Rob,

while some comments may be astroturf, I have many friends who are obsessed with this product and had no problem gushing to me about it.

Charles Manson isn't releasing any music. He is in maximum security prison with no access. Someone else is doing this. As it's written, this is incorrect.

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Thanks #21, I also found the trick of language here.

He may very well be delusional, but he is undoubtedly delusional about more things than ONLY being mentally ill, so the fact that he's correct in one space, but incorrect that people are trying to get him, is really just part of delusions.

I have a sort of distant relative who believed the church convinced her mother to have her committed because she stopped believing in god. In fact, her mother talked to their priest because the girl was schizophrenic and behaving very strangely. The girl wasn't stupid, she knew her mother asked for help from their priest in getting her daughter treatment. But her brain couldn't process that without paranoia.

Even people who have managed, against high odds, to own houses are affected by this process. Many elderly people in the historically black district of my city are finding themselves under serious economic strain or even losing their houses because of dramatically rising property taxes.
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I bought a house in my city neighborhood in 1998. I'd lived here since 1994, renting. My African-American retiree neighbors love me because I keep my little yard clean, shovel the snow in front of their houses for free because their sidewalks are still like 1/10th the size of a driveway, clean up the alley and the sidewalk from trash and dog poop and have their grandkids over to play with my kids in the afternoons.

My neighbor passed away and willed her house to her daughter. Her daughter couldn't afford the increased tax payment (roughly $400 per month) so she invited her recently widowed friend to rent out the basement for $600 per month. That's a $200 per month profit and she has a buddy to go to the doctors with. I know this because I checked over her taxes. People talk about these "horrible" situations that are easily solved to create better lives. Why live in an empty house at age 70 if you can have an 80 year old boarder and friend?

They tore down the joints where heroin dealers hung out and replaced it with a mall that the elderly can take a shuttle bus to instead of asking their grandkids to drive them 20 minutes into the suburbs. And confused people still try to paint that fully-integrated mall as some kind of white thing. It doesn't make sense.

One elderly neighbor sold her house for 1.1 million in 2005 and set up trust funds for her 12 grandkids. trust funds. You talk about involuntary displacement that I don't see in real life. You talk about resentment that I've only seen amongst the drug dealers and their mom as the kids were convicted and sentenced. Once those kids were gone, suddenly no one was stepping on the flowers and throwing burger wrappers on the sidewalk. and no one has heard gunshots since.

This isn't theory, it's real life people. Sometimes a challenge is simply that, a challenge for you to succeed at. Stop being so negative and look at change as opportunity.

Unless of course you plan on working in the arts like I do. My grad school loans are putting me so deep into debt that I'll be lucky if I own a home by the time I'm 50.
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to quote myself again, "No one promised you a lifetime career as a buggy whip manufacturer." All of my friends who put 10 years in the arts moved on to computer-based design work and do painting, music, sculpting as a hobby. Money is leaving the arts in a massive exit- people just don't pay $12 for a cd if they can download it for free, people don't pay to see movies multiple times when they can buy the DVD once. Think carefully what your goals are in life and plan accordingly- it will save you massive financial headaches.

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Mst ppl n cts dn't wn thr hms, s f prprty prcs strt rsng, thy wnd p vctd. Rsn ngh t sbtg ny ttmpt t drss p nghbrhd.
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mm... wht? Whn y cn't ffrd t by yr wn hm t's gd's wy f tllng y tht y nd t g t cllg r grdt schl. dd, gt bttr jb, nd vrythng bcm rght wth th wrld. Rntng s nt th ntrl rdr f thngs. ;-)

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S wht? s tht rt smhw wrthwhl? N, t's nt, t's stll slss.

First off, the backlash against graffiti by hipsters has been a long time growing, but it's here to stay. Kids today reject graffiti because it's lame. Part of that is that back in the 1970s when graffiti was still vital, kids didn't own their own communication space because the barriers to entry were too high. there were usually less than 10 tv channels, less than 5 newspapers including underground papers, and music still involved real production or talent to play.

Nowadays any kid with something to say will say it on their blog and the people doing graffiti really are nothing more than common criminals. They have nothing to say and aren't using graffiti to say something at all- it's and endless repeat of their nickname- and not only are finger-wagging former punks like myself calling them on the error of their ways, they've completely lost their peers who look upon art and architecture a little differently. And this defaces architecture.

