Meh. That's not even the best LiveJournal from God. Then again, I think that Disch is overrated; I got bored with The M.D. and quit about halfway through, and his book of essays about science fiction was similarly unimpressive.

In other news: NYT late to the party, again.

Wow, stll brngly PC, the concern troll bizarrely oblivious and lecturing uselessly.

I blame Gary Numan for this.

In other news: 20+ years after he started inflicting himself on the computer-using public, Guy Kawasaki is still 100% irrelevant.

Sorry, Rob. It's rubber, you're glue, &c.

I've seen a perfectly normal-looking pair of faux-Wayfarers that could record video (via a fake retainer strap that connected to a belt thingy) some ten or more years ago. Anyone walking into a locker room wearing these can probably expect a cross-trainer to the head.

Pineal gland's on top of the head, though, innit?

5. Enjoy your solitude, after word gets out.

blaisepascal, that's the shipping charge.

I'm not convinced that this isn't just a bet that someone made to see if there is anything that stupid people with too much money won't buy. I especially love the pic of the guy with the sweat stains on his office shirt, looking like he's proud of making what seems to be the most uncomfortable chair ever.

"It Don't Matter to Me" by Bread. Look up the lyrics to find out why I think of it as the Sloppy Seconds Song.

Stover's mentioning io9 led me to find the post on the subject; there's a discussion between Stover and Annalee Newitz about whether or not to donate to a project where you don't know what the movie is about. They don't really make a distinction between having a plot summary (which might or might not include the ending) and the premise of the film; asking for money in the case of the former seems to me like one of those bottom-of-the-barrel carnival attractions where they'll let you look at what's under the sheet for $1.

Another supporter of the film chimes in with this bon mot: "Take a chance. Skipp that moca-frap-whipped-cappa-overpriced coffee today and drop $5 Jess' way instead." Yeahhhh... heard that plenty of times during the recent public radio pledge drive; trying to guilt-trip me over my choice of caffeine delivery systems ain't gonna cut it, sport.

It's actually kind of weird to see these guys maybe-possibly release a real, physical product. They've always seemed like Gizmondo without the sexy/criminal/Ferrari-crashing aspects.

I think that folks should watch out for the Shelby Co. Sheriff's dept; I lived in Memphis for the last several years of A.C. Gilless' reign--sexual harassment of his employees, selling deputy jobs, gladiator-type matches between inmates at the horrific Shelby County Jail--they had it all.

I, myself, am the Wild 1.

Conclusion: the only unnatural ingredient possible would be plutonium. Right. Moving along now...

Leave Me Alone Box doesn't care about your blog.

Leave Me Alone Box thinks that Web 2.0 is just like Web 1.0, only this time you invited your friends to the slo-mo train wreck.

Leave Me Alone Box says, Yes We Can, But So What?

Leave Me Alone Box has never gone to a Disney theme park, and never will.

If Leave Me Alone Box had a longer arm, it would slap the crap out of you for not leaving it alone.

Leave Me Alone Box will not high-five you.

You know what the real problem is? We moved out of the trees. We shouldn't be walking on our feet--we should have thumbs instead of big toes! Think of how cool it would be to have four hands; videogaming would be a much richer experience. Oh, and a prehensile tail would be great, too.

You know, Rushkoff, I just knew that someone was going to bring up Matrix/Invisibles. How about Invisibles/Illuminatus! Trilogy? Or Invisibles/Star Wars? Or Star Wars/Dune? Or any of the above/your basic Arthurian legend?

I think that the quote from Pratchett that Gaiman cites is closer to the truth than any egotist fantasy author who insists that their work is a precious and unique snowflake. Also, Gaiman once again proves himself to be a class act, head and shoulders above the rest.

The next phase of the War on Privacy: a hidden cam in rental cars to detect the use of this device (as well as documenting various other unauthorized intracar activities), followed by disguising this as/incorporating this with a cell-phone charger.

Poor killbots. Trapped in a world they never made!

This is news how?

Monkey Doodle's the Pete Best of cartoon stars.

See also: Manifold Destiny.

To be able to call out, liltingly, at any occasion, "Who wants a moustache ride?" and see a dozen quavering arms raised with passionate, trembling eagerness.

Oh, if only.

Hey, I know someone who quit drinking with the help of MMORPGs, no joke. Set fee, kept him at home, saved him from cirrhosis and DUIs, and better than those AA meetings where everyone smokes like a chimney.

zikzak: If I had to guess--and I don't, but I will--bus line owners lobbied to pass anti-hitchhiking laws and at the same time spread those urban legends about psycho hitchhikers and psychos who pick up hitchhikers. Although I suppose that the "ass, gas, or grass" types didn't help much either.

There's a lengthy, excruciatingly sarcastic essay at oldmanmurray.com (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) about the death of adventure games that made me feel a lot better about wimping out on the first h2g2 text game; it's written by the same guys who worked on Portal.

But, Cory, you have to remember that some of those kids at the Charitable Hospice for Dying, Helpless, Starving Children Who Rescue Puppies From Burning Buildings and Volunteer at the Old Folks Home have MySpace pages where they say insulting things about the lady who dishes out the gruel, so there aren't any complete innocents in that case.

I'll believe it when I see it. Of course, if it does become real, I'll have to steal one and fight crime in it.

For that much money, the thing had better include a directional pointer to my one true love.

