I miss my old Akai 10".

One word (or is it two?): View-Master.

Over thirty years ago, I studied cartooning under a cartoonist who was Capp's assistant for over a decade. In other words, he drew Lil' Abner when Capp was 'self-incapacitated'. He told a great many 'Capp is an ass' stories, too. Of course, Capp was also a genius, which my mentor emphasized as well.

Funny how the two seem so often to go hand in hand.

Does bOINGbOING have a official Humorous U.S. Currency Calculator app now? Are you going to CC license it so that we can ALL use it?

When I worked on construction equipment, I owned wrenches that were three times bigger than the biggest ones in this set. Trust me: no matter how many tools you own, you'll never have exactly the right one for the job you have to do right now.

Now that it's popular, I suddenly hate it. I hate it all.

You mean I'll be able to buy a coat someday that can grow to fit me no matter how big I get? Bring It On!

I want a big one for four people.

Conservatives robbing their companies blind.
Conservatives getting rich on media piracy.
Conservatives patronizing prostitutes.
Conservatives snorting cocaine.

And that's just today's news.

The true inspiration of this magazine is revealed in the totally ludicrous and instantly appealing title.

Only the "Famous" monsters? What about the "infamous" ones? Or the lesser-known monsters? Shouldn't they get some attention, too?

And only the ones in "Filmland"? That seems like a very provincial perspective. After all, maybe Finland DOES have some monsters that deserve coverage.

I love it. It wasn't on the racks at my local drug store when I was a kid, but I thumbed voraciously through a copy whenever we drifted near a newsstand on a visit to the county seat.

My parents would never allow me to buy one, though. Of course, that only made me want it MORE! (Milhous voice.)

Extrusion. Is there anything it can't do?

It would be the ultimate irony if our country was militarily defeated and overrun by the Chinese simply by them turning off all the chips in our multi-trillion dollar war machine.

That those chips were made in China because the paranoids who created our bloated military were the selfsame greedy bastards who drove our infrastructure overseas just so they could line their own pockets... well, that's cosmic justice, now, isn't it?

If you have not seen the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" rendition of "Honey", complete with a tour of the "Honey House", it is must-see comedy. (I can't seem to find it online, though.)

And how a very mediocre song about a guy coming home from prison got to be the theme for returning military veterans is beyond me. ("Tie a Yellow Ribbon")

My folks - who were not rich - got me the mid-line Gilbert chemistry set when I was about ten years old. I made plastic, created banana flavoring, all kinds of cool stuff. They didn't even take the set away from me when I stunk up the house with sulfur or started a fire on my desk. Best. Parents. Evar.

Later on, I was the chem lab assistant my senior year in high school. I prepared the chemicals for the students' experiments. I only got one wrong. Fortunately, it didn't explode - it just didn't work. I thought one bad mix in a year wasn't bad, but the chem teacher reamed me out for it, anyway.

Good times.

Two tools:

(1) Notepad2
(2) HTMLTidy

That's it.

Sold out. You could make one yourself if you could find a place that would sell you 216 1/4" spherical neodymium magnets for that price. Which you can't. I've looked. They must have gotten a hella deal on the things.

Needs holes so the dog can sniff those inaccessible places as well.

Robot zombies. Now I'm afraid.

I am a lifelong LTA (Lighter Than Air) fanatic. I thought I'd seen every possible airship, blimp, and balloon design, but even I am awestruck by Air Jelly. :O

I live in Iowa. If I want to see ladies in gem sweaters, I just have to go down to the Perkins restaurant.

But Leslie is hot in hers. Literally.

The old adage says "A picture's worth a thousand words." Since the average word length in English is 5.1 letters (http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/), that means a 1024-byte picture is worth approximately 200 words. So show me a 1024-byte image that conveys as much information as 200 well-chosen words.

Yes, I'm a writer, not an artist. :)

Individual volumes from this set, with reels, come up for sale every once in a great while on eBay. They always go high.

Of course, they're on my 'must-buy' list.

Reminds me of all the type drawers in my grandfather's small-town weekly newspaper office.