Leave only footprints and take only memories.

Graffiti changed for me when some really wealthy kids started stickering the stop signs in my parent's quiet suburban streets and inexplicably leaving their tags in the middle of intersections on the cement around 1996. The kids who were rumored to have done it were far wealthier than I, owned big old SUVs and wore European designer faux-hip-hop wear- remember those awful visors? Whether or not they were creating art had nothing to do with whether or not they were doing something good or evil. Art was an excuse they used incorrectly.

No. I think this is kind of clever, but I live in a city where a "thoughtful stencil" shows up every block and at this point, it's just crappy.

How is the Banana Splits a local show? They were a vehicle for a series of Hanna Barbera cartoons like Atom Ant.

Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, the Mickey Mouse Club and other skit plus education plus cartoon shows were national shows as early as the 1940s. Don't forget similar national kids' radio shows also existed in the 20s and 30s.

Soupy Sales was national in the late 60s/70s.

These shows don't feel local to me.

#9, Freedoms can easily get overturned when evil people collaborate. You missed the point of the comment by a mile. The Nazis didn't make our freedom taste more free as much as they caused, directly and indirectly, the deaths of what, 30 million soldiers and civilians from across the world.

#6, if you work with collaborative teams in the real world, you find that groupthink is a much larger danger than "competitive collaboration" is a feature. The reality is that a few people view themselves as alphas and the majority have no interest in inovating, they just want to be a member of the team and listen to mp3s.

DCr (54), y my nt fnd Lzrdmn's stry blvbl, bt d.
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I saw this video in its first public showing at a record convention in 1986. I was one of the first 100 people to see it ever and was still in high school.

What people may not fully understand is that the people featured in the video were strange early-1980s anachronisms in 1986. The joke was, what kind of weirdo sees Judas Priest in 1986 when Metallica, Megadeth, and related bands were the forefront of heavy metal? I mean, the priest were the New Wave of British Heavy Metal circa 1981. In 1986 people were listening to, I remember, Voivod and speedcore bands.

Jeff Krulik is a national treasure.

I had an installation completely worked over (some might even say vandalized) by some of my colleagues and it was an absolute privilege and far better than any of the positive reviews and compliments it had been receiving.
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Sorry, not believable. Try having it worked over by someone who is jealous of your work and "pretends" to respect it when in fact, they are vandalizing it. I saw MUCH more of that and the people defending their vandalism are the ones who always have to trot out that B***sh** argument about "who can say what art really is?" Look, people who make good quality art never have to explain themselves to people who know art. People who are phony artists who are just bad at what they do are always asked to defend their pretend art. That's how criticism works.

Look at the pop artists. The public would joke about them, but the art world always supported them. I knew people making really crappy representational paintings who would criticize them, but the best painters I knew always supported other great painters, regardless of how amateurish they are.

only a very bad artist or narcissistic "look at me" person would wrap someone else's art this way and I say that with 25 years experience around good and awful artists. Every artist that I knew who "made it" was always super nice to me about my writing. The artists who went nowhere would always try to use my writing to gain an advantage to themselves and friends reported them talking behind my back.

Wrapping a sculpture doesn't contain enough of a theme to be "real art," unlike Christo.

I'd really like to see some political commentary from Canadians where they aren't obsessively comparing themselves to Americans. Culturally, that's one corrupt system when they talk more about the KKK than the New Empire Loyalists. Stop pointing fingers Canadians, it's just freaking weird.

I was a bit surprised by this article. In general, it's not a violation to run a business while you're a federal employee. You just can't run something you have influence over. I mean, I knew many people who wrote books while feds because they were experts in their fields.

Mintphresh's rumor is just that- one of many rumors swirling around this case with no basis in fact.

Uber producer Terry Melcher once lived in the house, but no one ever remembers Manson showing up before. Dennis WILSON (there is no Dennis Love) knew Manson, but so did many others in LA and San Francisco- although Dennis used one of the songs. There has been massive research into the Manson/Melcher/Beach Boys connection but it's pretty much a dead end. Because they hung around Hollywood they knew actors and musicians because they lived near where they hung out. They also knew bikers who were massive drug dealers and ran into real hippies as well because all those groups lived around Los Angeles. That doesn't mean there was a conspiracy, it would be like living in San Fran in 1999 and knowing people in the dotcom world.

Please note that Tiger Beat super star Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders also lived at that house prior to Polanski and there's really no connection between him and Manson at all.

