I'm gonna need a capo too, I'm afraid.

@59, my first thought was "French". The guy on the right looks EXACTLY like LeBeau from "Hogan's Heroes". They don't look Middle Eastern, and they don't look like terrists.

"Text entered was wrong". Screw it.

Short version: Record companies are doomed, music is not culturally important anymore.

Oh damn, this is fantastic. Thanks.

Nice of the guy to steal the book so that no one else can make the same discovery. What is it about music dorks that makes them steal from libraries? No section of the library has as many titles listed as "missing" as pop music.

I'm keener on the soft-pop, lyte-psych stuff myself. There is SO MUCH of it being re-released lately that I'm kind of in paradise. For some reason it's always Brits or Germans who understand American culture the best -- all those amazing Bear Family sets, and Rev-Ola in England is so wonderful for pop. I just got The Merry-Go-Round the other day; I'm in heaven.

@24: I read a thing a long time ago about a guy who went to the distillery at Glenlivet and had a long, fruitful discussion about the history and science of Scotch with the people there. The ice and water "controversy" was covered in detail.

The distillery manager drank his Scotch with lemonade.

This just makes me think I'd be spending an hour and a half trying to find the (*&%&*^$# No. 2 Philips head screwdriver.

Cheddar can't be XTREME. It doesn't have caffeine in it. Pasteurized Process Cheese Food Product with caffeine and Guarana -- now that's XTREME.

B&H or Adorama, definitely. I wouldn't trust any of the others. You're dealing with scumbags, you're going to get upselling pressure like you won't believe, and you probably won't be getting what you think you're getting (switched out kit lenses, included batteries stolen, etc.)

B&H is my favorite, but just don't try to order anything on a Saturday (or during Yom Kippur).

Mr. Brownlee, if you were as attuned to youth culture as you claim to be, you would know that the word is XTREME.

The gelaskins tip is a welcome one. I just ordered one for new ipod. I have been assured that it is RADICAL, as the kids say. Possibly even BITCHIN'.

I would be willing to pay a small fee to ensure that I will NEVER know what they sound like.

I do like the way he explains the cover, as if people are stupid for not understanding it. Oh, of course, they're shooting up with that other guy's feces, that makes PERFECT sense. Why didn't I think of that!

Ah, hippies.

For some reason I'm reminded of an old country song: "How Can I Miss You (If You Won't Go Away)"?

So awesome! Great style. And I love the wire finders on those old Graflexes -- no press photographer would be caught dead with a 35mm SLR until the late sixties.

Cameta are notorious. I wonder how many other reviews they've bought off.

What irks me the most about Ebay is when sellers tell me "we hope you'll give us good feedback, and if you do, we'll do the same for you". Feedback is NOT supposed to be given for feedback; that's logrolling. My obligation to the seller ENDS the instant my payment clears, and positive feedback should be given to me then, not afterwards. My feedback for them depends on later events -- shipping speed and quality, the condition of the item, etc.

Waveydave @31 -- There is no greater catastrophe in the world of beer than the disappearance of mild. There are still a few, and I make a point of ordering one whenever I have an opportunity -- which is sadly only every three years or so. Londoners don't even know what it is. Cain's still makes a nice one, and Newkie Broun is ALMOST mild.

Photoshop's "Save for Web" removes the EXIF data while compressing the crap out of your image.

I'm a little curious as to whom has access to this magic tracking ability. Despite what you see on TV, most law enforcement agencies couldn't find "Plans To Destroy The World.doc" in your average crim's My Documents folder. Presumably if you are suspected of being Extra Bad you'll get real technicians on your ass, though.

If I am declared Emperor, I will establish a new policy by which the patent application for living material (plant or animal) will include a mandatory fifty-year stay in Guantanamo. Step One.

Mousepads are for losers. Get an optical mouse, they work better right on the table than on any pad, and they'll work on your pants leg in a pinch.

Americans might be surprised at the length and vehemence of British pint glass arguments, particularly if you get some Scotsmen into the discussion. Generally speaking, the further north you go, the more foam head they like on their pint, which means the more short-changed you are in a pint-to-rim glass. These glasses obviously come from London (or someplace like Slovakia, more likely).

Oh, my god, this is a fantastic beast -- WORKING! I was excited enough to see just part of an original Babbage machine -- No. 1, Babbage's original parts -- in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum a couple of years ago, but to see this -- not original parts, but working, which the original never did -- would blow my mind.

This was a spectacular achievement, one of THE great intellectual achievements of all time, and there's no better tribute than to MAKE one.

I'm flabbergasted. Thank you.

@2, I'll just stick with the dog's tongue, thanks.

Um, they still make these. The big brands are Jensen (USA), Mamod (UK), and Wilesco (Germany) (though there are many other brands, some of which are VERY high end), and they turn up on Ebay all the time. This is an unusually complete set.

See here: http://www.ministeam.com/acatalog/Wilesco_Steam_Shop_Accesories.html

Malicious links still there, after seven hours?

I've found at several places that shouting HELP HELP HELP works.

Hmm. It's not really taking panoramas, though, just overlapping regular photographs. You can do the same thing with a $20 Holga by just winding the film a little less than normal.

Where's all this great moderation when you need it? 7 and 15 need zapping post haste.

Yeah, George was OK on the uke, but if you really want to hear something track down some Eddie Kamae, especially his stuff with Gabby Pahinui in Sons of Hawaii.

Call me stupid if you must, but what the flippin' heck is "duggerized"?

I'm confused. When I look at the page, I see the MiniNote on there.

Jazzminecat, there are loads of jobs that get to go around security. TSA is nothing; how about a job where you get to crawl around the airplanes? The baggage handlers don't get screened. The effing CLEANERS don't get screened.

Air security is a total farce designed not for security but to enforce obedience -- which has uses in many places besides airports. In the future, ALL aspects of society will involve being herded around by people who couldn't graduate from high school.

Does it do fine, error-free work like this?

http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/04/so_im_reviewing

I just wish I could find a pair of shoes that would get rid of this goddamn Morton's neuroma that's been killing me for the past YEAR. Stupid Group Health doctors wouldn't recognize a clue if it was stuck to their face, and I've tried every pad and insert known to man.

Wouldn't get me in one of those Vibram thingies, though. A person has to have SOME dignity.

The most comfortable shoes are usually expensive, rock-hard men's dress shoes, like Florsheims or Allen Edmonds, which, like good hiking boots, cut your feet to ribbons until they're broken in, but after that you don't ever want to take them off.

Oh, my gosh, I crave one of these. Mrs. Fnarf lives in mortal terror that I'm going to get one and start pottering with steam in the living room.