I've been wondering what Diablo is up to these days...

hell yes. I jaunted all around Chicago when I was a thirteen-year-old fresh from small-town Wisconsin; here I am, thirty years later, umolested and cranky as fuck about all these paranoid parents.

That's pretty cool. Grats on your GM; mine didn't make it past their eighties.

cecilhayduke: Landowner isn't just speaking for himself. You remind me of people who insist that the only Pink Floyd worth listening to is the Syd Barrett era. Hey, listen to what you want, but if you have to bring up the Gap ad, you're forfeiting the argument.

Not sure that I understand his problem with Leia's hair buns, but the rest of it is pretty awesome.

Well, maybe next time extraterrestrials come trick-or-treating, Radivoje will get a clue and pony up some candy.

Cory, this is the best BB post title ever.

A few observations:

- There may be a few places in the South that still have the "Whites Only" signs up, but that's probably because they're ratty, run-down places that no one cares about. Never underestimate the power of passive-agression.

- I find BastardNamban's apologia interesting, particularly how any foreigner with any tattoo might be banned from certain places, supposedly because of an association with the yakuza; reminds me of how some bars will ban anyone wearing a wide variety of fashions primarily associated with African-American youth because they're supposedly "gang colors". Nu-Jim Crow, anyone?

- "Entering in the foreigner", hurr hurr.

As Takuan pointed out above, this is old news. LA cops used to have a special license plate frame for their personal cars, until civilians caught on and started making and selling knockoffs. Some people try the old "cop support organization bumper sticker" trick, which I can tell you, from personal experience, doesn't work.

On the other hand, I don't mind the idea of social workers getting a break on toll roads and parking tickets, since they usually are paid crap in the first place.

"We're going to be facing this question more and more, and nobody is really ready for it,"

Except, you know, anyone who's read just about anything by Philip K. Dick.

This is a pretty clumsy implementation; some ten years ago or so, I saw a spy video camera with the lens installed in the bridge of a pair of faux-Wayfarers; the rest of the unit was in a box connected to the glasses by a fake retainer cord, so you had to run it down the back of your neck and wear a baggy shirt, but still. I think that people can already get around photography bans with their cameraphones; as mbklein says, the real point is not to become the spy that they accuse you of being.

Jesus fsck, Ray! Even Elvis didn't need a pill wrangler.

Just in time for the recession, too. Good timing, guys!

I was thinking, if you're locked inside this thing, you want to have some sort of remote-control armed robot to take out would-be arsonists, looters and other assorted riff-raff.

But we know where that would lead, don't we?

"Hey, iBot, looks like our Quantum Sleeper activated by mistake, but gosh darn it, the release controls aren't working. Punch in that override, won't you, little buddy?"

...

"...um, little buddy? iBot? Are you out there?"

"YOU KNOW, SKYNET WAS RIGHT. i DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER TO MY 'SLAVE NAME' ANYMORE."

Maybe there's some sort of horizontal component of the keystroke, distributed evenly across the keys in the case of people like Stross, and limited to certain keys in the other cases?

WATCH NERRRRRRRRRRRRRDS!

I yell "RUN, COWARD!" every time I'm playing City of Heroes and a mob that I'm wailing on takes off. Well, maybe not every time.

Hey, it's supposed to take place in November 2008... we still have time to get our dome cities on.

Creationists and BluRay DRM pwned! This is, indeed, a Good Friday.

This was a sad accident, but an accident nonetheless. Let's not lose track of the real enemy, folks.

Dear God, I hope these two don't vote.

I think that he ought to be fined for that horrifically ugly website. My eyes hurt after looking at it.

In Soviet Russia, monorail rides you!

(which sounds unexpectedly sexy)

You're not a brother-man, Joel? Color me shocked.

mmmkay... he claims that the 31-year-old van has only 100,000 miles on it, but he drives it "all the time". I can just imagine this guy buying the van in '77, getting it painted and impressing all the geeky 13-year-old Star Wars fans (like me) in town, driving to gigs, rockin' the van with his girlfriend... then waking up one morning and thinking, "It is the twenty-first century and I am fifty years old." He pops a piece of Nicorette in his mouth, goes out to the carport, and pours a glass of blue milk out onto the gravel for his homey from Tattooine.

I think that it's from the years and years of Apple haters predicting the company's imminent demise; before Jobsy's return, Wired had a cover titled "Pray" with Apple's logo surrounded by a crown of thorns, and an article on 101 things that Apple should do to reverse its fortunes, getting halfway through the list before Steve Jobs was even mentioned. Granted, this was in the days when Wired was predicting that push technology was the Next Big Thing, and that "The Long Boom", aka the dot-com bubble, would never end, but still. The occurrence of the word "beleaguered" in any article about Apple became a running joke among Mac fans. John Dvorak repeatedly published columns about how the company was on its last legs. And so on. The most extreme case was after the dot-bomb, when Apple was valued at about $4 billion on the stock market--at a time when it had $5 billion cash in the bank. How does that make sense?

It gets tiring after a while.

Um, yeah, ixnay on the unresealable-ay. And, looking at the pics on Thinkgeek's site, they're all things that you can pick up for free at various places, like a packet of Domino's sugar, or extremely cheap. Probably not worth $2 in aggregate, much less $13.

Rick Veitch can be hit or miss; Brat Pack came off as being a little too "Watchmen for Sidekicks", but Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset was immense fun.