Another well-known rumor is that some of the people who were at Cielo Drive were involved with drug dealing (reportedly a very early ecstasy ring) and since Manson was too (via his associates in the Straight Satans motorcycle club), there must have been a drug deal gone wrong. Again, it was 1969 and many people were involved in drugs, there is no identified connection between the Straight Satans, Manson and drug dealing at Cielo drive.

Charles Manson was an abused child who grew up in the Boys Town orphanage, was in jail most of his young adult life, got out and ran a call girl operation as a pimp in Los Angeles around 1963-ish. He gets out of jail in 1967-ish (long past the Monkees had try-outs- one rumor claims he was there for that, but he was in jail) and when he tries to go back to work as a pimp he finds out that he can have a new pack of prostitutes, but the culture has changed so he ends up pimping them out for drugs and the like.

The main book on Manson was written by the district attorney who prosecuted him- not a journalist. Therefore Helter Skelter is really untrustworthy. The "next best" book on Manson was written entirely on rumor and was successfully sued (Ed Sanders book). There have been no thorough, scholarly works written on this case, but I will bet people dollars to donuts that if they really got into it, these people were nothing but pimps and prostitutes who got way too into LSD, speed and hallucinogens and spiraled into madness. and that's it.

The families of his victims deserve to know what happened, but the American public deserves to know that there might not have been a hippy boogeyman after all- and just a garden variety murderer, pimp, and drug addict.

I don't know anyone who doesn't know that all the items sold in major chain grocery stores are made by major corporations or are made with money from major corporations. How did these items get into the major chain stores if they weren't?

What does this story have to do with pirating cds?

Once again Cory misuses a simple word like "prankster." I would hate to live in his mixed-up universe. That gadfly is a stain on this blog.

Oh yeah, common sense, why don't we let a COMMITTEE solve everything, because nothing solves a problem like sitting around and talking about it without action. Sorry, look, actually playing the game does not change the content of the game, does it? Right?

This is no different than those clods in the 1990s who told me that I needed to READ Rush Limbaugh's books and listen to his radio show before I could criticize him. So then I went ahead and read one of their books for a few pages and I criticized him because he was manipulating facts. Then it was, I had to read the entire book before I got a chance to express my views. Then it became I had to listen to the radio show over several weeks to EARN my right to criticize him, when their issue was they had nothing to back up their opinions once Rush was considered a fool.

This brings me to my one-time aversion to first person shooters in the 1990s. I felt they were too violent and encouraged anti-social behavior among myself and my coworkers and so after wolfenstein 3d I wouldn't play them in the 1990s. I didn't like walking through a hallway after a long game and peering around doors- that was wrong.

Then at the dotcom I worked at, everybody played multiplayer Quake and I gave it a shot. I was immersed in this violent world and it was both cool, but also really lame. You couldn't build anything, just destroy things. About a year into it, in the middle of some violent encounter one of the vice presidents shouts from the other room to one of my gay coworkers, "That that you ****-****ing f*****t."

The office froze. The guy had gotten so immersed in the game that he had no idea what he just said in the office. Not only did he kill a gay man onscreen and use that language, there was a room full of lesbians already having problems with the good old boyness of these games. A written apology later, my cool coworker took it in stride.

the knuckleheads played Quake after work, but no one else did. I sporadically looked at quake or unreal, but the FPS is dead to me. It's just not a smart enough genre.

So sure, go ahead and tell me that your discussion committee is going to make a difference! I think it's a navel-gazing timewaster and you just want people to agree with you, not present a detailed critique of the issue- that FPS games do weird things to people.

What is this graffiti story doing tagged "art."

That beard is seriously lame. That's the kind of beard someone lets grow because they think it makes them look distinctive or something, but it makes them look like a poseur.

Americans are far more heavily medicated than Canadians, and we (Canadians) live longer than Americans.
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I have long argued that Canadians are more aggressively nationalistic than Americans as well, despite denials.

I've heard this same story before plus lived the game play of it- I remember most games coming out one year, 1982 or 83 were just bad games. I remember people just getting sick of the same old same old. One thing I remember was that when I started writing database interfaces for clients professionally, around 1990, I soon realized that any kind of turaround speed required 2 or 3 developers. At one point I thought to myself, "A long way from 'Created by Warren Robinet'" and that's when it clicked that the games were bad because only one person wrote them and they had to write them while the arcade game was still a hit.

