Hi Takuan! Kisses!

About these spiders and these here ephemeroptera, I'm asking because that one doesn't make sense to be, based on what I know.

I don't know much about spiders at all. And I probably only know enough about mayflies to get myself in trouble.

First off, I had no idea that any mayflies used pheromones to attract mates. I had some idea that they swarmed, possibly using visual cues. And then I realized I was thinking of those mass emergences and you'd hardly need any kind of fancy cologne for a gal to find you in the middle of a swarm. They're everywhere.

Then I was thinking, hoo, pretty slim pickings for a spider to special in one particular species of mayfly. The adults aren't out and about much. Most of the life cycle is spent as aquatic nymphs. Thos spiders who hunt underwater would be getting better meals. But if that niche is taken, a spider's got to do what a spider's got to do.

Then of course I was thinking with a temperate zone mindset. How provincial of me. Most mayflies might be univoltine around here, but they're sure to be multivoltine in the tropics. And I have no idea how often a spider has to eat. It might just go into some kind of diapause when the mayflies aren't emerging, much like flyfishermen when the trout season is closed.

So I don't know what I can bring to the discussion, but I know what I'd like to take from it; I want to know the specifics (or, at the very least, the generics) of the spider and mayfly in question.

Spider? May fly? Could we be a little more specific, taxonomically?

How about a link to the literature?

Terribly clever. If the tight budget thing is true or no, better to spring for an editor/director than a camera crew, eh?

I was wondering if it was supplemented with some non-security camera video. Zooms could be added after the fact, but the resolution doesn't seem to degrade much, so I don't know. Seriously, I don't know much about this. I've only done in on film, with an optical printer, like a million years ago.

But big points for concept here. The filmmaking kept me engaged and I watched/listened to the whole thing. Couldn't say if the song was bad or good, because the genre, the sad white boy thing (Emo?), ain't my cup of tea. The same way I couldn't tell you if a country western piece was any good. Well, not unless it was Patsy Kline. I think we can all agree that these fellows are not the Patsy Klines of their particular niche.

I think this is a better portfolio piece for the director than the band.

Holy crap, what does this teach a kid? What does it feel like to "play" in this censored environment? What the hell happens to these kids when they face the real world.

My sister used to love the whole Disney experience, the theme parks, that online game, thee whole deal. It just freaked me out.

We met in Orlando, about twenty years ago. I had some business stuff I had to do. She toured my kid around the parks. I met them one afternoon, but arrived early. I waited just outside Epcot. The tourists arrived in waves, ferried by whatever the transit system was from the parking lot. The whole deal was choreographed. There was a sound track. I never liked the films (put Steamboat Willie side by side with Koko's Earth Control and even without sound, the Fleischer clown is so much more alive than the bland little mouse), never cared for the whole mouse thing and the stories about Walt's treatment of his animators left me cold. I hadn't thought much about the parks, hadn't really been to the parks. But watching the mood control in action really upset me.

My sister and son finally arrived. Somehow I made it through the day, but it felt like a bad acid trip. YOUWILLBEHAPPY,YOUMUSTBEHAPPY,YOUAREHAPPY!

My sister and I used to fight about it. She loved it and I was revolted by all things Disney. Well, except NBX, and I hardly count that as a real Disney product.

Over the years she's lost her love for the parks. She says they exhaust and depress her now. S'okay kiddo, says I, there are a whole mess of under utilized national parks to explore. Camping, sez she, Camping? Are you kidding me? The dirt, the bugs!

*sigh*

Now I see the commercials for Sea World with the child actors blathering on about nature and imagination and I think, good grief, is there anything LESS natural than this? Do these kids ever go outside?

It's freaky. It's all about control,

and profit.

Some of us really don't give a rat's ass about scriptures. Truly, we don't.

Slowglass!

I like the ones of Antelope Canyon. But I'd rather just move to someplace like Moab.

In the sixties, when it was very hot, my dad would order a Chiva Regal mist, which was pretty much a scotch slurpy. I used to sneak sips of it. I guess he would be arrested in this day and age.

Chivas isn't what it was. It's always been a blend, but it was a nice light sweet blend. Not bad now, but it used to be better. I'm guessing there was Talisker (sp?) in it, in the good old days.

If you want something round in your drink just for the looks, how about tapioca pearls. Oh yeah, scotch boba.

Jesus said to turn the other check, but it appears he never said you couldn't whine.

"He still has enormous arms, but one is misshapen because of the scaring."

Actually both of his arms are misshapen. Only now they don't match.

Oh cool, I have something in common with Thomas Disch. Neither of us proofreads when we post on intraweb message boards and such!

Is "The Golden Compass" steampunk?

How about Miéville's Bas-Lag books?

I'm with #1. No ice please, just the tiniest bit of water.

And bourbon? No! Scotch, a nice single malt plz!

But the ice spheres are way cool. I'm sure they'd be dandy in a G & T.

Yeah, I was sort of half following the Yale thing, it's a hoax, no it isn't. OMIZOG, HTF is this going to affect alumni donations? Does not do to piss off the old blues. Even if I found the original piece grotesque (real or no, it's a glurtfest), watching Yale scramble has been vastly amusing. And if THAT was the intent of the artist, well...

And of course, an awful lot of artist of all sorts are in it for the attention.

I haven't any academic background in philosophy. (I do know that the more philosophers you have on any committee, the less likely it is that the committee will actually accomplish anything in a timely fashion. And for some reason, they seem to get into sparring matches with the mathematicians. Which is entertaining, but not productive.) So my philosophical approach to art is pretty loose.

Obviously, once photography and similar technologies appeared, the role of the artist in society changed. The name of the game was no longer primarily about having the skills to use a series of conventions to make visual representations. First artists started playing with the visual images, then they started messing with your head, with concepts and ideas. Hurrah sez I, all to the good.

In no time at all, we've jumped from signed urinals to silkscreens of canned soup to giant curtains dividing valleys.

If getting the public to discuss art, to consider the role of art is the point, then you've really got to give Christo the nod. Who has done a better job of getting the most people to have real conversations about what art is? The thing about poop art, about the shocking things, is, yes they get a reaction. But also they'll have people putting up walls and then they're running so hot emotionally, that they don't think. They have a kneejerk response. And sometimes that's a fine thing for a piece of art to do, but when it has been done and done and done, it doesn't get you anywhere.

Christo could get cabbies and their fares, folks in the diner, folks on line at the post office arguing and debating and discussing what art was and wasn't and thinking about the relevance art had in their lives. I think that's a good thing. Pieces like Valley Curtain were inclusive without being dumbed down. What's better than that?

The poop art, the mutilation art, the infect yourself with parasites performance art aren't invalid, but they aren't as effective. For one thing, it starts becoming pretty derivative. Yeah, here we go with more bodily fluids. After a point it becomes like dirty words scribbled on a restroom stall. We aren't provoked in a way that produces thought, we're just annoyed.

A conversation about what art is, is good. Art is not simply oil paintings on canvas of landscapes and portraits and still lifes. Art is a whole lot of things. Art is pretty damn open-ended.

The biggest problem with poop art is that it inspires the tedious anti-intellect response in people who are uncomfortable with things that aren't immediately easily pigeonholed. These are the guys who aren't comfortable with paintings that aren't by Rockwell, by food that isn't meat and potatoes, by music that isn't pop, by travel outside of theme parks.

And their responses, the old "My two year old could do that." are so predictable, so boring and possible the only thing more derivative and pointless than the poop art itself.

The guy in the pictures linked by LSK reminded me of someone or something. It was bugging, and then it came to me! He looks just like one of those pickled frogs you have to dissect in high school.

I love it, but it does need bacon. And toast. And coffee.

Maybe sausages instead of bacon, maybe they should get a bunch of Oscar Meyer wiener cars.

And then there is this:

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513

On an abstract level, that is to say, from a safe distance, I'm pretty open minded about what constitutes art. I can't quite put myself in the salt-of-the-earth-guy objecting to these artsy farts. I doubt you're alone Loopfiend, still, I'm not standing with you.

But I'm not a fan of the gross stuff.

As an art student in the days when conceptual art was all the rage, I remember being compelled to watch Chris Burden's Starry Night video in which he slithers, bare chested, across a section of asphalt on which broken glass has been thickly spread. I was revolted. In the discussion that followed, after my fellow sophomores had fallen all over themselves going on about how brilliant the piece was, I said something to the effect that It struck me that Burden was getting off the piece and he was like a carnival geek who'd found an upscale audience, and good for him, but YUCK.

