So much for my drinking game tonight. Only six 'awesome's, so only six drinks. What a bust. Hell, I usually spill that much.

The school is a pipe dream. It's just an idea being floated by Wilmington GOP politicos and some local wingnuts. It has no charter, no facilities, no funding. But at least it's something for boingboingers to talk about.

Drinking game! Drinking game! I'm taking a shot each time someone says 'awesome.' I should be drunk on my ass by midnight.

I think that's sweet.

Sister Y, imagine that: Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of Functionalism, was a romantic! I think that's sweet.

The major social consequence of the agricultural revolution's population explosion was the shift from human relations based on kinship to those based on property; it wasn't long until people themselves became property. We often forget that all the ancient civilizations were based on agriculture...and slavery. And what, after all, is prostitution if not a form of property-defined slavery?

Market forces can sure make a mess out of people.

#32 Interesting question, NOEN. I can't recall in my reading any hunter/gatherer society where prostitution as a financial practice exists or existed. There is plenty of sex, of course, and it is safe to assume that the arts of seduction have always included gift-giving and similar enticements. The Inuit practice of loaning or borrowing wives, for instance, was not prostitution as we know it, but rather a reciprocal arrangement that furthered social interdependency, and was conducted with the full consent of the wives involved, or not at all. One cannot imagine the selling of sex as a profession or existing as a functioning moiety.

Prostitution seems to be, as per your hunch, a creation of the agricultural revolution, as are many of humankind's ills. In fact, I am more inclined each year to agree with the cyninc's assessment that the agricultural revolution is proving to be as great a disaster for the earth as a meteor strike.

No legitimate business can afford bad publicity, especially from a highly visible haven for potential customers like boing boing. It's my bet that the rude phone person who 'pushed' JASON has already been canned. I'll further bet that there are staff meetings being scheduled; they've got a real problem and a lack of policy and procedure to deal with. Nobody wins on this one.

I remember seeing a shoecycle in a comic strip from the 1930's, probably 'Smokey Stover.' So it's an old idea—and a good one.

Are these pre-1991 pieces? If not, what's with the 'Soviet' label?

I'm flabbergasted. Why would you fake an orgasm with a ghost?

I was out of the country too long. So it comes as a great surprise to me to learn that non-drooling ADULTS play this shit.

Joshua: "How about a nice game of chess?"

He didn't toodle-oo off to sleep in there, he PASSED OUT in there. Remember some of those places and times....

Great chutzpah! Right up there with the kid who kills his parents asking for leniency because he's a 'poor orphan boy.'

All I know is that we shouldn'i poke sticks at animals in cages.

#8, I don,t think he designed shoes, did he? I know he illustrated them for newspaper ads, and very cleverly; he got his mother to do the lettering, which was also very clever because it had the right contrasting effect—high style+naive script. Like many of the Pop artists he worked in window display and advertising.

I'd like to see the Museum. I'm not denying that he was a sort of genius (savant), and that he was, for better or worse, the spirit of Pop Art. He really took chances, a very ballsy guy. But I just don't find the work as interesting as the idea of it. As someone once said about one of his projects, "It's not the sort of thing you have to see; it's the sort of thing you hear about and go 'Wow'!"

I jade very quickly when it comes to Warhol. Proving that even genius can be boring.

Human societies (cultures) are thermodynamic systems that exploit, with greater or lesser success, available energy sources. Grains could be stored against bad crop seasons, yams and potatoes could not. Complex, densely populated cultures (civil societies) first arose in the east-west grain belt where surplus cereal grains resulted in surplus people. In order to evolve into a civil society the hunter/gatherer bands had to be in the right place at the right time (on that axis, at the end of the last ice age). This is called luck. It is also called environmental determinism. That's the core of what Diamond is saying in GG&S. The CERTIFIED anthropologist Leslie A. White put it this way: E (energy) +T (technology) = C (culture). That's as simple and neat and deterministic as one can say it: E+T=C. Whether you harpoon seals through the ice or dig up taro roots, you are HOW you eat.

Note that the turtle again fares better than the (preceding) hare.

Jesus, that sign is fucking disgusting!

#12, Vipers dig Vipers?

#18: 'is "environmental determinism" a method or a world view?'

>It's both. Evolution is accepted as a universal process: If evolution is anywhere it is everywhere.

#18: 'when you say "evolutionist" you mean "social evolutionist," right? because that seems to me more questionable than biological evolution.'

