Ug-Lee.

Hardly better than a bright pink dollhouse. Why not wait until your daughter is 5 or so, and build the whole thing together? It'll be much less sturdy than this thing, much less "pretty" (oh god, how ugly) and way better in every conceivable way.

Kid:

The Chinese are already master terraformers; they've managed to grow the Gobi at a rate of ~2,500 square miles a year!

http://www.articlediscovery.com/blog/2007/11/17/chinese-gobi-desert-threatens-beijing/

Seriously, though, the disregard the authorities have for the environment is stunning, and has very complex roots. Part of it is the explicitly anti-Daoist (as well as anti-Buddhist, somewhat anti-Confucian) roots of Maoism; accommodating nature was considered backward thinking for much of China's modern history. This is how the Three Gorges dam project got underway.

Another aspect is the percieved political impossibility of hampering growth. The Communist party believes that only continued economic prosperity insulates them from overthrow, and enforcing environmental standards could threaten a lot of very dirty businesses that keep the system going. Wishful thinking leads them to weather control that way.

Cronyism probably has something to do with it, too. Weather control schemes employ people, effective or not, and if it "works" (random chance being what it is), it'll reflect some glory onto the schemers.

Oh, I could go on. I'm frankly glad that the Tibetan riots, for all that they'll be disastrous for the Tibetan people, have happened now. It's finally shaken people out of the notion that China is some kind of "normal" country. It's a deeply troubled place, and without internal and external pressure, it's never going to solve its issues. Schemes like weather control are symptoms of top-down rot.

Here's my real question:

Who here, complaining about the moderation policy, ever thought that Boingboing was anything other than a party to which we were merely guests? A party, indeed, thrown by a group of Believer-reading, Amiga-lusting, West-coast punctuation fetishists? Let me tell you that, while I enjoy reading the posts, I am in no way under the illusion that this is a Hell's Angels convention. Furthermore, if this were BB the zine, there would be no complaining at all about "moderation policy"; the vast majority of dull comments, like this one, would simply be left out of the letters column, were there ever a column in the first place.

Boingboing, as a pasttime, is only lightly participatory. We as its readers are mostly, justly, relegated to minor roles, our voices unheard, our opinions unconsidered. All these things will be lost in time, like tears, in rain. Time, to die.

Phoebe is my mother's favorite comic book creator. If you know her work, you can understand how terrifying that is for me.

My final post on this topic. I love the mutant posting-plants that grow overnight.

Reading as a pastime is rapidly becoming a minority activity, and it twists people's tits that their primary signifier of cultural fluency is falling out of fashion. If it's poetry, fiction or nonfiction, the act if sitting down with a book is becoming increasingly rare.

Giving books away seems like a good way to reverse this trend. Period. Is it good for the publishing industry? I think it is, for the simple reason that computers haven't yet found a nice way to emulate books. I know I bought Kelly Link's second book after reading her first book online. If anything, giving away free books is undermining not the publisher's business, but the library's.

Writers will write creatively regardless of the market. Anthony Trollope made a mint of his work. Franz Kafka made bupkis. And regardless of your opinion of his work, Jay-Z became a very rich man for his lyrics, while Emily Dickinson made nothing.

The question really is, now that the content writers produce has virtually no protection against infinite reproduction, how do we cultivate a market that will encourage people to do the very difficult thing that is writing? As long as publishers view the web as being something to fight against, all they'll ever do is slow down the inexorable erosion of their market.

They absolutely need to come to an accommodation with the internet. They need to aggressively seek it out, WHATEVER that compromise is, and buy into it. It's obvious to everyone but old people.

DCER- I work at a magazine which runs poetry and reviews of poetry, although the majority of our articles are traditional journalism. On an average day, we get 1-2 books of poetry to review, and about a dozen packages of unsolicited poems. I can't keep up the pace, and I don't know anyone who could. Of course, the majority is crap, but that's the same with every slush pile-- one of the distinctive features of art is that it generally takes decades to puzzle out what was really great from what was dated and faddish, and what was just nonsense.

Just because you like the Beats doesn't mean they were the end of poetry. Indeed, the market hardly abandoned poets- if anything, despite the withdrawal of public support in the 80's, for the first time in a century, poetry got into the business of making money. Arkizzle's point is exactly right- hip-hop, if not to the tastes of the chapbook-buying public (all 100 of them), could be the most lucrative form of versifying ever.

(And sorry for the crack about the chapbooks- poetry readers are actually some of the most astute listeners of hip hop.)