Later that term I met a grad student who claimed to have been a classmate of Burden's. The story this fellow told me was that Burden's first shock piece had merely been a publicity stunt to draw attention to his paintings. He'd had a friend shoot him in the hand. And when the critics practically wet themselves over the artistic significance of the shooting (Kind of their Rorschach reading of the blood splatters, don't you think?)and had ignored Burden's paintings, he took the hint and dropped the painting, but went on to have himself crucified on a Volkwagon and all kinds of other yucky stuff.

Does that make it all less valid as art? I don't know. I don't like it, but I don't think that is relevant. I think art is largely about the intention, and I don't know that Burden's intent was as pure as I'd like. But if he'd gone on to paint like Diebencorn, I wouldn't be questioning his motives, because in that sort of situation, the work stands on its own.

On the flip side, when you have guys like Rudy Guiliani telling us what is and isn't art, you just have to say, OH FUCK OFF RUDY.

Lawns are harmful to your soul.

Hurrah for dandelions!

I wanted to take a break yesterday, and bask in the sun and listen to the birds and glory in the springtime wonderfulness. But just as I was heading outside, a truck pulled up to a neighbor's house and spent the next forty minutes spraying god only knows what horrible stuff all over their lawn. At the very least, it smelled like evil chemical ass. So much for sitting outside.

I'd like to put a lemon, or a grapefruit up my neighbor's... nevermind...

The first thing that pops into my mind for reproductive metaphors is not dandies, but squids. Squids vs. sharks!

Squids reach sexual maturity fast fast fast. Then they reproduce like nobody's bidness. Then they die. Lots lots lots, fast fast fast. Sharks mature slowly, don't have so many young. Both approaches work just fine, at least they did until we entered the picture. Sharks and squids are old codes both. The shark meme has persisted for a long time. It looks, however, like it is one of the many that won't survive the latest curveball the universe has thrown its way; H. sapiens. Such is life, such is evolution. The squids have a better chance of surviving our hijinks, because they're rolling the dice so much more than the sharks. Still, it might not be fast enough. I'm putting my money on the ooze.

Code or story, the meme's the thing. The tasty tentacled calamari, the cheery yellow blossom, the dog-eared trade paperback, these are only the shells.

Adorable, until you look at the price. A sixty-two dollar cardboard box, unless I am reading it wrong, makes this a product for the rich and bored.

The dollar is going down hard, ain't it? Ouch.

Happily, given any cardboard box and some crayons or markers, most kids find they can muster the imagination without 62 dollars worth of screen printing for inspiration.

# 3 beat me to the punch!

Where is Log? Log had it all, snappy graphics, a jingle that embedded itself permanently into your brain and a dead on send up of the baby boomer TV ads.

Log pwns the Bass-O-matic!

I thought you guys were SpumCo fans!

Kind of creepy? This sounds terrifying.

I agree with Aceys. It's fear. Fear, fear, fear. Some may experience it as simply anxiety, some as outright dread, but it is fear.

For us oh so fragile living things, the universe is as threatening as it is wondrous. We're all gonna die. That's the deal. And many take comfort in fairy tales that tell them, oh, no, you won't really die, you'll just move on to another place, a better place, a perfect place.

But they don't really believe it. And they can't bear to have other people question the fairy tale because it and the comfort it offers are tissue-paper thin.

Thinking, in this context, can become precarious. It is like walking across a wide balance beam which is easy as pie, as long as you keep your eyes on your destination. Look around, take in the scenery, look down and you're gonna fall!

If you aren't settling for the fairy tales, then looking around is much less frightening. Because you are curious about the world. You hop off the balance beam, if ever you were on it. And you stomp around in the grass and the mud and the rock. There's things to see and do! The universe itself becomes the pay off, not some fantasy future life. However imperfect, whatever trials we endure as we travel through our lives, we get to see stuff, we get to learn stuff, we get to think about stuff. And that is our reward.

And then, looking at those people on the balance beam with their eyes straight ahead, looking at the preacher or the television or the bank account, you can't help but feel pity for them.

Until they insist that no one is allowed anywhere else but on their balance beam, or to look anywhere but the authorized direction. Independent thought? Independent speech? Not permitted!

At that point the feelings change from pity to something else.

#37 wrote:

"I can guarantee you, nobody who lost a family member or friend is losing sleep over these people's "harassment"."

No, actually, you can't. You and the blowhards on Fox and where all else cannot speak for the relatives, friends and loved ones of the victims of the September 11th attacks. You can't speak for the people who risked life to rescue them. You can't speak for the members of the armed forces who have gone overseas to respond to the 911 attacks.

You can only speak for your own arrogant self. You can only air your own cocksure, poorly-reasoned opinions on your own behalf. You speak for no one else. You have one voice, no matter how loud and annoying that voice is.

Gene Shallot had a cat that looked just like him.

It didn't seem angry like teh Brimley kitteh clearly iz.

Was Stein always this loopy?

Yeah, I know, he worked for Nixon, but there are degrees of crazy.

There's a range, in the mental health spectrum, and it seems like the needle on Mr. Stein's gage is leaning into the red zone, edging past batcracker into the "shithouse rat" zone.

This is another example of celebrity mental illness. He's not all over the tabloids with Spears and Cruise and Gibson, and all the other stars having their meltdowns, but only because he isn't pretty. But Stein has got the tinfoil beanie cred. He's totally in the club. He might be more articulate than average, but in the internal battle between smart and nuts, crazy trumps intelligence every time.

One feels sad, in the supermarket checkout lines, that the World Weekly News is no longer with us. I always thought it must have been a really great gig, cooking up those headlines.

The World Weekly News is gone and we don't get our alien news anymore. Or do we? Next time you run out for a carton of half & half and some TP, scan the magazine rack at the check out. Clues!

Is Angelina really a human? How about Travolta? I say they are escapees from Rozwell, the lot of them. They climb over the chain link fence and head straight to Hollywood! If the WWN were still around, they'd be on the story like white on rice.

Oh, it took courage to even read to the bottom of the thread. I feel like I've been trapped in an elevator on the way down to hell!

It is hard to quantify gruesome. I couldn't put any of these in any kind of order, but I didn't see a single suggestion anyone had made that didn't leave me both nodding and shuddering.

Might I add ANYTHING by Seals and Croft.

Also, that pop song that started out:

"My baby takes the morning train..."

GLURT!

"There is no patriarchy. Women hold the majority of political and social control, and always have. They lack power, to be sure, but they have always had the control. Control beats power every time. It's the pen over the sword. A man can beat his wife, but his wife instills values in his children."

Oh good f#$%, we're invoking the hand that rocks the cradle crap now?

Since when did Boing Boing get taken over by Fox news watching drones?

GTA is just a game. It has clever moments. It has some pretty disgusting moments.

One could, in all fairness, describe it as a sexist and demeaning example of patriarchal media. But nowadays, even here, folks will get all huffy and call you a feminist or an intellectual or an elitist. Because all you are supposed to be is a beer swilling lobotomized slob.

You wouldn't want to make your neighbor uncomfortable by actually thinking about something, would you? Shut up and drink your Bud Lite.

So let's not invoke that academic vocabulary. Let's put it another way.

The sex in the game is designed to appeal to insecure boys who think the world revolves around them, their needs, and their chironomid-sized willies. These lads are so self-involved that they can't even tolerate hearing criticism of their favored mass-produced (and astonishingly unimaginative) masturbatory fantasy product. The game can be as demeaning and ugly as ever, yet it is too much for the delicate ears and limp micromaggot member of these boys to bear to hear anything.

Some of us are smirking. Some of us think the ones who look absurd and the ones getting all hot and bothered about defending those tacky virtual lap dances.

I'm reminded of that scene in the Stepford Wives.

Oh baby, oh baby, you're so BIG!

As many have pointed out, this is certainly child abuse, on the part of the state.

@ # 22, There are a million stupid products out there. I'm supposed to know about Mike's Lemonade? Why? Why in hell am I supposed to pay attention to it or any ads or any commercials?

Yeah, you've got booze that seems like it belongs in the ice cream truck, you've got energy drinks with macho packaging that looks more like hair tonic, you've got ice cream and cereal and candy in colors that glow in the dark and why in hell should anyone have to keep track of it all? I am a mom. My kid ate some horrible junkfood at times. I didn't read every effing label. Parents who did creeped me out. I didn't, and don't, pay a lick of attention to ads for beer or breakfast cereal.

I stop to admire a wildflower while walking with some undergrads. "Look, here's a trout lily." And they are amazed that I can tell one flower from another, one tree from another, one rock from another, never mind the insects and what all else.

"How can you remember all that stuff? "

They're amazed. They shouldn't be. They know hundreds of different brands of worthless products and logos and commercials.