>Why? If evolution is anywhere it is everywhere.

#20: 'the Greenland settlements didn't "collapse" or "vanish", rather the people there willingly decided to up and leave and go home because they made choices to respond to climate change.'

> Hauling ass for home sounds like 'collapse' to me.

#21: 'cultural anthropology is not a science.'

> Neither are chemicals or canaries. Science is just a method, a way of studying cultures, chemicals, and canaries. The social sciences try really hard to 'science up' their studies, as they should if they wish to be taken seriously.

#22: 'Cultural and material bounds...are inescapable until the structures are changed, either through the development of new technologies, cultural patterns, or other factors; yet their flexibility renders them no less bounds.'

> Sounds solidly deterministic to me. The cultural determinists like Diamond don't allow us much wriggle room. We would have to turn to theism to get off their hooks, and embrace such notions as 'human spirit,' 'soul,' and 'free will.' It's strange that we espouse a rigid determinism in all natural things other than ourselves, but flee from its stain upon what we consider to be our otherworldly uniqueness.

Diamond is an environmental determinist, and a pretty damned good one. He's obviously an evolutionist and has done a lot of work for the cultural determinist school, asking and answering questions that were too long put off by the 'gossip columnist' school of anthropology that held sway for too long in American universities.

Diamond's next book: 'Pigs, Women and War.'

'Many had resorted to...a constant firm grip...to prevent the member from vanishing entirely.'

Ah-ha.

Be quiet. EVIDENCE or IVA BIGGRUDGE will hear you.

If you follow IVA BIGGRUDGE, you'll never get the stink out.

VORPALSWORD, Since brains wired for language were obviously selectable, I can't imagine linguists frothing over a word merely used to describe, um, a kind of hitchhiker. A spandrel (Gould again) has no systemic function; it's just along for the ride. I'm just not up on cross-discipline academic fueds.

I thought I was through with steamstuff, but this is simply beautiful!

Because they climb on walls right near the desk where you sit and freak you into thinking it's a flashback from 1967.

#142, Gould used the word 'spandrels' (sounds like a warm puppy) to describe stuff that isn't selected for but isn't hurting anything, so what the hey, some of it's kinda cute, let it stay...right Mr. Cockatoo?

Homo erectus to homo sapiens; micro or macro?

It's been interesting listening in on all you people. I was in a strange place throughout it, a time-trick of some sort, and felt like I was reading alternate history, of which I am quite fond. I was remembering what the period was like, but at the same time I accepted all the revisions, misunderstandings, and mistakes made here; MY history was being revised and analyzed. QUITE A TRIP. Thanks. Wait until you try it in 30-40 years (and I sincerely hope you live to do it).

A couple of things... The much abused MOON is mostly right, I think. We did think the Weathermen were fucking crazy. We were also afraid of them. They DID hurt the anti-war movement.

It took a European on this thread to mention SDS, the WU's mother organization, a legitimate and trailblazing civil rights organization from which they split to wage urban guerrilla war; nobody else did.

What really ended the war was 200 NVA battalions.

taps....

I assume you mean 10" johnsons and a box of testicles. I'm a little slow today....

Note that it's 'Preventive,' not a 'tat' to be found.

I grew up with Eisner. During 1940-41 The Detroit Times Sunday funnies section each week contained a separate but small 'Spirit' comic book. I collected them, of course, but they went off to fight the Axis in the first wartime paper drive. Those things would be priceless today. Never question my patriotism!

A life-changing book? Probably happens around eighteen when we're most vulnerable to radical/iconoclastic/idealistic/visionary oversimplified exhortations. Okay...reaching down the long corridor off memory...there it is...Got it...ah!

Philip Wylie's 'Generation of Vipers.'

Bad, I know, but it could have been Ayn Rand.

boingheads?

Boingerists, not Boingerites. You wouldn't call socialists socialites, would you?

You 'press' the ink throgh the screen with a squegee (sp?), sort of like a window washer's. It can be done on a kitchen table, but I don't recommend it; it's a helluva mess.

Science isn't phenomea, it's a method. It's not rocks, clouds, or chemistry, it's a way of studying them. The social sciences keep trying to "science" up their areas of study, with greater or lesser degrees of success, and good for them. But science is when people employ the method. Science is really just the act of sciencing.

