For those of us who use plumbing & mechanical codes this is great. I'm fighting off the urge to cut up my Uniform Plumbing Code and a very thick pile of ASTM specifications to add to the archive.

Having just spent an hour poking around to get 'the background' on this story it's pretty easy to develop a narrative as to why Violet got clipped when she did: Congdon; No Name Jane; The fifth Boinger theory - Take your pick, they're all entertaining and equally irrelevant.

But does anyone really think it took Violet a year to notice she'd been 'unpublished?' The real story here isn't why BB did what they did but why the story is breaking now. The whole thing has the stench of orchestration and a quick look at Google Trends suggests BB's 'response' made Violet a hot topic today. Mutual parasitism at its best. Perhaps Mr. Sarno can clarify the sudden interest?

My tinfoil hat says that Violet needed some publicity and this was a great way to spike some quick hits. This sort of behavior might have something to do with why she was redacted in the first place. Who knows? Who cares?

As to the discussion of censorship, BB has always been wholeheartedly nepotistic and what the editors give they can also take away. Coop and the Reverse Cowgirl are a couple of notable beneficiaries of BB editorial policy. Violet is apparently one of the casualties.

The Fab Five (yes, Joel, we love you too) are opinionated, capricious, self-obsessed and fully entitled to do whatever they damn well please with anybody's posts. The day they stop having opinions is the day I shuffle over to the Huffington Post before taking a header off a viaduct.

Those who take issue with this can just keep on trucking over to a genuinely neutral POV website.

Please tell us when you find it.

This reminded me of my own security theatre escapade in Washington State back on 3/20/03, the first day of the Iraq War.

My company was contracted to do some pipelining at Fairchild AFB. We pulled up to the gate and they searched our truck upside down for two hours before letting us out on the flightline. The funny part is that they let us take a 60HP high-pressure boiler with us and operate it on the tarmac for the better part of a week.

The only difference between a boiler and a bomb is a pressure relief valve that can be replaced with a plug in about 60 seconds. Dial up the Pressuretrols and move away quickly - A 60HP boiler without a PRV will easily take out a building. Mythbuster's did a nice demo of this with a household boiler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnL8SipXT8

Anyway, doesn't surprise me a bit that somebody was able to a mini-van onto an airstrip at SeaTac without anybody saying a thing. Having worked on a lot of 'secure' facilities, it never ceases to amaze me how big the security holes really are.

I know photographs of public space is a sensitive issue for the Copyleft crowd but the title of this is pretty misleading. The City is not saying you can't take a photo, it's saying you need 'permission for use' which (probably) means commercial use. Having been through Duncan with a camera on several occasions, I've never been accosted by local authorities for popping a lens cap nor do I anticipate I will be in the future. We are not talking about Cloud Gate here, people.

It also sounds like the policy was implemented at least in part because of requests from the public for permission.

Duncan has a population of less than 5,000 people. While the surrounding area (The Cowichan Valley) has about 70,000, the city itself has a very small tax base and they've made a significant effort in the interest of tourism by putting up these 80 totems - Regardless of the legality of the issue (I don't disagree with Michael Geist - he is our resident expert on all things copyright), I'm not unconvinced the city shouldn't be able to have some control over how its vista is used commercially and, more importantly, reap benefit from its use. The city needs to generate money to buy these poles in the first place. Do you think totems grow on trees?

Hmm... maybe that's a bad choice of words.

My Canadian five cents worth - conveniently, it's actually worth a buffalo nickle for the first time in 30 years.