I don't know more than they do, I just chose to focus on different things than they do. Those trout lilies have been around for millions of years. It's probably worth my while to learn about them.

Mike's alcoholic lemonade? I don't think that will be around so long. I don't believe it will last to the end of the decade. And that Smirnoff's Twist crap? Someone (a total lowlife, I might add) left a sixpack of it in my fridge once. As far as I could tell, it was made by soaking urinal candy in sugar syrup. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

If I want alcohol in my lemonade, as I sometimes do, especially when I have a head cold in the winter time, I make my own. I squeeze lemons and use honey and some hot water from the kettle and pour in a little scotch.

But I don't drink the prebottled corn syrup and emulsifiers with artificial lemon flavoring commercial lemonade, especially not the kinds with alcohol. Pleh! Pleh! Pleh!

Come to think of it, I've run into people who really think like this. This is the way a cluster-b personality disordered person reasons.

/me shudders.

The whole business of these damn EULAs is absolutely insane anyway. Really, this is no crazier than the so-called legit ones.

It's kind of perfect, in a bizarro universe kind of way, really...

As conceptual art goes, it's a fun project.

But as far as the spiders go, can you blame them for discarding the so-called repairs? The workmanship is dreadful and the material is all wrong. Human thread? Thread! Spider silk is gorgeous stuff and some is sticky, some is envenomed. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of nozzles that produce the silk. Each species has a different recipe. There's no human thread that is going to cut it, even if it is our crudely-processed silkworm-spun thread. Nope. And the glue? Besides, foreign objects are always removed during spider rollover.

And as for having time on her hands, better this than mySpace.

I’m hopping into this thread rather late. I read it, at least as far as it had gotten by about 9:30 EST, before I followed the link and read Shirky’s piece.

The spark that sets Shirky on fire is the TV producer’s comment “Where do people find the time”. From the way he describes it, what she’s doing isn’t asking a question, she’s simply implying that it is time wasted. And from here he defends internet culture and it participatory nature.

And here on Boing Boing, the readership responds with a very lively discussion about television versus internet, passive versus active, the thoughtful/elite versus the-salt-of-the-Earth/great-unwashed.

You’ve got those who say online participation isn’t any better than watching television because 90% of the activity surrounds crap like lolcats, Myspace and American Idol fan sites as opposed to the loftier pursuits like editing Wikipedia, contributing to the Tree of Life project, watching TED lectures and, of course, reading Boing Boing.

I’m with the camp that says pretty much any participatory activity is better than passively watching television. (And yes, there IS a difference between watching television and watching movies.) If Bob is using the internet to learn how to anodize the tailpipe of his motorcycle or searching images of stoneflies to help him work out what feathers to use on a trout fly he is designing or planning a meet-up with his raiding party buddies on WoW, that’s better than his cousin Tom who is just sitting on that couch. Even if Tom is watching Masterpiece Theater, Tom hasn’t figured out how one way his relationship with the television is. Bob, methinks, gets out more. Bob, in a pinch, is better equipped to mobilize, to adapt to changing situations, to problem solve.

I don’t hate all TV. But I’ve never bought a television. Though there has usually been a television kicking around, it is often a dusty unused thing. Since the advent of cable, I’ve not bothered to have it connected as often as I have had it connected. And the times I’ve had it, it has usually been because someone else wanted it. At any given point in time, there’s one or two programs I have liked, though not always enough to bother to watch on a regular basis. But sometimes the television has sat cold and dark for a year or more. I do like films. I prefer to see them as FILM and projected. Am I an elistist in this area? You betcha. But I can live without the films.

When I can’t access the internet, I twitch. Disconnected, I continue to twitch everytime I need to learn something. But I get over the general twitching after a week or so. Because the general surfing, gaming, and social interacting I do online fills that need that some fill with sitcoms or beer.

It isn’t so much a refusal to think, as it is an uneasiness with allowing my thoughts to run loose because I’m not comfortable with where they go. This is not to say that I’m always looking for escapist activities online, often it is quite the contrary. But I certainly use to soothe myself.

I don’t believe I am unique in my uneasiness. I often look for a certain amount of emotional background noise. This is what broadcast television and sitcoms offer many, maybe most, viewers – a chance to shut off not necessarily their intellectual minds, but their emotional minds.

Part of this is just part of the package of being a living being with a big brain. We’ve got all those instincts that make us prone to anxiety, things that can help us survive. And we’ve got all those other emotional needs, to feel valued, to feel loved. We get stressed. We’re not sure. Things gnaw at us.

And there’s so much that can trigger this anxiousness. Those in power, or those who want to have power over us play on our fears. Are the terrorists going to get you? Are those struggling immigrants going to take your job? Are your teeth yellowing? Do you need a boob job? Here, we’ll make you feel better, we’ll keep you safe, keep people who are different away from you and the things to which you are entitled. Buy this truck and you’ll manly. Drink this soda, and you’ll be satisfied. Shop, shop, shop for clothes. Decorate your house over and over. Feel safe, be numb, be numb.

I don’t think people are as lazy as some claim. I don’t believe they are necessarily afraid of thinking. Even rationalizing can be quite a mental exercise. But they’re terrified of feeling those uncomfortable feelings. They’re terrified of feeling pain. They turn their eyes from the homeless people. They flip the channels rather than think about the people just over the border who are hungry, of children in rags living in shacks, of dying forests and ocean gyres choked with garbage, of riots and wars and genocides.

You look at teh lolruses and teh p0rn and you wonder, with all the capability of teh intrawebs, why this? It is emotional. It is people struggling with overwhelming emotions. It is fear. Not all of it, certainly. But if you want to know why the bulk of any media is drivel, this is why.

You can numb yourself out with anything, with the internet, with books, with sitcoms or booze or drugs or Second Life or trips to the mall. But you can also use many of these things for positive purposes. Okay, I’m hard-pressed to figure out what good comes out of “Everybody Loves Raymond” ( I don’t, didn’t love Lucy either…) but books and wikis, and even drugs and Second Life can be experiences that allow people to learn and grow. There is that potential. If you’re doing something, you can adapt. If you’re doing something, you’re closer to feeling and opening up and thinking than if you are watching Regis while you microwave the kid’s PopTarts.

With a sitcom, there just isn’t so much potential for the viewer. You just sit there on the couch and take whatever they dish out. And you get softened up, get passive, get prepped for consumption of product or ideology or whatever. On television only certain topics are permitted, only certain types of thought and there is NO dialog.

Couch potatoes get sliced, diced and julienne-fried. They get mashed. They get eaten.

The goal of television is to make you flatline and do as you’re told.

I vote for the internet, lolcats and all.

@ #7, Citation please. I'd really like to read that article!

I saw video clips. I saw ads. What I want is for youse guys who know more about matters electronic if any of these things are worth a damn or not, and why.

Cripes, if you were to need some little creepy crawly thing IDed, I'd step right up and help. I'm just looking for a little advice here.

and

@ # 51, who freezes gum?

No no no, you never ever cook after you smoke. You cook first, then you get baked, then you eat.

Bong hits before baking or even boiling can be terribly terribly dangerous. I once over salted a perfectly good homemade chicken soup.

Hmmm, Why do you need insects for biomonitoring radioactivity around an accident site when you can just count the tumors on the local human population?

Insect chitin is actually pretty darn sturdy. Pinned, in collections, they can outlast the collectors who pinned them, the cabinets in which they are stored, and even the pins impaling them.

I can't say much about the cause of the mutations, if these are appearing at the expected rate for such abnormalities, but these illustrations are not of "breakage".

The segment count of the antennae in the illustration above is different. It's not a random thing, how many segments a given part of an insect has. Things like antennal or tarsal (one of the leg sections)segment counts are used as taxonomic characters for that very reason. The twisted thoracic and abdominal segments look like a developmental deformity, not an injury, likewise the wingpads and metanotum. Was it the metanotum? I'll have to go back and look. Just can resist throwing those entomological anatomical terms around. I've paid my dues, keying out the critter until I thought my eyeballs would fall out on the bench. Not to say I'm stellar at it, but I've logged the hours.

The only one that didn't look to me like a mutation was the fly. I think it is entirely possible that the artist just wasn't familiar with your garden-variety (or house, come to think of it) dipteran aristate antenna. The text describes them as "feelers". Yeesh.

- Pip (who just reads along and nods in pretend understanding when you all start doing your leet intrawebs banter, but who is going to so totally jump on the invertebrate nerd deal)

Oh, and I really like the water colors.

The sign is both cool and creepy. But not as creepy as if Warner Bros. comes down on the butcher for copyright violation.

Duck season!

