedberg

Robbie Alomar gets a "thank you" credit at the end...for having his rookie card prominently displayed?

Pyros: Graveyard advertising (amongst other tacky angles) was once attempted by video game developer Acclaim.

To compound Joe's observation, there's this classic on what's to be done about AIDS victims:

"The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration."

...And that's Buckley in 2005. Glad to see that those twenty years offered so much opportunity for sober reflection upon one's earlier opinions. Why on earth would anyone think to compare the forced tattooing of a minority group to the practices of the Nazis?

Greg Egan's "The Infinite Assassin" comes to mind.

Given the number of literal calls to "please, think of the children!", I'm guessing the majority of the letter writers didn't watch The Simpsons long enough to catch Helen Lovejoy's catchphrase. Then again, I'm not sure these people's satire meters are properly tuned.

Bonus tidbit - the truly bizarre footer on the letter on page 27 of the Simpsons doc:

"How to Connect with Our Living Earth:
Telepathic Love from the Dolphins
A true story of the author's experiences with real dolphins. Healing our
bodies and preserving our environment is indeed a spirituaal (sic) action. Find out why...
Deborah A. Frenette, Author
http://hometown.aol.com/debfrenette"

Readwrite makes a good point about the McLuhan book. I recently taught a cultural studies class in which it was assigned, and we actually had to postpone lectures on it while we waited for the book to come back into print and ship to the university bookstore.

Like Kromekoran, I'm getting mighty sick of rereading the same basic "Spook Country" interview. WG's response to the term "fraught" seems to be the only new thing this one brings to the table - maybe that's just because I'm a total Jameson nerd.

To Wolfiesma: To take up your question, I'd say that there's very little that's "natural" about the relationships that the characters in "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" have with the world around them. Almost without exception, they seem fragmentary, isolated, adrift in the cultural wilderness of late capitalism ("No Maps For These Territories"), trying to plot a course through all of the overlapping worlds of the present (sorry if this all sounds pretentious - I just finished some work on "PR" and Jameson's cognitive mapping). The one exception I might posit is Tito, and the stability that his family and systema offer.

You could be entirely right, though - this might be more about craft than intent or effect. One aspect of "Pattern Recognition" that I did find revolutionary in terms of normalcy was the simple fact that it was the first novel I've read which actually communicated the experience of checking and exchanging e-mail and posting online without resorting to awkward and stuttering prose explaining the nuts n' bolts of what was happening. Almost every novel I've read in which online communication (present or future) played a major role invariably resorts to tacky infodumps, or at least drawing far more attention to the process than any character would pay. "PR," on the other hand, wrote about these things as they are today: as common as walking downstairs.

Just tore through "Glasshouse" a couple of nights ago - looking forward to this as well as the next book in the Eschaton series. Haven't been this excited about finding a new great sf author since Egan.