I gotta' say, you commenters make me laugh like crazy. Thanks.

"Elvis has LEFT the foundation of the building..."

>>#4 posted by Hentosz , July 23, 2008 4:47 PM
>>
>>Lemme guess: it was from Caesar's Palace -- right?

Nope, it's a crouton from a Caesar salad. Hard on the teeth though...

Come on and be my little good luck charm
Uh-huh huh, you sweet delight...

Thank yuh thank yuh verymooch.

Very cool... I have an original of this poster. I wonder how much it's worth? I don't remember where I got it, but I remember I snapped it up quickly when I saw it.

They don't call it the "Chair Force" for nothing.

The VIP jets makes sense, as they allow senior leadership to travel quickly without having to rely on large transports or the whims of civilian airlines. The jets aren't used just for four-star officers, however. I would guess that these are available to any officer down to about the 0-6 level (Colonel or Navy Captain), but with availability varying depending on rank and need. Just an educated guess.

Even if these comfort capsules are worthwhile (and I don't believe they are), the PR effort the Air Force is making is terrible. At least that's what Air Force General Pantywaist told me.

>>I suppose that that's quite similar to a Westerner deciding to name/theme their trendy bar after Mao or Stalin or someone.

Or Che Guevara. I guess ignorance is bliss, and those that don't understand the atrocities take on the aura without really understanding the reality.

Secret Service
Secret Sauce
Sansabelt Slacks
Stainless Steel
Secret Society
Seven Sisters
Silk Stockings
Simple Simon
Sorry State
Summer Solstice

>>Tun Sie Es Einfach.

Oops, wrong shoe company slogan. Sorry.

Adidas Macht Frei

Tun Sie Es Einfach.

>>#20 posted by rebdav
>>
>>The left hand ball...

Oh no WAY! Now they make balls for left handed golfers?

Nah, I'm not really that stupid.

Now if we could just power our vehicles with those worms, we'd be all set.

That's knot a Gordian worm... (Just kidding)

I thought the RIAA was running things at Gitmo?

I don't have these problems. I carry mine slung over my shoulder.

It's a shame that fate dictated that he died on the 4th of July (although just barely, at 1:15 am).

It must have been interesting to have had a 19th century world view while living in the 20th century.

That cartoon needs the Kool-Aid character bursting through. : )

I wish I had a BofA account just so I could close it.

Kinda' looks like a ThighMaster.

Cummi Lighthouses...?

I wonder if he had it on vibrate?

>>Lady in pink Corevtte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelyne

You think it's the same person? Looks like it could be.

WOW!!! What are the odds of finding MYSELF in the photos??? Zero in this case, I'm not there. : )

>>The old lady in the Barbie Corvette is freakish!

I Dream of Jeannie, Nightmare Edition.

>>She won't win her case without concrete evidence.

We have a winner!!!

Well, after reading all the comments, and knowing that Stuart Franklin is a well-known photographer who would know better than to do this, and after looking at the photo again and again, I believe it's entirely possible it's not a fake, but a very unfortunate twist of fate.

What I think is the case is that by some odd chance, the edge of Mickelson's shirt just happens to line up with the edge of Woods' shirt, looking like it overlaps. The slight rim lighting makes it look like a bad Photoshop job.

I'm going to have to go 60/40 that it's not a hack job, based in part on the reputation of the people and organizations involved.

One interesting thing that's going to come from this is the discussion and debate that will likely occur in the NPPA magazine.

Whether this photo ends up being real or fake, issues of photo manipulation and picture choice may come up, resulting in constructive discussion of the subjects.

In that regard, PhotoshopDisasters has performed a beneficial service by choosing to examine this photo.

No, this is Photoshopped. If the effect were caused by telephoto compression, Tiger would be completely behind Mickelson, or vice versa, but in this case they overlap. Absolutely, 100% altered.

That being said, the journalistic standard would be to label this as a photoillustration, and that would cover it. I did plenty of (better) photoillustrations for the papers I worked for, as well as standard photojournalism, but the illustrations were ALWAYS labeled as such.