@12, You mean OCPD sufferers. Folks with OCD would need little sinks and soaps in every room, so they could make like Lady Macbeth and wash their hands over and over and over...

There are a number of companies advertising sleeves and wallets, running in the $10-$25 range, faraday cages and the like. Are these any good? If they work, it seems a good solution. You could take your passport out of the sleeve when it was time to do the scanning reducing the chances that some officious numb nuts would hold you up in your travels.

My passport was issued in September 2006. As I understand it, that means it might be one of the chipped ones. I do not like that, not one little bit. How can I tell? Where are the chips installed in passports? Front cover, back cover, in the center, a corner?

If these sleeves work and if my passport does indeed have a chip, I might well consider buying one. As angry as I am about the fact that these were installed (and that the US citizenship couldn't be bothered to interrupt their shopping and television viewing to take a stand on this and other issues) I would like it if there was a way to deal with this that didn't entail breaking the law.

Bare ground isn't always grass. And with the herbicide/pesticide/fertilizer cocktails on most lawns, shoes might be a healthier choice than bare feet.

I like a good pair of hiking boots. I suppose one could get tough enough to lope over scree, but I'll pass. Are these barefoot advocates hiking in Minnesota or Utah? Not every place has soft bouncy soil.

Takehashi,

Patronize me youngster, and I'll matronize you right back.

I've no patience with the every-cop-is-bad-and-we-need-to-come-down-on-them-harder school and just as little for the cops-are-risking-their-lives-so-they-should-get-a-free pass school (An attitude described by a friend who is a lawyer who specializes in going after rotten cops, as the "If you aren't in blue, you're little people" school of thought.)

I don't think cops are allowed to do anything. That's not what I wrote. I'm just not going to get up on my high horse about minor traffic violations. I don't work myself into a lather when people violate them.

This might be a cultural thing. When I have lived in the northeast, I have noticed there are an awful lot more people who work themselves up about every little rule. And oh good crap, are there ever a lot of rules.

There's a thin-lipped puritan prudery that doesn't enhance the quality of life one little bit. Out in the west and down south, there seems to be less of it and people are a lot more relaxed, maybe even happier. It might be because they aren't sweating the details so much. Or hey, it might be all those guns. But I always figured that a good part of it was that there weren't so many damn lawyers.

Situations are nuanced. I would hope people would be able to manage a sophisticated response. When they don't, we getting those maddening situations like the kid who was expelled (or suspended or whatever) for sniffing a Sharpie in class.

Discretion is what is called for, especially from cops. It's not a bad thing for the rest of us either.

Amazing. Bikes + Rail + Robots!

The folks responsible for this should be put in charge of worldwide carbon emissions. This is just genius.

Takuan,

I missed that naked cyclist deal. I was wrong, wrong, wrongo. But the guy doesn't need a ticket, he needs another job, like lighthouse keeper, on some island, just him and his "lady friend".

- Pip, (less peace dove than wet hen)

Takeshi,

No, running a red light is NOT always dangerous driving. Have you never been stopped by a light in the wee hours, when there is no traffic on the road which has the green signal? Illegal does not automatically equal dangerous any more than it means immoral. It just means illegal.

There are these things called stop signs. They're admittedly low tech. But used properly, they work a treat.

Lactose is milk sugar. Butter is mostly fat.

It's the lowfat stuff like skim milk that is total misery for the lactose intolerant.

Oh, and the guy is a lawyer. Perfect.

I'm a tree-hugging liberal, I'm leaning towards supporting the cop.

There is a lot more I would like to know. Is this an area where parking regulations are aggressively enforced? Was someone blocked by the cop when he was double parked?

We have a trend in this country where lots of doinky little security professional and rent-a-cop and TSA minion and who all else seem to have taken leave of their senses and harass people for the stupidest of reasons. Yes we have cops harassing people for the most idiotic things, but it is still the exception, not the rule.

I'd be cheering if the cop was getting nailed for messing with someone's civil rights. The parking deal just seems peevish and crappy to me. I'm thinking the citizen who issued the "ticket" is the kind of guy who make a wretched security guard or police officer.

I'm sorry, but I just don't care if a cop double parks or even runs a red light in a non-emergency situation, provided he or she isn't driving dangerously.

When cops harass citizens, then I go through the roof. But the deal here sounds weird. Yeah, the citizen had the right to confront the cop in the bar, but it sounds like he really had his pecker up when he did it.

Okay, okay, it is hard to extrapolate exactly what happened. We're all projecting our issues on to the situation.

But me, I'm just glad that citizen is NOT a cop.

I love these things. I love that they don't have faces.

The air subway monster is just as cool. It simply needs a good soundtrack. Something of the same vintage as "Glad"? But instrumental...

How about Hot Tuna's "The Water Song"?

A friend gave me some chocolate-covered insects last week. The crickets were okay. The mealworms (I think they were mealworms, some kind of beetle larvae is my guess...) were nasty.

The site is a disappointment. I'd hoped to realize a lifelong dream to eat some honeypot ants. Ah well. Anyone know where I can get some?

http://www.myrmecos.net/formicinae/MyrmecoMex9.html

chicken
nubbins

I've never been, but something about Poland, of all places, strikes me as surreal and the perfect setting for this marvelous stunt.

I have a cousin who was a vegetarian for about ten years, because she experience meat overload when traveling through Poland. It was the breakfasts that really did her in, she told me. Couldn't face meat at all when she got back.

It all sounds very David Lynch.

#15

Media-wise, the difference between now and then is that there aren't a helluva lot of journalists around. Print, television and radio news staffs have been pared down to nothing. There are no reporters left to cover anything. What you are getting is McNews, produced cheaply at some central location and shipped out for mass consumption like so many batches of frozen fries.

It bears no more resemblance to real news than the crap that is served at Applebee's or Taco Bell does to real food. And it is for the same reason: corporate profits.

And if the slant seems, well, rather Republican, go reread what I just posted and ask yourself why.

Doubt me? Just pick one major magazine, say like Time, or your local paper, and look up the stats on how many people, how many reporters they employed five years ago,
ten years ago,
fifteen years ago,
twenty years ago.

It is happening in TV and Radio too. And the creeps in charge whine that profits are down. The profits are not down, they just aren't increasing at the same crazy rate they had been.

Because it's getting to the point where there is no one left to lay off.

#16.

You had to be really rich.

And they weren't creepy. Not like that Yoda cake was creepy, anyway. That would have scared the crap out of us, back in the day.

Without the "talking tape", these used to be a pretty standard cheapo dimestore toy, back in the day. We got them at birthday parties, as well as the little decorated candy cups at each place setting and hats and noise makers (this was way before the concept of choking hazards/not safe for children under three thing) and favor bags to take home. Not to mention cake and ice cream and prizes for winning at musical chairs or pin the tail on the donkey. These things were all required, as were balloons like the above.

If you were really lucky, you had your party at the bowling alley. And the rich kids had smelly rental ponies brought in for rides.

Takuan,

I've had dealings with hate zombies like this guy. It always leaves me wondering, what the heck would I do, if I had the power to do anything? Punish? Rehabilitate?

Mostly, what I'd like to do is warn others that this guy is a toxic and potentially dangerous jerk. So I keep coming back to Neal Stephenson's forehead tattoos.

That leaves the challenge of coming up with an informative diagnosis that is concise enough to fit on a face, and that allows others to read it from a minimum of a ten-foot pole's length away.

So's we all can keep our distance.

@ RAWBEAR,

Oh heck yeah, I remember that. Couldn't use the heat because exhaust would fill the car. There were even some holes rusted through the floorboards and it got cold. Not quite as bad for a passenger, who could wrap their feet in layers of old blankets, but total hell on the driver.

I remember a nighttime midwinter trip, when I was on the road for three hours. At my destination, I got out of the car and promptly hit the pavement. My feet were so numb from the cold that I couldn't balance on them or walk.

Straw bale homes are pretty nifty, and not just for the insulation, the thickness of walls lends a quality of solidity and serenity. In the American southwest, where you see them done with an adobe-style finish, they're just gorgeous.

Why do people buy hideous and energy inefficient McMansions, when they could build a reasonable-sized strawbale home instead?

Suburbia = despair

I think that's what the books insulate against: depression, ennui and brain death. If they help keep you comfy, temperature wise, all the better.

Charming, yes. Nostalgia inducing, yes. A fascinating document of a moment in time and a particular culture? You betcha!

Spectacular? Not quite.

@#1, The impression it gives depends on just what kind of books are on the shelves.

Overall, shelves full of books give the impression "I am interested in stuff" as opposed to nary a book in sight and great big television screens as decor, which give that "I think what I'm told to think" impression that comforts your drinking buddies because they know you won't make them look bad.

