I think the one immediately below the tin woodsman is a centurion from the new BSG.

It's been said by those who know me that a quick way to get me to confess to anything is to merely threaten me with the torture that is a drum circle. This then, is my worst nightmare incarnate.

Kurzweil needn't worry about a heart attack. His liver will no doubt give up the ghost soon. That many supplements have GOT to be toxic.

This reminds me of the passive-aggressive notes website: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/ (which I think BoingBoing first introduced me to)

What Mr. McGuinness apparently fails to realize is that a major cause of the current sorry state of the music industry is that they sat down and looked on as the technological boat sailed right past them. They continued to do things the same old way long after their customers were demanding (or already adopted) a new way. Somewhat like the American car industry which is hurting because other car producing nations were much more flexible and attuned to customers' wants and needs.

Now that I've seen the dirty answer I can't for the life of me see the proper one.

It's true we only remember the bad customers. There were certainly plenty of good ones. I worked at my bookstore for more than 10 years. As much as booksellers love to tell war stories about the insanity of customer service it's a job that people tend to stay in once they're in it. And I do still love books, I just don't fetishize them any more.

On my first day of my bookstore job many years ago a co-worker said to me, "before I started here I had respect for two things: books and people. Now I have respect for neither." I quickly adopted that position. I rapidly got over the idea that books are sacred vessels. Paperbacks had to be destroyed after covers were ripped off for return to the publisher. We used to have book ripping parties in the back room and books that were uncategorizable, and thus unshelvable, might sit in the stock room for months and then be returned to the publisher. We regularly abused, mocked, swore at and generally hated most of the stock.

I ended up becoming a librarian and I still don't think that books are "sacred." The ideas in them are another matter...

Shiny things!

Yikes, didn't Ted Bundy murder a handful of women at FSU in 1978? I expect the novelty of approaching strange men on campus and asking them if they wanted to sleep with you wore off after he was caught. I hope so anyway.

It's curious to see how research ethics have changed over the years, because there's no way that an experiment like that would pass the ethics review these days.