I don't know what the big deal is. Clearly Harpo's funny face is definitively steampunk.

I'd argue that things really began spinning apart for the West 50 years prior to that, on the killing fields of France.

Actually I've heard quite a few people talking about the feet / missing men connection, but the media doesn't seem to have picked up on it at all. A few weeks worth of DNA testing could confirm or discredit it; the RCMP would be nuts to to at least be checking.

#4 (Takuan) - That's always been my question too - to what degree are seeing the visual evidence of traumas from WW2?

I recall similar stuff in carnival midways as late as the early to mid 1970's - "Houses of Horror" painted with images which simply wouldn't be allowed today. Terrible, distressing pictures of torture and dismemberment; very often with women as central figures of the action. At the time it didn't rankle overly but in retrospect it is quite stunning.

Like #9 and others have said, ebook readers are easily available all over the place - but simply as applications for wider-purpose devices. I use my old Palm Pilot as one. The physical form factor is smaller than a paperback, the display is pretty good (it's a Tx), and I've never yet had a battery problem while reading. I used to have one on my old cell phone as well, but just never found my reading time intersecting my phone-carrying time to any significant degree.

I love the ability to bring dozens or hundreds of books around with me - carrying a paperback seems like more of an inconvenience because it's just one more thing to lug.

Well personally I find Palindromic's comment tediously derivative of great jaded postings of the past.

But I liked Gary's Casablanca cameo.

I hope someone is going to hook Mike up with an etext of Illuminatus!

I've seen it around from time to time.

Funny, I was under the impression that the tip is whatever I choose it to be, subject to the general guideline of around 15%.

Spreading around FUD about some 20% standard is just another version of the nodding trick, I assume.

I've been feeling like Terry Gilliam should be hailed as a prophet. At least the government in 1984 was reasonably competent at being evil - the real deal is a lot more like Brazil. I keep waiting for Cheney to start rambling on about the importance of information retrieval surcharges in Gitmo.

That "tree of life" is pretty old now and gives the heebie-jeebies to anyone with a background in molecular phylogenetics. It is severely bent and biased by a number of pretty well-understood artifacts that arise from oversimplified tree-building methods.

The basic upshot is that all the short branches cluster together within each major group, and all the long branches hang out towards the middle. Consequently it looks like plants, animals, and fungi cluster at the tip of the radiation. There is a truckload of newer work that discredits this notion, though there are of course some old-school hangers-on who won't let it go.

A better look at the overall tree can be found here - http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

I'm not actually complaining about the bulk of the article, just that particular tree.