I hope that K-9 is not removed in the new version.

Would have liked to have seen Fooly Cooly's Kanchi/Canti in there somewhere.

R2 and Threepio are there.

As for the inclusion of a Dalek, I'm thinking that's an outgroup.

Who is the long-legged tripod one in the middle?

Polio and Ebola aren't evil. They're horrible, but not evil, at least not in the universe as I understand it. Tsunamis and cyclones aren't evil either. Shit, as they say, happens.

Unless you believe in some kind of all powerful deity who inflicted these things on the creatures he made in his image. In that case, disease and weather and geological processes can be evil.

Takuan,

Come to think of it, what I'd really like is a Twilight Zone ringtone for my phone.

I don't think this would spell doom for reptiles. Gator farms are already a done deal.

Gharial farms would be trickier.

@ #11. Sometimes people who get plastic surgery pay a lot of attention to their kids, too much really. And as soon as little Binky is old enough, mummy will see to her getting her nose done, and her breast implants.

The kids, the girls especially, will be taught that only people with "perfect" bodies and faces are worth of love.

It is very sad. I wish, when folks looked in the mirror and saw the drooping eyelids or sagging boobs or receding hairlines, instead of spending the money on themselves to get the silly surgery, they'd donate that amount to provide important medical treatments for people with real problems who haven't the funds.

Because no surgery is going to make you look young or perfect forever. We all age. The good karma lasts a whole lot longer!

Anyone else feel kind of broken up that this marriage is falling by the wayside?

I get a feeling that these two really belonged together.

They may not have been tasty snacks, but the cupcake choreography was delicious.

If that was my kid, I'd get a lawyer and start sending out some letters: legal warning shots over the bow of the school board, press releases and notes to state senators and such.

Because really, how dare they expose a minor to hazardous art supplies?

Sometimes you gotta fight stupid fire with stupid fire.

Someone up near the top of the thread wrote that feminists have been coming off as uncivil since the 1800's and it has worked for them.

I don't know if I'd describe it like that. There is a price, when you take a stance that goes against the existing culture. Back before the 1800's, what happened to feminists is they got burned at the stake.

The price can be terrible, but being silent has its cost. So hurrah for those with courage.

To admit you are a feminist, in whatever tone of voice, is to be judged strident. To voice aloud the fact that you are an atheist, will raise hackles. To dare to admit that you are proud of being an atheist is considered an affront to many who think nothing of announce their pride being members of their religion.

I'm a fan of Dawkins. I'm grateful that he has the courage to stand up for what he does not and what he does believe in.

My complaint, if you could call it that, is that he does not go far enough. I remember seeing a video of one of his talks, in which a young woman mentioned the anger she had about being raised as a christian. Dawkins seemed genuinely mystified by this. He doesn't have the anger or the pain of one who, as a small child who was terrorized by being told he would be burned in hell by a raging god if he did not obey. (Some of us count that as child abuse.) He doesn't know what it feels like to be told that masturbation is sinful, that birth control is wrong, that your body is not your own.

And he can't imagine what it is like to be told that there is an all-powerful deity who is some kind of super father, some giant male super male being, and you're just a cobbled-together second-class citizen whose purpose is to be some kind of brood bitch.

I don't know if any guy can wrap his brain around what it feels like to be told that god is made in your brother's image, but not yours.

So rather than strident, Dawkins seems quite genteel and calm to me, a moderate.

Take it from one who IS strident, who is a feminist and atheist both, and who knows full well the price society makes you pay for not keeping your mouth shut.

"Somethign" Freudian, to be sure.

@#4

It seems like a perfectly good reason to take action to me.

If you just sit on your rosy-red backside, waiting to see outcomes, you haven't made a damn bit of difference in directing what that outcome might be.

This is so obvious that I'm amazed it needs to be explained. Cory and a bunch of other folks boycott (or attempt to boycott) the product of a company where the CEO has loudly gone on record with an very aggressive statement to the effect that he plans to exploit his customers.

Then there is your approach, in which you drop trou and curl yourself over a large log with your buttocks in the air, and wait, wait to see what happens.

Hmmmmm. I wonder which action (or lack thereof) might possibly let the company know that their customers won't allow themselves to be screwed?

I'd heard, somewhere, that it was all those missing kids on the milk cartons that got people freaky about letting their kids go out in the world. And that those missing kids were, for the most part, not random abductions, but rather custody battles in which one parent had done a scamper with the kid and gone into hiding. (Citation needed, to be sure...)

Abusive parents also keep children from the world. It is a matter of control. It is not unusual for an abuser to want to keep the victim feeling there is nowhere else to go, no one who could help.

But being over protectived also clips the emotional wings the children. One's emotional growth is retarded. I think a certain amount of xenophobia comes with the territory. And, of course, contained and controlled as they are, kids aren't outside as much.

And the kids don't get exercise because they aren't running around (except in the context of organized sports teams, pretty yucky IMO) and they are disconnected from the natural world because there isn't much of it left near where they live, or because heaven forfend they climb a tree and somebody gets sued.

And let's not forget to start bitching then, that the kids spend too much time in front of the computer.

I don't know what the hell we expect from our kids nowadays,

I am a mom. I'm of the school that you need to let your kids experience the world on their own terms. I think boredom is important, that not every moment needs to be planned and monitored. And one finds, as a parent, that you end up having your child play more with children of like-minded parents. Because it is just annoying and joyless to have a forty-minute playdate with a child who is scheduled up the wazoo and cries and wails every time he has to leave your kid for his violin lesson or whatever.

And so my son ended up with a nice little cohort of fellow young travelers, boys who wandered and explored with him. And now, as adults, they are still friends.

And the world seems much more their apple that it is for the kids who were kept "safe".
Because if they do not experience the world, how are they ever going to care for it, care about it? They'll just be obedient little consumers/cubical rats.

And I can't help but think that the overparenting and the overprotectiveness is some kind of selfishness on the part of the parent. You need to let your kids DO stuff. You need to let them drop into that halfpipe. You need to let them breathe. You need to let them live in RL. If you don't, then don't bitch when they spend more time in WoW than whatever micromanaged suburban existence you've got laid out for them...

With a little spray paint you can turn your old specs into 4-D glasses. You can't see diddley through them, so they make you aware of the passage of time.

Takuan,

And naked. We're going to have to fly naked.

/me shudders.

Oh well, they'll probably be confiscating my glasses too and that will be a mercy.

That bee wasn't merely "servicing" that flower, that there bee was "SONICATING" that flower.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAPT!!!

Oh, baby, was it good for you?

Interesting to watch him grill Margaret Sanger.

I don't think the point is the specifics of whatever warning whatever celeb offers. Ted Turner is not, in case you hadn't noticed, a scientist. He's not a researcher. It's just that folks getting upset about Ted Turner invoking Heart-of-Darkness scenarios seem absurd when they should, perhaps, be a bit more upset about the state of the planet.

Fun!

This didn't work for me at all. Not a bit.

I read the headline and thought someone had made molecular models with Legos, but no.

The monotone voice over is bad enough, but the music makes it worse. And what is the pointless flashing in the background about? Don't know if I want to doze or have a seizure.

This was made by biology students, not film students. But university students, not high school kids, so I'd hope for something a little better.

The hostile response people often have to warnings of looming environmental crisis has always perplexed me. But hostility is really fear, isn't it?

Exactly how things will play out can't be known. The variables are too great, we're still gathering data. But I'm just baffled about the massive degree of denial I see. How can one not see the changes on the face of the land and the water? It just seems to take a massive effort to not look. That's wall being maintained, one that requires a lot of energy. Having emotional targets like Turner or Fonda helps generate emotional energy. If nothing else, such ranting keeps an emotional noise level high enough to help dampen thinking.

Because one wouldn't want to consider the possibility that one's lifestyle might be causing problems. One wouldn't want to think about other people's suffering. One doesn't want to contemplate change.

No one in my extended family, for example, seems to even consider the impact of their lifestyle on the environment or other people. There is no modification of behavior, not even in small ways.

And I can't understand it, just can't fathom it. Especially as there is so much lip service given to family and CHILDREN. And I keep wondering, if you care so much about your children, then how can you bring yourself to live in a 4000 sq foot house in an unsustainable suburb, rolling around to all those lessons and activities in those big cars? How can you keep buying foodstuffs in plastic packaging and a thousand other bits of offensive inanity. Because the piper must be paid. And maybe you'll just sleaze by, oh baby boomer generation, or maybe not. But your kids will surely pay, and every generation after that.

So when Ted Turner describes a scenario of terrible suffering and fear, and people start freaking out and picking apart the details, it sure sounds like a lot of frightened noise. And it sounds like selfish frightened noise.