I lugged a ton of books transcontinentally a couple of times (pre-PC days) before I wised up and swore to sell them if I moved again, which I would have, but then I met and married a woman with almost as many; soon we had a small house stacked and lined with aisles of books. That was livable, barely, but then her bookophile mother died...so, at the joking suggestion of a friend, we opened a bookstore.

I assure you, if you have a problem with books there is no quicker or more lasting cure than owning a bookstore. A couple years of that and your personal library skinnies down to about a hundred or so of the damn things.

Now my hard drive(s)....

Beautiful, NOEN! Much better than the original 'Rawhide.'

'The Prettiest Girl In Alaska' is a great book title.

Lotta lowbrows hanging around the fringes today. Go play with a gadget.

Hate to quote myself, Grim Sean, but read what I said:

'This is really very funny stuff.'

Why do you think Lit and History professors can't enjoy 'humorous writing'? Have a couple of bad experiences did you?

I've slammed into a few walls in my life: math, music, statistics, the Mambo, hitting a curve ball; but this STEAMPUNK mouse is a helluva collision! I'm through. I quit. It's too outrageously wonderful to be topped. At least I'm quitting winners.

#44: 'I've seen "tolerant" liberals in college write some of the most hateful ignorant verbal masturbation I've ever saw.'

Since you're in college, Kevink, ask your Remedial English instructor what's wrong with the above sentence.

#2, The iambs break down at the word 'then' in line 6; drop it and the rest scans very well. This is really very funny stuff.

#3, The beat is still with us and still widely employed. It's the echo of our heart beat, after all, thus famously the most 'natural' of the meters.

I recently finished a translation/adaptation of Ben Jonson's 'The Alchemist', five acts in iambic pentameter. That took, in every sense, a whole lot of heart beats.

The guy was drunk. And his boss is a woman. Ex-boss.

Supposed to be a late 50's Chevvy, but it's too stubby. Can't make out the other two.

This had to be quite a few years ago. Ed's got to about five years older than god, if either of them are still alive.

Yeah, HAYDUKE, somehow it doesn't happen. This Surrealist/Dada Subgenius Bob Dobbs trip seems to have been around a loooong time—and I haven't laughed yet.

#8, Any photos of that Boise wall available?

There was a similar New Deal program that killed millions of pigs during the Great Depression, when millions of people were hungry,and none of the meat was saved, stored or given away. An outraged uncle used to call FDR 'The Great Pig Killer.'

@5, I'm with you; who'da thunk it?

@11, Hey, an Alfred Hitchcock rip-off: wife bashes hubby with a BIG chunk of stale brown sugar, then dissolves it to make a batch of fudge and offers some to the investigating police officer. Better than the original leg of lamb, no?

The dial typewriter, or versions of it, had a long life—as a toy. I got a painted tin version for one Xmas when I was 7 or 8. It took so goddamn long to write a sentence I decided not to be a novelist, and I wasn't.

Don't know how to say this without sounding like a kiss-ass, but sell all the ads you can: bb is the best eclectic site in the world.

Hippie hadn't really spread yet in '68. It was still mainly a Time/Life phenomenon. It took another year or two.

Extremely clever. No doubt a first. His major problem was no doubt the fact that most kids try to look the same. Think of it: a thousand kids with two hair styles!

Have another beer.

I'm an agnostic and, perhaps by definition, lazy. And you know what I say to zealotry of any stripe?: Relax, let's have a beer.

Ten years ago I foolishly placed a play I had written on a college-sponsored web site collection of dramatic (or comedic) works to be used for "sampling" by drama department students. Since it was a one-person play, essentially a monologue, I figured it might be right for auditions, competitions, etc. Long story short: despite a posting that gave my email and name IF anyone wanted to fully produce it, it got snatched and performed twice in a few months without my permission. (There were also two contacts that resulted in legitimate productions, I'm pleased to say.) I managed to get it yanked from that site, however, and now...I'm kind of sorry I did. After all, I do write the damned things to be seen. But my "union," the Dramatists Guild, advised that I protect my copyright by at least protesting the "pirated productions." I did so and was compensated by one of the pirates who actually didn't think the work had a copyright.

Today any production with any print advertising at all would probably be caught by Google alert, but ten years ago....

I was a free range kid. I ranged so free and so far that when I was sixteen I sort of forgot to come back. And why did I do that? I was escaping from over-protectiveness.