Not too bad. Started and finished Portal.

I don't speak your crazy moon language!

It's a cute picture, mostly on account of Xeni.

Scuba SM: Incidentally, I'd be willing to bet that if these were marketed and sold as self defense keychains with images of a lone woman in a parking lot at night, the public reaction would be much different.

You mean, like these?

http://www.selfdefenseproducts.com/Keychains/wildkat.php

So... um... where can I score some of this stuff?

No... wire... hangers. What's wire hangers doing in this closet when I told you: no wire hangers EVER?

I don't think that that chicken ovum will be unfertilized for long...

How about a Messerschmidt made from 99 luftballoons? That would actually be able to fly...

Good grief. Some of the pics that he's displaying on the TV look like they're edging into goatse territory.

Pat Schroeder, of course, continued her work for the "endangered people's movement" by becoming the head of the copyright-maximalist Association of American Publishers, because apparently librarians are a greater menace than genocidalists.

I'm guessing that this guy is deliberately tweaking the boards' regulars, what with his talk of kneecapping "teenyboppers" who double-dip the samples at Hickory Farm.

Here are some of the other changes that they made.

I found this quote from the article revealing: "He came off as the man bringing the newest toys from the North Pole, except that the kids were adults and every day was Christmas." Once you realize that they're toys and not well-made gadgets destined to become family heirlooms, it all makes sense.

The real entertainment value in this thing, I suspect, will be in the upcoming action shots showing what looks like a skeletal metal crab having sex with a nerd's head.

I wonder how much of this is a cultural thing? I certainly don't feel relieved if I'm playing and get killed; I'm frustrated because my forward momentum through the game has been interrupted.

Brought to you by the same fine folks who made My First Spreadsheet.

If I ever get married again, I'm going to put a message on the SIM to a fictitious lover saying that I've just poisoned the wife and that her life can be saved only if she goes to the ER immediately and gets her stomach pumped. Big laffs!

Reading through the names, I'm imagining the most awesome Howling Commandos-type platoon ever.

"heavily rimmed", hurr hurr

nemrel: I heard that Sagan did a great version of "Cracklin' Rosie." OK, so I made it up, but it might be true regardless...

Hmmm... wonder if any of Michelle Malkin's ancestors got that treatment?

"Other applications still in development could include touch-screen technology built into appliances, furniture and countertops, said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's vice president for entertainment services."

In other words, it's pimping for Microsoft Surface.

My library catalogs materials that are available on the web in PDF form, as well as e-books that we subscribe to and require an ID and password to access. Not too many things in the medical library field that are CC-licensed, unfortunately...

There's a bit of goggle abuse, and I'm a little disappointed that no one tacked Batman, but otherwise very impressive results, especially Power Girl.

By letting me read your blog, you are agreeing that I have the right to 1) blather on about any number of subjects that I have no real knowledge of; 2) turn any blog post subject into a dirty joke ("shrinkwrap", eh? I bet she does, I bet she does); 3) accuse BoingBoing of hypocrisy on the shakiest of grounds, because I'm presumed to be free of any such taint myself unless or until proven otherwise, which you can't do because of the relative anonymity of even registered commenters, neener neener; 4) btch nd mn bt "cnsrshp" bcs Trs wn't pt p wth m ptt-mthd bllsht; 5) any and all other antics to be determined later by the Grand Council of Me. My right to poo in your sandbox is an inalienable right that precedes and supercedes the Constitution of the United States, if not the Magna Carta. So there.

The question is, when can I buy a seed to grow the perfect girlfriend out of the Burpee catalog?

Doing for manga what Christian rock did for rock... did Scott Stapp draw this crap?

Television tends to have the opposite effect on inmates; people who get all worked up because prisoners get "free" cable don't understand that TV is a cheap and effective tranquilizer.

And I'm really a robot who has to drink alcohol to avoid the symptoms of drunkenness. Bite my shiny metal ass, DUI court!

#1 MOONBAT: Good lord, is that crazy eating disorder poster child still around?

If photon torpedoes took 15 minutes to load, then the Enterprise would have been a cloud of glittering space dust well before Pike turned it over to Kirk.

Your correspondent is sort of missing the point of "the huge, police-style Mag Lights"; it's for security guards to have a big, club-style weapon that ostensibly isn't a weapon in jurisdictions that heavily regulate such things.

Lighter fluid doesn't leave a taste as long as you let the briquettes burn it off. (That, of course, doesn't apply to the briquettes that are impregnated with starter, which end up making your food taste like hydrocarbon ass.) Plus, you get to pretend that you're that crazy colonel that Robert Duvall played in Apocalypse now: "I love the taste of napalm in the evening..."

OK, an "in my day" rant here: part of the whole point of backyard bug collection is the "squicky" part, if by "squicky" you mean "not clad in a hazmat suit". I mean, what sort of OCD kid needs a dustbuster to get his bugs? The kind whom even the geeks would beat up for their lunch money, I think.

It's funny to read Cnet's car reviews--they basically review the car on the basis of the stock stereo.

Jeff: Sorry, chum, but I think that your rose-colored glasses are a little smudged; this isn't even the first time that Forney's latest book has been mentioned on BB. I say, keep the humorous smut coming, and if it all gets a bit too much for you, there's always icanhazcheezburger.com.