Because even if such things do not happen in YOUR lifetime, and I think there is a good possibility that they might, the party is coming to an end. And if you can't imagine yourself in a world where basics like food and water and shelter are nearly impossible to come by, you need to imagine your children in such a world.

That world is here, now, for many people on the planet. You need to imagine that possibility for yourself or your children and not in that vague and abstract way, not in that "future generations" somebody in the distance you can not see, but as people you love.

Do you love anyone but yourself? Think of your child, that beautiful young person. Think of that son or daughter of yours as a baby, a toddler, a teen, a young adult. Imagine specifics: a smile, a laugh, a stride. Think of that individual you love so.

Now put them in one of those scenarios, be it Mr. Turner's or a different one. It doesn't have to be a Mad Max world, just think of the struggle if agriculture becomes problematic. Don't even take it to the point of nothing growing. Push yourself too far, and you'll flinch away and feel nothing and stop thinking.

Just imagine enough of a change, that food starts to become an issue. And think, not of yourself, but of someone outside yourself who you love. I'm not even asking you to expand that circle very far, because probably if you could do that you wouldn't be in that hunker-down, look after yourself, so terrified that you can't consider the possibility of a life or world unlike the one you know now, rigid rigid rigid mode.

Stop focusing on Turner or Honda or whatever boogieman. Stop making that noise so you don't have to think about what is happening with the oceans and the skies and the soil beneath your feet.

I'd like to ask you to invest some time in learning about the planet you live on, to just pick up a secondhand Earth science textbook so you'll understand that we aren't talking about the thermostat out in the hall in your home or office. But I know that is too much to ask.

Just do this simple thing. Think hard about your kid and take responsibility for their future. Understand that this is bigger than a good school and a solid career. Understand that changes are coming that the upper middle class will not be able to ride out, that it's going to get harsh.

Think of your kid. Because I'm hoping some basic instinct will start working. I'm hoping that you'll be able to function despite fear, for your kids.

Love requires action, even when you are scared.

To quote Harlan Ellison,"There ain't no security this side of the grave."

If you focus on terrorism, but not on health and enviromental issues, are you safe? If the gov't will spend to buy tanks and guns, will hire Blackwater goons, but not make an effort for health insurance, are you safe?

What is more frightening, a random act of violence, or a random disease that is common and treatable, but you have no money to treat.

Does a giant wall and big brother spy eyes make you feel safe in a place with an unsustainable way of life is about to come tumbling down for most folks, if it hasn't already, and the safety nets have been removed.

What makes you feel safe?

"#28 posted by OM Author Profile Page, April 2, 2008 6:04 PM

...Amazing that such products of selective inbreeding could have come up with such a scam. Wonder if the bad guys had a black horse to put that stolen saddle on?"

Nah, the horse likely is the product of selective inbreeding. There is nothing selective in the breeding of trailer trash.

If the guy is freaked out enough that he has attempted suicide, he has a mental illness. It may be a short term one, it may well not be the specific illness that these knuckleheads are writing down as his diagnosis, but the poor man has a problem. He's spinning in circles in his head and needs some help to bust out of the loop. Delusion- smusion, it's some nasty kind of anxiety disorder. He needs therapy. He need Xanax. He needs a warm bath and a back rub and a visit with a nice fluffy therapy dog named Wuffles.

The paradoxical niceties are, IMO, a bunch of mental masturbation.

It looks a lot like a model of a giant squid that used to hang in Yale's Peabody Museum, one that was not plastinated.

People projecting a lot of their issues on squid lately, don't y'all think? You've got one boat captain describing them as vicious and this museum describing the usual preservation methods as demeaning(!) and a researcher tell us they have no feelings at all.

I suspect squid feel a lot of things. I don't think demeaned is one of them, especially after they are dead. While they are still in the pink, I think mostly they feel... hungry.

I especially like the helpful directions, which are also educational:

"Next, carefully warm (don't melt) the Tootsie Rolls in the microwave. Taper them a bit on the ends, because if cat poop weren't tapered, their buttholes would slam shut after they doo-doo."

Guess it's a LOLCAT litter cake.

It's lovely.

And it's fun.

It lifts the hair on the back of my neck, and not in a good way.

To each his own!

Now I'm going to have to find a Diebenkorn to wash the residue off of my retinas.

Chin up Kyle, we're old and getting older. Next thing you know, we'll all be dead.

And you will be the tiresome older generation.

Shampoo, rinse, repeat...

I misread the headline. I thought they'd had their nipples removed for real in some kind of body modification. And I thought, that's kind of icky, but not so hardcore as the USAC speedskater a few years back, who fell down in the middle of a race, and his nipple somehow stuck to the highly polished wooden floor and ripped off. But he just scrambled to his feet and finished the race. Now that's badass. Gross, but badass.

And nope, don't have a link or an article. I heard the story from another skater who had been there.

Wonderful!

A moment of sanity, hurrah!

Teresa,

I didn't mean to limit it to books about dragons. I was just thinking of things that I enjoyed as a youngster and a teen that I couldn't abide once I got past the last bit of puberty.

And I like fantasy, I just prefer Miéville and I adore T.P., I do I do. He's brilliant.

I guess I haven't read that enough books about dragons to justify jumping to a conclusion. Honestly, sometimes the tacky cover art you see as you walk by that section in the bookstore is pretty scary. Could be good stuff inside. Would go digging if there weren't so many other interesting things to read.

I've been trying to think of genre writers with blatant politics who I do enjoy. I used to read Sheri Tepper. Guess I just happen to prefer her politics.

I still want to know what Mr. Ellison got up to on that stage.

And all you folks who seem to think that Card is queer and that somehow excuses him from homophobia, it doesn't. Have no idea if he is or isn't. Makes no never mind.

My son read Ender's Game when he was twelve and found it both fun and creepy. He's the one who pointed out the mother's big riff on obligatory breeding. He didn't think that philosophy would make for parents who were, to paraphrase, very healthy about their relationships with their children. I thought that was pretty damn astute for a kid his age.

Other than that, he enjoyed the book.

Assuming that this behavior comes from some kind of defective internal wiring, I imagine there are different reasons for it and different types of offenders.

I think there is this foggy idea about sexual desire that allows, perhaps, a little too much misguided empathy.

Some people just really like hurting other people. I'm not jumping up on any macho position here. I feel the same way about people who hit children, starve children, mentally and emotionally abuse children. I have the same gut reaction to people who intentionally harm other adults. Rapist and batterer are all much of a muchness. It is not about sexual urges, it is about violating and degrading and harming another person. Some people just really like to do that, and it isn't necessarily a sexual rush. There are monsters out there who did other people's pain.

I guess it is a matter of who you empathize with most. One reads the article and thinks, wow, how much would that suck to have those signs on my house and car.

And plenty of people don't really think about what it would be like to be that little boy or little girl. It's really uncomfortable to imagine their pain, their terror. And the emotional trauma will persist for life.

That is something folks who have not gone through being a victim cannot imagine. How long after you have dealt with what happened, your body does not forget your fear. There is long-term health deterioration from a constant release of stress chemistry that, in someone who was never traumatized, is only in the body in emergency situations. And with a stress disorder, insurance is even more difficult to obtain than it is for the rest of us.

Then there is the constant low-level fear, the feeling you are never safe anywhere. If you were abused at home, the feeling that no place is home.

You don't usually find much outpouring of concern about abusers' rights from the victims. But no one likes to talk to the victims much, because they are not easy to be around. They hemorrhage pain.

But all the grandstanding about stringing these guys up by their necks, does little good. Ask a rape crisis advocate about punishments and you'll learn they don't support extreme ones. Because convictions are more difficult to get when the punishments are extreme.

While I understand the urge to want these monsters executed, if I had a magic wand I'd cure the faulty circuits of all of them, make it so no one would ever have, say, a cluster B personality disorder ever again. If my magic wand would not do that, I'd wish them away to another place, an identical earth, all of them. But I wouldn't really care where they went. Because I'd just want them GONE.

I'd really like society at large to take this more seriously. I'd like to see the kind of research money dumped into this that we put into cancer and heart disease. Cure it, get rid of it, whatever.

But I don't think you can get up on your high horse about offing these brutes or respecting their rights or any of it, unless you have been on the receiving end of their attentions.

Because they look like people, but they're NOT. They're monsters who feed off of people.

I saw Harlan Ellison at Carnegie Mellon back in the seventies. He was full of piss and vinegar. He spoke/ranted/performed for about four hours. No one got up and left. Actually, the room just filled way beyond the point of SRO.

