haven't seen the other parodies, but am perfectly amused by this one. loved the castaway reference. smooth!

yes, after that abuse, i hope this little dude figures out how to attack the loser/s who douse him with water each day. poor thing.

Loop NYC has been making boombox bags for a while. Here's one on eBay for $10! (I think they usually end up going for more like $40 by auction end.) http://cgi.ebay.com/LOOP-NYC-PARCEL-Audio-Couture-Original-Boombox-Bag-BLK_W0QQitemZ130210334631QQihZ003QQcategoryZ63852QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting

Unlike Paul Smith, this one has a TAPE PLAYER!!!

I love how you can just barely see where the tagger cleaned the door before he left his own mark so the paint would stick.

From what I understand, this happens all over the Sahara. Like the ocean's tide, the sand dunes shift over villages and eventually shift back away (or somewhere else) revealing the villages again. When I visited Tunisia, it was explained to me is that when the sand starts to come in on a village, its inhabitants up and move to one that has recently been re-exposed. I don't recall what a typical timeline for this type of cycle is, but now my curiosity is piqued!

h.o.a.x.

*** vEARy *** CUTE!

did you watch the video? why is the cat wearing a diaper? okay, i know there may be many reasons, but i can't help but wonder if there's something even odder than 2 faces going on here.

One of my favorite questions to ask people is "What is your earliest memory?" Fascinating snippets and stories--sometimes concrete, sometimes ethereal, often mundane.

My earliest memory? I was 3 years old. My mischevious sister (who is 3 years older) held my hand and forced me to jump off our backyard deck to a dirt pile a story below. I can't remember any emotion--just the action.

FWIW...

Obviously this whole idea is ridiculous, but I do need to point out an inaccuracy in the posting. If you read the original article (2nd para), it is the author, Jeff Stein, who suggests that the FBI intended to specifically look at falafel sales. "The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area." The word "say" is key to identifying that this is the idea of the author, not the FBI.

What's hilarious is that the author makes himself look like a racial profiler by ignorantly selecting the first commonly-known middle eastern dish he could think of to drive his point home. He probably thought the term "falafel trail" sounded catchier than a more accurate "kalam polow trail," for instance.

a random john,

your game was awesome. if they won't post it for you, i will! heh heh.

http://www.kulturblog.com/2007/11/marshie-attacks-halloween-interactive-driveway-activity/

Jayemdee,

*T*h*a*n*k*y*o*u*!!! for that link to the Pretty Big Dig. My 19 month old son is just bonkers over all things in the "tractor" category. That's what made me go looking on YouTube for tractors in the first place and where I lucked out on the square dancing. CAT has a video on their website for excavators, but this...this is so amazingly beautiful!

Thanks!
-Jen

Excellent. I wonder if the heads normally articulate. I'm sure you spotted the blackbird/crow/raven in the studio? Super fabulous, eh?

If anyone is still hanging around this comment thread, I want to come full circle back to the original posting about the technology feature offered on the Disney mobile phone. It is a FEATURE. And, it is a feature on a phone marketed for YOUNG CHILDREN. Somehow I doubt most parents are spending their days tracking their kids’ every move. If they are, then I think the kid has bigger issues to worry about with their folks. This feature is probably used more like an insurance policy. IF the child goes out of a special range THEN an alert is issued.

Is the creepy aspect of this feature that it is one-way? What if your kid’s cellphone showed where Mommy and Daddy was too? Would that be so bad? Maybe it would even be “cool.” For example, a similar feature branded “Boost Loopt” is a draw for users to Boost Mobile. Subscribers offer up their locations on their GPS-enabled phones for their friends to know where they are.

Everything needs to be evaluated in context. Nothing is black and white. I think to damn this capability in a blanket statement is short-sighted. Furthermore, one thing that I’ve learned as a mother is that it’s not for me to judge how others parent their children as long as the child is not in any type of danger. I think I’d rather allow my son to go off on his merry way walking to school in the city with a GPS-enabled phone in his pocket, than hand deliver him there everyday without one, but I'm not going to judge a parent who chooses to hand deliver their kid.