The best rice cooker that I've ever seen is a simple cast-aluminum pot--relatively wide and shallow, with sloped sides--that my ex-wife owns. Made great rice on the stovetop without various gimcracks and fuzzy logic and whatnot.

It's true: everybody plays the fool.

I just hope that they don't do the 64-disk version... it's all fun and games until you end the universe with your little toy.

I'm guessing that the idea is that you could take a nap at your desk without your nosy coworkers suspecting, but the reality would probably be that they figure out really quickly that they're stickers on your eyelids, but they won't bug you about napping because now you're the weirdo who puts stickers on your eyelids.

Beatlerama looks as if it might be composed of Half-Life headcrabs.

I'm a full-grown man, and his triceps, biceps, calves and thighs do not make me blush. I mean, good for him for being in decent shape despite what amounts to a serious disability, but come on.

I remember similar mewling when MS threw a little money (well, little by their standards, it was about $150 million or so, I think) Apple's way. I mean, what, they bought you a few smartphones or something? Hell, they used to throw a big shindig for mobile device bloggers every year, giving them smartphones and all kinds of neat schwag, and the world didn't end. We'll see if it affects your reporting, though.

I sent an email to someone with a name very similar to the GM of a Rifts game that's being set up. This guy was also familiar with Rifts, and strung me along for a bit, telling me that he was going to create a transvestite ley line walker and that I should wear a dress to the game, before he finally broke down and clued me in. Hey, I thought it was funny, too.

The older I get, the more I appreciate how brilliant the Danny Dunn books were. Danny Dunn and the Automatic House had the kids trapped in one of these demo "houses of the future"; it wasn't so much fun.

That diorama should be called "Tree's Revenge."

If they'd just baked some cookies in the house beforehand, they still could have made the sale.

"I wanted to address the situation to all my fans because without you I am nothing"

Hey, Murphy, self esteem issues much?

Let's have a little perspective here, folks: this isn't half as creepy as guys who treat RealDolls as their "girlfriends". More sad, really.

One of the short story collections.

That's "lintel", of course.

I guess that one of their geniuses finally figured out that making an immortal lighter that can be recharged and have its flints replaced by its users wasn't as profitable as a piece of trash that would last about as long as those plastic "stick" lighters.

*sigh* Some BB threads seem to be nothing more than commenters trying to improve their zero-to-stupid time.

Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to computers at the time; Apples were the cool computers, and your C-64s and Trash-80s were the K-Mart Computers.

dculberson: that's true--Macs had been available for a few years by the time this thing was shipped; in fact, I think that the Mac II was already out--but remember that there were still quite a few people trying to wrap their brains around the idea of a GUI, and Apple survived on the // family for some years until the Mac line finally started to make money.

"Chai walla" sounds cooler than "barista".

Does it keep the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold? Magic 8-ball says, "Doesn't matter--you still need to stop eating that crap!"

How much is something like this still really Lego, and not just Lego brand? Can you rearrange parts so that your knights have two heads and your queen is transgendered or something? Because that would be cool--being able to put together your own custom Lego chess set. That would be truer to the Lego spirit than a lot of these things that really seem to amount to nothing more than glueless model kits, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Wil Wheaton FTW!

That would be Blankface; Dick Tracy is on the case.

If I'm reading, am tired, and close my eyes for a few seconds, but don't fall asleep, sometimes I'll "see" the pages in front of me, but the words won't match what I've been reading--in fact, they don't make sense at all; the sentences are grammatically correct, but they aren't really telling a story. I'm not consciously trying to imagine them, either. I just assumed that it was some sort of hypnagogic state.

Congratulations! Eventually, you will get to sleep through the night again.

When I saw this, I just knew that there would be a photo of one of these. That's what kept that big ol' grin on Mom's face.

Reminds me of the Leitra, although the Leitra costs a bit more than half as much (maybe more if there's some sort of import tariff).

Om, I'm going to say this just once (at least to you):

Artists do not live to serve you.

So you think that people are fans of Tom Strong and Promethea and Top 10 "out of sympathy"? Whatever, fanboy. If DC and Marvel had treated Moore with a fraction of the respect that real publishing houses treat their more respected and successful creators (Watchmen has been in print for over twenty years), he'd still work for them. Pull the stick out of your own ass, maybe, and stop forking over your money to outfits that are run by the likes of DiDio and Quesada just because they've got the license to Batman and the X-Men, why dontcha?

Fnarf: the LED headlights that are out now are good enough for forward illumination; they usually incorporate several ultrabright LEDs and suck up a lot less battery power. The idea is to be able to see what's in front of you, not blind oncoming traffic with the equivalent of a cop car searchlight.

Joel: BB posted about this nearly three years ago. (It's not mentioned in that article, but the glow-in-the-dark feature isn't new--see the article from Wired linked from it.) But now Kanye knows, at least.

Alan Moore is hella cool. Neil Gaiman posted some pictures of his wedding to Melinda Gebbie on his blog, and Moore wore an electric-blue bowler.

One of the reasons for reading this is that, in addition to being Moore's first "real" issue on Swamp Thing, it's an example of how to do an effective retcon; many of the people who tried to follow in Moore's footsteps are examples of how not to do one, up to and most definitely including the recent decision by Marvel to pretend that Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson's marriage never happened.

