That was funny. For some reason I kept picturing Robert Palmer singing in the foreground. Simply irresistible.

Wow. You here at Boingboing really have handled this badly. Sure it's your blog, etc. etc. but that's still not a good reason for the actions that were taken. It has the quality of being in someone's home and noticing a college year book on the coffee table and when perusing through it seeing regular holes where a face had been removed from some pictures and a name removed from some text. Of course in the digital world we have to be told of the erasures but now that we have it has all the qualities of the Swiss cheese yearbook. Expecting that people looking at the holes wouldn't have second thoughts about the people that did the cutting is living in a dream world. That's your doing. Not someone else's.

I get the impression that the cause of this editing was something personal ("piles of shit lying around") and that's fine. I have no desire to get into what someone feels is private. My guess is that nothing at the site was the cause, just the result. The problem is that the sense of "free spirit" that I think is the big attraction about Boingboing has taken a hit.

You're still in my RSS feed and you're still one of my favorite Internet stop overs. We've all had our freak out moments but it's important to keep them to rare moments.

I did a three part detailed look at the chase sequence from "The French Connection" a while back.
http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/187525/
http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/191269/
http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/194025/

The last part includes some Google map tracings of the chase route.

The Brooklyn route -
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=638314

The phantom Queens scenes -
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=636449
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=636451

Also satellite views of the Queens scenes as part of an explanation of how I figured out where the scenes were -
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=40.703206&lon=-73.90658&z=18.3&r=0&src=ggl
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=40.707821&lon=-73.913809&z=19.2&r=0&src=ggl
http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=40.704862&lon=-73.901836&z=19.4&r=0&src=ggl

Images from the chase Brooklyn neighborhoods as they are now -
http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/269618/

Ironically, the top image from the above current neighborhoods link was selected as part of a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on the "changing faces of Brooklyn."
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2008/06/25/click-is-not-a-contest/

They look exactly like the rectangular plastic tags used to hold the ends of twisted bags of sliced bread, except a group stacked in a row. It's the gluing or screwing that don't seem acceptable. A small broad clamp with most of the mechanism below view would make more sense than gluing, etc.

The image on the right, especially with the wrinkled sheet background, reminds me of a famous Irving Penn style.

http://www.masters-of-fine-art-photography.com/02/artphotogallery/photographers/irving_penn_10.html

Creativity, whether intellectual or artistic, is always based on "prior art," often being quantum steps (the smallest possible increments) from the existing milieu. That's the outrageous aspect of much of "intellectual property" ownership. It's one thing to claim some sort of superiority but quite another to claim ownership over all further quantum steps.