For all that, there are plenty of more prolific writers in the genre, and he is not writing crowd pleasers. Niven's stuff (and the last time I read him was about the same time I saw Ellison) is more escapist. I don't know if there are furry folk out there dressing up as Kzin, but it wouldn't surprise. Hard to imagine anyone projecting themselves into the world of "I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream."

Harlan wasn't comfortable and he wasn't trying to make his readers comfortable. But I learned stuff from him that day, sitting in the audience with my jaw gaping, life stuff, stuff I have put into use for decades.

Teresa, do tell, what the heck does he do when there are women on stage with him? Behaving badly, he must be a handful. Hell, on his best behavior he must be a handful. Can you imagine him as a toddler? They'd have him on a Ritalin I.V.!

Politically, I've found Niven offputting for years. Never could stomach Pournelle's stuff. I read Ringworld when I was young enough to have a soft spot for large ill-tempered talking tigers with parasol ears. So I'd always let myself believe that Niven had fallen under Pournelle's spell. But I didn't track the whole science fiction scene all that carefully, so I had nothing on which to base that suspicion.

But that quote from Niven seems really nuts, even given his politics. Somebody must have slipped angel dust into his Metamucil.

Why is it that so many folks who write a particula r kind of escapist type science fiction and fantasy come off as total asshats when they are interviewed? Is there something about writing about dragons and spaceships that turns you into a thoughtless turd? Or is there something about being a thoughtless turd that lead you to writing a particular type of story. Niven, Heinlein, Card, Anne the-underclass-deserve-to-be-drudges-because-if-they-worked-harder-they'd-be-rich-like-me McCaffrey, they all have characters who succeed against great odds and the lessons are that the characters share the writer's values. Only of course, it's an obstacle course the writer has set up to begin with. And they pander and stroke readers who are hungry for this weird affirmation because reality is rather an unnerving strain.

Well, yeah, I get the strain part, I get the unnerved part. I'm just too old and cranky to want to be part of that kind of circle jerk.

Is it something about inventing worlds, and not having to step back and see how they'd really play out over time? This could be why this stuff isn't sitting on the literature shelf.

Oh, I'll still genre stuff. I'll read Neal Stephenson and Gaiman and China Miéville knocks my socks off, truly he does. I want to have fun as much as the next person... But I didn't go near the Discworld books for years because they looked so much like the Xanth books my sister read, and that I couldn't go near without a basin. And look at all the fun I nearly missed...

Hmmm, somebody musta put something into MY metamucil, because I surely am rambling.

And not proofreading, no no never.

Participate? You want the sheep who shop to participate? They won't until the whole mall and TV lifestyle cant' be supported. Nope, not until it all collapses and by then, it might just be too late.

As far as organizing without organizations goes, the eusocial hymenopterans have got us pathetic primates totally pwnt. Ants have it down!

Bardfinn,

What planet do you live on? Since when do editorial staff have anything to do with fact checking ads? This is not the way newspapers work, and not the way they have ever worked. It's all they can do to fact check what passes for news, what with the journalism end of their budgets being cut more and more every day.

I totally blame the people who blew off the owner. I'm sure he had ID. I'm sure they couldn't be bothered to wait and see if his response was valid. He had called the police. They were doing a scamper.

They were asshats.

I don't know about the counting, but schooling behavior is neato. Newly hatched fry don't know how to school, they have a lot of near misses before they get the hang of it. If a baby fish of a schooling species hatches out and is not raised with others of its kind, it does not know how to school. It will learn, when reunited with the others, but it never swims in formation quite so tidily.

It's called polarization. Birds do it too. Nice trick, eh?

I'm with #34 on this.

Tolerating the intolerant does what, exactly? Not help. Tolerating the intolerant enables hate.

The FSM is a whimsical poke. The religious can't seem to tolerate that. They will, however, pass laws based on bigotry based on ancient tribal legends.

I can handle jokes about dykes who hang drywall and drive trucks. I can't tolerate the culture of hate and fear fueled by most religions. I can't tolerate a culture in which queers and atheists have to hide what they are and what they believe, all the while any kind of religious b.s. is considered just dandy.

So I am supposed to be tolerant of that, but be worried that the adorable and amusing FSM who is, by his very nature, less threatening and hostile than even Barney (Who is, after all, a T. rex.) might offend some religious bigot?

NO.

This is a double standard we face every day. This is one set of rules for the religious and another set of rules for the rest of us (and there are a lot of the rest of us).

NO. I'm not having any of that.

Ben Stein has had his amusing moments, but he's always been an asshat. He's a right-to-lifer. He worked for Nixon. So his views on evolution aren't a shocker, nor where he stands on issues like integrity and honesty.

Just having watched the online trailer, this film is such a steaming pile of blatant propaganda, that it makes Stein seem worse. It's like having someone shove their festering skin rash right in your face. It's stomach churning.

These look so dang familiar. I read a lot of science fiction back in the sixties and seventies. I picked up a lot of it secondhand. I know I've had books with this cover art. I wish there were examples of what they looked like as finished book designs. I'd love to see the titles.

@ #2 About drug addicts...

Jeff, I think you are huffing something.

Having attended a couple of big-name art schools back in the day (and by back in the day, I mean in the late 70's when drug use was common and open) and having visited and met artists from a number of other art schools during that time, I can assure you that there really is no noticeable difference between artwork made by drug users and artwork made by non-drug users.

We could fill a gallery the size of Grand Central Station with art, half by people who never touched drugs and the other half by people who "inhaled". You would not have any clue. You'd have no way of telling which was which.

I'm not saying that substances get mixed up with chemistry don't effect art output. I'm saying you could not tell. There is no consistent style, or technique, no way you could tell. No more than you could tell from reading a passage of text if the writer had been drinking.

Being an artist, doing art, involves operating at many levels. There's a cocktail of components such as learned skills, physical dexterity, life experience, personality, perceptual ability and more. Those are just off the top of my head. Someone who does a lot of their art, be it visual or musical, dance or theater or the written word, has a lot going on when they do it. Some processes are very much the active here and now, some are happening at a deeper intuitive level. The latter are where your history and training and experience come in to play.

Some folks, folks who either cannot or will not do art, see artists as savant, mystical or idiot. It isn't magic. It isn't one process happening. Art is not the same combination of processes for everyone.

And stoners don't necessarily make paintings like these.

Humanity is a taxon; a species Homo sapiens. There is, however, no designated holotype.

Now y'all can start sparring over just what a species is.

7 kids = uterine prolapse.

Uteri are best kept internally, not dangling down between your knees.

For some of us, going on any of these rides, safe or not, seems as appealing as being waterboarded.

Oh my gawd, are the folks in congress finally growing spines? Has there been new testicular transplant treatment? A small spark of hope.

It is about goddamn time.

I'm not so much into keeping "stuff" these days, but boy, it would be cool to have this.

What I would really love is the real Luggage. Think about how wonderful that would be for flying these days. Some damn TSA jerk gets too pesky flipping through your things, and the luggage eats him! And no matter where they try to warehouse it, or what flight it goes on, it ends up by your side at your destination. I'd LOVE that. It's like Felix's magic bag crossed with a pit bull. Or maybe a hungry, hungry hippo!

All the best to Terry. For what it is worth, I'm beaming love to him. His books, his humor, his portrayal of characters that show his appreciation of human beings and their foibles and strengths, and his altruism have gotten me through some rough times.

He's one of those people who makes me happy and proud to be human. I don't often feel like that. IMO, he's better at it than the Dalai Lama.

I just have to say that Bewitched really freaked me out when I was a little kid.

She had powers, she could do anything. She could have cured diseases or built homes for poor people or even been a crime fighter.

And what was the whole point of the show, that she stay home and vacuum and do the dishes and be a housewife so her husband would not feel emasculated.

Samantha might have had two Dicks, but they were very tiny one and insecure and unimaginative ones.

Growing up as a little girl in that era, Bewitched depressed and terrified me.

Um, easy or hard, interbreeding with aliens is biology, not physics.

And the Alien aliens weren't interbreeding, they were parasitoids and they happened to throw a little lateral gene transfer into the mix, scooping up some interesting characters from their various hosts.

Maybe some rich schmuck will buy it. Then he'll die, and his kids will fight over the jags and the beach house in Malibu and the ranch in Santa Fe and no one will want these old bones that their crackpot dad had on display in the living room at the "cabin" in Jackson Hole and they'll donate the dusty old mess to some museum for the tax write-off.

The Dalai Lama is homophobic? Bummer.

And he seemed like such a nice guy.

Do ALL religions have to be yucky?

#5, I read your post and I just don't know where to start. It tires me out just to look at it. So I'll skip it, except to say yuck.