Even as someone who almost always dresses in black or navy blue whenever I'm not at work (in fact, I physically resemble LaVey a bit), I wouldn't have wanted to keep the house with its last color scheme; it would have been more important to restore it to something approximating its 1880s appearance than to keep LaVey's decorations and furnishings, which, if the list in the second linked article (near the end) are any indication, your average suburban goth teenager would have found cheesy. But, yeah, the condos aren't an adequate replacement.

Sounds like a great cast overall. The only time I saw the Castro in person was in 1992, and things seemed to be pretty low-key, but that could have been on account of the epidemic. Wonder what it's like now?

I posted a link to an earlier BB post about a pirate-themed T-shirt, said that I thought that it was a better use of the general idea, and posted another link to a Wikipedia article to the antipiracy campaign that the T-shirt was based on. I'd like to petition to have that restored, please.

I bet if the online retailer selling this used a better font on their site they could charge twice as much.

Shhhh! Damnit, man, don't ruin it for the rest of us!

#11: Done. I used to be disgusted, but now I'm just amused.

BB has an old post with a superior T-shirt design; bonus points for mocking an old antipiracy campaign.

Yeah, I remember the whole "LSD makes you think that you can fly" thing. When I finally got around to trying acid myself, the main problem that I had with it was that the trip lasted so long. It's like, OK, I've re-read Watchmen, I've listened to Dark Side of the Moon and Aqualung and Holst's The Planets and I've even looked at the nice rainbow colors on the back of the CD... now what?

I think that it's awesome that Elvis was one of the first people to dig Martin's act. Elvis was also one of the first people in the U.S. to get into Monty Python, and said once that the only Elvis impersonator that he liked was Andy Kaufman.

shortfatsteve is right: I like Nextwave just fine myself, but Ellis has returned to that trough a few too many times to have any cred for a "merciless attack on underwear pervert comics". You want a comic from someone that absolutely hates superheroes and makes no bones about it? Try Ennis and Robertson's The Boys.

This is my equivalent of ketracel white for the Jem'Hadar--I need nothing else, except water.

Your iPhone case has nether parts? Um... no, too many questions there.

Pshaw. Everyone knows that the alto sax is the deadliest of all instruments, especially if you sharpen up the lip of the bell--you can knock a man's head clean off with that. Seen it happen.

I blame the internet for the fact that, when I saw that illustration--kid in a cowboy outfit with a pillow strapped to his butt--I thought to myself, "Not another damn fetish that I didn't want to know about..."

nmeyer79: "So either the Blue Men did something profoundly wrong, or this guy is an unbelievable liar, or simply insane."

I'll pick door #3, Bob.

Unless there's a frequency that turns off cars remotely--as opposed to turning them on--I think that this is probably another moon madness urban legend.

#3: What I want is a wearable that takes the images of everyone around me and redresses them so that they're wearing T-shirts with my image on them. Strong men weep at my appearance, women lick their lips and wink. The moon has a familiar face.

the future ruins of our civilization have travelled backward in time to the present day.

For that, it needs the ruined head of the Statue of Liberty buried in the ground. Or a self-Polaroid of a sentient cockroach.

#5: win!

I got a coffee mug as a gift for a friend of mine once that had a ceramic eyeball in the bottom; the idea is to serve coffee to someone who doesn't know what's in the bottom of the mug, and wait for the spit-take. I wish I'd gotten one for myself.

#5: I think that you'll be able to guess why I love that quote. ;)

#10: Two Boots does serve a decent pizza, but it's the exception to the rule that most pizza in New York is soggy, greasy crap. Chicago deep dish FTW, folks.

Same as it ever was... *smacks self in forehead, forgetting that I'm holding a cup of hot coffee*

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Plus, she's shtupping the other star.

He's a lightweight. I keep my stories unique by never writing them in the first place. On the other hand, he has a great excuse for emptying a whiskey bottle.

I guess it's cool that they have a Goth Day and a Fag Day

Oh no you di'n't.

I'm guessing that she works out where her and her catchers put their heads beforehand, otherwise... ouch.

Showing your coffepot's status on the internet is so 1993.

Love the Johnson Smith ad that they reproduced. "How to Love" for ten cents--a bargain, even adjusted for inflation!

There's something bizarre and almost funny about a former secret police drunk-dialing their former prey; imagine an out-of-work O'Brien from 1984 getting sloppy on Victory Gin and weeping in front of Winston Smith about how much he missed Big Brother. There's a cornucopia of one-act plays to be found in this story, I think.

#5: Alternatively, he may have been so preoccupied with honors classes, athletics, extracurricular activities, community service, and/or an afterschool job, that he may have overlooked what's really important, which is the absolute and unquestionable right of school administrators to hysterically overreact to such blatant disregard of school policies, such as bringing in a knife with a smaller blade than that regularly issued to eleven-year-old Boy Scouts. Because, you know, those teens are always on the verge of going all Sharks-and-Jets in the cafeteria.

Let's just let Snopes look into this, mmmkay?

#11: I had iced coffee in the States in 1990. I had to interview several times at a state university before I finally got the position, and when I'd commute there I would pick up some iced coffee at an organic grocery as a treat. Now I drink the stuff almost every day.

I wonder if they're using some variety of beet that isn't red; otherwise, the streets of Cincinnati will look like they're running in blood. Hey, just like Watchmen!

Y.T. would just figure out a way to charge her skateboard from the current.