It WAS remarkable when I powered up the atari about 1992 how incredible unfun the games were. I expected a nostalgic, fun time, but they were all horrible compared to even the shareware available in 1992.

Wow, LOLCats is really over now, isn't it.

Those farm towns in the middle of nowhere are desperate for entertainment, so anyone will be welcome.

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That's not exactly a ringing endorsement for your side, is it? Pretty much bolsters my argument, no?

has a good point about needing to build your tribe. I think there'll be room for intermediary companies (like LiveNation perhaps?) to take care of that sort of thing for artists that don't want to hassle with the details, but they'll be working for the artist, instead of treating the artist as a disposable face-of-the-year.

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You really have no idea how show business works, do you? It's not the label that treats the artist as a disposable face, it's the consumer.

and it's the consumer now, the consumer 20 years ago, the consumer in 1954 when they dumped pop vocalists for R+B and the consumer 20 years from now. When the music industry tries to sell something the audience doesn't want or only wants for a few months, it's a major pop culture joke. Vanilla Ice, for instance. But it wasn't the label who made him a fool, it was the artist himself and even more so, the people I knew in the dorms who thought he was great. (!!)

I hope you were being sarcastic with your airy "for most folks," considering the median income per individual U.S. household member in 2006 was only $26,036.
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But you cannot be a professional musician in a farm in the midwest, you must start out in a major city, so you better not think that average has ANYTHING to do with rent and housing prices in NY, LA, Chi, Seattle, Atlanta, etc.

I can say with certainty that there is no such thing as a "true fan." End of story. This entire concept is a fallacy. I will repeat this, THE ENTIRE CONCEPT IS FALSE and has NOTHING to do with how people consume music. Just nothing.

I knew people who "toured" with the Grateful Dead for two years and then stopped. I drove to NYC to see many bands who weren't playing locally. But When I turned 30 I didn't have enough free time or money to pay to see bands until they came to town. Besides, since I'd become friends with these bands, they didn't charge me for shows anymore.

I'm a major fan of different bands and I sure don't pay one day's wages to them, they don't sell $400 worth of stuff I'd want to buy in a given year!

No, the ONLY way to make money in music is to entice the majority of people who are NOT your core fans to buy your products. If you don't sell music, if the music is stolen, then you have to have a day job.

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Oh, and what any good internet entrepreneur will tell you is that there is nothing stopping some teenager from providing this service for their favorite band for free, eliminating the label's flow of money there.

There is nothing that can fix the music industry short of "fans" paying for songs.

First off, how nice of Seth to describe how Public Relations companies work! I'm sure that companies that have been providing this service for the last 20-40 years (fan club operations) would enjoy the increased business. I believe the two companies that do most of this nationally are Live Nation and Signatures Network, but correct me if I'm wrong. All I know is that in the 1980s I knew interns doing exactly what he talked about, but via snail mail and phone calls.

Ok, so what happens when there's a great band that doesn't have a tribe yet? They are introduced to someone else's tribe and no one goes because no one wants to pay money for music anymore? Already the new music fail-conomy is requesting this band pay for recording production up-front and the "Fans" are requesting free downloads that the won't pay for. Then, does the band play for free to get noticed? At what point does the band break even?

I love the idea that you can notify people that Natalie Merchant is coming to town and "they'll all go." Raise your hand if you bought Vista when Microsoft released it. Did you "all go?" No, you didn't. Having toured with bands before, I'll let you in on a secret, maybe 10% of the people who own your music will go at best and more often than not, we'd see 25% of the people at a show were people who went to ALL the shows, but didn't know your band except for record reviews in the newspaper.

This idea of tribes is not how people consume music. You have a large group of people who don't care much about music or bands and look for songs. You have a smaller group of hipsters who go everywhere. You have a small small group of people who absolutely love your band. These "tribes" may pay to see you all over the place, but they may only account for 300 seats at a show. Basically brokefying your band.

DCer.. WTF?

Have you listened to hip hop? ..but again, for the umpteenth, not commercial radio rap.
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Of course I listened to it. I was a teenager in the 1980s and hip hop is the music of that era. You misunderstand what makes poetry poetry and stop trying to pin your issues on me.

