The online photo gallery was pretty disappointing, I thought. Only one really cool steampubk object (the computer); mostly not particularly distinctive steampunkish clothing.

I was at this panel--it was smart and funny and really thought-provoking, both about the future of comics and the uses of the Internet. I recommend watching the video or listening to the podcast if you can!

I too remember the BOOP, and I also came here specifically to say that watching a filmstrip without the BOOP just doesn't feel right. Sorry.

"As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

That is a simply chilling, Orwellian statement.

The author's problem sounds like it might be a) localized to the UK and/or b) more of an issue with public libraries than academic ones, where there aren't reaally "sections."

I'm not a cataloger, but I am a subject specialist and reference librarian at an Ivy League institution. I can tell you that there are two steps to the process of cataloging: assigning a classification number, or call number, so that the book can be physically located, and assigning subject headings, so that it may be found conceptually. Fewer and fewer academic library patrons browse in the stacks, so the key question becomes "How can they find work on the subject of their interest?" This is where the subject headings come in, and I can tell you that there is a very respectable general subject heading called "Occultism" which has over 450 titles associated with it, and that main heading has pages of sub-headings, by more focused aspect or geographical location. The call numbers are all over the place, but the majority appear to be in the BFs, which in the Library of Congress classification scheme is "psychology" or the BLs, which are for "religions, mythology, rationalism."

But the classification is not how a researcher in an academic library is likely to find them. He or she would use the Library of Congress Subject Headings--aided by their smiling and non-judgmental reference librarian, who has been carefully trained not to let any personal prejudices get in the way of the needs of the patron.

But Dubuis is writing in Britain, where they don't use our subject headings, and may well be discussing public library issues, which are entirely different from academic library issues.

Don't tar us all with the same brush!

Oh my lord, Three Men in a Boat and the tin of pineapple! By the time they start beating it with the oar, I'm already helpless with laughter. There truly could be no more cautionary tale for a container of a survival kit. The last thing you need when scrambling for post-apocalypse first aid is to have to locate an oar to beat open the survival kit with.

Wow. I think we have some Darwin Award nominees here.

Oh my gosh, I had a 2-hour tour of the offices of MAD and DC Comics just last week! I wanted desperately to take photos but was too shy to ask if it was OK. What a treat this Flickr set is--thanks!

Interesting that none of these people claiming rotten neighbors seem to be able to spell or compose in written English at even a 3rd-grade level. I wonder who the rotten neighbors really are?

I read about half of the comments here before actually going to look at the video, and I am appalled--APPALLED!--that ANYONE would think that what that cop did was the right thing to do. I'm a middle-aged woman living in NYC, for what that's worth, and I don't think the appropriate response to a 14-year-old boy's so-called disrespect (which appeared quite clearly to be from not having heard the cop in the first place) merits being put in a choke hold and wrestled to the ground. A 14-year-old boy! I wonder what the reaction of the "that cop should get a medal" people would be if it were done to their own children. "Disrespect"? You don't hear someone tell you to stop skating, and suddenly that's "disrespect"? It took that cop about 3 seconds to go from 0 to 60 on the bulging-vein scale, and that was before the poor kid even called him "dude"--he was already screaming at him.

That cop should not be allowed to interact with the public at all.

In fact, if he's been on the force for 17 years and he's still the equivalent of a mall cop, I'm betting that he's had troubles like this before, and the department did the equivalent of the Catholic Church's transfer of pedophile priests.

I actually think that the gas mask over his John Thomas was the most disturbing part. That's a gas mask in a place where no gas mask was meant to be.

"One of the newer songs," a "modern spiritual."

Sweet JEEBUS.

I think BillBarol is on to something.

Beautiful baby, fantastic name--congratulations to the entire Doctorow clan!

This is a whole genre that is simply fascinating. The electronic publisher Alexander Street Press is about to release a subscription database of advice literature called Manuals and Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family:
North American Advice in Text and Video, 1900-1990 (http://www.alexanderstreet.com/products/adli.htm). THe company's president had been buying this sort of stuff on eBay for years, and finally reached a critical mass and decided to create a searchable full-text database of the things. Have can you not want to read something like the 1940 "How to Get Along with Black People: A Handbook for White Folks and Some Black Folks Too"?

