It can also be assumed that bribing someone to take down a negative comment (and nothing else) does not constitute "pride in our customer service." One could also figure that their concept of pride in customer service is merely pride in the *image* of their customer service. You can assume that these are not the same thing.

Donald Judd should be proud.

Laser Cats 4!

Guiness74@6: Ever see the TV show COPS? That whole show is premised on incidents like this. You're thinking of "The Andy Griffith Show," which was canceled about 45 years ago.

Loving the "why is this posted?" comments on every post today.

These comments are made of hysterical. Parents are dumb, kids are dumb, cops are dumb. Everybody is dumb, that's why this whole thing happened when it shouldn't have.

"Get involved" = $$$? Hard to tell from the writeup.

GTD furniture!

It's not a compound, okay?

Focussing on the elephant says more about you than it does the image.

This is great news, he should step it up and create a biological torture installation.

I'm with Eustace. Where's Rumplestiltron?

Oh come on, character is less well defined by the past than it is by the future. "It ain't where you been, it's where you're going."

Joshua Allen is engaging in obvious link and pageview baiting.

Wait, people use cheeses other than American?

I can't watch this, it's too annoying!

Man, burglary is boring.

Noen: It hurts your credibility and your cause when you misrepresent what that link says. Are you doing a Bill O'Reilly impression?

I like the idea of a 14th Amendment challenge to tickets in SF County, any idea if that might work for FasTrak, too?

I'm predicting we won't see any episodes about asking quadriplegics jokey questions about wheelchair operation, though.

"Those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns."

#11 proves that if the Onion reference didn't already exist, we would have had to invent it.

Just remember who's captain here!

Yet you go to Staples these days and the desks still look the same. Or, at least they did until flatscreen monitors took over.

ross: that would make an excellent flickr group

April Fools GMT?

The parallel universe couldn't be much worse than the one we've got now. I say fire it up and give it a chance!

DOLL POWER!

FIRST...YIKES!

And to think that in 1981 we all just used our dad's screwdrivers to loosen the axles (not too much or it'll be too loose and lock up!) and a little WD-40 for lube.

If insanity is a logical response to a world that doesn't make sense, an insane screening procedure can only be explained by the TSA having no fucking clue what they're looking for. Their job just plain doesn't make sense to them as an institution.

Outsiders are always sacrificed for group solidarity.

#2: Apparently you're not a drummer, as every drummer knows that "everybody's a drummer."

I wonder if any current directors are doing contract work for the US Govt's PR machine.

EPIC LULZ

Looking at the cover of a book about grocery lists, I guess sex really does sell.

It's funny to watch all of these people claim narcissism on the part of the graffiti writers, yet they think their perspectives on the issue are so much more nuanced and persuasive that they must not have been made before. "This point will be made more convincing by my telling of it!" Hardly.

That people associate graffiti with the desire to break someone's arm or have their homes decorated against their will is telling, not ever once stopping to consider the difference between private property and a commercial bathroom. Not that this should cause you to like graffiti (that doesn't hang in a gallery), but you might pause to consider the tendency of public spaces to attract public behavior. I mean jeez, it's just a pizza bathroom in the Mission (or is it Noe Valley?). Little Star ain't Gary Danko.

Oh, but let's cast the net wider than Little Star so we can make our point 110% better. "You hate private property!" "Free Mumia!!"

Burns:
In case you hadn't noticed, you're not alone in this world, nor are you the sole arbiter of what is interesting and artistic.

In case YOU hadn't noticed, in a world where 99% of art is garbage nobody can agree on what the remaining 1% is.

Isn't this an old Crispin Glover favorite? I could have swore I saw/read him mention it like 20 years ago, not that that should take anything away from the awesomeness of it being posted on the tubes.

No, actually, I think that spraying paint on someone else's property does implicitly carry a great big 'Fuck You'. After all, if you respected them, you would not be spraying paint all over their stuff.