Anonymous, you can get a working one starting at about $100 or so, less for badly used on Ebay, but you won't be able to power a laptop with most of them -- their output is very small. There are fancy kits that allow you to set up a working shop, with miniature lathes, bandsaws, drill presses, etc., all whirring away with exactly the kind of belt-and-pulley setup that was used in the early industrial era. Or you can light up a flashlight bulb, but that's about it. They typically burn pellets, not actual coal.

The really nice ones, like the solid brass ones shown here, go for a LOT more money, and are usually not purchased except as plans or unmilled kits, for machinists. That's beyond my skill level (well, pretty much everything is beyond my skill level).

Avoiding legitimate tax you can afford to pay when you use the services it pays for is a little dubious, if you ask me. It's no different than, say, fare-jumping.

An ergonomic disaster, though.

Boing Boing's moderation policy makes me physically ill.

The law in the UK is a lot more vague, thanks to some inept anti-terror provisions that were enabled in recent years.

But in the US, you cannot be stopped from taking any kind of photographs at all from a place the public customarily has access to. You can be asked to leave, and if you don't leave you are trespassing, which is a crime -- but the photos you're taking are still not in themselves criminal. There's a difference between a RULE and a LAW. Even if you continued to take pictures as you were being arrested, right up until your camera was confiscated, that's not prohibited -- and the photos themselves can't be confiscated or deleted.

In the UK it's fuzzier -- but again, unless I'm completely mistaken, a private security guard can't do anything at all to you. Only a policeman can take action. UK's got weird trespass laws too.

Whatever country you live in, you really should take @42's advice. Read and understand your country's photography laws, and carry a copy of your rights with you.

Nice try, Mammal. Who do you work for?

There's a video on the link. The photographer and videographer are clearly outdoors on a public street, not inside an arcade. It's also clearly the same location as the photo above, so it's not "on the other side of town".

Your motives for deliberately lying about this incident are interesting. What are they?

I think he's just concentrating really hard.

I'm sorry, what's a "gypie"?

Nothing is as alienating as being forced into a multi-meg Flash hell when all you want to do is see what Product X looks like and how much it costs. I like the "concentration camp" metaphor. I like online shopping where I can quickly point at what I want and then pay for it, in and out, zoom zoom. If they want to help the experience, try taking on the challenge of reducing the total page size by 75%.

I assume this will jam Lo-Jack signal too? Car thieves will love this one.

On the downside, will it kill your wireless internet?

Oh, come on, Shelton is a great little town, downtown at least. Fantastic taco joint. That address looks like it's probably the pharmacy that closed down a few months ago, which is probably why this is coming up now.

Many people don't realize that this is exactly what causes a lot of old newsreels and silent footage to have that speeded up look: it was filmed at 16 fps. The equipment used to show it now usually can't do 16, so it plays at 24 fps, and is thus sped up -- people walking funny, waving their arms erratically, and so on. Quite funny, and no, that's not how people would have seen it back in the day.

I foresee some similar (but even worse) problems with old movies and DVDs and so forth after a new 48 fps standard gets established, and crappy players lose the ability to set the playback rate.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see a big push by the media companies to make it ILLEGAL to play back at 24 fps after a while, requiring you to buy all new media. That's been their modus operandi for the past 100 years or so.

So, did he end up smoking in the elevator? I've worked a few places where they'd probably cite you for that even after 41 hours. Rules is rules.

@5 -- MOST people in the suburbs works someplace other than downtown. Downtown's workforce as a fraction of the total regional workforce, in Seattle and elsewhere, is rapidly shrinking.

Note that in Seattle, people living in the central city frequently need cars to commute to their jobs in the suburbs, as evidenced by the fact that the reverse commute on the 520 bridge is MUCH worse than the old-fashioned regular one. And even more common than that is people who live in one edge city commuting to and from another.

And most people change jobs every couple of years, usually to someplace many, many miles from the old one. You could move next door, but in five years you could be commuting 50 miles.

It never as simple as they make it out to be.

Speaking of "thinking how things can be made to fail", I just got the lovely "Text entered was wrong. Try again." message AGAIN. That's something like ten times this week. I guess Boing Boing ARE security professionals after all?

The original version of my message read:

Speaking of "thinking how things can be made to fail", clicking on various internal links on that SmartWater page produces lovely "Server Error in '/' Application. The resource cannot be found" errors. I guess they ARE security professionals after all?

Seriously, folks: please fix it. Please?

Better yet, a sticker with the mobile number of your worst enemy.

The island of Kauai, in Hawaii, is covered with unattended papaya stands -- put your 25 cents in the box please.

I'm confused. Wouldn't these conduct heat? Isn't not conducting heat the whole point of having a cuff around your drink? Isn't that why the cardboard ones are corrugated or crinkled in some way, to form air pockets?

How about a nice solid gold one?

I'm not buying it. My uncle had a monkey, and it spent all of its waking hours tearing things apart and shitting. Shitting down the CURTAINS. He also owned an ocelot IN NEW YORK CITY, so maybe it wasn't entirely the monkey's fault.

Especially because statistically speaking the vast majority of predators (sexual and otherwise) come from WITHIN the Magic Circle.

I'm really getting sick of this "the text was wrong" crap, and being logged out automagically.

I lost a long post about why the best carryon backpack is the Rick Steves, but now you'll have to do your own research on it.

I couldn't even watch the whole clip because of the scary MSNBC woman. "let's take a look at the war zone, and THIS IS a war zone" -- argh. And her tone of voice is so irritating -- condescending, even.

I can't imagine that Walmart isn't going to eat their lunch. Ownership of tapes does NOT mean you can sell the watching of them.

Invasive species are NOT fun; they drive out native species and cost the US and Canada billions of dollars in damage and eradication efforts. One person's "wildflower" is another person's "invasive weed". Imported wildflowers have done tons of damage to American ecosystems.

It's also gimmicky, because these seeds don't really cost anything, and the plants don't have anything to do with primate habitat. It's another example of the burgeoning trend of "green symbolism" whereby "loving the earth" is expressed by symbolic actions that accomplish nothing for the environment and may even harm it.

Ideas shared with RJ Reynolds are rarely good ones.

You know, I don't really care about the "moral issues", but I think it's spectacularly funny for the head of the world's richest sport to be caught in such an over-the-top, tawdry sexcapade. If Jackie Collins included a scene like this in her latest novel, it wouldn't be believable. Fantastic stuff. Ideally, the drama of whether he steps down or not will draw out for months, years.

What IS it about Tibet, anyways? It's the trendiness and media savvy of the Dalai Lama, isn't it? No one is hanging banners off the bridge in support of free elections in Zimbabwe, or against the public hangings of gay teenagers in Iran. It's always Tibet. Why is that? Is it the mysticism? Is it the support of cartoons like Bono?