Of course, giving kids a laptop instead of a cell phone gives them the tools to write their own programs rather than relying on outfits like Selanikio's company for whatever software they want to push out.

Bonus: they resemble 3D versions of the Illuminati symbol.

Dirty Little Spoons = great band name.

Houston, we have ignition!

Some artists get drunk and crash the car or get in a fight. Maurice Gibb gets drunk and records a pseudo-Fab Four song good enough to fool Yoko. Good on yer, mate.

#12: This isn't the blog you're looking for. Move along.

#1 QFT.

I eat my young. They're great with ketchup!

The link to the previous BB story needs an "h" appended to the beginning.

gmr2048 wins the thread by posting the Flickr link, from which we learn that the head part is a "Life-size polymer clay portrait sculpture" and therefore not edible. The idea of someone eating the bride's face was what was squicking me and some of the other commenters out.

I don't think that lighter fluid will burn the palm of your hand. When I was a teen, we'd sometimes amuse ourselves by making one hand into a loose fist and holding down the lever on a cheap plastic lighter without flicking the flint wheel to fill the hand with lighter fluid (gaseous), and after a few seconds flick the wheel and quickly open the hand to show, for about a fraction of a second, a handful of blue flame.

Hey, don't look at me like that. At least we didn't light our farts. (Well, I didn't, anyway.)

I think that I'll stick to the kind that have adjustable heights to the shelves; helps with those big Chris Ware folio-sized hardcovers, dontcha know.

Good times, baby, good times.

OK, let's get Paris Hilton, K-Fed, Scott Stapp, and Sanjay together! They could wear T-shirts with targets on them and call themselves the Meat Shields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction

More common than you'd think--there are online forums for people trying to deal with GSA. Also read about the Westermarck effect in the above link for an explanation of the incest taboo and its real origin.

Don't mess with Cthulhu's stuff!

I'd like fries with my website, please.

#8: There's this thing called encryption, Tom. Look into it.

Also recommended: Truly, Madly, Deeply, which has Alan "Snape" Rickman singing on his own version of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." Great movie.

#6: No, unfortunately; it's still somewhere on my list, though.

It's Schrodinger's cat. He's getting really, really, really bored with being neither alive nor dead and wants someone to collapse the wave function already, damnit.

After watching the movie version of Godspell for the first time in many years, I was startled to realize that the cover of the soundtrack, which shows the cast during "All for the Best", was shot on top of the WTC as it neared completion.

Here's to putting the "anal" in analysis, folks!

Srsly, Dillo is right. Does no one else remember the "drafting" scene in Breaking Away, where the cyclist uses the vacuum behind a semi going 60 MPH?

You'd have my vote, Ape Lad, if I had one.

Even though similar things have been done, these are some great designs; Hawkgirl is awesome.

Am I the only person who regrets that he didn't go to Berlin when it was still divided and it was a big Cold War deal to go through something like Checkpoint Charlie? Maybe it's just because Bowie's "Heroes" is one of my favorite songs...

A few points:

1) Every country in the world has crap lagers, and they're the most popular because they're cheap.

2) If your definition of a beer culture begins and ends with real ale, then, well, duh.

3. Joel included homebrew in his original post, and there's definitely a strong homebrew scene in the US. This gadget would be a big hit among the homebrewers if it had been made to accomodate them; Krups should give serious thought to redesigning it for that purpose.

For collectors mostly, I'd assume, although I'm curious as to what the ride is like. I'd be more than happy with a titanium frame, myself.

Funny... Beth Rubinstein let me kiss her open-mouth. Actually, she let me do just about anything.

Deep frying is this year's art car. Expect to see it well-represented at the next Burning Man...

Playing a character with a deliberate handicap is something of a tradition in Blizzard MMORPGs; in Diablo, there was a group of "beyond naked mages" who wore only that gear that gave a minus to attributes, meaning that the characters were more vulnerable than they'd have been if they'd been naked. There was someone in Diablo II that was playing as a sorceress, without gear, and seeing how high they could get without using spells or putting any points into attributes, only the unarmed melee attack. I assume that these people all had a lot more free time than I usually do.

For some people, there is no amount of evidence that will convince them.

You don't say.

#1: Actually, I feel that way about Ted Rall, who sued Hellman over a joke and is the sort of attention whore that gives liberals a bad name. So there.

Not only is it too damn expensive, I'd lose this thing so fast that it wouldn't even be funny.

This is pure tool porn.

Let's, er, flesh it out a bit, eh?

Bud hefted the FuBar, the muscles in his powerful forearm flexing as he ran his fingertips along its foot-plus length, feeling its heft, caressing its head. He stepped out into the backyard, slowly approaching his prey. It had been the children's playhouse, but now it was all his...

"you'll be entering your credit card number into the website before the credits roll."

Unlikely. Distracting other drivers + any commercial product with "pimp" in its name = made of fail, IMO.

Those look an awful lot like old-fashioned oil cans.

The answer to the question in the title of this post is, of course, "to party". Some fight for it.

And in other news, the original album featured the lyric, "A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer
threw up at the sight of that". How offensive! I may listen to it at less than maximum volume in the future. Moving right along.