I remember, in a sort of joking fashion, interviewing KRS-One, who really wasn't the nicest guy in the world, and he went on a tangent about hip-hop being "the news" of the Bronx. But, did hip hop follow journalistic ethics? Was it less news than simply gossip? So we discussed that. And, you know, I was really tempted to ask him about how "the news" that Scott La Rock was seeing some girl got Scott killed, but that would have been the cruelest thing possible to say. But to me it illustrates that people like to talk in real vagaries that sometimes don't make much sense.

I like the old Chris Rock show skit where the aging grandmother talks about hip hop as urban poetry and Chris plays the "table dance" sound clip. So, is Chris Rock right that hip hop isn't poetry or are you right that it is? You be the judge, because I have no dog in this fight. I don't need to defend what I can say from an educated perspective is correct. You all can argue to your hearts delight because I seem to have struck a nerve.

It's self propelling. That's what makes something an automobile.
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Hey, you signed your name to that silliness, not me!

As to its audience being microscopic, I'm a 50 year old yoga teacher and I listen to it. Even my mother, in her 70s, appreciated it when it had something meaningful to say.
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How did I know this was the case? How I wish I added in my story about the graying of hip hop prior to you posting this. Hip hop is the music for older people trying to be hip. It is not genuinely hip or meaningful to young people and hasn't been for years now.

There's a white grandpa on my block who saw Grandmaster Flash spin at Danceteria in the 70s/80s and he always bores the African-American kids, who abandoned hip hop 3-5 years ago, with his grandfatherly stories about the hip hop he likes. His daughter is one of those tattoo faux-rockabilly women into the NY Garage/No-Wave revival scene circa 2002. The closest thing my African-American neighbors listen to hip hop is either crunk or reggaeton, but usually gospel or other pop vocal styles.

When I was a kid, grandparents liked to talk about big band jazz. Today, grandparents talk about hip hop to bored teens. We all pine for the lost music of our youth, but I first heard "The Message" in elementary school 27 years ago.

Poetry is not hip-hop.

period.

This is like saying a motorcycle is an automobile. Yes, vaguely, but to say that removes central points defining both.

No one takes this kind of anti-logical stretches seriously, least of all me. Having spoken word lyrics doesn't make something poetry. The news, for instance, could be poetic, but that doesn't make it poetry, it makes it the news. All lyrical music includes words, but that doesn't make it poetry except in the vaguest possible sense. And anyone who wants to trade in those tangential stretches of the imagination is welcome to- without me around.

Lots of bands put out cds for indie record labels and made $5 on cds where the label owner made $3- on a $9 wholesale price in the 1990s. Don't believe the stories that say bands made no money on cds, that's merely rationalization from computer business professionals trying to explain why they don't buy music. $1 per cd was more or less what bands got from majors, but I knew at least one band that negotiated $2 per cd for their major deal during the grunge signing boom. ITunes isn't paying more than $0.25 per song to bands and almost no one I know who is older is selling anything but their hit singles, which is to say, the rip off economy has ripped them off.

The fact is that as soon as the kids can steal books using P2P then they will. I know two musicians who have moved exclusively to soundtracks and aren't making popular music anymore, because their main audience won't pay for it and these guys are 40 with kids, a house payment and health insurance. If people sell 10% of the amount of mp3s compared to the cds they sold 5-10 years ago, and amongst my friends that's about right, and mp3s pay them $0.25 when they'd get $2.50-5.00 per cd then their income as musicians is about 1/100th of what it used to be. When you're 18 you don't pay attention, but when every tour keeps you out of the house when you're daughter is learning to write her name, you dang well better make some money at it or else stay home.

The rush to free culture is echoed by the rush of talented people OUT of the fields, like music, where it's come in.

Ask yourself this, what happened to poetry after the market abandoned poets? There hasn't been a movement in poetry to equal the Beats since the Beats. Why? Because you can't make a living at it. Adam Smith's theory holds true.

Take the ability to make money out of writing fiction and people who can write will become technical writers, work in public relations, or do anything so they make enough money to buy a condo and pay for medical care. It's as simple as that. Either pay for it, or lose it, but there is no such thing as FREE CULTURE.

Just look around for poets with the quality of the Beats and pine for the good old days when the world wasn't run by internet billionaires trying to obtain free media so they can sell more portable devices.

The term mundane is a slur. Apology accepted in advance.