The Boing Boing hoodies don't cost $120 because they were made without child labor; they cost $120 because they are art objects. Whether they were made by children or not HAS NO BEARING on how much they cost or whether it's a fair price or not. For all we know, the base garment might well HAVE been made by a child; but it costs $120 because they think they can get $120 for it, and the reason they think that is because of the very limited, very stylish, and very attractive artwork that is screened and embroidered on it.

Boing Boing commenters are surprisingly ignorant of how goods are priced, how much designer goods usually go for, or even how things are made. There's nothing even remotely unreasonable about the prices of these. Wal-Mart is always open for those of you who need the very cheapest of everything.

Baggage handlers don't have to go through security, either. They just have to wave a badge. Of course, there's no way a terrorist would get a job as a baggage handler for a few weeks or months before doing something untoward with your luggage, say, putting something in instead of taking it out.

This is just an inferior updating of Little Gator's (Susan Mudgett's) Deep Shit cookies, which nestle in a bed of Grape Nuts cereal, which dates back even ruther than this 1995 example:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/geoffr/Humor/text/deep_shit_cookie_recipe.html

It works best if you put the litter box on the floor and ignore it, then walk into the room and bend down and eat a couple. I can verify from personal experience that this is EXTREMELY effective on small children. Make sure there are no real cats.

I'm with @1. Screw the heirs, and screw DC Comics. The man is long dead.

Stupid comments focus one's attention on the nature of the stupidity that generates them, and can stand in for the views of a whole segment of the population. Freely-flowing discussions can handle a few dumbasses. Really, they can.

If the comment is too offensive, zap it entirely, and maybe ban the commenter if he or she is a repeat offender. Leaving their comment dangling halfway like that is just maddening, for him or her and for me. It's far ruder and disrespectful to opinion than anything I've ever seen in comments. Because it's always used on opinion.

I agree with #28 almost entirely.

I think disemvowelling is incredibly rude in itself; and it's counterproductive, because I actually WANT to read all the comments, even the stupid and/or mean ones, and reading disemvowelled text is extremely difficult. It's a bit ironic that I spend more time on the disemvowelled ones than on the supposedly contributory ones.

I also agree that it's applied EXTREMELY haphazardly, which is absolutely a cardinal sin in moderation. The motivation does feel like it's applied on emotional grounds. Rather than being "what's against the rules" it's more "what pushes Teresa's oversensitive and seemingly random buttons".

Stupid comments sometimes serve a valuable function, too, I've found. I've been moderating things off and on for fifteen years, so I'm not totally ignorant on the subject. I've made more than my share of mistakes, including feeding the flame, which is what I think disemvowelling does.

As a result, Boing Boing's comment threads rarely get off the ground and become a true conversation.

I also think it's ironic that this erratic yet heavy-handed moderation style is apparently to become the basis of a BOOK on the subject.

Is Cory having another baby?

No, Vicko is quoting from the "Here Comes Everybody" section of Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, whence Cory and Clay got their title.

What's wrong with regular old "realistic"?

When is Chrysler going to come out with energy-efficient models? Cars that get less than 35-40 MPG are obsolete. I don't care what kind of internet I get if I have to drive a 20th-century behemoth like the 300 to get it.

The thing is, the 78 era encompasses 75 years of history. Wind-ups, with steel or bamboo needles, are only appropriate for records made before 1925 or so. People in the 40s and 50s played their 78s on electrical turntables just like we do today. Monochord is correct: playing Nat King Cole on a windup turntable is criminal abuse, and would have been recognized as such even when the record was new.

Yeah, they all do it, but Sony sets a new standard. Their warez are more copious and more crappy than the competitition. And they've gotten pretty good at disguising what parts of their crapware are actually necessary to run the damn things (like drivers). You can easily spend 90% of your "get up and ready to go" time with a new laptop getting rid of crap, even including the time spent installing Windows Updates, Firefox, etc.

On the plus side, this 78-year-old gal's got her tone back. That baby's TIGHT. Ooh wee!

Why would I buy a product I was just going to smash to pieces the first time I used it? Nothing like a flash fire of pure rage to get you started on a beautiful day.

As far as we know this list has a 100% rate of fail, right? I mean, we've caught a couple of terrorists here and there, using old-fashioned regular police methods, but we've never caught a single one using the terror list, right? It's 100% bullshit, right?

It's becoming more and more clear, as the Iraq War destroys the American economy, and its citizens submit eagerly to more and more instrusive and stupid terror rules, which are in fact terrorism themselves, that bin Laden won the war on terror.

Anyone up for a public hanging?

"Um, no. In fact, the "user story" for Archimedes was determining whether his gold crown had been diluted with silver. The question Archimedes sought to answer was how to determine the volume of an irregularly shaped object, which in addition to massing it, would reveal its density."

But the volume of this fake gold bar is not in question. What's in question is what it's made of. It would displace the same amount of water whether it was made of gold, iron, or aluminum, thus immersing it doesn't tell you anything about its composition. The fake bar is BY DEFINITION the same volume as a real one, and will displace exactly the same amount of water. Archimedes tells you nothing.

Of course you can make more gold: you mine it. There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about gold than there is anything else.

You keep cigarette butts in your lungs?

Erm, Archimedes only works for buoyant objects. Gold bars aren't bouyant. The bar, fully immersed, will displace an amount of water equal to its volume, whether it's made of gold, lead, titanium, cast iron, what have you. If you get the ratios of heavier and lighter elements right, Archimedes won't tell you a thing about whether it's real or not.

Gold is a stupid investment. If the dollar is tanking, buy one of the currencies that it's tanking against. The only thing that has value is value.

Petreboing, it's not this clip that is NSFW, it's the Otromano blog they are hat-tipping and linking to.

Does buying a pair come with automatic membership in Dexy's Midnight Runners? JoBoxers, maybe?

"Trepidatious" is not a word. Believe it or not, it's just plain "trepid".

Oh, Jesus, no -- Kevin Warwick is in Scientific American? I thought that charlatan publicity hound was out of the public eye for good.

It's not as funny without Billy May yelling.

Did they mention the greatest troll of all time, snopes's usenet message saying that "everyone knows light can't travel in a vacuum" back in c.1994? That one darn near broke the internet, as I recall.

I'm going to agree with Marshall here. Plus, I can't think of too many bars, beachside tikis or otherwise, that are looking for more useless junk that needs to be washed.

The apologists here for this latest TSA atrocity scare me as much as the TSA does.

The incredible force of Junior!

Can you fold your ebook? Can you read it in the bath? Can you hold your finger in place while you check the index? How often does a book need to be converted into ecologically catastrophic e-waste and replaced with a new model?