Never the less, poetry reading or writing is not a pastime for the majority of Americans. For on-the-page written poetry, there exists no profitable market. Yet American poets persist.

In fact, from my limited perspective, poetry is doing better now online than fiction. The cost of publishing has finally come into line with the potential profits made from poetry- nearly zero. Poetry boards and chatrooms are jumping nowadays, and the form itself is better suited to the internet than many longer forms of prose.

Now, you may not like the last fifty years of verse. Language Poetry or New Formalism (or East Coast hip-hop) might not be your cup of tea. But give it a couple of decades, and we'll shake it out, and hand you a clutch of classics.

Dr. Pickles,

Editors and publishers are attracted to bookselling because they like books. Bringing a book to market is a tedious, difficult business that takes a lot of energy for a very uncertain and generally small profit. For the same amount of time, effort and brains, they could be making big bucks in any of a dozen other businesses.

Now, the guys at the tip-top are definitely in it for the money. But they're b-school babies, and their mentality is to minimize the difference between different flavors of widget-selling anyway. Obviously, part of the crisis publishing finds itself in nowadays is that it's being expected to conform to the predictable, high-growth models that apply to fungible commodities.

The guys in the middle, that is to say, the vast majority of the people in the book trade, are in it because they like the business, at least in theory. But I think that as the market changes, their attitudes become more and more conflicted. Their self-worth is tied both to the notion of books as art and as commodity. "Free books" undermines their self-worth as breadwinners, while the "bestsellers only" attitude goes against their artistic aspirations.

The solution, I feel, is to grow the freaking market. Carpet-bomb the country with literacy programs, lobby congress to improve education and reading programs in the schools. Fund local libraries, promote more authors, break up the Amazon/Barnes and Nobel/Border's triopoly. Why don't they place their products in more movies? Why didn't No Child Left Behind didn't include a novel-a-month mandate from the industry? It's almost like they weren't even trying.

Also, give away free books. Give them away online, in a nice format. Go into the back catalog, and pull out some likely candidates, and seed them around. See if you can drum up interest. They can't be doing much worse than they have been.

The vast majority of books I own I've bought second-hand, specifically because books are a big gamble. A movie can't last more than three hours, or cost more than about ten bucks, but to blow fifteen or twenty dollars on a hardback, and invest ten hours reading, only to be disappointed, is an awful blow. My tastes were shaped by reading that I picked up at garage sales for a quarter a piece. When I see a rack of Dover Classics at the bookstore, I'm all over them, and if a particular volume doesn't work out, I'm out a buck or two.

I'm honestly stumped by the attitude of media publishers towards giveaways. I think its roots are more cynical than even the "screw the consumer/screw the artist" notions that get floated around. I think it has a lot more to do with the fear that they're crap shovelers, and that the role of publishers (of any media, not just books) is to somehow package what's unredeemable.

This is a natural outgrowth of publishing, getting calloused eyeballs from looking over so much dreck in search of the merely acceptable. At the end of the day, all you see are the flaws, and you naturally fall into panic mode when somebody suggests you give it away. When you see your job as packaging crap, it sounds like they're yelling, "the jig is up!".

The problem with getting publishers to embrace different flavors of free is that their objections are rooted much more strongly in human nature than they are in economic reality. If publishers were really serious about their economic interests, not only would they be giving away a lot more, but they'd be aggressively targeting kids the way McDonald's does. But they don't, because they've got a deeply conflicted notion of what they're doing. After all, they wouldn't have gotten into publishing if they didn't love books. Rotted idealism is poisoning the industry as much as anything.

What the Texas Legislature did to the state's districts is a scandal, and deserves all the attention and protest the people of Texas can muster. If politicians can't endure a fair vote, they've no right to hold office.

Peacefully marching down a highway and blocking traffic is a perfect way to protest. It harms no-one, while making a point about the ridiculous placement of the polling station. Of course, some people will get caught in the traffic jam and be late for stuff, and they've got every right to be angry. But being on time isn't a civil right. Voting certainly is.

These kids are fantastic, and due all praise.

Don'tcha mean whale skeletons? I thought the title "Cetology" was a dead giveaway.

Actually, I'm all for a Chinese Olympics. If the Chinese DIDN'T get the Olympics, they would never have a chance to be repeatedly embarrassed over the abuse they dish out to their own people, and their "minorities"- the Tibetans, the Uigyrs, the Mongolians et al.