Well, it's all well and good for the French, but what about the British? I had a dozen British people from London to Manchester stay with me in the last 15 years and saw a very different reaction. Food, for the first time in their lives, was cheaply available- fruit and vegetables were easily half of what they told me they'd normally pay. Beef was similar- they were used to fish and organ meats, not cheap steaks. Most of them overate and complained about the effect of American food, but I still think it was the cheap cost and variety that did them in. I learned that a great first day trip to a Wegmans or Trader Joes was better than a museum.

I have one good Bavarian friend and he claims he barely eats when he goes back home because the variety of food just isn't there (heavy sausages, cabbage and beer).

I knew one French Swiss woman and when she grew up her school lunch consisted of a section of french bread, an apple or pear, cheese and water. That was it. No meat. No vegetables. Her lunches most days of the week were two cigarettes and a cup of coffee on a park bench. Sometimes she'd have bread and cheese. I'm not sure that's really healthy even if she was thin.

I'm a vegetarian and she never ate what I'd consider a balanced meal of beans, rice and green vegetables. But she was only culturally French.

A friend of mine designed clothes in the 1990s. She used only union-made clothes made in New York City by NYC residents as a local products kind of thing. Because of that the shirts started at $20 when cheap foreign shirts were $10.

It is entirely possible that if you are buying American-made shirts, and I mean shirts really made in America and not Chinese shirts with fake labels then the only way to do that is to pay for them. $40 is too much for me, but it's very possible that their costs are $35 per shirt if they play fair.

Yawn, there are other cities besides New york. been there, done that, don't need a print.

Whoa people, calling someone a m**get is uncool. It's also really uncool in the write-up to continue the war between little people who are proportioned like tall people and people who do not have the same proportions. It would literally be like writing that an African-American person had really light skin. Both the Boing Boing write up and the comments here are seriously ignorant.

I've read some of John's work where he mates the "decline" of culture from the 60s forward to the women's movement.

I don't see a decline in culture as a whole. Music had high points in 1966, 1977, 1989-91, etc. Computer-related culture is growing positively and exponentially forward. Movies had a renaissance in the mid 1990s. Starting in 2003 or so Television entered into a "copper age" with insanely well-written shows such as Arrested Development, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, etc. He has no evidence to back up any steady decline and his blog posting, while artsy, says nothing.

That Nick Fury cover is probably my favorite mod comic book cover ever.

Are you sure these guys are American? Their faces don't look like they speak English. They look almost Dutch, the one guy who is more muscular than anyone else, his face doesn't look remotely American.

Sounds like you are judging an entire Province by a small group in their Beavis and Butthead stage of life.

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Provinces, this was Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia, but the worst was definitely PEI. Bunting, New Brunswick was not as fun as depicted on SCTV.

you are simply ignoring the larger truth to what I experienced by trying to pick holes in it. I've gone through these stories with my Canadian immigrant friends and they definitely are like, "hey, what would happen to me in Mississippi?" or "Same thing would happen to me because I'm from Toronto." You don't want to accept it and as I said, a lack of self-reflection and "who, us? Canadians would never do that" seems to be part of this. Americans understand about ugly Americanism.

You may want to think back about how you were behaving, because in my near-decade of experience, maritimers do NOT go about insulting strangers. It's anathema to them.
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I specifically said that these guys called us anti-gay slurs because we were wearing t-shirts! Call me at age 12 and called my father who was easily 50. I think the issue was I had a light blue surf shirt. We were in PEI and ordering ice cream cones. These guys were 15-18 and picking on a 12 year old. What could I have said, that I came from "America?" instead of the USA? Please. Did I mispronounce ice cream cone? I knew a handful of people from Toronto and Montreal who immigrated to the USA and they never said it was an anathema to Maritimers, they said Maritimers were comparable to our states like West Virginia or Alabama. I simply say that Canadians imagine they are a more open and friendly society than they are in real life. The tipping stereotype is part of that. There is a misconception about how to behave in another country that isn't theirs. In the US we are all warned about Ugly Americanism. Canadians wear their flag on their backpack. Think about it.

I guess this is only fair, since for the last few years, 'American' has been synonymous with 'arrogant and ignorant' in Canada. If someone is acting like a boor, more often than not, they'll get shrugged off as an American tourist.
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Indeed you are correct, nothing is ruder than an Eastern Canadian realizing you're an American visiting their country. When my family took a summer vacation in Nova Scotia the populace could not have been more rude or mocking of us- our accents, our clothes, our careful review of the currency that wasn't ours. Most often it was guys in plaid shirts calling us F___s for wearing t-shirts!? I never again will spend money in Canada. Their rudeness is only matched by their lack of self-awareness regarding their rudeness. In the Maritimes. I've been told Vancouver is more open, but still, more provincial and monocultural than any US city.