FOR GOD'S SAKE, WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN???!!!???

I just picked up a wonderful, nearly untouched set of the 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica's 'Gateway to the Great Books' series. This is a ten-volume set of short works - short stories, essays, excerpts from books - that is intended to be an introduction to EB's Great Books series.

Each of the volumes covers one area of expertise: literature, mathematics, natural sciences, etc. The idea is that 'younger readers' or 'those of lesser ability' can use these books as a gateway to ramp up to speed for reading the Great Books series. All 60 volumes of it.

The Great Books include works by everyone from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Voltaire to Twain to Wolff. They are considered by the editors to be those core books which every civilized person in the Western world should read, re-read, and re-re-read until they are intimately familiar with them.

Did I mention that there's a suggested reading schedule? In their opinion, you should begin in seventh grade and have all of the Great Books read and understood by the time you're a sophomore in college. That's between the ages of 12 and 20.

Of course, in the introduction they apologize for the fact that all of the works are in English, and that they aren't insisting that many be read in the Greek or Latin originals as they would have been in your standard English boarding school of the 19th or early 20th century. After all, they are realists enough to know that by 1963 no one can be expected to live up to the scholastic standards of their more disciplined forebears.

I'm 56, I went to college, and I've read maybe a dozen of the Great Books and a handful of the essays and stories in the Gateway volumes. Yet I have the audacity to consider myself smart and knowledgeable. I guess it really is all relative.

But I kill at TV and movie trivia. That counts for something, right?

These sound a lot like Colorforms, only magnetic.

Did anyone else play with these as a kid? I understand they still make them. I remember the Peanuts one, and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I wish I still had those sets.

After all, I'm only 56. That's not too old to play with Colorforms, is it? ;)

You could link your clothes together with other peoples' clothes via wireless, with GPS tracking. That way if you leave the bus but another person gets on who's on the same feed, the people on the bus can continue watching.

Or a bunch of you could stand together for a simultaneous wide-screen feed.

And be kind. Don't use a ghetto blaster - broadcast the audio via Bluetooth.

Gumstix are cooler:

http://gumstix.com/index.html

Kudos to Takwan for posting the lyrics to 'For What It's Worth', my favorite 60's song. Rock on, Buffalo Springfield! Woo!

Wow! It's hard to believe that any building located that close to the Epcot sphere could be so desolate!

Thanks for the link, Yorgle!

Think of each key showing a small window into a full-keyboard-sized animation. Is your brain working now?

Carlin's Law of Commerce:

"If you stick two things together that have never been stuck together before, some schmuck will buy it."

The problem with these pants is the assumption that anyone who uses a computer with any regularly will have a physique that still allows him to be able to reach - much less see - that part of his body.

As is also the case with the horribly misnamed "laptop computer".

When I was in high school, we had a substitute English teacher once who told us that a quiz would be graded. Our regular teacher had told us in advance that it wouldn't be, and I told her so. Since she insisted, I threatened to burn mine in protest (even though I was a straight-A student in English and wasn't worried about my grade - it was all about the principle). Anyway, before I could think about it another student handed me a lighter and... oh yes, I did! It got gasps from the girls and laughs from the guys, but it scared the crap out of our poor substitute. I got a 3-day suspension and a couple of weeks of detention, as well I should. What I did was dangerous.

But I only got three days for an act that could have burnt down the school. These guys got five days for dressing in costumes. And our vice principal was renowned for being a hard-ass!

Doesn't seem equitable to me.

We should start seeing white asparagus in the stores about now. If you haven't tried it, DO! It's wonderful!

We need more stuff that doesn't do stuff, because in the end the stuff that doesn't do stuff does much less damage than the stuff that does stuff.

I wish this would have happened. I was born in '51 and I would SO be a space cop right now!

The point to make with alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, or anything else of questionable value, is that it's definitely NOT good stuff for a developing child to use. Whether or not it's good for adults is moot. What IS relevant is that it should be left up to the judgment of every adult individual as to whether or not to put that stuff in his or her body.