Yet at the end of the day, spraying paint on a wall, garbage can, or mirror does not in fact "destroy" those objects.

Look, it's either this or the terrorists waltz right through and blow something up.

Hate to exhibit first-nerd syndrome, but it's actually a "classic Piero Umiliani" song. :)

Zipped #1: I totally agree. As an IT guy I'm supposed to find these funny, but they're always really sad. Both in the way that other tech people seem to gloat over these experiences and also how they illustrate huge technical design flaws. I see each one of these "funny calls" as a failure of technology to fulfill a promise.

I would be interested to know if the Denver airport newsstands sell Playboy magazine.

Good for her, kicking against the pricks!

So wait, doesn't this list of requirements reveal the weak spots of TSA screening? Reminds me of an inverse of the "sources and methods" argument against revealing detainee interrogation techniques. That is, if you want to get something past TSA (or slow them down), just make sure your bag incorporates the problems listed above.

Disney can't resist this. They are pathologically driven to brand it up, and the fact that Stitch is nowhere to be found on the ride probably exposes the executives of the company to shareholder lawsuits for not maximizing Disney's value.

The only solution is to dress exactly like them.

#25: Breaking up the monotony so the prisoner can't tune out the sound.

#9: There are theories that Jones was a pill-gobbler himself, leading to a lethargic manner with a lisp.

CPT Tim: What in tarnation are you talking about, America is the best, freest country in the world.

Wow, that was awesome. And I'm even wearing a death-metal t-shirt right now.

They thought his heart was going to explode, and it did. DHS is protecting us!

"Detained" is a word with a very specific legal meaning.

Squashy, they didn't treat the cop as if he had no authority, they recognized that he shouldn't have any. He obviously can't handle it. Maybe they should be arrested for causing his true colors to come out? Oh, I got it. Terrorism!

You want to see how tough this guy is, put him in general population with all the other thugs who beat up on teenagers. Maybe not. Maybe the review board is like you and will just let him off with a paid vacation.

Pedophiles can't stand competition.

This just furthers my unfortunate suspicion that they will never make an album as good as "The Electric Version."

My racoon's breath smells like cat food.

Assault and battery under the color of authority. Put the guy in unprotected custody.

"In my dreams, I'm the wizard-master!"

Imagine the FBI as an wholly-owned subsidiary of the Seventh-Day Adventists.

Ill Lich @ #5: Funnily enough, when Alex Bennett had his morning radio show here in SF in the 80s he had an occasional segment where callers would provide descriptions of the weirdest food combinations they ever ate while high. It was great (as was the show)!

Newspapers would be a lot more valuable if they realized that incidental news coverage is out of their domain now. With TV and the Internet, there's just no way that a paper that comes out once a day is going to be able to satisfy peoples' need for current information. If they focused instead on creating more in-depth coverage (which may no longer be possible with the rise of blogs), rather than reprinting the same AP wire stories that every other paper (and Internet news site) is printing, they could provide real value. Something in between current news and magazines, which is about what their publishing cycle is best equipped to cover.

Yes, the rings push the shoulders down. I learned this 30 years ago from an x-ray in National Geographic.

i hereby nominate her to be the raddest woman ever in existence for all of human (and bug) history.

If you like things like this, laugh.com has a series of interviews with comedians about comedy that is excellent. I don't have a connection to them except as a fan, because the interviews are deliciously comedy-nerd friendly.

And here I was, hoping it was just the words in Helvetica.

Burt: Strange, I'm under the impression that material privacy is not codified in the Constitution beyond the third and fourth amendments. At the very least I haven't heard of any laws that would enable someone to go after companies that leak personal data in terms of civil liberties. Am I a victim of the public school system?

I believe each Utilikilt also comes with free built-in affinity for Renaissance Faires.

Great news, but it would have been nice to know about this earlier...