The library where I work is going to be subscribing to this, and I can't wait. But apparently eBay is still a terrific resource for finding and acquiring these things. So, Jeffy, you might be able to get your own copy and do your own mashups.

I must be an outlier. I don't appear to resemble the Hebrew race type at ALL.

"Cat crap in sticks"?? Bite your tongue!

I was probably 9 or 10 when Space Food came out, and I adored them, especially the chocolate. They were like a less-chewy Tootsie Roll. I didn't care that they had anything to do with space; I just thought they were delicious.

You know what J.P. Morgan said, "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it."

It's ALWAYS Snapple bottles. ALWAYS. Never, say, Arizona Tea. I wonder why that is.

"Blow your lunch"? Yikes. I think I just did.

Perhaps the average person only uses vanilla extract 4 to 6 times a year, but surely bOINGbOING readers are not average? I know I use mine pretty often, and buying the special Madagascar variety from The Baker's Catalogue gets expensive. This recipe is pretty exciting to ME.

#27: What about transsexuals? What exactly do you think they're in fear of having discovered? A male-to-female transsexual looks like a woman. A female-to-male transsexual looks like a man.

Are you thinking of transvestites?

Oh, Cory. Shame on you for thinking that was actually the Beatles! Did the fact that no one in the video actually looks like John, Paul, George or Ringo not tip you off?

That being said--wow. Crazy brilliant. Well done, Beatnix.

Leroy Comrie has been on something of a crusade for some time to eliminate or outlaw anything that denigrates African-Americans. I'm not saying he's wrong or right; merely that this is the latest in a series of moves that originated, I think, with his desire to pass a resolution that would ban use of the N-word.

He also opposed the decision to name a street in Brooklyn after Sonny Carson, a black activist whose activism was born after a conviction for kidnapping, and who spent much of his youth in gangs. Comrie has had death threats leveled at him, and the chief of staff of a different council member, who was in favor of Sonny Carson Street, called for Comrie's assassination. She later claimed she was referring to the assassination of his political career, but she was fired by the city council president, thus setting off a kerfuffle of epic proportions between her boss and the council president.

All of which is to say that Leroy Comrie has very strong and decided principles, and that his anger at O.G. Nation (which does, indeed, stand for Original Gangsta, making its presidents' stance disingenuous in the extreme) does not exist without a decided context.

Great. I can't wait until some kid builds one of these, paints it appropriate colors, and then gets shot by cops who think it's the real thing.

Sorry, I just find this irresponsible. But then I live in a city where this kind of senseless shooting happens more often than it ought--which is never.

Wow. That reminds me of the sort of mandatory-exchange Valentine's Day cards we used to get when I was in grade school in the '60s. So very very shiny.

Hey, grumpy CLOUDSOUP: it ain't Christmas for me. I'm Jewish. And since no one can tell it to look at me, I'm very happy with being wished Happy Holidays. I will concede, however, that when the image is bearing a Santa Claus cap, you might as well not waste the PC effort and go with Merry Christmas.

High-LAR-ious. I suspected it was satire, and was relieved to find my suspicions confirmed. I wonder how many people will buy it unironically, however?

I'm reminded of the scene from "Bull Durham," where we learn that the one thing that will definitely get a player ejected from a game is calling the umpire a cocksucker.

This exhibit--an annual event at the NYBG--is well worth the visit to anyone who is in the NYC area over the holidays. Dozens upon dozens of NYC-area landmarks are rendered in flora, and nestled among the existing foliage in the conservatory, all lit with holiday lights and with a train going through it all. The Guggenheim is cool, but the ones that really knock your eyes out are some of the Hudson River Valley historical houses, like Lyndhurst or Kykuit. Grand Central Terminal ain't so bad, either!