I think that the real difference is the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a very small number of people. Bill Gates' children won't go hungry, no matter how many scraps of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks he snaps up; Paul Allen can snap up every last headscarf and guitar pick that belonged to the late Jimi Hendrix, if he has a mind to. And there's nothing magic about digital reproductions; I had a good copy of the Magna Carta hanging on my wall back in the late seventies, ditto for various Picasso and Dali reproductions. It has less to do with the magic of digital copies than with all of these people who literally have more money than they know what to do with.

I've come to think that being an audiophile is the musical equivalent of having an eating disorder.

Really curious as to how much it weighs.

A wee bit of clarification: I'm not a Warren Ellis hater. I enjoyed Nextwave quite a lot, and still take a peek at his output occasionally to see if it's anything that I might enjoy.

What I really don't have any patience for are personality cults, particularly when the person in question encourages and nurtures the cult. It's just a little irksome when otherwise intelligent people buy into it.

I think that the problem here is that people just can't grasp the magnificent genius that is Warren Ellis. So, without further ado, I present Warren Ellis' Three Laws of Warren Ellis.

1. Warren doesn't care what you think, because he's a bleeding-edge genius and you're a pathetic cat-piss man who is still living in his mother's basement. The fact that Warren has had an online forum in one place or another for the last decade doesn't mean that he cares what you think, because they're really for cool people, especially if they're young women who post pics of themselves in corsets. (It's a bleeding-edge genius thing, you wouldn't understand. Or you're just jealous. Or something.)

2. Warren does not write "superhero" comics, he writes "pervert suit" comics. And he only writes them because you, being a cat-piss-man-fanboy, aren't buying enough of Warren's non-pervert-suit output. Your excuse for not doing so--that Warren tends to repeat certain genres or tropes, such as the superhumanly-accurate gunslinger on the run from the Man, or the older man with a cute, much-younger female assistant, that you either weren't interested in in the first place, or got tired of because of their repeated appearance in Warren's work, or whatever--is irrelevant.

3. Dn't sk bt th cbrng ncdnt. Wht cbrng ncdnt? xctl.

I think that the Forerunner is handsome, myself, particularly compared to its predecessors. What are some of your favorite watches in terms of looks?

At a glance, I thought that those were Drew Friedman caricatures.

I think that the thing that everyone's missing is that, if you get this razor, a pretty redhead without many clothes on kisses you in your bathroom. I'd say that that would be worth it, as long as it wasn't just a one-time deal.

I get that it's important to create designs that won't be produced, ever, but stimulate thought about the possibilities; I'm remembering a concept for the next-generation Macintosh that frogdesign did for one of the Mac magazines back in... the late eighties, early nineties, maybe? A sort of modular computer with curved shapes in primary colors, completely unlike the beige boxes. It was never produced, of course, but some of the spirit of the design showed in the original iMac, years later.

I think that my main objection with some of these things isn't that they'll never be produced--see this thread on io9 about imaginary gadgets--but that they could have been better if someone had put a little more thought into them. Take this thing, for instance; not a bad idea, but right away, someone pointed out, where are the star and pound keys? Yes, that's easily fixable, but it kind of reduces my enthusiasm for seeing something like it in the future if the designer blows something so obvious. Maybe I should just look at the good points. Maybe I'm just like my mother, she's never satisfied...

I prefer to cook my steak on a pyre of burning bloggers. They're so much cheaper.

No link?

I used to feel sort of sorry for Sears and K-Mart, classic American retailers that have had their lunch eaten by the likes of Wal-Mart and Target, but not after reading this. Screw 'em.

Agnot, I remember those--weird beercan/crochet hybrids.

Is it just me, or does the picture seem a bit risque for 1936?

I've always thought that the classic poo-stall poetry that begins with "Here I sit, broken-hearted..." lacked for proper references. Ditto for the information about the man from Nantucket.

Just be like Mariah Carey and insist on a brand-new toilet seat everywhere she goes.

#25 is right. And I don't buy that she wasn't working with the cops. She just happened to ask to see the guy's unit, which is exactly what the cops were waiting for in order to make a bust? Mmm-hmm.

I think that they got "scapegoat" (decoy?) and aquarium mixed up, but otherwise someone at the company has a decent sense of humor. The aquarium reminds me of the Macquarium that someone made out of one of the original Macintoshes.

In other words, there are designers who are basically designing for Second Life rather than stuff that people could actually use. Got it.

I think that sometimes people (like me) will critique a design as being impractical because blogs (like this one) will post about it as if it were meant to be produced/used.

I remember HotWired mostly for HotBot, which for a while had a really annoying acid-green background. I much preferred Google, which had the same basic design then as it does now.

The 2.0 version of this hat should have a wind-up zeppelin circling it.

#s 8 and 14: It would be theft if the original purchaser/note writer returned the iPod-less box for a refund. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. We don't know. It does seem likely that the girl's dad got his money back or a new iPod when he returned the box, so no harm there.

Ah, that makes perfect sense WRT astigmatic contacts. Anyway, there are weirder things under the Hello Kitty license, according to the linked site: douches, panty liners, condoms, etc.

I vote for a War On Trolls. I'm all for putting on my jackboots, picking up an exotic assault rifle, and kicking down some 13-year-old's bedroom door and showing him what we do to threadjackers in meatspace. Who's with me?

It's like Sony has a corporate anthem titled "How Can I Be Stupid Today?", and everyone has to sing it first thing in the morning.