Books are the greatest technological achievement of all time. They're not going anywhere. Certainly not for any $100 or £100 gizmo that I'm going to throw away in a year. Maybe -- maybe if they were free.

Every attempt to date to "go paperless" has created a massive increase in paper usage because of people printing the same stupid garbage over and over, in drafts and repeats.

Every couple of years? People in the US throw away 150 million phones a year. That's probably close to total penetration. The world buys a billion new phones every year. Most of the discarded phones, contra anonymous @1, work just fine.

Sasquatch is brown.

16x24x36 inches? What in the hell is this thing for? You could get, what, 40 Mac Airs in there. Is this a serious suggestion for passenger use? What the hell? There are already about 50,000 different bag designs on the market, meeting every conceivable need.

Wait til you get a load of their specification process, too. If you ever wondered about those "hundred dollar hammers", this is why. Whoever makes these is going to have to hire 50 people to serve as a compliance team. And then TSA, the only people on earth who would be interested in such a thing, will end up buying 100 million of them and storing them for eternity in a climate-controlled secure warehouse in midtown Manhattan.

I think TSA is daring us to do something about them. I fully expect to be asked to strip naked and hop around holding one of my feet in my hand while being pelted with ping pong balls the next time I fly.

@19: all good beers come in casks. Cask-conditioned ale is alive; keg beer is dead. It's a shame American craft brewers have barely begun to grasp this fact, focusing instead on how to market and technologize themselves.

If only all this ingenuity and whiz-bang tech crap design was focused on ways to bring good beer to you. GOOD BEER DOES NOT COME IN PRESSURIZED KEGS.

Now try it for a band with five members. Hmm, $20,000 doesn't look so good.

Ha! Guns are funny!

Does anyone else ever wonder what it must be like to live with Billy May? "HEY, DO YOU THINK I COULD GET A LITTLE MORE COFFEE, SWEETHEART?! THANK YOU!!!! HEY, DID YOU SEE THIS ARTICLE IN THE PAPER?! LOOKS LIKE THEY'RE PUTTING IN A NEW SUPERMARKET DOWN BY (blam, sound of shotgun followed by blessed silence).

I always thought the "we will not ship to China" on camera auctions on Ebay was related to fraud. Maybe it's because they get confiscated at Customs.

Well, to be fair, the designer ones are much, much better-executed. That 4 stitches/inch gauge is awful-looking at the top.

Is that a camera over the door? Sweet.

Ebay is the world's most comprehensive fencing operation, with the advantage that a huge portion of the goods sold there don't even exist, and are being "sold" through compromised accounts; indeed, through the magic of bogus "second chance" offers, most of them aren't even sold through Ebay (I now receive three or four of these for every bid I make on Ebay, often before the auction even ends).

Just take your pants off, and boom -- the principal is an instant child pornographer.

This is child abuse.

Um, no. The web has its roots at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee came up with HTML, but the internet was 20 years old by then (1969, not 1989). The web is not the internet.

Death to the TSA. I would like JUST ONCE to hear about a bunch of people and their supervisors getting fired over stuff like this. I am SICK of turning over the security of the nation to these mouthbreathing rebrobates and their Nazi overseers.

Fuji already produces the bulk of instant pack film (the peel-apart kind), and theirs is better than Polaroid's. The stuff that's going to be missed is the integral kind, for Spectra and 600 cameras (successors to this SX-70). No word yet on a replacement provider, which is what has people worried and hoarding the stuff.

Typical Wikipedia dross. I used to support Wikipedia, when the chief charge against it was that it was "inaccurate" (it wasn't). But it has been completely infiltrated by the trivia experts now, and the know-it-alls, and the microscopic detail hounds, none of whom can write a simple declarative sentence to save their lives, to the point where most articles are no longer comprehensible to a general reader.

When you can't look up any medical-related topic without encountering fifty pages of jargon copied out of a medical textbook; or a political article without having the most basic information obscured by mountains of trivia (did you know that the most important thing to know about Super Tuesday is that someone once called it "The Tuesday of Destiny"?)

Travel articles are heading the same way. The amount of "information" is vanishingly small compared to the B.S., and the ratio is shrinking by the second.

"The accused said he had been driving home after visiting family members when he decided to stop by a river to drink some wine."

This is sheer poetry. It should be accompanied by some tragic Delta blues guitar.

"Friends Don't Let Friends Buy Packard Bell".

Also excellent for tearing apart endangered coral reefs, polluting the water, and randomly killing wildlife for no reason.

I want the death penalty.

Told you I wasn't feeling well.

The burka is in fact a symbol of fear of exactly what these women have -- "a desire for a more Western lifestyle". This is of course a story of oppression of women, but the root of the oppression is the loss of control in the modern world. That's why burkas are becoming more common, and why the headscarf is such a potent symbol in Muslim communities in the West, as it never was until recently. The "religious" authorities are afraid of us and what we offer, because they are terrified that they have nothing to offer in return, but ultimately they know that they are losing the culture war. That's why this kind of religious extremism is on the upswing.

It doesn't have anything to do with Islam or the Quran or the Prophet; it has to do with fear.

My favorite part of this emo drama is "I am regualarly asked if I was named after the Beatle, having always replied no. My mother named me after "John Lennon that wrote songs, painted, and baked bread with his son". She named me for the man, not the pop star."

What a load of tosh. Your momma didn't know the man. She knew OF the pop star. What is it about Beatles fans, more than fans of any other pop group, that makes them think they've got this intense personal relationship with the figures on their album jackets?

If you really want to get into the world of 78s and cylinders, you're going to have to get to Archeophone Records (http://www.archeophone.com). Their stuff goes back to 1891. The history of popular music is a lot weirder than the standard Received Version would suggest.

So, random, arbitrary, ad hoc rules are still happening, but you can get rid of some of them by blogging about it on their blog? Gee, what a huge victory.

The advantage over shitting in your hand and eating that is that you don't have to wash your hands for as long after eating this.

I assume it's spammers inserting some kind of megarouter in rather clumsy fashion. After all, as long as there is still a single non-spam-related packet floating around somewhere, their mission is incomplete.

@1 -- "My main concern is how these tear free onions would taste, what kind of onion they are, etc."

Exactly. The most important factor in the quality of your food is how it is grown or raised, not what its genetics are. Onions, maybe not so much, but think about wine: wine made from syrah or pinot noir grapes varies tremendously depending on where and how they are grown, where and how they are made into wine. The genetic determinists at Monsanto disregard this and assume that all industrial food production is identical. I suspect that tear-free onions grown chemically are also nutrient-free and flavor-free, just as cloned beef that raised in the appalling American feedlots will be just as diseased and flavorless as its ordinarily-bred counterpart.