(And I shot two freelance assignments for the DC Post in the 90s.)

I like 'em, although I don't know about the bulge about 2/3 of the way up.

Do they make Petroleum Non-Bacon Bomb Samplers for people that keep Kosher?

Tattoo a pimiento in the middle of it and you've got an olive with a stem. Tattoo a martini glass around that as an option.

>> tired

I tried one, too. : )

I tired a GPS art project, assigning color spectrum to speed of the package and grayscale to the altitude of the package. This is what I came up with:

http://img61.imageshack.us/img61/1325/artuh6.jpg

My first stop would be the x-ray specs rack at the joke shop. Then on to complete the rest of my shopping elsewhere...

I have no doubts the puking and all that were real, but were brought on by extreme emotional states. I've been in churches where that kind of thing has gone on. I don't believe for a second, though, that it's some supernatural being causing it.

It's been well over a year since I've seen a movie in a theater. No reason to these days.

JGS, good point. I should have been clearer when I posted. I'm not saying the skulls are thousands of years old. I saw a TV show the other night, and the impression I got was that they were saying all the skulls were fakes, and I guess I was rebutting that. That's what I get for PWD - Posting While Distracted. : )

Jesse M - I've long since lost contact with the person behind the treasure salvage, although I did see the prospectus in my storage unit just this past Sunday. I believe that document lists the date of the sinking of the ship. I wish I had it here to refer to.

I used to be a newspaper photographer, and I'd sometimes freelance for AP. One time I shot an assignment for them in West Palm Beach, Florida, of some treasure retrieved from a Spanish shipwreck. Among the items were several pre-Columbian gold items, the "Isabella Emerald," and a few small crystal skulls. Since the emerald was real, it's probably safe to say that the skulls were authentic. They were about the size of a Key lime. I still have the prospectus handed out to investors for the survey and retrieval.

That's a B-52 wing.

It's not that big a deal, Antagonistus. I was just making an observation.

Well, see, Chris L, the thing about a successful blog (or magazine, or TV show, or dinner conversation) is to discuss what the audience will find interesting. Otherwise you have no audience. The editors of Boing Boing do a good enough job to keep me coming back several times a day.

My post was written to hopefully avoid ruffling anyone's feathers, but I guess yours are more easily mussed. Sorry.

Boing Boing is much-anticipated daily reading for me, so please take this in the spirit of tough love. I've seen several of these shoe bikes pop up online in the last few months. Is this concept really news anymore?

The Japanese built cars for us out of our old razor blades... maybe we can build razor blades for them out of their old (new) cars.

Is this usable under a Creative Commons license?

And has anyone seen my keys?

I have plenty of relatives that are older than 107, but none of them are alive. ; )

It'd be cool if you could arrange some sort of online birthday card for your grandmother that we could all sign (like a guest book). I think she'd get a kick out of that.

Roman hands and Russian fingers?

"nope, t'was a Roman ham wagon. What did those Romans ever give us anyways?!"

Roman Meal bread? With ham and Swiss and a bit of spicy mustard.

Rob, possibly one of the greatest posts in Internet history. Bravo!!!

To save time, I cross posted from Wired.com, and combined two posts...

I have been waterboarded, as a student at the US Navy's SERE school in Warner Springs, California.

Although I suffered no lasting effects, and I was fine within 30 seconds of it ending, part of that recovery stems from the fact that I knew it was a training exercise and that they wouldn't let me die.

Despite that foreknowledge, the experience was, for me at least, VERY panic inducing. Some people handled it worse and caved more quickly than I did, and some people handled it a lot better. Being led to believe it was going to happen a second time was even worse than waiting for it the first time.

Whether it can be considered torture or not is up for debate, and it's really dependent on the mental strength of the victim. For some, it's torture, and for others, it's not.