Engagement works if you give 'em a little, and punish 'em a little. There's no way the Chinese are going to up and say, "You're right- everyone out of Lhasa! We're shipping the DL right back!"

But if you promise them the world, and then bug them repeatedly about stuff, you have a chance at more positively affecting policy. Especially in a nation like China, whose politics rush from crisis to crisis with stagnation in between, having the Olympics creates circumstances where change is possible. Now, are democratic governments and bigwigs like Lucas doing it effectively? Maybe, I don't think so. But if this is China's "coming out party", then it's a good opportunity to send signals and press for reform.

I think there are two things the "anti-splittists" (Kid, Vaporlock, et. al.) are ignoring:

1) A genocidal war, justified on the Serbian side as a defense of "national integrity" and "defense of ethnic Serbs" means that nobody in their right mind is going to oppose a majority-Albanian region from seeking greener pastures elsewhere.

For all I know, it might be a bad move for Kosovo, economically and politically, but the Serbs gave up their right to territorial integrity as soon as they began ethnically cleansing. Isn't that why we split Germany in the first place? And isn't that a constructive (if desperate) stick to beat developed nations with- commit genocide, get politically dismembered?

2) Now that Kosovo is independent, how long will it be before it starts folding itself into a greater trans-European sovereignty, the EU? Honestly, while I have concerns over the much of what goes on inside the EU- their economic policy is just steamrolling some ex-Bloc members like Hungary- I sure as hell welcome the notion that wars of nationalism will be short-circuited by continent-wide relationships that are too sticky to break with a couple of bombs.

Alright- we've got a list:

Edward E. Whitacre Jr. (Former CEO, AT&T)
Randall L. Stephenson (Current CEO, AT&T)
Ivan Seidenberg (CEO, Verizon)

Every Republican member of the Senate, plus these guys-

Bayh (D-IN)
Carper (D-DE)
Conrad (D-ND)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Webb (D-VA)
Clinton (D-NY)

These proud men and women have sacrificed our privacy on the altar of something (I honestly don't know what... Security? Money?)

In any case, since they've given away all American's rights, I think they should be the first ones to experience the loss of such rights. I encourage anyone with access to please report on the heinous and embarassing details of these individual's lives. Do they have hemroids? How's their love life (what kind of porn do they like)? What's happening with the fam'? What's in their medicine cabinet? Why don't we dig up old SAT scores?

Of course, scatological and sexual details are the best, but anything gossipy will work fine. There is nothing to be done with these people but to shame them and shame them again (they're politicians, so it won't stick the first time). They have done a scandalous thing, and they need to be exposed to ridicule. It would be far less than what they have exposed us to.

Courier 12 pt. is my favorite for writing. It's gotta have a serif, and it's gotta be monospace. Anything else distracts my ear-eye. I've always found that for creative writing, the typeface and program you use has as much impact on the story as the room and town in which you work. Just like some stories feel "Boston" while others could have been written anywhere-- there's no reliable correlation, except that some pieces I write just feel "word processed".

Honestly, I'll never get over Word for MS-DOS, 'cause that's how I learned.

Romney is a crass opportunist by any measure, who ran for office in Massachusetts as a moderate and immediately began tacking right in preparation for a presidential run. If he were only a Baptist (or even, at this point, a Catholic!) he'd virtually have the presidency in the bag.

It's interesting to see big banner Conservative ecumenicism bump against small "c" conservative scriptural interpretation. String-pullers like Cheny take a Machiavellian (or, perhaps more properly, a Straussian) view of religion as a cosmetic ordering principal to establish common public morality. But when the grass roots takes their dogma seriously, big tents get smaller and smaller- see Ann Coulter's recent crack about us Jews needing to get "perfected". This can end up making the conservative base in America just about as fragmented as the liberal one.

Roping the Catholics and Israeli-supporting Jews into the Republican party was a major win for the conservative movement, but I have to wonder how long they can hold it together? As a paleo-leftist, I'm curious how many conservatives feel alienated by the dominance of Southern Protestants in a party that's ostensibly committed to staying out of one's face?

Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are TV shows, but a kid's show that's got Paul Frank's mascot traipsing around on it has lost my sympathy entirely, no matter how many Biz Markies they throw at me. Might as well be a big, fat can of Coke out there, doin' the twist.

Hipster commercialism is the same as all the rest. I grew up on television, I have no doubt that when I have children, they will watch it, too, and that there will be gold amongst the dross. But the experience has taught me the there is a lot of dross, and that most of the time I spent watching TV as a child was time utterly wasted.