"Although the exact type of biofuel to be used has not been disclosed, the airline said it is a form that does not compete with food and freshwater resources."

I wonder what it is then. It can't be corn-based, which violates both of those restrictions, and several others besides (more petroleum goes into fertilizing it than is saved). Soybeans are competing with food. Is it palm oil? Palm oil biofuel is an ecological catastrophe. What other options are there?

But if you're far from electricity, aren't you probably also far from ice?

Yeah. That's the one that's never going to happen. For starters, we no longer have the technological nous to pull it off; it would cost several hundred trillion dollars; and it would destroy the ecology AND the economy of the region; and it would indeed spark a shooting war. I'll be shooting too if it ever comes to pass (I live in Washington State).

I was thinking of Mexico, who are at the far end of the Colorado spigot -- the one that's not going to have any water in it.

I also think farmers in the Imperial Valley and elsewhere are going to be uppity about having their water rights taken away, as they inevitably will. And Nevada "ranchers", though most of them have been bought out by Vegas water interests. Farmers and ranchers have lots of guns. What happens when the Feds come -- armed -- to turn off the taps?

This is what you get for trying to take his Doritos.

Ian70 @1, I'm hearing your sarcasm, but I can't figure out who it's directed at. Obviously, they water the golf course; that's the whole problem. The amount of water taken out of the Colorado annually exceeds the historical average of the river's flow by a substantial amount. Most of it still goes for agriculture, though.

I have golfing relatives who live in St. George, Utah (I wouldn't golf if you paid me), and their course frequently has dead grass because the river drops to the point where what's left is so alkaline (salty) that it kills anything you water with it. Their water is purified three times by the time it comes out of the tap and its still undrinkable.

I think there's going to be a shooting war over Western water inside the next decade.

Barclaac @9, you're thinking of "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest" for Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine (south to north). Of course, you still have to remember which is first in each pair.

The best math teacher I ever had didn't care if we cheated. We could bring in anything we wanted. You still had to know how to figure out how to answer it, which is more important than just plopping out the right number. Hence "show your work". In the real world you're allowed to have references....

Wow, you can view album covers on this thing? I'd pay thousands.

In a typical US big-city paper, wire stories and other big-topic news takes up a really small portion of the paper. Most of it is small-potatoes local content -- PTA news, sewer board hearings, obituaries, business news, recipes, high-school sports, and small local ads -- not to mention the classifieds.

Some of these things can be easily ported over to the web, and in some cases the results are better or even much better -- classifieds, for instance (Craigslist is killing 'em).

But other stuff is unglamorous, poorly suited to the web, and immensely valuable to the community: community news. Obituaries, for instance. Most Boing Boing readers are young, and thus don't have a lot of people they know dying all the time, but older people do; and they need that connection.

The web is also a lot more sensationalist and partisan than old-line papers. Boring local stories, like local business and politics, can't possibly compete on the web with 24/7 Britney Spears coverage. But, as newspapers die off and the outlet for this kind of coverage disappears, communities are impoverished. People who are isolated from their communities but have connections with, say, Boing Boingers from across the globe, have advantages that were previously unavailable but also have new DISadvantages that they probably aren't even aware of. That's a shame.

As a genealogist and history buff, I can say also that old newspapers are THE most fascinating source in the world. There is nothing that even comes close to the sense of a place you get from paging through its nineteenth-century papers, especially if (as is usually the case) you've got several to choose from in the same city, each with a different political and business outlook. Just the "trivial" stuff like following the level of the Mississippi River as it rises and falls in a river town -- absolutely vital news of the day -- tells you a lot about what life there was like.

There is no history on the web.

OMG! Kids today have no idea how to thresh wheat by hand! They have bikes with rubber tires! They don't know ANYONE who died of cholera! Their shoes come in "lefts" and "rights"! Steam engines! It's amazing!

That's "condescension", you freak. Kidding! Don't steal my vowels!

As for "organic", many people are upset that words in the English language can have more than one meaning. This usually passes with time.

Jack, you're right -- LEDs are fine, as long as they are bright and in a proper headlight unit with a large external battery. Niterider has great ones. What sucks is the blinky things. I see them all the time on riders, wearing all black, weaving in and out of traffic, no helmet, a little red flasher clipped somewhere on them.

You won't blind oncoming traffic if it's aimed correctly. Do cars and motorcycles blind you?

This fellow needs to get himself to the World Gurning Championships in Egremont, Cumbria, England.

That doesn't make any sense. Bootleggers don't bootleg boots.

How long is the "internet designed to survive a nuke blast" notion going to live on? Forever?

You're missing the point. He wasn't looking for a chat; he wanted them to be angry and chastise him. He's a pervert, not lonely.

Just get a freaking light, people. A big one, with halogen bulbs and a separate heavy battery, not some little blinky LED thing you can't tell what it is until you're on top of it. Think "motorcycle lights". Niterider makes good ones.

I'm not usually keen on this style, but this is really, really good.

It has more of a 50s feel to me (think tiki barkcloth) than 60s. But it does ring 60s, I guess because the freedom of the shapes is a little too wild for the 50s. It's a 00s reworking of a 60s Jetsons reworking of the 50s original. The background fade is modern, though, and overall it's clearly modern, not 50s or 60s, because it's drawing from too broad a range of ideas than either of those -- something that usually turns me off of this semi-retro style; but this one hits the mark. Nicely done, sir.

Dubai is not a mystery. They use slave labor to build those glittering towers. They believe that their country is going to be THE tourist paradise of the 21st century, but they need to do some more research on 21st-century tourists' attitudes towards soft drugs and sex -- not to mention human rights -- before that's ever going to happen.

Try this: imagine a plane with no wings at all. It won't fly, but if you run the engines, it will move forward. It will do this no matter what is happening under the wheels, because the wheels free-wheel.

Your RC car is propelled by its wheels but a plane is not.

Think of it this way: the treadmill is running 100 MPH backward. The plane isn't going anywhere, because the wheels free-wheel. It just sits there. Then, they start the engines. They trust against the AIR (not the ground), and the plane moves forward. If it has wings, it will eventually be going fast enough to leave the ground.

I'm really having trouble seeing how people are getting this wrong.

"Airplanes fly because of lift".

Um, no. They rise up because of lift, but what pulls them forward isn't lift, it's thrust. Lift is dependent on air moving across the wing, yes, but thrust is not. Thrust is going to pull the plane forward no matter how fast the wheels are turning, and the forward motion is going to cause lift. The plane takes off.

The photo is not underexposed.

Lolita is NOT "erotica", fer chrissakes!