'Amazing how 50 years ago seems like a completely different country and people.'

There's not that much difference, really. Now take it 50 years the other way, from '56 to 1906, you'd have a helluva difference!

The poet Richard Brautigan handed out copies of a handmade chapbook from the San Francisco City Hall steps in 1967 that was titled 'Plant This Book.' On each page was a small packet of flower or vegetable seeds, but the packets were...plastic!

'I am a girl who will marry (who will marry very quick)
'Any Tom, Dick or Harry, any Tom, Harry or Dick.
'I want a Dick Dick Dick, I want a Dick Dick Dick,
'I want a Dick...'

Cole Porter being sexually subversive in 1948.

This irritating 'submissions error' thing has been popping up for two days.

My father had a coat like these and he was an apprentice auto mechanic, so it wasn't just a college thing: it was a youth thing. Think hoodies and baggies.

I don't want to be overly picky, but as a 1965-67 resident of the Haight I assure you it's spelled hippie, not hippy. A hippy is maybe a beatnik with a fat ass, but a hippie is what we called young wannabes seeking to be hip. And BEATNIK is of course a word we never used.

It's a dog in an alligator suit.

#5, I'm with your mom: I thought it was kind of stupid. Well, maybe not stupid, but dumb. Remember, it was San Francisco, 1968, my friends and I had taken gaudier trips than that; a psychedelic movie, a trippy movie, couldn't have been a more sympathetic audience. We wanted it to be great. Perhaps we wanted it too much. When it wasn't, we became openly derisive. Somebody else in the audience loudly pointed out that "The fucking computer is gay!" We came close wanting our money back, but the sets and the colors and the Strauss boys were cool, so we stayed around for the dumb ending and then went up to Mike's Pool Room on Broadway for some minestrone. Ah, to be young during the revolution and be assholes together!

My psychologist friend K was Manson's "counselor" at Vacaville prison for a couple of years. I asked him whether Charlie was consciously evil or truly psychotic (we were debating the difference), and he sighed and said: "Charlie's crazier than a shithouse rat."

Hitler didn't kill anyone either.

The new 'Kilroy' is Pac-Man?

Aren't all 'paradoxes' just 'trick[s] of language'? Is it true that there are no paradoxes in nature?

A bow to Seng-Ts'an: When we discuss language, we are using what we are discussing to discuss what we're using....

Great idea. But only to get OUT.

Note duly noted. I guess I drew too many of these things during an obsessive phase in 5th grade. Fortunately my hormones kicked in and I switched to sketching multitudes of scantily clad pneumatic young women.

The snarky one-worder was uncalled for, and I apologize.

One of the saddest things I've read this year.

My uncle was a WWII pilot for the RCAF in Europe. After the war he gave me two silk neck scarves that were area maps of northern France and the low countries. I was a kid; I lost them.

"Only a few examples survive..."

Good.

They used to tell a similar story about Ira Sandperl, Joan Baez's pacifist guru, and how he evenly divided what little money he had with his street robber because he was hungry and hadn't eaten yet that day. The point of the story was that it was a typical Ira thing to both attempt and succeed at negotiating such an outcome. Although I never heard him tell it, knowing Ira I believe it.

I know it's Ohio, and I'm usually prepared to believe the worst about those neighbors to the south, but a million bucks! No, no, nobody's that stupid.

i AM ABSOLUTELY NOT GOING TO READ THESE COMMENTS.

Is the word out yet that boingboing coment threads are the funniest sites on the internet? You guys are fucking FUNNY! 'Would you like new anus with that?' had me rolling on the floor for ten minutes.

Correct. It was HGB championing female feel-good. I goofed. Cake or Death!

I don't get it either. And by the way, I spent 20 years as a professional letterer; they'll never be 'fonts' to me — they're alphabets.

A girlfriend in ,um, 1960 complained bitterly to me that her last boyfriend sprung a Vibra Finger on her. 'I know I have a hard time getting off,' she said, 'but really....' What a difference Tina Brown and her crew made.

I used to own a bookstore on the Venice, CA oceanfront promenade. There was nothing they wouldn't steal, except maybe Jane Austen. I'll bet they would even steal "Colture and wresteler biographies," whatever the hell they are.

The bus will someday be rebuilt as a GASPUNK classic.

I recall a Penn & Teller "Bullshit" segment that said there were no meaningful studies of second-hand smoke being a killer. Is this true? C'mon, you sons and daughters of Reason: is it just sort of an urban myth? Where's the math?