Let me clarify. First, I didn't mean that I support implanting RFID chips in children. Just that it crossed my mind when my son was born. I *don't* however, have a problem with GPS locators in cell phones for younger children.

As for the types of freedoms you (Cory) describe--you're absolutely right. In my early morning brain I was thinking about the access to information that children have, and the “freedom” or requirement (depending on how you look at it) for kids to grow up earlier and earlier with each passing generation… and that children are exposed to adult topics at younger and younger ages.

I know I’m opening up a can of worms here, but I believe that one of the reasons that kids are surveilled, controlled and denied access is because parents and families are generally less involved in their children's day to day lives than in previous generations. Kids are denied access to parks because they tear them up with skateboards. Denied access to stores, because they go in en masse and steal from shopkeepers. Often children can’t take themselves to school not because of adult molesters, but because of creepy kids. All these situations arise in part because children no longer appear to be taught to respect the property or welfare of others – because they’re not being adequately monitored and mentored.

We reap what we sow. As long as parents don’t take accountability for the behavior of their children, and watch out for them, the cycle continues.

Many mobile carriers offer this service. Some services have parental controls that include restricting when and where the phone can be used and an alert if the child leaves a predefined area (such as school). Yeah, seems creepy, but when my son was born I wished I could install a GPS locator in him for fear of him being kidnapped. In this day and age where children have increasingly greater freedoms, I don't think it's unreasonable to know where your child is.

Uhm, is everyone forgetting what education must have been like in 1869?? Yes, today many of the math questions are routine for 9th graders, but consider that these MIT hopefuls probably had to scratch their answers on rocks with charcoal. ;o)

Hell, when I went to high school we were still programming Fortran. DO that a loop!

yeah, what laurel said--prolly she was nesting nearby. happens with starlings here in s.f. all the time. maybe there's a market for hats with hawk silhouettes on them. or hats with owl figures on them. ;o)

wicked. wicked. wicked.
i want...no, i NEED that in my life!

Yeah, every year someone tries to pull pranks--some more innocuous than others. One year kinda way back someone stole the man's head and replaced it with a plaster googly head (googly eyes, f*cked up teeth and tongue sticking out.).

Couple of years ago we were working on the base of the man and snuck a metal sculpture of the devil inside. The idea was that it would remain standing when everything else had burned away. We were so giddy having succeeded, but the debris was still taller than our sculpture! Hah.

I can also see the appeal of burning the man pre-burn, but the problem is that in recent years, attendees have had access to the base which supports the man. I'm not there now, so I don't know, but I assume this year is no different. So, burning the man without proper precautions is just plain stupid. How did Paul know that the accellerants and fireworks hadn't been loaded in?

I agree with telecommuter. Also, Burningman is an experiment on multiple dimensions--one of which is community. Since I've been attending I've seen them ban access to the hot springs, ban coming and going, ban handguns, ban driving vehicles (other than art cars) ban fires in camp, ban fires not in special burn areas and the list goes on. Most of those rules came into being because of specific incidences where people did something relatively stupid which becomes increasingly dangerous when both the volume and density of people increases, as it does as Burningman each year. "Hey, I'll build my camp out of hay bales and use open-flame tiki torches to illuminate it at night." Duh.

Now I imagine that next year the base under the man will not be accessible by the general public. Thanks, Paul.

"Unreal Spot,"

Desperate situations doesn't make desperate actions appropriate. As a mother, I cannot bear to read that entire article, so I may not be as informed as I should, but my opinion is this:

These children are being treated like Skinner's dogs. Not even dogs should be treated like this. Being tied down and forced to wear a white-noise helmet? Shocks? Depriving food? Meanwhile NO psychological counseling? NO psychiatric treatments? NO medication whatsoever?

These children need to at least be met half-way. Torture isn't going to help them.

yay, comments!

by the same token, i immediately noticed a couple of bothersome things you should consider tweaking.

1. because of the narrower content column there's a lot more scrolling required. bah.

2. discussion link is more effective at the bottom of the entry.