Please stop calling it "salvia". It's salvia divinorum. Just plain "salvia" most normally refers to sage, a common household spice. You're not smoking sage.

I like my coffee brewed in a big-ass Bunn that hasn't been cleaned since 1979. Served by a frazzled blonde with a bad attitude.

@2 is right. Junk that has coupons is junk, period. Manufactured, processed garbage. If everything you eat comes in a tray that goes into your microwave, great, but if you eat real food, coupons are almost never useful AT ALL. When's the last time you saw a coupon for yellow onions or spinach?

Tyson Frozen Ready To Eat: you can keep it. I wouldn't take them if they were free.

And food prices aren't high, they're ridiculously low, and distorted by government price supports that protect exactly this kind of high-fructose-corn-syrup-stuffed puke.

Eat real food. Cook it yourself.

This is related to the future where our every movement in the public sphere will be controlled and directed by minimum-wage security guards who can't even pass the GED: the future where all customer service relations will be conducted by people who have no idea what their company's own policies are.

Another example: try finding out what your bank charges for overseas ATM use. You'll get more different answers than the number of people you talk to, and none of them will be right. Bank VPs don't even know.

That's nasty. The more I learn about the variety of life on earth, the more I believe that LIFE MUST BE STAMPED OUT. Starting with us.

Or buy some cufflink blanks and make your own.

http://www.jewelrysupply.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=4034

"Scourge" doesn't mean what you think it means.

So, you get to grate the cheese with the wet thing you just scooped the pasta out with? No, thanks.

Those grater holes don't look sharp to me, either. Once you've tried one of the Microplane laser-cut graters, you'll never look at anything else.

The Tunnel of Love doesn't have anything to do with Disneyland. Has Disneyland ever even had one? I don't think so. The Tunnel of Love is more Coney Island, or better yet, traveling amusement parks that set up on the fairgrounds.

These things are beautiful.

In not-very-related Google annoyances, why does every Google page -- search, map, groups, gmail, etc. -- reset my Firefox character encoding from Western (ISO-8859-1) to frigging Unicode? Every single time? Reset-to-Western + refresh = Unicode, even. I hate Unicode. Hardly anyone uses it. It doesn't render many, many characters correctly. Color me off-pissed.

American "craft brews" are mostly mediocre or worse. And very few of them are alive, in the way that real ale (cask-conditioned) is. America also doesn't have a very strong tradition of the seriously dedicated pub, that actually cares about keeping its equipment clean and so forth.

Sure, there are some, but it's a big country.

The pub in Norwich mentioned above is not all that unusual in the UK. OK, 86 cask ales is a lot, but a pub like the Ship and Mitre in Liverpool is in that same ballpark. All real ales, too, none of this keg beer nastiness.

All across the UK there are pubs serving outstanding real ale in a variety of styles that can't be approached here. Who in the US is brewing mild (a traditional northern style)? It's always the same old overhopped, overmalted, over-flowery IPA. And the craft beer revolution is in full swing in the UK as well -- it's not all traditional. The difference is, craft ales in Britain are usually real ale as well. There are real ales in America, but it's just not comparable. It's a culture there; in America it's just beer.

And the traditional public house -- more like a living room than a bar -- is simply unparalleled. The best examples, with no music, no giant TVs in every corner, no fruit machines, no dipshits shouting and punching each other, are so much better than even the best American bars it's like being on another planet. Even the more ordinary kind are better than anything you'll find in the States.

So one of your pacifist characters throws bombs? Interesting.

I agree. He's a jerk, and his puerile joke isn't even set up correctly.

Do you have a citation for New Zealand's copyright law? The Wikipedia article, which is absolutely terrible and incomprehensible, says "Canada and New Zealand have not, as of 2006, passed similar twenty-year extensions. Consequently, their copyright expiry times are still life of the author plus 50 years."

"The plumber still wants to know how wrench he had just put down next to him on the floor ended up on the other side of the room."

Well, gee, I guess that settles it, then. No way a plumber has ever misplaced a tool. I assume the million-dollar check is on its way to you.

You can't (yet) digitally reproduce paintings, because paintings are three-dimensional objects, not two as commonly stated. In addition to brush strokes and so on, there is the reflectivity of glass to consider. Anyone who thinks they're getting the full experience of a Rembrandt or a Pollock from a JPG is participating in a process of cultural loss.

Good point, Infinite Decay -- I wasn't thinking of green tea, but black tea.

As for electric kettles being no more efficient than stovetop ones in the US, because of lower voltage: rubbish. We have a Russell Hobbs that heats water to boiling many times faster than a stovetop kettle, nearly as fast as a UK kettle. And unlike the stove, almost all of the energy goes into heating the water and not the air above the stove. Using a stove to boil a kettle is wasteful and ecologically unsound.

The Zojirushi can't make tea. 208 degrees isn't hot enough. It really does need to be at a full, rolling boil to extract the proper flavor. The temperature is a non-negotiable aspect of the process. Americans accustomed to those evil little metal restaurant pots with the bag still in its envelope on the side aren't drinking tea, whatever they think they're doing.

I've only worn heels once or twice (I'm a man), but I have Morton's Neuroma, and it hurts like a mother. It's fun to tell people I have it, though, because it sounds like cancer.

The people in northern England, and many other places besides, who were drenched with radioactive rain from the Chernobyl plume, thought it was a bad thing.

Freebeets @6 says: "A big problem with TSA is that they aren't the most educated of workers. The requirement is a high school degree."

No, it's worse than that. There was a PROPOSAL to require a GED, but it was scrapped. TSA screeners do not have to have graduated from high school.

That is after all the real purpose of TSA screening: to teach us to obey the commands of uneducated boobs earning minimum wage. A real police state with real police costs too much money.

Any guesses as to the average ability of a TSA screener to accurately gauge what "25 grams" means?

The Anderton boat lift in Cheshire isn't as swoopy looking, but it does the same job. And it was built more than 130 years ago. Interestingly, there is more boat traffic on British canals now than at the height of their industrial use, due to the advent of tourism.

What would Jesus spam?

Ah, the joys of "information wants to be free". Just wait until some loser murders his wife in her domestic violence shelter whose location used to be shielded from public view. Google recently had ours on display in their directory, with a friggin' photo of the front door. Getting it removed was extremely difficult, because mortals can't contact Google; they contact you. Like the gods.

"Deserve" -- there it is, the fundamental core of the American theology. It doesn't matter what's best for SOCIETY -- what's likely to stand the best chance of preventing the crime from happening again -- the only thing that matters is punishing the guilty. And punishing them again. And again. And punishing them even if they're NOT guilty, what the hell. As long as someone somewhere is being punished for wickedness, I feel better about myself.

