Yeah, Trevor is right, it's Floyd Gottfriedson.

The following at least gives some artistic context, if you can track down the actual work:

http://ob7.free.fr/mice_and_ducks/mmd/mdayl.html

@ Soupisgoodfood:

Even a negligible or inefficient effect is still an effect. I've had big bookshelves around me since I was a kid. The things really soak in the cold.

Oh! I think I've heard about Air Pirates!

And this, right around the same time that Dorfman and Matellart's "How to Read Donald Duck," which documents the wierd involvement of Disney comics in propagandizing Chile up to the Pinochet coup. Strange times.

@ Cory: I can take those of your hands, yannow :)

@ Michael W. Dean: I'm sure he's got more than a few ebooks, but still...my object fetish won't let me stray too far into that territory.

Most of the ebooks I get are old stuff that I don't want to pay for, or Creative Commons sci-fi stuff.

Also...objects! I do love objects!

As #22 pointed out, overt references to suicide were pretty present in Bugs Bunny cartoons through the 1940s. I wouldn't find it too startling that a Mickey cartoon from the same-ish period wouldn't have something like that.

All of the Disney comics have a much more wierdly plotty quality to them that the cartoons never had--lots of intricate plots, extra characters, wierd plot devices, and so forth. Particularly in Carl Barks.

I wonder if this is Barks's work...It looks like the lettering style he used.

I'm looking at Cory's bookshelf and I'm thinking, amateur! You need more books!

also, @24, from my meager amount of desert living experience, adobe houses are awesome, but really only work in a desert climate that is fundimentally 98% dry as hell. Anywhere else in the country, they'd turn into mud.

Also, a friend of mine who lived in New Mexico for a time kept telling me how people would, for some strange reason, put a plaster finish over their adobe homes, presumably because they wanted the plaster look and were too stupid to realize that this traps moisture in the adobe walls and causes them to deteriorate.

I'm surprised no one has heard of Douglas Adams's other, other Infocom game, Bureaucracy. I think I have a version on a CD somewhere.

My favorite part of the game (and I never got that far into it) was a point at which you go to a burger restaurant, go through a very elaborate menu selection, and no matter what you choose, you get the same crap burger thrown at you.

The Slate list is admirable, but definitely skewed towards latter-day TV offerings. The Abbot and Costello bit at #2 seems like a lame requirement as opposed to descriptive of anything the people who compiled the list actually knew about.

Hell, no Goon Show? No Three Stooges? No Marx Brothers?

Also, it's a crying shame that Upright Citizens Brigade only showed up once on the list. What was really amazing about that show was that it brought incisive, Chomsky-esque anarchist politics to mainstream television, and made it effin' funny.

I can't even get five people to show up to my orgies. Damn you Britons.

Just followed the link someone above posted to the Kindle version of Cory's book at Amazon.

Did anyone else notice that the top review for the book was by Jeff Bezos?

The Jeff Bezos?

Yikes.

These were all over Wondercon this year. It's nice to know that hardcore Kirby fandom is more accessible than the TwoMorrows Kirby books, which wonderful as they were, are far too difficult to find.

Also, I see by clicking the link that DC is reissuing a collection of Kirby's OMAC! If only they'd follow up with his Sandman, and if Marvel could reprint 2001, I'd be a happy camper.

I'm not sure if your headline is entirely accurate.

There actually is an Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock, but the hospital you're referring to is in northwest Arkansas, 200+ miles away.

Then the thought struck me that you might be referring generically to *an* Arkansas children's hospital, so I thought I'd mention that there actually *is* a hospital with that specific name.

@87:

"Another comment from an avowed Socialist."

And this invalidates my points exactly, how?

As someone who considers himself a democratic socialist, I should point out that the overwhelming majority of Marxist and socialist scholars have dealt with the issue of distancing themselves from Stalin--this has been a major topic since the 1930's, and you can see it in writers such as Arthur Koestler or George Orwell.

However, in the discussion of the legitimacy of Objectivism, no one has yet brought up the fact that Objectivism is neither wholly original nor was it willing to submit itself to rigorous academic scrutiny (Rand refused to publish in peer-reviewed philosophical journals).

Objectivism is easily cribbed from a number of sources. Their rejection of metaphysics is straight from A.J. Ayer and Logical Positivism. Their social philosophies are straight from David Hume and Herbert Spencer, among others, and the economic principles in Objectivism are basic Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire capitalism.

I suppose if you want to praise Rand, she did combine them and give them the spin of a religious zealot.

However, just as communism's primary fault was to ignore the problem of human greed, the problem with libertarian and Objectivist philosophy is that gives greed free reign, in all of its worst possible manifestations. I think that in actual social practice, I'd much rather live in a society that recognized the value of social community and derived moral judgments from an ethical, community-oriented approach. Ultimately, crass individualism leads to the psychopathic belief in social Darwinism.

The future of Vlogging looks so bright right now.

I can imagine, "You keep fuckin' wit' me at school, I'll hit you back on da YOUTUBE." Whatever happened to writing insults in marker on the bathroom wall?

I had the Blacktron as well as the Magnetizer. As far as the Magnetizer goes, I remember LEGO trying, every year or so to do some idea or another to redo their space lines so that they were wierder and wierder. The Magnetizer was part of LEGO's big line involving magnets, which was the lamest feature ever.

The Blacktron combined really well with a set of non-LEGO bricks that were intended to make an SR-71 Blackbird. I think I combined the two well enough to make an X-15 as a youngster.