Don't recall signing a loyalty oath for the nutmeg state, but I think they did run a security check on me. That's something fairly recent.

I guess my job is safe... for the time being. Until they find out that I'm a Cory Doctorow fan. Then I am so screwed.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a boingboing reader?"

Ken wrote: "I have to ask how a post like this jibes with the subtitle of this site: "A Directory of Wonderful Things" No matter which side of this issue you fall on (TSA or Parents were at fault) I can't find the "wonderfulness" of such postings - of course, your site, your policies (no argument from me), but have you considered that this may be outside the scope of this blog?"

To which I answer, shutting down the TSA would be a wonderful thing.

And I have to ask, where do you get off deciding what is outside the scope of this blog?

You know, when Viagra first made the news, I'd hoped it would help save endangered creatures like rhinos and all the other poor beasties who seem to be ingredients in traditional rod stiffeners. Alas, it was not to be.

I think all Viagra has really done is increased the incidence of cystitis in elderly women.

Oh, and I thought it could make you go blind. Or was that from playing with yourself?

EKPP.

First you blame the kid for not being responsible. Then, when someone points out that it was a kid, you're jumping on the parents. Where were they?

Sometimes kids fly without their parents. It happens. Sometimes they are visiting family or there is split custody or who knows, they could be going someplace for some kind of medical treatment and the family can only afford a ticket for one.

But you're talking the talk of someone who is pretty convinced the system as it stands will protect them over other troublemakers (poor people, people with accents, people with health issues, people who resent the way the USA is rolling over on its back and letting a police state come in to being...).

You side with the guys in the jackboots. I side with this kid and all the other folks.

Just don't be too terribly surprised when someday the TSA or some other arm of the new Amerika takes a dislikin' to the way you look and marches you off to the body-cavity search cubical, despite your protests and your being a white Christian male.

Just don't holler too loud and disturb the law-abiding folks waiting on line. Maybe if you remember to bring clearly-labeled lube in a 2 oz container in a sealed transparent plastic bag, they'll let you use it.

Animal abuser? I don't see how waving your arms at a sixteen foot long crocodile as abusive.

I think the croc felt the way you'd feel if a cookie started waving at you, and then got away before you could eat it.

I'd like to thank you BoingBoingers for turning me on to the TED talks. I'm utterly hooked on them. I've been putting friends on to them, including faculty at a teaching university who have, in turn, been showing TED talks to their classes of science education students.

These are fun. These are eye-opening. And these are chewy!

Thanks Mark & Everybody.

I haven't permission either.

No soup for me.

I prefer my local independent to Starbucks, but this will make those on-the-road stops at Starbucks much nicer.

#3 I can't believe anyone would think this would help Dunkin! They used to make a good cup of coffee about 35 years ago. No more. Now they can't even manage an edible doughnut. They taste like nothing natural is in the dough, not flour, not nothing that didn't come out of a test tube. Horrors.

Here's an alternate or, at least, modified headline:

"39-year-old man fails to pass as high school girl, Duh!"

Howzabout complaining, taking your biz elsewhere, and giving any and all a head's up about the crap product?

Just don't sit there and mindlessly stuff down that dogfood from Taco Bell.

This fellow did not intend this to be art. He was marking territory. What an doink. The tradition way to do it, pissing in the snow, works just fine.

The thing is, this was NOT a SCIENCE fair.

They can call a pig a pigeon, but that won't make him fly.

I'm imagining Anthony Bourdain doing an episode of "No Reservations" in Ankh-Morpork. You know he'd be all over CMOT's sausages. But you also know he'd kill off any living pathogens in the sausage by washing it down with a bottle of scumble.

Mostly apples + sort of meat = fine Discworld dining!

Funny how if a kid downloads a song, that's stealing, but anybody can nab your personal information and that's not...

David,

In that context I kind of get it. But these little pieces don't really capture the feel of her larger work. They look more like something you'd find at a Kingdom of Loathing convention.

But yeah, I've half a dozen Michael Corney skull cups that I really treasure. But I think they stand alone very well and are also more representative of his larger pieces.

It is just that our lives are filled with stuff. I've been watching people pare down the stuff in their lives a lot lately for all kinds of reasons: they've moved, they're putting their house on the market and need to strip down the clutter, a death of a spouse, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a baby along the way...

All kinds of life changes happening to many of my friends and family and common theme is dealing with stuff. Look around you are ask yourself, what would make the cut, your cut, if you have to have a lighter load for some reasons.

Helping friends downsize, organize, pack up, move, mourn, maintain, prepare, I'm torn. I'm a visual person. I collect things. I've also become more and more gypsy-like over the years. I've hung on to those cups, to a number of prints and a few molas. I have some natural history items, some lovely shells, an old scuba backpack from the 1960's that looks like modernist sculpture and I use it as such. But other than that, I am down to functional things. And books. I have a lot of books. Not as many as I used to, but still way too many, probably.

It's just such an American thing or a a modern thing, to amass all this stuff. I'm thinking it does't help. I'm thinking it is much more satisfying to go to the gallery and see McGrath's more serious work. Because then you are doing something. And no, seeing it is not like the owning of it. But maybe, it turns out, it is better.

I like the concept, I like the idea a whole lot. Cozy spaces to be with books! Even window seats flanked by bookcases delight me. But the design of this bed feels like retail display. What's with the shingled roof element?

Or maybe it looks like furniture from an upscale nursery school circa 1966. Creative playthings. Is this for a child? Maybe in that context in makes sense.

Collectible? Limited edition? I'm underwhelmed. It isn't awful, it just isn't killer.

Why not just make your own stuff?

If you've some artsy background, grand. If not, well, you're folks, aren't ya? Make folk art. Do it yourself. Don't buy crafts stuff to do it. Use what is kicking around the house. Riffle through piles of bulk trash waiting for pick-up. Re-purpose.

Do it. More fun than buying it.

Cognitive science? Hell, any graphic designer could have told you this stuff years ago.

I took a look at this site and wished I hadn't. Never mind what the "rotten neighbors" are like. The posters are cretins.

Unicorn chaser plz!

#32 You wrote a dramatic farewell, which indicated you were leaving and told us all the ways that BoingBoing had let you down. Yet you stuck around to read #31's don't-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass response.

That didn't strike me as entirely honest. It also took some of the wind out of your exit speech.

All in all, however, it was funny.

Speaking of E. coli, here's another busy strain:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7250742.stm

Oh yeah, we've had our golden decades with antibiotics. And we over used them to the point of uselessness.

Don't you hate it when life gets really, a little too interesting?

And yet, they feed big-ass magnets to cows.

Cows, like toddlers, sometimes eat strange things. Cows, unlike toddlers, don't have a parent keeping an eye on this sort of thing. Also cows don't wise up as they grow up. They eat all kinds of metallic and potentially dangerous junk. So the trick is to feed them a big old magnet and to collect all the metal stuff.

I am so not making this up. I shit you not.

Kyle,

I can tell you are a helluva host, doing whatever it takes to make your guests feel warm and fuzzy. And those are your friends.

I was objecting to eating meat contaminated with feces. If that's your idea of charming rural fare, I'll take a pass. Here, you can eat my share of the 0175:H7.

Bon apétit!

Xenu, it does. And it's a rainbow too!

I was served an undercooked burger at a local fair last September. I got good and sick, but not as sick as I could have. As it was, I lived on probiotics and rice gruel for three weeks and even though I'm much better than I was, my guts still aren't right.

Imagine my horror when I learned that massive amounts of beef infected with E. coli 0157:H7 had been released for sale. This is nothing amusing. I got sick, but this can kill people. Or it can mess people up so badly for the rest of their lives that they wish they were dead.

After I got sick, I read that 22 million pounds of infected beef had been recalled. And I figured there would be massive pressure on the meat packing industry to clean up their act. But no. I got on the USDA mailing list, and the recalls kept coming and coming and coming. And the public just doesn't care. I wonder what the deal with that is? One batch of contaminated spinach and folks have sworn off spinach for life. But fecal burgers? Oh hey, yummy!

There's an interesting book by Nichols Fox about the first famous E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak about around 2000. It's worth a read.

Skateboarding illegal in the city center? Cars should be illegal. Sk8rs don't pollute and they reduce congestion.

I've often thought the main reason they are banned in outdoor malls and such is that the retailers don't like people having a really good time without buying something. The dangerous thing about skaters is that they aren't especially big consumers. Maybe only because they are young and haven't the money and gotten the full dose of brainwashing yet.

But people on skateboards are daring to use the space for something other than trudging their fat asses into the trendy mall to buy a loveseat at Pottery Barn and some electronic doodah at the Sharper Image.