In summary, kids don't get to choose. The answer is always 'NO!'.

But adults, not the government, SHOULD have the right to choose. Even if they make choices some of the rest of us would not make for ourselves.

Just shuffle along quietly with your heads down. HEY! YOU! YOU, THERE! Get your head down, troublemaker! I don't like your attitude!

A couple of criminals blow up a couple of things, governments latch onto it and use it to keep their citizens afraid and in line. Same old, same old. As long as people are terrified of 'outside threats' they'll put up with whatever crap their governments pull. Like lining the pockets of war profiteers.

Accosting innocent photographers? Kiddie stuff. In the US we pull people off the street and send them to Gitmo.

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...

According to Hollywood movies, that sign could just as well say "Victims".

Great! Maybe you can clear up some questions we have about so-called 'reliable information' that is rumored to have made its way down the timepipe from your era.

For example:

Is LOLspeak really the official language of the 31st century?

A standard 10-inch 78rpm record can hold approximately 3 1/2 minutes per side. A 45 can hold about 5 1/2 minutes. CDs can hold up to 64-72 minutes of music, and MP3s can be virtually infinite in length. These limits have historically dictated the effective practical length of a pop song. That's the end of the history lesson.

I was a DJ once upon a time, and I can tell you that commercial radio stations don't like to play long songs, because they can't squeeze in enough commercials and mindless patter.

While the too-precise number '2:42' is crap, it's not far off. I'd say that any song between 2:30 and 3:30 is the most likely to get extensive airplay.

As to the question of whether or not length and/or airtime make a song great, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Rather than "click on the cats", a better approach would be "What's this a picture of?" Then the spammers can write automatic image-recognition software for us.

Strider, Simpsons did it.

At least I seem to remember they did, though I can't find a reference anywhere on the Interwebs. Of course, the Simpsons have done almost everything, so I'm relatively secure in my assertion.

Happy Birthday to your Grandma, Mark!

Visit your older neighbors and relatives and ask them about their past. They'll surprise you. They may seem all old and wrinkly and boring now, but I guarantee they've got some stories to tell.

My great-uncle Harley died in the early 1960's at the age of nearly 100. I was only ten at the time, but he had been a federal Indian Agent in the Black Hills of South Dakota in his youth, and he told great stories of Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and all of the Deadwood regulars. It's hard to believe I once held the hand of a man who shook hands with Wild Bill!

His weird speech may be the reason Sterling became a writer in the first place. You know, bullies making fun of him in school, not getting any dates, etc. If he could speak like Jame Earl Jones, he probably wouldn't have become the quintessential ubernerd.

How many were killed by terrorists?

I'm just sayin'...

I've written over 20 technical books, and I can tell you that the hard part isn't deciding what to put in, but what to leave out. You want information in a book to be concise, digestible, and easy to find. My 400-page books would have been 10,000-page books if I'd included ALL of the information in my source material.

And what about the issue of combining and distilling related material? What good is a 'book' if it covers the same topic in 10 or 20 different places, most of it repetitively?

At best, this program is only performing the first step in the writing process - research. The result is nothing more than a pile of hopefully-relevant research notes. Like the guy says, if you're good at searching the Internet, you can do the job yourself.

On the other hand, I can't imagine you finding anyone willing to write a book on “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India”. Not and remain sane, anyway.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks "Who's on First" should be first... only out of comedic necessity, if for no other reason.

I think you're missing the main point here. His immediate reaction to trauma was to pull his pants down. Admirable. I believe that will now be my default reaction to anything that happens to me that is surprising, painful, or disturbing.

Bookmark this post and come back in a year. By then you'll wish the dollar exchanged for that much.

Cool. Looks like we're in for a resurgence of 'The Blues'. Great music.

I certainly hope it's a certifiable mental illness. Because that's going to be my defense if they ever try to fire me for excessive web browsing here at work. I'd much prefer a few weeks in rehab to being fired.

There was a case in the Old West (or it might just have been a 'Death Valley Days' episode) where an old lady's front porch was destroyed by meteorites. She went to court to sue God (via the church) for the damage, as she felt that she hadn't done anything wrong for God to be justified in taking his wrath out on her. I can't remember if she won or lost.