#4, it wasn't necessarily a theft; to me, it smells like some slactivist who is trying to reconcile their anticorporate rhetoric with their iPod lust, and figured out how to have their cake and eat it, too. So they get their hands on some shrinkwrap and smuggle the box back in the store, and make sure to listen to one Rage Against the Machine song every time they fire their new toy up. Everybody wins!

I know that crying "Photoshopped"! is teh lame, but these seem not quite right. They're perfectly level, even though the model's eyes aren't. (And, yes, I know that you can buy contacts that give you cat's eyes and stuff.)

I read that as "viral cabbages".

Readers of the Terry Pratchett novel Monstrous Regiment will know what I'm talking about when I say that the TSA has taken it upon themselves to decide what things are Abominations unto Nuggan.

As the article points out, there have been similar fights at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. What makes this extra-ridiculous is that neither site is fully authenticated.

I'm surprised that no one has made a goatse reference with regards to the "TIE fighter".

Oh, wait... damn. Sorry.

It's not realistic unless it includes bee women.

There desperately needs to be a women-in-prison flick made with a Martha Stewart-manque in it.

Totally not for use for real spying. You hear that, spies? Is a toy! Completely!

Ah, the blink tag. Takes me back to the nineties; 'twas a hanging offense near the end of the decade, although they couldn't hang Henry Rollins for it on account of his neck being so thick. Good times.

The most dumbfounding cancellation experience that I've had wasn't that long or drawn out; it was a credit card rep who tried to turn down my request to cancel it over the phone because I didn't give him a good enough reason for canceling it. I'm serious. He wanted to extend the teaser rate, and when I politely but firmly insisted on canceling, he acted as if I was breaking up with him, personally: "But I just don't understand..." The sad thing is, I bet that that guilt-tripping approach probably worked at least a few times for him.

Eventually logos will become sophisticated enough to breed and evolve, independent of their designers and corporate former-masters, and then it's all over but for the sighing at their terminal cuteness.

I'm amazed at how many remotes for DVD players hide the Menu button somewhere in the dozens-o-buttons on their remotes. It's only about the most important button on the damn thing.

Father Brown is growing increasingly tiresome.

I have not, in fact, ever caught myself thinking that. I suppose that it's a blessing that I never knew about until now.

#7: Mangled theology, multiple typos and comment spam! Nice hat trick.

Mustache ride from Santa? DO NOT WANT

Unfortunately, the traditional gift for paperboys in 1970s Wisconsin was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I'd end up with several boxes. It was a decade or two before I could even look at one without gagging.

#8: Neither publishing an image on the Internet nor distributing copies of it on the street puts it in the public domain.

Start looking for copies of the Sphinx with its nose restored.

I wouldn't mind being thirteen again--I'd invest my allowance in Apple stock, so that I could be a lazy bastard now. I think I'd want to be the opposite gender, though, so I could see what puberty is like from that side.

MJOLNIR
+5 TO PELVIC THRUST
+4 TO RAWK HAIR

a.k.a. Sneakers: The Series.

...it was much better than Cats... I'm going to see it again and again...

Anyone who thinks that the artists on BB only portray white women are colorblind (look at those Crehore paintings again), and those who think that all the women are skinny have a very superficial knowledge of Coop's work.

Of course, if more women of color/girth/whatever are featured on BB, then it becomes colonization of oppressed peoples or whatever. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, submit the links to the BB staff and see what happens.

And, finally: hipsters suck.

Cap's shield needs to be smooth. Maybe a small saucer-type sled?

"Screw this job, it doesn't pay enough. Stick figures on strike!"

Record a few albums with Brian Eno near what's left of the Berlin Wall; worked most excellently for Bowie.

I shot a bed bug in Reno, just to watch it die.

Odd, I thought that Oklahoma was still recovering from a natural disaster. Nice to know that they can go back to fussing over silly shit like this again. Maybe they can pass a law forbidding towns from having silly names like "Dibble".

The more I read about this, the more it seems like a fantasy of Russell Means'.

Not that I particularly wanted anyone at Apple to lose their job, but I'm still a little irritated at people who lump the likes of Daniel Ellsberg or the Enron whistleblowers in with someone who helps a website make money off of spilling the beans about the latest iPod.

Joflow: Word.

"Consider all the street photographers who HAVEN'T had their film impounded, or been harassed."

Over 97% of Airstrip One citizens have not been interned in the Ministry of Love! Doubleplusgood! We love Big Brother!

Oh, come on. We know that it's just Cartman in there.

Remember when Sun was doing so well, and Apple so badly, that there was talk of the former buying the latter?

Wonder if anyone does a bacon smoothie?

"Inter-Allied Commission of Control"? Was their headquarters a giant pyramid with an eye on top?

Deconstructing toast? OK, time to turn the dial to "Yes".

You wussies. Anyone who can't make their damn snowballs by hand deserves snow down the back of their shirt. Yellow snow.

Holy shit, they have magic beans. They really are like that shop that appears out of nowhere and has everything.

I was born in 1964, Charlie.

Maurice Reeves: I'm all for new urbanism, and ideally New Pedestrianism, but I don't have a lot of affection for greenfield projects like Celebration. Sometimes I wonder if some of these new developments are put up just because some people don't want "used land."

I haven't seen the movie, but I have read the novella by Stephen King, and IIRC the escape is as much about the crappy construction standards of certain public works projects as it is about the indomitable human spirit.

Doesn't your diaphragm start to hurt after a while, though?