I have problems with that, oddly enough.

Seven comments, all identical, within a couple of hours from "Fark" here. Nice. Please delete them, and him, ASAP.

Oral B's got nothing on Sonicare. If you care more about brushing effectiveness than gee-whiz, that is.

I wish I could sign up for comments on Fry's website, as I am a huge fan, but it won't let me.

Imposing new and complex technical rules without any way for the average person to tell whether they are following them correctly or not is a recipe for security-line disaster. We also know from experience that TSA agents are completely stupid and arbitrary in the exercising of their decision-making power. Do the AGENTS know how to tell the difference between Lithium-ion batteries and "primary lithium" ones? Or how to calculate the amount of lithium?

The purpose of the rule is to give the agents more arbitrary power. That way, if they don't like you for some reason -- you give them a funny look in the line, for instance, which I've seen happen -- they can throw out your batteries just to show you who's boss. Are they under the limit? Fine, appeal the decision. Please submit your confiscated batteries as evidence.

That's the real purpose of the TSA anyways; not security, but teaching citizens how to obey. In SecurityLand, every movement of the populace is controlled and directed by high school dropouts who couldn't get into the real police force.

Everyone likes to hate sex offenders, for good reason; but the problem with this sort of thing is, they are saying "we want you to stay out of prison and reintegrate with society, but you will never be allowed to have a job".

Personally, I think allowing perverts to wank over internet smut might keep them away from live victims, not encourage them to find more.

Brian Eno will be 60 next year. Ian MacKaye is 45. Henry Rollins is 46, and a total douche. Youth? Hardly anyone under 20 knows who these people are. Brian Eno is most famous for producing U2, but U2 is a grandpa band. Bono is 47. Kids don't know or care who they are. Kids don't care about pop music at all these days.

Also, Haroun is right -- the EPA list actually has MORE steps, they just number them differently.

Being a bit of a dork, I've actually broken apart the base of CFLs -- not the tube, the white base. It's got a little circuit board and several electronic components in there. How much energy do those things take to make? What other harmful chemicals are present? What happens to them when they're trashed? I'm not really convinced they're better for the environment than a hunk of glass, wire, and foil.

Scotch should be drunk with as much as a third of water added -- 25%, certainly not more, but a spoonful isn't enough. It really opens it up. Cask strength should be cut by a third to a half. A small amount of ice is good, too; you're not trying to get it COLD, just a few degrees less than your overheated 72 degree room. Freezing the glass is insane, but these idiotic granite blobs are an assault on decency. This is SkyMall-level "connoisseur" crapola.

Well, I have overstated the law in the UK. For one thing, the law is different in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But apparently it is not NORMALLY illegal to take photographs in any public place, and NORMALLY neither the police or anyone else can confiscate your film.

However, the Official Secrets Act 1911 lists things you can't photograph "where this might be useful to an enemy", a phrase which is not well defined; and the even broader Terrorism Act 2000 prohibits photography "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism", which unfortunately could be interpreted to mean pretty much everything; I mean, a terrorist might be planning to bomb a pub, so that photo showing where the tables are could be useful.

That's the situation in the UK: it's up to the interpretation of the courts, and while it's unsettled the police can screw around with you as much as they want.

And of course in any country the police have the right to make your life difficult for a couple of hours for no reason at all.

I gleaned all of this from the UK version of the Photographers' Rights, at http://www.sirimo.co.uk/media/UKPhotographersRights.pdf.

Christ, I finished way back at Barbara Babcock, 887.

The law in the UK is different than in the US. In the US, anything that can be seen in public or even in a private place that is normally accessible to the public, like a shopping mall, can be legally photographed.

If you ARE on private property, like a mall, they can ask you to leave -- and if you don't, you're trespassing -- but it is still legal to take photographs.

Cases like the "silver bean" in Chicago are no different. If you can see it, you can photograph it, period. When the new sculpture park here in Seattle opened, they had signs out saying you couldn't photograph the Richard Serra piece "for copyright reasons", but it was immediately pointed out to them that this was (a) stupid and (b) illegal, and the signs were removed. Any judge at all would throw out anything like that in two shakes.

But the UK does not have a Bill of Rights, and they do not have some of the freedoms we take for granted.

So it's a video iPod, except that it doesn't play any kind of media, just a "pattern" (huh?) and it's much, much larger, and it doesn't actually exist. Uh, yeah. Cool, man. Like a, uh, lava lamp.

Woo is correct. Urza9814, you can call them, but there is no reason on earth why they should care what you think. And they don't. And you can't vote for (or against) them.

This nifty little tool is uncomfortably close to spam for my tastes.

If you enjoy watching this sort of thing, head on over to englishrussia.com and poke around. He's got video of the popular Russian sport of paying homeless street drunks to chug a bottle of vodka down in one go and then laughing at the results.

Death can and does occur (no video, alas). Not recommended. But you can't really call it "waste" -- vodka is horrible stuff. Real liquor has, you know, flavor.

The voices in MY head are telling me to smash the loudspeaker with a sledgehammer until it stops working and then jam what's left of it down Evil Genius Creator Guy's throat with a 16" long screwdriver.

Biodegradable how? Virtually nothing degrades in a landfill. If these save on fossil fuels to make, that's one thing, but if they're made from corn, the corn probably takes more oil to grow than plastic ones take to make. Cosmetic green.

Cool, but $2200 cool? I think I'll continue to make do with the lap I got for free when I sat down.

Newspapers in landfills don't release carbon into the atmosphere when they decompose, because they don't decompose. Neither does much of anything else, except the really wet stuff. Landfills are almost perfectly anaerobic. Garbologists routinely find newspapers that are fifty years old or older in perfect, readable and flexible, condition when they dig landfills. It's a better way to preserve them than leaving them out on your coffee table.

I would expect these "logs" to release massive quantities of floating ash, and stinky smoke.

Bizarrely, he appears to be working at a plywood prototype Macintosh -- a computer Wozniak had nothing to do with. Notice the disk slot, just like an early Mac. Wozniak was the brains behind the Apple II, and was long gone from the company by the time its flagship product was released years later.

If that's too much for you, they have really cheap hoodies at Wal-Mart. It won't be artist-designed or have felt applique, embroidery or multi-color printing on it, though.

That is NOT a large cockroach. It's quite small. You don't get to brag about your cockroaches until they're an inch-and-a-half long, not including feelers. Really, two inches minimum to be remarkable.

And by "giclée", you of course mean "inkjet".

You could use it to project your stencils on the sides of buildings for that super-scale Banksy graffiti vandalism you've been thinking about.