Is this retroactive? Because I've still got dozens of promo LP's I received when I was a radio DJ back in the early 70's, and I'm thinking about getting rid of some of my old stuff. I'd hate to go to jail for passing them along.

When I was a sophomore in high school, one of the senior Advanced Science students hacked a rotary phone dialer to create a binary adder. You dialed a number, and it added that number to whatever was in the accumulator, displaying the result to a row of eight neon lamps. (Carries from the eighth bit just rotated off the high end.) As I recall, it was a stack of four or five 8" square circuit boards. He had it all nice and neat, though. Great project. It was the first actual 'computer' I'd ever seen.

In Vegas you can take a blimp ride over the city for $100. I suggest the fight at dusk, when you can see the city lights in all their glory.

You can also purchase an R/C blimp and control your own small piece of heaven. I've got a tiny model that I can fly around my living room, but you can get bigger models to fly in convention halls and gymnasiums. Of course, those will cost you thousands of dollars.

And it's still not the same as flying around in your own blimp. *sigh*

I'm a born-again evangelical Christian, but it sickens me how these extremists have given the public the perception that all Christians are intolerant Neanderthals.

I know a lot of Christians who think like me, that Christianity can hold its own in a free marketplace of ideas.

1928-29

Right before their rich daddies all went bankrupt in the stock market crash. I'll bet they were all selling apples on street corners in 1929-30.

#32 Tom P, I wish I had said that. :(

I think the point of him choosing wrestling and being competitive in it is that his disadvantages are at least somewhat offset by the advantages his disabilities give him in this particular sport. Weight class, lack of normal leverage points, and low center of gravity all work to his advantage. But he still suffers from his normal disabilities to maneuver and grasp. Maybe it all comes out even. In any case, it's obvious he's taken what he has and has applied himself to do the best he can with it. I really admire the guy.

'Prevent Lincoln's Assassination' has always been the top political act on my time travel list. But the very first item is to go back and tell myself as a young boy to buckle down and accomplish something with my life. Oh, and give him a copy of 'Gray's Sports Almanac 1950-2000'.

Better for most people would be an 'Urban Survival Kit'. Useful for when you're lost in the city and some jerk has snatched your purse or picked your pocket.

Use an Altoids tin (who's going to steal your mints?) and put in duplicate ID, a list of important phone numbers (you know, the ones that are stored in your cell phone you just lost), $20 or more cab fare, some change for a pay phone, etc. Anything you might find useful when you're alone in the city.

Navy blimps (NOT rigid airships) saw extensive duty during WWII and into the mid-1960's as escorts for naval convoys. They were used primarily as sub spotters. No convoy accompanied by blimps was ever successfully attacked by an enemy submarine.

"I should have had her at least in a negligee."

No, Dave, no you shouldn't have.

Rest in peace, buddy. 'Good girls' never looked so good.

Enochrewt, the idea isn't to make SMALL gold bars, it's to make counterfeit bars the same size and weight as standard London good delivery bars, which is what financial institutions use in trade. Grey addresses the cost issue in the article:

"Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about $50,000 to produce because it's got a lot of real gold in it, but you'd still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth closer to $400,000. A lower budget version could be made by using the same under-sized tungsten slug but casting lead-antimony alloy around it (to match the hardness, sound, and feel of gold), then electroplating on a heavy coating of gold. Such a bar would still feel and sound right and be only very slightly underweight, while costing less than $500 to produce in quantity."

Fortunately for Pratt, I'm doing a highly scientific and valid scientific study right now to see if eating molasses (think 'mole asses') is a useful treatment for his particular type of Parkinson's. I figure I'm only $1,000,000 away from the cure! Do you have his phone number?

Since I have a very common name, I don't have to guess the chance that my name is on the list- it's 100%!

Teller was a teacher before he joined Penn. I'm sure silence was a welcome relief for him after that.