You can see a lot more images here:
http://www.nybg.org/hts/images.php#

I really miss the writers, but I have to say I've loved the creativity of a lot of the strike videos. This is supreme, though--I love me some David Cross. And a nice swipe at scabbo Daly, too.

And. even when I'm following my favorite TV shows, I am able both to go outside AND to read books--I'm just that versatile!

I read xkcd religiously. I cheered at the return of Cory, but my favorite line was how the blogosphere was located up "above the tag clouds."

Heh.

My favorite subway sign swap was around several years ago. Signs that said "This is an air-conditioned car. Please do not open windows" were mimicked by signs that read "This is a karma-conditioned car. Please watch what you do."

I've always remembered that fondly.

most of you coasters will recognize the buildings from the cover of Wilco's YHF)

Really? Not from "The Bob Newhart Show"?

Damn, I feel OLD.

Congrats on scoring a free copy, Mark! I collect comics/GNs for the Columbia University Libraries, and Art Spiegelman gave me the heads-up on this edition after he taught a course here last spring. I'm so glad I was able to get a copy for our library! Winsor McCay is my personal comics god, and this is as fitting a tribute as one can imagine...

This is a nice complement to Michael Paulus' excellent cartoon character skeletons....http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/v/character-Skeletons/

Man. Moondog. My mom worked in Rockefeller Center, in the old Exxon Building, from about 1971 onwards, and when I would go to meet her for lunch sometimes I would see Moondog sitting on his short wall. He never seemed to do anything at the time; just sit there. And then one day he was gone. That happens all the time in NYC (I have no idea what happened to Mosaic Man, who adorned streetlamp bases all over the East Village in the late '80s). I was only in my early teens at the time, so I had no idea about Moondog's rich musical life--he was just part of the city landscape.

Fewer and fewer such characters these days, and NYC is much the poorer for it.

INCREDIBLY cool. You might want to mention, though, that some elements of his photoset are NSFW.

You beat me to it, DCULBERSON. I can't believe the Young America Foundation seriously considers reading Ann Coulter essential to anyone's education.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Sorry, that's all I've got.

ONLY 66? I would have thought there'd be hundreds, by now. Good heavens--"32 Short Films About..." alone should have yielded 66.

This resort for guards and other employees was not far from Auschwitz, so you know that everyone in that photo lived with the smell in their nostrils of the dying and the cremated. Perhaps that is why they are so giddy--that might be one's only recourse in the midst of the macabre.

It's worth looking at these and then reading the brilliant, brilliant book, "Into that darkness," by Gitta Sereny. Sereny spent weeks interviewing Franz Stangl, a commandant at Sobibor and then Treblinka, trying to determine what set him first on the slippery slope that led to his effortless extermination of thousands of people. He was conscious enough of right and wrong to lie to his wife about his work (she eventually left him when the lies couldn't conceal the truth), and his work drove him to alcoholism eventually, but he maintained to the end that he was doing his duty. It's a chilling and absolutely necessary book.

Why are they doing these on DVD-ROM only? What's wrong with making a web-based subscription version for institutions? I'm a librarian at a very large university, and acquiring these for a one-user-at-a-time model is just CRAZY.

I actually JUST saw this over at the nytimes.com Opinion page. It made me cry.

So much senseless death.

Working together? Great! I, for one, greet our new Arachnid Overlords.

Sigh.

Ballet scanning machines? Oh, those wacky Scots!

I don't think Garrity really captured Gorey. There's not nearly enough cross-hatching. The font is good, and she's got the profiles down pretty well, but it doesn't really make me think of Gorey.

With Bluto as Judas. Brilliant.

She's actually handling it all pretty well, I think. Poor kid. She's just a teenager, and she's probably never been rewarded for anything other than her looks in her entire life.

Anyway, my favorite reaction to the Maps for US Americans kerfuffle is this:

http://mapsforus.org/

Because the children of American need maps.

Anonymous #8, you beat me to it. It looks EXACTLY like Wallace.

Very pretty, very clean--but it does make it more difficult to get an overview of a lot of entries at once. It's a compromise, though; I get it.