Why is it fun to see someone's granny getting grossed out by this? Are you going to show it to your kids next?

My ISP just sent a note today about "a sudden and severe increase in SPAM volume after the Thanksgiving weekend". At my work spam is up by around 1,000% over a year ago. Whether it's caught or not, it's a significant drain on resources. So I guess your mileage may vary.

You're right about the increase in "quasi-spam", though. I get DOZENS of these "dear valued customer" turds a week now. For entertainment I like to write back to an address I know will read it with suggestions for ways it would be fun to watch their children die or some such.

My lot is less than 0.07 acre, and my house is a dream?

I'd also like to hear Mr. Doctorow tell us under what arrangements Amazon is selling Boing Boing on this thing.

Yes, it's much more convenient to carry around a set of three or four giant screwdrivers than a small coin-sized thingie. These are great.

Your neighborhood is hosed. These are Paul Bunyan's curling stones. See the handle mount? Wait until you see the size of the brooms.

Nice.

That old UPS logo is 1,000,000 times better than the new, shiny, reflecto 3-d thing they replaced it with. I love love love that bow.

I'm wondering what would happen in the opposite situation -- Halloween reveler has heart attack on train and actually dies, in a city where Halloween costumes are common. How long before they discover him? What are the reactions when they find out the cartoon-dead-looking guy really is dead?

There already is a TM university in Skelmersdale, in Lancashire, northeast of Liverpool. I'm sure there's more than the square root of one percent of the population meditating there; that's only 20 people, but it doesn't seem to have brought peace. Peas, maybe.

Jeez, read the comments there. "I shouldn't be on this list, I bought a list with your email address on it". Uh, yeah. A bought list is a spam list. If HE didn't ask YOU to email him, but you batch-email him anyways, you're a spammer just as much as the penis-pill guy. If your email is bulk, and it's unsolicited, it's spam. Period.

Makes a change from the usual "Nig Nogs Ruining Britain" the Daily Mail usually publishes.

Speaking of plagiarism, the Wikipedia article is almost entirely copied from yet another page, on which the entries are unsourced. "A newspaper", yeah right. I think the Wikipedia article should be deleted post haste; it's bullshit.

Best Buy is the worst goddamn company on the face of the earth. They're the only company that drove me to actually cut my Best Buy credit card up into little tiny pieces and mail it to the CEO. Hint: don't ever, ever, ever give them your email address, even for a repair job.

Don't let the people at bmezine.com find out about this.

No, dictionaries aren't handed down by God Almighty. They are handed down by the usages of English speakers. If people use a word, it's a word. If they use it enough, it will get into a dictionary. Errors that make their way into usage have exactly as much legitimacy as any other words. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.

The title on the film is "Skaterdater", not "Skater Dater". Yes, I am a nerd.

What happens if a plane hits one of these things?

When is this sort of thing going to be seen as the major-league national security threat that it so obviously is? It's not just spam anymore; these things can shut down governments, or will be able to soon.

If I found $15,000 in the trash I wouldn't be too unhappy.

Fucking Gumby. I always knew he was up to no good.

Why doesn't it smell like corpse?

Why doesn't it smell like corpse?

If they were archived with the original advertisements, as they aired, I'd be keen. Old commercials are fun. But not loaded up with NEW ads.

The problem is that a company like Viacom could throw 100,000 man-hours at the problem and still not come up with a workable, enjoyable solution -- in large part BECAUSE of the 100,000 man-hours (most of which would be devoted to figuring out the optimum speed to make all 37 simultaneous items of Flash garbage rotate differently).

YouTube's success is in very large part BECAUSE it's a hacked-together thing. It's about the videos, not about the boring stuff that goes on around the videos.

Winston is an idiot, like most people at Brookings.

He doesn't understand the problem, and his knee-jerk libertarian solution doesn't address it.

Take a minute to look at the political and geographic realities of building new runways. That's not the answer, and even if it magically WAS the answer, it's not going to happen. Not in the places that need the runways.

The problem is that the number of planes is increasing dramatically faster than the number of passengers. Every hub now operates hundreds of flights of "regional jets", small aircraft in hourly takeoff patterns, that clog the system. What used to be one Boeing 747s is now eight Bombardiers.

Air traffic control is not the bottleneck. The clusterfuck of taxiing jets on the tarmac, and competition for gates, and you have a system that starts to fail dramatically with even minor delays, that ripple across not just airports but entire continents. It is not at all unusual for small jets clogging up JFK to hold up entire Australian-bound 747s at LAX.

Al Billings's experiences are a huge part of the problem as well.

Patrick Smith at Ask the Pilot (Salon) explains this all much better than I do. Clifford Winston explains nothing.

I intensely dislike this citation style. It cites the blog but not the entry. Try finding the entry you're looking for years afterwards. It should reference the specific entry .html file.

I got mine for fifty cents. It's a "Raleigh", a knockoff of a Diana, but made from the same molds. Even came with the original box!

BTW, the dreamy effect doesn't come from light leaks; it comes from the fact that the "lens" is a blob of plastic. The light leaks are just a side benefit!

I just flew through Heathrow twice last week, and both times the security queue was negligible.

What was horrific (and insecure) was the connections between terminals. Try getting between the very last gate at Terminal 1 and the very last gate at Terminal 4 sometime! We ran the whole way, with our bags, and barely made our flight -- almost an hour it took us (the incoming flight was quite late).

OK, long terminals I can deal with, but the bus ride? There are DOZENS of entry points where baddies could get into areas past (some) security (not to mention that in the meantime your plane is crawling with cleaners and baggage handlers who have never had to pass security).

On one of our bus rides, we were ON THE TARMAC, AMONGST THE PLANES -- we were so close that I thought a wing was going to clip the bus (it would have been too high, but seriously!)

You KNOW the "no liquids" rule is super-duper important, because of what the security workers do with the liquids they confiscate -- throw them in huge trash bins right next to the gate. In Dublin, there was a huge pile of full clear-plastic trash bags of liquids right next to the security line -- the bags were leaking, and the passengers were literally stepping in the spilled lattes and perfume running onto the floor. Heathrow was nearly as bad. So much for security. Not to mention sanitation and common decency.

But the lines themselves? Not that bad. Nowhere near as bad as Sea-Tac, for instance. The place looks completely hammered, but that's because it's the busiest airport in the world. It's a busy system, and they actually move people through pretty fast. Try Cancun sometime, when six 747s are getting ready to load!

I'm a lot more worried about the mountain of 1.4 million lost bags at LHR. Our bags didn't make our connection, and apparently spent the next two days in standing water -- the contents were soaked through when they finally arrived. I think that's down to BA, not Heathrow, though.

But seriously -- build a train or something. Those buses have to go.