I've seen some examples of Hitler's work. A would-be watercolorist of buildings and monuments. He couldn't draw for shit. He wasn't good enough to have drawn even these simple copies of what looks like Walt Kelly's work (who toiled for Disney). Uncle Walt D. couldn't draw for shit either.

I'm an Oregonian; we vote by mail. So simple and easy, you'd think every state would do it. Maybe, to paraphrase Lord Buckley, it's so simple it evades them.

Texas? Been there, fuck that!

That was me in the wheelchair, #19. I get caged all the time. I was a visible radical in the 60s and my name is still on their list. They also like to inspect my Sebagos and my laptop. It's like, "What's a 75-year-old communist doing wearing loafers and carrying a Mac?"

"Uh, what's a communist?"

I want the wool sweater that burrhead's wearing.

Sure, we used to get stoned and watch some Welk.

I am left with this memory: LW: "Denk you, denk you, denk you — for an excellent fine number."

It's a bad painting of a horse about to have at least one broken leg. Jesus H. Christ, horses can't gallop on rubble!

Feh. The Swamp Thing is a ripoff of The Heap, you yoing whippersnappers....

I heard NYC guys in the Army talk about 'pizza pie' and what it was all about. When I was discharged in CA in 1952 I stopped in Chicago and was taken by a buddy to a restaurant for pizza. It was deep dish pizza, of course, and I loved it. In my hometown, Flint, MI, there was NO pizza. All Midwest pizza either evolved from Chicago or was transplanted from NY in the late 50s or early 60s, and it soon became the national dish. It was that fast! It was an overnight phenomenon.

When I was at KPFK (Pacifica Radio) at Los Angeles in the 1960s we used to do sound collages or montages — we never did know what to call them — that mixed snatches of music, political speeches, noises, etc. Some of them were quite long. I did one called "Brotherhood Week"that was thirty minutes, featuring recorded movie dialogue, Beatles songs, Nazi speeches, movie sound effects, and lots of other stuff. Of course it was only radio, but it was all "sampling" the works of others. (Our motto was, "If it makes a noise, record it.") Is that the sort of thing today's avant garde is doing? Jeez, it was done forty years ago....

I wonder about the ring....

I worked a lot of years on assembly lines at GMC's AC Spark Plug in Flint, Michigan with a few thousand women. None would have been allowed to wear rings on ungloved hands when operating a hand drill or a 'rivet gun.'

It's a posed picture, fellows, although a delightful one.

I think the question is how have YOU changed your mind about something you believed, and why.

For many years I subscribed to the notion of the regional evolution of our species; that we evolved from a wandering ancestor, homo erectus; also, that along the way we absorbed some neanderthal genes into what became the homo sapiens pool. But the DNA anthropologists like Spencer Wells and his colleagues put paid to those notions. It's only us, I guess, sappy homo sapiens, out of Africa and all over the world, and all in only 60,000 years.

Damn, we're quick!

Every ten years a new set of psychology hotshots approach primatology with the goal of talking to apes or monkeys. It's easy. Our cousins are intelligent and quick to learn — as much as they can learn, that is. Sure, they can be taught signs and sign language, but what they can't be taught is the ability that is uniquely human: the ability to symbol.

Symboling is here defined as the ability to arbitrarily bestow upon a thing or event a quality (or qualities) that cannot be perceived by the five senses, and the likewise ability to appreciate and share such a bestowment from another person. Human language is based on this ability. And Koko, Cheeta, and King Kong ain't got it.

Any intelligent species (and there are many) can sign, but only we can symbol. It is, I guess, both our glory and our curse.

The movie isn't about the nature of reality; it's about the nature of humanity. So the ambiguous ending is best, AKBAR56.

I remember seeing the original and remarking to a friend that Scott blew the chance to make a better movie by not making Dekard a Nexus 7. My friend said that he thought it was clear he was one of the new replicants, citing the family photos on Deckard's piano, "...just like Rachael's." Neither of us credited him with the absurd ending, however, having grown up on studio endings. But we both liked the opening voice-over, making Deckard into Philip Marlowe or any standard noir private eye. I still like it, despite its being widely scorned.

I am new to boingboing and I love it. I usually pass on gadgets, but the steampunk area is quite cool. I am reminded of the ill-functioning retro machines in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."