@TERESA -

"That's a pattern I've been seeing all my life. In the lower-priced range, you get overcomplicated, flashy goods that are indifferently manufactured from cheap materials. You can find some solid, well-made products in the luxury goods bracket, but they're marked up to unreasonably high prices."

This is one of the things I've noticed, too. Modern industrial methods make adornment trivial, and one often has to pay a premium for simplicity. Clothing has to be the ultimate example. A shirt which both fits and lacks a prominent, ugly logo is as rare as hen's teeth.

In some areas, this calculus breaks down- my cheap Chinese DVD player has many more USEFUL features (multi-region, multi-standard, VGA and digi-optical outs...) than most "luxury"-brand players.

But conversely, I would argue that many of the "low priced" items you cite are overbuilt monstrosities, despite their simplicity or sturdy design, and that many an object's utility stems from its obsolescence.

$10 Moleskine notebooks are a glaring example- for $1.25 I can replace it with a simple spiral-bound or legal pad. The sewn binding will not protect my notebook from it's real enemy- being filled with trivial nonsense no one will ever want to look at again.

Nor will an $85 (or $50!) Stetson protect itself from falling off my head and blowing into Tiger Leaping Gorge, to be swept irrevocably away. Any conditions where I would want to wear a Stetson will immediately expose that Stetson to conditions I wouldn't want to subject a "nice" hat to. I would rather wear the hat they gave me at the Sheraton- I certainly won't weep over it's loss.

Nor, in fact, will a Maytag washing machine ever use less energy or water to do its job, which it performs otherwise admirably.

There are many, many tools and everyday items in our lives where the good enough thing is actually the superior one. Not in every case, of course, but in fact in far fewer cases than we suspect to be true.

Which brings us back to "luxury goods". They are only very occasionally better built than the average. But they very effectively communicate our social position. In China, they're still working out the bugs on just how to best exploit this tendency, because material wealth is still relatively new, but there's no fetish for the "genuine", as there is in the US, and it's real work to convince people who grew up without pervasive capitalism that what you buy = who you are. There are a lot of bugs still to work out.

(What I find ironic is that BB is filled, in fact, with links and commentary on luxury items, albeit items which put you firmly into the San Fran Graphic Designer / Williamsburg Knitter class. See the recent Bird Lamp.)

"Misreported" is a misnomer, in this case. The great scam of luxury goods has a lot to do with the great scam of the Bush administration- they both rely on a lazy and collusive press corps. I'm not suggesting that we give Givenchy the third degree, but honestly, from Sassy to the NYT, the fashion industry simply buys their way into prestige without earning a single bit of it, and the rest of the luxury goods industry is worse.

For every feature that says "Prada's stuff looks like crap this year" or "Bang & Olafson makes overpriced ugly junk", there will be twenty photo spreads or sidebars hailing these things as the second coming of Christ.

The situation is worse in China partly because they don't have Consumer Reports. There's assloads of new money, a culture that is strongly conformist, and a media that has even lower standards that the US. Chinese fashion magazines don't even have sex columns, for God's sake. It's just shopping shopping Gong Li horoscope shopping shopping. Censorship makes most publications into an inane hash, and the government is hoping that buying crap will work as a substitute for having a vote.

What is refreshing about China is the access one has to the manufacturing base. They still haven't managed to completely alienate the manufacturer from the buyer. If I want a new suit, or a string of pearls, I'm getting the first one from a tailor, the second one from a wholesaler. Sure, they're yenim's brand, but they're as nice or as crappy as I can stand/afford. Brand names, after all, came about because when you don't know your tailor, the tag is some kind of assurance that the sleeves won't fall off your coat next week.

This is ironic because in other areas of commerce, Chinese people are hard bargainers. Buying vegetables, Chinese consumers are among the toughest, most discerning in the world. Buying cars, they're lambs to the slaughter.

I used to pass Bunghole every day on my way to work at the Museum of Myths and Monsters in Salem. I love Massachusetts.

To Electro,

I actually agree with you that Serrano isn't an interesting artist (less still as a pornographer). The problem with smashin' up the exhibition, though, is that guys like Mikael Lindberg, who would otherwise not care about him one way or the other, are now going, as I indeed would, to the exhibition in support of the artist and the museum who chose to show his work.