I still believe it should not be employed in a real-world scenario. It was applied to us (probably in a slightly "watered down" form -- pun intended) in order to show us what could potentially happen if we were captured by potential enemies.

I believe it was a useful instructional tool, but I don't believe it's a useful interrogation tool, and I certainly don't believe it buys our country any international credibility, considering the humanitarian image we're trying to portray to the rest of the world.

***

Waterboarding is as effective as any other similar level of coercion -- you may get true intelligence, or you may get lies. In my case, I finally gave up my Social Security number and maybe another couple of bits of useless information, but it took about five minutes (not long in the overall picture) and I believe three "doses" before that.

It's true that waterboarding is (or, more accurately, can be) safe. And as EW-3 said, "to consider waterboarding torture is to not know what real torture is." I'd rather be waterboarded than have my nails pulled out any day.

My biggest objection to waterboarding isn't so much what the captives are experiencing (if they're truly guilty, and there are plenty of doubts about the guilt of some of them in the current situation), but what world opinion has to say. I know there are a lot of people that will bash me for worrying about that, but the US really is in a position of world leadership, whether we like it or not, and we need to set the example for other countries to (hopefully) follow. It's our responsibility as a nation.

It was drilled into me in my training that we wouldn't subject our prisoners to that sort of treatment, primarily so that our example would to better treatment of our military members who had been captured.

The questionable value of torture along with our tarnished reputation convince me that torture, or whatever you want to call it, isn't the right thing.

Once bitten, twice shy. I am NOT falling for this scam again!

Eleven months and one day... eleven months and one day...

It's easy to debate one side or the other, and as with most things, both sides have some merit (that's why I'm pretty much middle of the road). So, let's hear your plans. What would you do with detainees from our War on Terror? What would you refer to them as? How would you get information from them? What legal protections would they have? Almost anyone can come up with something better than we've got now, so let's hear your ideas.

RRSAFETY,

I understand your point, and it's perfectly valid in a standard-issue war with clearly recognizable combatants. In this case, though, those "detained" in Gitmo may or may not be terrorists, so we need to be careful about how we handle them. What if we torture a truly innocent person? What if we're keeping a truly innocent person locked up?

We need to be extra cautious about those things if we want to live up to what our country is supposed to be all about. Sure, mistakes will be made, but we have to be vigilant to avoid as many as possible and to be able to correct as many unavoidable errors as possible.

Cory,

I agree with you (and international law). However, put yourself in the place of a 19-year-old Marine from the corn fields. More than likely, this green-behind-the-ears kid is going to be dishing out food and helping to move detainees from one place to another, not dishing out torture (that's reserved for the CIA's "enjoyment"). Although they're peripherally involved in illegal activities, I can hardly consider them criminals.

In my experience (Navy, mid-1980s), instruction in the laws of warfare was essentially non-existent, at least for those of us that would be unlikely to ever deal with POWs.

As one who would have more likely become a POW, I experienced waterboarding as a part of SERE training. Would you consider the instructors that carried out the waterboarding to be criminals? We experienced this to prepare us for the possible eventuality that it might happen to us in earnest, and I think we probably got a "watered down" (pun intended) version, although it was still plenty unpleasant (panic-inducing, to be honest). Even with SERE training, our exposure to the proper handling of POWs was minimal, and only from the perspective of being a POW.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the Bush administration. I just can't bring myself to consider clueless kids as criminals.

Dave

I take exception to classifying all the staff at Gitmo as criminals. I agree that the whole situation is criminal, but many of those working there had no choice in the matter. Think enlisted personnel vs. those that make the policies. There is a need, in my opinion, for a facility like Gitmo, but the legal gyrations put into action to keep the prisoners incommunicado are illegal and immoral.

I completely believe the story, although I don't know how much of it is because of Ford.

I once opened a store on CafePress to sell "American Idiot" items, complete with a PARODY logo. This was long before Green Day's album came out.

CafePress removed the images despite my appeal to them that this was a legal parody. They were NOT happy when I opened a "CafePissed" store in protest.