The Big Bus is one of my favorite films nobody has ever heard of. It's hilarious! Joseph Bologna and Stockard Channing star, but it's got cameos from Ruth Gordon to Ned Beatty to Lynn Redgrave and more. Favorite line: "Eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal."

We have lots of crows here in Iowa for some reason. I like them.

BTW, I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain just to eat vegetables!

I've loved 'Wordless Workshop' since I was a kid. Even before I was allowed to hammer a nail by myself, that comic made relatively complex projects easy to figure out. It's a perfect example to point to when people say "comics are worthless".

I hear it's nice there this time of year.

I just hope they have an application in zombie control.

Buying a gift card is essentially making a loan to the issuing store. If they go bankrupt, you're a creditor with a claim against the company's assets in bankruptcy court, the same as a bank, contractor, or supplier. The court will decide how much you get, if anything, when the bankruptcy is settled.

Just make them watch an endless loop of "American Idol" shows.

Snow White: 1937. Possible, but by then Hitler was very busy with politics. I doubt he was painting much by then.

Pinocchio: 1940. Totally and completely impossible. Poland was invaded in 1939 and Europe was embroiled in WWII.

I doubt Hitler ever picked up a brush after 1939, and probably much earlier. He was imprisoned after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, where he wrote Mein Kampf, which was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926. I rather imagine he had given up painting by the time he got involved in politics.

I was Managing Editor of a computer magazine* for eight years, during which time I and my staff wrote hundreds of game reviews. Which qualifies me, I think, to pass along the following bit of wisdom:

"Dude, they're just games."

* That would be INFO magazine, BTW, for venerable Commodore 64 and Amiga personal computers.

I don't care if it works or not. Add a few blinking LEDs and some theremin-based sound effects and you've got one kick-butt super-futuristic fashion accessory, there.

You probably don't want to know this, but in Victorian London there was a scandal involving well-bred young aristocrats who would gang-assault prostitutes on the street. Because there were not enough orifices for them all, they would simply... well, make some more. Remember, this is in the time of Jack the Ripper.

Maybe there was something in the water.

The problem is, we have traded our freedom for security and all we've done is lost our freedom. We haven't gotten any security in return.

I wish my mom and dad had been this cool. *sigh*

They no longer use 'canvas slappers' to move slaughter animals along. They use cattle prods, which are essentially slightly-lower-voltage tasers. (Trust me, you still don't want to be stuck with one.) Seems to me like the canvas slappers would have been much more humane.

I will henceforth be performing professionally under the name "Xeni Lennon". I am seeking complete legal worldwide exclusive performance rights for this name. Might as well make everybody mad.

If this name is already taken, I will settle for "Yoko Jardin".

Obviously, the Interwebs have been so badly clogged by international music and video pirates that they have burst under the load. When will we get serious and begin executing these godless criminals?

Zippo, if you really want to innovate, I have one word for you;

Lasers

When I had my Handspring Visor, I used Pocketsat for tracking satellites. It had data available for communications, military, and even top-secret satellites. I just thought it was so cool that I had a computer in my pocket that could show me what satellites were overhead in real-time.

http://www.bigfattail.com/software/pocketsatplus/index.html

GDR is a bit off base up there. Dispensationalism is a widespread belief among Evangelical Christians worldwide. Korean Baptists and English Evangelicals believe in the dispensations as much as their American brothers and sisters do. The Catholic Church and mainstream protestant denominations do not subscribe to it, however, no matter where on Earth they may be located.

Just use illegal immigrants. They move around so they're harder to hit, and if you do they can't go to the police and complain because they'd be deported! Way cheaper than this thing, too.

/political commentary

Journalist: "Mr. President, why is this your favorite painting?"

Bush: "It's a cowboy. And he's ridin' a horsie!"

'Nuff said.

Well, duh! They're all dead and black and shriveled. Creepy as all get-out!

The message would have to start with the ACTIVATION word and end with the TERMINATION word for the current date in order to be valid. That still means that "Governor has declared a state of emergency in parts of Topanga Canyon" would be accidentally valid, if it happened to have been sent on October 5, 1973.