You see where this is going, right? If you're interested in censoring art, you've got to do it pervasively- state power, or truly overwhelming vigilante violence is what you're looking for. Piecemeal "statements" by hooded gangsters will only ever be effective if they can instill a feeling of pervasive fear in the populace. Anything less will simply draw attention to the controversial work, or create a "whack-a-mole" system where work is suppressed in one small area only to re-appear somewhere else.

So if you really want to go get those negatives, you better have an army behind you. Especially in the case of Serrano's uninspired provocations- it's pretty easy to whip up your own "Piss Christ". If somebody actually went so far as to try and wipe it off the face of the earth, you can bet myself and hundreds of others would be creating our own, just in protest. Piss Christ would literally become another LOL Cats- I HAZ A PEE COLOR.

This would be the opposite of your intended effect, and, in fact, would be the opposite of my own. I wish that better, more interesting photographers than Andre Serrano would rise to international prominence. You wish that his offensive images would receive as little attention as possible. Therefore, the best method for achieving this is either a takeover of the Swedish state by Neo-Nazi forces, which you apparently don't want to have happen ("Too bad that they are neo nazis.") or to ignore Serrano's work, and actively promote better artists.

Y'know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news to those Nazi Swedes, but they just messed up a bunch of photographs. It'll take literally hundreds of dollars to make new prints.

Honestly, there is zero reason to throw the OLPC project so much shade. It's an entirely voluntary project with clear goals and an entrepreneurial, self-sustaining model. This thing isn't The Heifer Project- it's goal isn't to alleviate desperate poverty. Programs like Big Brothers / Big Sisters or microlending banks isn't there to do that either. These projects are intended instead to help people from poor, but not dire circumstances, get a leg up in the world.

I just came back from China, a country where up to 60% of the populace could be described as just that- poor, but not starving. Getting by, but not thriving. (This is the RURAL population, of course- China's city dwellers are zooming along pretty well, thank you very much.) They don't just need education, they need educational resources, especially books. In many parts of China, literacy is marginal and education in many aspects of "modern" life, like sanitation, health care, and basic business skills are poor. But these places already have computers, cell-phones, and net access. After all, how many email scams do you get from Nigeria a year? What the OLPC represents isn't a "wellspring of technology", it's simply a way to make an end-run around educational resource distribution.

The OLPC educational model is one where textbooks, books and other information are electronically distributed and updated, and where custom programs can be tailored to the needs of struggling communities, ideally by the communities themselves. This is a great idea- books, which incur print, transportation and distribution costs, can be partly supplanted by the laptops, which need only be delivered once. Countries can distribute and update their own educational materials electronically, or students can seek out online materials produced in other countries, if permitted. Paper, pencils and other teaching materials can also be partly replaced by the laptops.

Now, whether the overall cost of maintaining the laptops actually offsets the cost of not needing to move around so much paper is very much up in the air right now, but we'll never know unless we try. Other real problems are, "Do we have free, age appropriate, quality texts and programs in the proper language?" "How well are we planning our teacher training?" "How realistic is it to expect regular Internet connections for the computers (vs. mesh-network connections)?" "How do we ensure fair distribution of the machines?"

We'd never have gotten to this point without the amazing efforts of the OLPC group. These are real challenges they've got to sort out, but strawmen like "OMFG COMPUTERS? PEOPLE ARE DYING!!!" are entirely beside the point. These are computer guys, doing a lot of very smart thinking about how computers can help kids who currently don't have them. To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But the nail, in this case, is access to educational materials, NOT clean drinking water or other basic human needs.

Big companies like Microsoft hate it because it's creating a whole new class of commodity Linux hardware, and Intel opposed it for several years only because it wasn't getting a slice of the action. They've spread their fair share of FUD, and probably someone who's posted on this board is their shill, willful or not. But don't distract yourself from the real issues, and don't mistake the poor for the desperate.

As for me, I'm going down the list of small-fingered girls I can impress this Christmas with my selfless generosity.

Ach! The day before I move back from China, they unblock the freaking service. Well, I guess it's back to buying the paper edition anyway.

To me, though, the most important aspect of the archive unlocking isn't the "plots for movies" angle, although I'm a fiction writer myself... it's the access that historians and researchers will have. Right now, they can get this stuff through a variety of sources, but I know more than one biographer who's unattached to any institution, and doesn't have 24/7 Lexis / Nexis or what have you. Letting the little guy get a crack at the archives democratizes our understanding of ourselves. There's no replacement for sitting down at the dining room table and doing real grave-digging in the Paper of Record.