Also, the coolest thing ever when I was a kid was the LEGO space shuttle sets, actually designed after NASA stuff and all.

As a life-long southerner, I've heard of this kind of thing, but not specifically this term. The divide between black culture and white culture in the south is gigantic, but is better with each generation.

I say this because, as easy as it is to caricature southern people, there are plenty of awesome, open-minded and progressive people here. As was discussed with the Boston example, it's not entirely fair to judge everyone by the worst examples of past decades.

It's going to be tough to retain that intensive amount of detail converting raster to vector. Like the other user said, high contrast is crucial, as is a high enough resolution source.

I believe I've used the adobe product you mentioned, and I don't ever recall having any amount of luck with it. After a while I simply traced by hand in illustrator. I agree, however, that any hand editing of this image to vector graphics is almost too time consuming to be worthwhile.

However, if you felt like bathing your computer in tar and dipping it in sulfuric acid, it'd make a hell of an acid-resist etching. :)

I rather like Richard Dawkins' word "meme" for a unit of knowledge. Sadly, it has been sullied by being applied to myspace bulletin surveys and the like.

Hey, Ruston! I grew up near there! Home of (in my opinion) two of Louisiana's most interesting universities--Louisiana Tech, which focuses a lot on technology and engineering, and Grambling, probably the state's largest traditionally black college.

Don't know if that has any bearing on that, but yeah. It's not quite the backwoods kind of Louisiana that you see in the Jena 6 case, actually--Ruston is actually kind of upscale.

Wow, this is terrible news. I've never seen PTV live and probably never will, considering my access to most of the venues they play at. However, Genesis's music has always been challenging and at least in some degree responsible to a lot of my views of the world.

I worry about Genesis with this. He seriously puts his ass on the line for his art, and he's made his life an inclusive aspect of his art. He's also always been willing to share a lot of his inner perspective on thing, either musically, or through his blog. Genesis has made it through plenty of troubling times, but it's hard to see someone whose life has been built on such an experimental approach to such personal aspects of his life to have to deal with things like this.

Actually, isn't Shock Value much older than that? I have his second book, Crackpot, which was published in the mid-1980's, and lists Shock Value as a previous work.

Speaking of Crackpot, it's a book definitely worth reading--a collection of essays and previously published articles that reads like the better humor prose of Woody Allen. Though I love Waters's films, he definitely has a gift for prose humor as well.

Rushkoff's totally right. If you make the perfectly valid claim that the Reagan-Bush administration's support of the Mujahideen contributed, if not inspired the later terrorism problems of Al Qaeda, you're immediately lumped in with the people who believe the people on board Flight 93 are living incommunicado in a bunker in Alabama.

Conspiracy theories are compelling narratives, but don't always reflect a scientific (or even rational) approach.

Re: #25 (Theresa) and #30 (TomH):

I'm not at all arguing that ISBNs are, or should be, considered *proprietary* intellectual property, which would pretty clearly go against Bowker's mission to standardize book cataloging under their system. However, I'm saying that this could fall under such slippery arguments as who owns what abstract piece of data: Bowker's not only sells the ISBN, but they control the system and force changes in how it's run (such as the conversion to ISBN-13 from ISBN-10) and administer access to their own "Books in Print" proprietary catalog service.

Similarly, prices are established by the publisher, not the distributor or the retailer. All of these are points as to why the individual store could never rightfully assert an intellectual claim on these. Withholding any of this data would accomplish two things: asserting an insider approach to retail only within large-corporate sphere, and enabling abusive policies towards customers.

As I suspected, and has been confirmed in later comments, the whole intellectual property argument is just a ruse to deprive their customers of the ability to make informed choices. I'm sure it's no coincidence that the group can't get anything useful from the university on this as I'm sure the bookstore's relationship with them is more than a little "comfortable."

Ultimately I think this is a lot larger than any of the single elements of the story. Anyone who doesn't suspect some sort of conspiracy in textbook publishing, distribution and sales has probably never been to college. I suspect something much like this could've happened at any university--in fact, something much worse, considering the high profile that Harvard has. If this had happened at the university I go to, I strongly suspect they would've been expelled for it. Here's hope that the public attention finally gives Harvard a reason to treat it's students more fairly.

It seems to me like most of the problems about finding specific course books for book distribution is that this is handled by distributors, such as Follett, who sets price standards for both sales and buyback. Most universities operate their own bookstore, and in the area there's an independent bookstore, which will deal in the same books through subscribing through Follett's system.

Obviously these guys were either not considering this or were trying to do something a bit more fair and equitable than paying possibly $100+ for new hardcover textbooks, and risking having to sell them back for less than $5 because of a change in editions.

It's a fine line between copying information for whatever personal use one might have, and allowing people to use the store to collect information that's potentially for competitive business purposes, and obviously the store reacted in the most idiotic way possible.

I'd also theorize that ISBNs, if anything, are the property of the licensing agency (Bowker's, in the USA), but of course, that's another barrel of monkeys.

The store does have the right to remove them if they're disruptive or interfering in business, as does any store. But I suspect that this has a lot to do with the corporate system through which collegiate textbooks are distributed, which is kind of draconian and monopolistic.

I'd also heard, a few years ago, that Wal-Mart stores would send security after shoppers who were writing down prices, presumably because pricing information could be compared and shown to be unethically low, in order to unfairly compete with other local stores.