Just to nip the "OMG legal tender!" ideas in the bud, you're wrong. It's perfectly legal not to sell a car to someone with a truck full of pennies. That's right, even if you claim to know a lawyer.

Hmm, I was thinking Florian Schneider for #2.

I always thought it was just a matter of "federal property."

I smell trade-dress infringement letters coming from Ugly Doll any minute now.

This is just psycho-by-proxy BS scare tactics on the US/Israel's part. If the CIA/Mossad/etc. really knew what was going on in Iran they wouldn't be advertising it in the newspapers.

And the Calder family has a collective stroke. Expect a C&D any moment now.

I was wondering when something like this would crop up. Camo has been cool for too long for someone not to get more specific in exploring and experimenting with mil-chic.

There is a version of the wave without a blade.

Another reason why there will never be a law criminalizing the corporate mishandling of personal information.

#4: Because the gov't manages the list.

Similarly to how surface tension holds wet sand together, water pressure holds magic sand together.

(sung to the tune of "Rock Around The Clock")

It's the AM-PM Mini-Market
You can drive right up in your car and park it
You can shop around the clock tonight
We are open morning, noon and night
You can shop,
You can shop around the clock tonight.

Well, cops do like to shoot people. They have as much education as a Taco Bell manager and tools at their disposal to remedy any resentment they may have against the world, their parents, bullies from junior high, etc. Add to this the "testilying" (as above) and psychological training to produce aggressive confrontations with citizens and you have a problem waiting for headlines. Thing is, since all of this is a part of police training, the POAs of the country have a head start on counter-PR tactics.

Sometimes people make a war, indeed.

Wait, so a kangaroo is only $5k?

Last I checked there was no law against being a surly asshole.

I think she's confusing copyrights with patents.

I guess this means Spore has been pushed back even further.

Ah ha ha, this is great.

Stephan: With the right hardware and/or software you could institute bandwidth limits for unknown clients.

The Department of Homeland Security has no idea what it's doing.

I have a question: Which came first, the word or the concept?

This will not get beyond the car-show displays. Remember what happened when some company wanted to merely make tires in colors other than black? Illegal on the street.

It's supremely ironic that in response to a story denigrating companies who colluded with an oppressive regime, the argument is made that more businesses should be held to political interpretations of their motivations. The irony is that the company would not be bad if they had adopted or acted in concert with more agreeable politics.

It's bad to associate business and politics at all, even if I agree with the politics (though this sentiment is itself a microfascism). In some places, this problem is referred to as "corporatism."

My daily reminder not to fly. Going on 5 years now!

I have an .avi of this from a couple years back. No idea where it came from, but it was likely a torrent from WFMU blog or somesuch.

OK, I just checked it and it's pretty terrible quality and low-resolution to boot. It'll be nice to have a decent copy!

There needs to be enough people taking pictures for the mall to have to hire a lot more guards.

I love this contraption and for years have considered a vacation to Scotland primarily to see it.

I'm still waiting for the "Total Recall Lady Costume" dresser, but I imagine there's some difficult licensing entanglements sitting between me and it.

Obviously-flawed techniques like this are more of a special-interest subsidy to authoritarian-technology companies. They are not supposed to work.

That said, maybe everybody here doesn't understand what they're looking for. If a God- or Allah-driven terrorist (there's more than one kind, don'tchaknow) is elated that he is about to join the Promised Land, perhaps the TSA is trying to make the flying experience as miserable as possible in order to flush out the people who are happy to be there.

It's so crazy, it's just got to work!

I wonder if they have that one who was pope for a month or so in the 80s.

Is there any indication that the TSA knows what it's even looking for?

Great start!

Best product name of 2007. They should negotiate a celebrity endorsement from Randy Johnson.

Blackbird@8: That's exactly it. The unspoken criticism of the TSA is that they obviously don't know what they're doing. Why else would it be so random? Does anybody think the TSA/DHS/Dubya organization could be so organized as to have a system that only appears random?