A similarly fascinating site for Chinese propaganda can be found here, at Stefan Landsberger's site- http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/

He's got the inside scoop on all those struggle posters you've been dying to know about! Now we can all be a revolutionary screw which never rusts.

I've always got mixed feelings about incidents like this one.

On the one hand, the Rev. was treated in an absolutely disgusting manner. The cops who piled on him should probably lose their jobs, although they probably won't, and if he's got a legit injury, the DC police force should be paying the medical bills, plus pain and suffering.

Aggravating this rather typical incident is the systematic use of arrest and detainment the Bush administration has used against dissenters since the beginning. An insidious violation of 1st and 4th amendment rights. In my opinion, the president should NEVER be shielded from dissent. (Just think about it- Bush the mealy-mouthed, slack-jawed yokel vs. the Bread and Puppet Dolphin marionette. Comedy gold.)

On the other hand, it does seem that the Reverend is spoiling for a little conflict. I have no problem with civil disobedience as a philosophy, nor do I believe that getting arrested isn't sometimes the right thing to do. But as my crack about the B&P hippies indicates, I have little faith in left-wing protest theater. There's too much water already gone under that bridge.

So, if (and I can't really tell from the video) the Rev. decided at some point before or during his meeting with the police to create a scene, then these questions have to be asked: Did we need proof that the police can be brutal? Did we need proof that the Bush administration violates the free speech and assembly rights of citizens? Maybe. But maybe not. As Scrooge McDuck once said, "Work Smarter, Not Harder"

Ah, but a Democratically controlled congress might just nail AT&T's ears to the wall. A Republican controlled congress did what? Nothing.

The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, through their actions the last seven years, and the eight before that, have proven themselves to be craven, venial, corrupt, autocratic, perverse and sadistic. In their repeated attempts to subvert the voting process, including the inane but destructive impeachment trials, they allied themselves with honest-to-God tyranny. In their collusion or subjugation by GWB's administration, they have shown themselves to be little better than the People's Congress of the People's Republic of China- a rubber stamp for despotisim, with special pleading included.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are simply politicians- disappointing only to those who expect them to crap diamonds on command. Those who suggest they are "as bad" or "just like" the Republicans have confused "a little" with "a lot". I invite these addled, strident people to take as many aspirin as they choose. What's the difference between 2 and 200 anyway?

Surely they make you read Machiavelli at Yale, right?

"The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way."

Like Lorenzo Di'Medici, there's little hope George W'Bush knows sound advice when he sees it.

I'll be there with bells on. Can I buy you a drink while you're in town? A brimming glass of baijiu will put hair on the chest.

Hey, Cory, where's the entry on China's Great Firewall? Your mention of Tor, which I use every day for reading the BBC, but which makes updating the blog (or viewing porn) excruciating, makes me think of what Montaigne said about 16th century condoms- "Armor against passion, gossamer against infection."

Hey, Cory, where's the entry on China's Great Firewall? Your mention of Tor, which I use every day for reading the BBC, but which makes updating the blog (or viewing porn) excruciating, makes me think of what Montaigne said about 16th century condoms- "Armor against passion, gossamer against infection."

Whoah, whoa, Coligny, rein it in a little, read my comment again. Maybe you've already spent a little too much time in Japan- all that rice got me pretty plugged up, too. Walk down to Mr. Donut and get a nice big cup of coffee- that always helps.

This is very tame children's entertainment by Japanese standards. Unko Manga ("Shit Comics") are a legitimate genre for kids, founded by the mighty Toiretto Hakase- "Professor Toilet" - in 1970 (the link is in Spanish, the only one I could find). Let me assure you, a Butt Biting Bug is exceptionally mild by the standards of the genre.

I find Japanese children's culture to be very refreshing and open compared to it's American counterpart. Kids are curious about and amused by their own bodies, and in Japan they are encouraged to see their bodies and their functions as normal. It's a mixed bag, like everywhere- older Japanese kids come under some very difficult pressure. But I highly recommend talking to Japanese kids- they're as bawdy and funny and honest as any I've ever met.

(Actually, I recommend talking to kids in general! They're pretty interesting people.)

Having used Festool products for three years as a restoration carpenter, I can say that this arm does not surprise me at all. They make really nice, very German tools that you just don't want to get dirty.

I imagine the ideal Festool tool would be one of these guys in a box, who got out, unpacked all the other tools, and did all the work for you, cleaned up with built-in vacuum attachment, and repacked itself. Or one of these ladies, who would be welcome on any jobsite I know.