I have my Bachelor's in Hamburgerology from McDonald's University. I'm going for my MBA - Master of Burger Applications.

The way America's education system is going, training at Mickey D's is probably the only education most of our citizens are going to receive.

It would be fun to make up stories using the words in this list:

"I don't give a Chinaman's pelvis about Mona's canyon," resounded Governor Hempseed. "My wife Glory forgave me for that orgy."

please continue...

I liked Steve Martin when he was funny, just like I liked Woody Allen when he was funny. They both got too introspective and 'deep'.

Now Martin writes pretentious intellectual claptrap, just like Woody. The only difference is that Allen apparently made enough money when he was still funny that he doesn't have to grub for dough, while Martin is reduced to starring in boring and unfunny 'family comedies' to pay the rent.

That being said, I bought and read Martin's autobiography. Turns out he's always thought too much, even when he was funny. Huh.

If you like UNO or 'Oh, Hell', you'll love Fluxx. Like they say above, it's very social and very random. An 8-year-old is just as likely to win as his 85-year-old grandma. There is a 'Family' version for just this reason.

I really like to play rules-heavy strategy games, but every once in awhile it's fun to just sit down with family or a bunch of non-gamer friends and have some fun.

That's what Fluxx is for.

More Kari Byron!

Come on, people! You all talk as though you don't already know that the government has hushed up all private work on death rays, hyperspace drives, and water-to-gasoline converters for DECADES! Maybe they've used their top secret memory-eraser ray on you...

I remember when I was a kid we would dig up $100 worth of asphalt to retrieve an embedded quarter. Now I won't even bend over to pick one up from the sidewalk. *sigh*

Pagliai's Pizza in Iowa City, Iowa.

Cracker-crisp thin crust, stretchy mozzarella, and sauce to die for. They don't deliver, but out-sell the places that do. It's hard to get in and sit down with the constant stream of people picking up to-go orders.

The cast of players in the Bible makes the list of characters in even the thickest and most convoluted Victorian novel look as short as a list of W's bestest friends. It's cool to have a chart that ties them all together.

That's okay. By the time Bush and his cronies are done building their anti-immigration wall, you won't be able to get into our country, anyway. And we won't be able to get out. Except for our military of course, who will still be able to go anywhere and bomb whoever we consider terrorists. Which is everyone who is the slightest bit brown and lives in one of those foreign countries which aren't America. For our own safety, of course.

This is a good life lesson for that kid. When you're more intelligent than average, you have to eventually come to grips with the fact that the world is run by those who are less intelligent than average.

Let's see... filtering out Cory, Mark F, Xeni... :)

Penn is often right. He's also often wrong. What he always is, is entertaining.

We desperately NEED to fill our landfills to the brim, people! After the Singularity our nanites will mine them for raw materials. The more trash we make, the more flying cars our nanites can build for us!

Looks pathetic. The 1 MHz Commodore 64 has longer demos that run with 3-voice SID synthesizer music and full-color animation that kick this thing's butt. And they did it way back in 1982, long before this guy hacked his old PC. It only took - what? - 26 years for someone to come along who was clever enough to make a PC do a halfway job of what the C64 did from the beginning!

I predict they'll sell ten times as many of these as they projected, most of them to middle-aged geeks. :)

Wow. They just happened to show this cartoon on the local community college cable channel a couple of weekends back. I assume they were using the commercial DVD. If so, the quality wasn't too bad for a cartoon of this age.

Buy a 6V lantern battery.
Peel off the label.
Pry off the top.
Cut the terminal wires.
Pour out the 32 standard AA batteries that live inside.
AA batteries = $5 per 4-pack
6V lantern battery = $5 for 32 AA batteries
That's 1/8 the cost for 5 minutes work.

As an amateur magician, I've bought many books that teach now to do a trick, but Nelms' book is invaluable in understanding how to make a trick actually WORK as entertainment. There are other magicians who have written books on the subject since Nelms, and most of them read as more 'modern' prose than his, but none covers the topic as well.

I hadn't thought about applying his ideas to my writing; I'll have to revisit the book with that in mind.