P.S. Is the "Post" button supposed to be missing on preview?

The airlines are exhibiting a classic symptom of insanity: trying to prevent something that already happened. All of these measures are designed to prevent a 9/11 from happening again, but the fact is that it never will. We are protecting ourselves against weaknesses that existed six years ago, which has the follow-on effect of creating other weaknesses. So, the airlines have no idea what their current weaknesses are (this is important), so they impose scattershot restrictions aimed at getting people to self-police lest they get rousted by some high-school dropout (the screeners are the panopticon here).

Intentionally or not, the process is designed to be random and capricious.

Funnily enough, if you click on the "the horrible contra fish" related video, you'll see a mention of Seaman.

I'm going to guess that the police vehicles in this story are effectively (if not actually) unmarked.

Twig: Intentionally triggering Godwin with your own post doesn't work.

Thanks for this, it reminds me I need to practice my bacon candy recipe for Christmas.

Advertorials. They're not just for the Pentagon and Big Pharma anymore.

This is one of the greatest law hacks ever. They're turning the weather against undesirables!

Why don't they just use email?

This is an excuse to allow the cops to walk around to all cars and check out the insides. Any guesses as to how long it will be before the first person is charged with a crime as a result of one of these checks?

Not only that, but the cops are INVENTING a crime here. Before they started doing this there was no such thing as a falsely lost wallet!

Ahhhh...Yoko rules.

Because this isn't a videogame.

What will this look like in 20 years? I'm guessing "CompuServe."

Carpet shampoo. I see a great need.

Cops are trained to be wimps. Their only reaction is to escalate the situation so that they can put the person into handcuffs or shoot them. These are their only techniques.

I've been reading up on encyclopedia dramatica over the past week, so most of these are lame. Zidane and Macaca? FAIL.

I'm just glad to find out there's a such thing as a "sea scorpion."

It's not so much the pant leg getting stuck in the chain, it's the chain making the pant leg black with grease. This occurs on both legs since wind is wantonly indiscriminate in its direction, the bastard. Naturally this is a bigger problem in an office than it is at Zeitgeist or Gestalt.

I'm starting to think that it's crufty business model crap like this that prevents decent tablets from reaching the market. Give me a 10" IPod Touch with a PDF Reader and who needs Amazon anymore? But no, it can't be that simple.

I was always taught to cut them under running water.

HEY-O

It's not that there are more lethal methods they would use in that context, because those methods would not necessarily be used. This all just looks like the authorities making a big deal out of nothing, so they use all these non-lethal gadgets so they can huff and puff in public. Sure, people got hurt as they did in the old days when the margins of authority bumped up against the protestors (or vice versa), but you didn't have yahoos with freaky sirens putt-putting around for next to no reason. I just don't buy the idea that 10 years ago the protestors would have been mowed down with machine guns for the same cause because the cops didn't have anything nicer. The cops would have just been more tolerant (if you can imagine).

As law enforcement gets stronger and larger, the dumber it will get because it has to cast a wider net for recruits. The Army had to lower its IQ test requirement a couple years back because not enough people were enlisting.

85 is not that fast, but fast-lane hogs don't seem to operate via speed limits or safety, but on selfishness and antagonism. To wit: "screw them."

Michael @19: Funnily enough, it does:

"If you watch the video on a different machine, another license will be required."

This would lead a reasonable person to conclude that watching the video on the same machine will use the same license.

There's good overview over at talkingpointsmemo.

This can't possibly be better than the episode of "Picket Fences" where the Pope was put on the stand for witnessing a murder that was ruled a suicide. The Pope gets beat down.

Much like Bob W., I saw this the first time it was on. I was 10 and it pretty much set the stage for my music tastes. Good thing Dad let us stay up!

@DGBELLAK: Funnily enough, their other performance in this SNL episode was a showing of the Jocko Homo video/movie!