I have long thought that Cory's continued use of the word Canadian was offensive, but now that he knows the term is offensive to African-Americans he has no excuse but to remove it from his vocabulary.

I was a little surprised that Philadelphia pizza wasn't given it's own style. I found that there were many pizzas I had there that were very very thin, very very crispy like a cracker-style crust, but otherwise new york style. Perhaps they were left out or perhaps too similar to another pizza.

This site ignores the relatively new Washington, DC Jumbo Slice. The Jumbo Slice was apres bar food sold in the Adams Morgan neighborhood and really didn't exist in any serious way until about 1994. It's a regular wedge slice taken from a 30-40 inch pizza, so the slice is pretty much as large as a regular small pizza. Imagine a slice that was 12-18 inches long. You have to fold it New York style because it's like street food.

In general, however, it's more of a drunken novelty than quality pizza. I do not consider it the "best" pizza even remotely, but these slices, along with the Washington, DC half-smoke, are representative of a modern Washington, DC regional style and for a city that rarely contributes to regional cultural totems, sort of a big deal.

What you're saying is a bit like blaming the guy in front of you at McDonald's when they run out of Coke, instead of blaming McDonald's for not having an adequate supply.
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Indeed, and if someone took all the coke without regard for anyone else because he felt privileged to do so then I'd have every right to complain about him. Are you saying that there is no controversy about people eating unnatural amounts of food from all-you-can-eat restaurants? Do a google search on that if you have doubts. You and I are in agreement on the analogy, I don't know why you think that it's Comcast's responsibility to underwrite P2P which is extremely controversial legally.

People have been made aware of this technique even if Comcast didn't announce it. If you have a problem with it, the first step should be finding a new ISP. You have the right to complain about the ISP your parents pay for, but only so much. I had about 50 ISPs to choose from, including dial-up and went with Comcast. You have 50+ ISPs to choose from- pick another one that allows you free rein.

I want Comcast to do this and let them know I am glad they do this. I do not want some P2P kiddie hogging the bandwidth I want to work from home. I am a customer and I pay for this. You P2P users should ask your parents to switch companies.

Seriously people, my school district instituted a no-knives policy around 1977 after a stabbing and when I attended high school in the 1980s it was well-known and people kept them in their cars.

People can say what they will, but I know that 30 years ago private knives of any kind were forbidden to be brought into school.

I remember pretty much all kinds of weapons rules from the late 1970s: no nunchuks, no throwing stars or any bladed weapons, no hunting rifles. The strangest elementary school rule for us was no underground newspapers, because in the disco era, 6 years after the hippies were gone, this made kids giggle.

But seriously, your parents probably had a no-knives rule in school. This ain't new and it ain't in response to Columbine.

Even in the Chilean fruit example, much less than 100% of the retail cost is due to crude oil (or even fuel in general). Something far south of 50% even in the worst case scenario - if we just assume 50% of that cost was oil, then quadrupling the cost of oil means the cost of the fruit goes up about 2x. Most people never get past the illogic of "oil goes up by 4 times, so everything else gets 4 times as expensive too".

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What is the relationship between production cost and consumer cost and is there one other than consumer perception of a fair price?

Hint, your theory is incorrect, there is no relationship.

This gets so tiresome - like the idiots who say that when oil is twice as expensive as it is now, a loaf of bread will also be twice as expensive. Know what the only thing is that will be twice as expensive? OIL.
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Ahem, as someone who was an Econ minor, I promise you that many items double in price merely because there's a perception that the doubled price is fair. In other words our pizza place charged a gas price fee for the first few months of increased prices, we paid it because we knew gas got expensive, gas prices didn't go down, but they dropped the extra fee. Explain that one except through plain old supply and demand.

Please understand, when I said "turn the icon on it's head," all I meant is that, for 60+ years, the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter has always been white.
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I can't believe how ignorant you are of history. There were massive, MASSIVE problems integrating factories because the southern white people in power specifically used Jim Crow laws to eliminate the African-American participation in skilled jobs.

please read history, this thread is bizarre. there were riots because there were almost no African-American Rosies.