Number 6. I signed in to write the same thing. Red Road is a great great movie, it'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you're interested in the social impact of pervasive surveillance on society.

If you like this you have to check out "Nu Pogodi!". It is the Soviet version of Itchy & Scratchy (or looney tunes, anyway).

Youtube link

Incidentally, the Russian Winnie the Pooh is called Vinnie Pookh in Russian. He's more of a tragic character/sad-sack in the Soviet version ... makes the American Winnie look like an idiot patsy (think Forest Gump vs. Camus' stanger). The voice was done by the great actor Genia Leonov.

Nothing beats Burton Cummings', "Woman Love" album.

Holy Holy! #1. yhchang is so great. you are so great. Now we can all know how great yhchang is. Too bad we're stuffed in this little discussion section. maybe no one will know how great she is.

I actually think that there is something interesting going on at boingboing. As some others seem to be expressing, I'm ambivalent about the explosive verbosity and number of posts. This is not so much a criticism of the posts themselves which are generally well executed here as an acknowlegement that there are new voices to train my ears to.

There is a transition afoot, no doubt, and there will be /blood/ growing pains. Once-upon-a-time I could zip over to boingboing for some instant /procrastination/ gratification that I knew would not last too long. Today, it is becoming more challenging to do that and I need to deploy new techniques to limit the time I spend digressing from my work and family. As boingboing grows, so does the effort to read it. I rely(ied) on boingboingers to make those editorial decisions for me and you've done a great job at doing just that. And, just maybe, some of your success has been built on that selectivity. Now, to some extent, you've abdicated that role (though you may have never chosen it in the first place).

I don't think this is necessarily a just-get-used-it scenario. Perhaps it is bigger than that. Maybe it is like a user interface that becomes too noticeable (doesn't easily slide into the background) or a listserv that becomes too active, so that I pay less and less attention to it. It is no longer rarefied.

The resolution is that /we/ I must learn or apply new techniques of discernment. Oddly the effort may propel me away. Obviously you're welcome to change, just as I'm welcome to come or go as I please (or to learn how to read selectively). But it would be interesting to track usage patterns based on the new explosion of boingboing entries.

Whatever happens you are appreciated and I wouldn't bother to write this if I didn't care.

The war in Afghanistan is portrayed in mainstream Canadian press as the good war (as opposed to Iraq) and feeds into a pernicious Canadian holier-than-america attitude. I think this really blinds Canadians to a very challenging debacle. The "We're liberating women" justification is almost as hollow as America's "we're bringing democracy." Somehow "we're making the world safe for capitalism" never comes up.

I don't know what the answer is but pretending that we're not killing innocent people surely isn't part of it. Neither is minimizing it or writing it off as 'collateral damage.' The real public secret is that some peoples' lives are worth more than the lives of others.

my cautious and tentative two-cents:

The nature of guerilla warfare, which is typically undertaken when there is a *massive* imbalance of (fire)power makes disguise necessary. An overtly armed jeep moving to a military checkpoint in Iraq will not get within a football field of Captain America (hell, many unarmed civilians seem to get blown up, just for looking suspicious).

Blowing up civilians is something else altogether. I think that the killing of civilians is deplorable but I also recognize that how we define civilian and military targets is a deeply charged bit of semantics.

Either way it is interesting to see an American Kamikaze (which is probably more appropos than 'suicide bomber' given publication date of the comic) in an era where such personal sacrifice is anathema to 'western' culture.

Joel, I think this is a great idea and it amazes me that there are no obvious solutions developed yet for this kind of thing. I used to be a kayak guide and always dreamed about remote connectivity. When working in Siberia, the reindeer herders I met used a really simple hand-powered generator to run their radios. I think that this is the way to go, though the generator recommended above looks absurdly impractical for hiking or even cycling. A quick search turned up the rip-cord generator designed for the XO OLPC laptop: potenco

I wonder if you could get your hands on one of these and if it would be effective given your equipage.

As noted above, I would also be reluctant to rely on solar energy alone. Even if you're dying of dissentry you'd have the energy to pull a rip-cord and send out one last post to boing-boing. While a cloudy day could put a kybosh on that if you only had a solar panel. (obviously that assumes the generator doesn't breakdown).

good luck and keep us posted.

It is amazing how sanctimonious you liberals are! These are dangerous items that most children couldn't make at home. Not banning them is like inviting youngsters to brutalize their teachers and playmates. SHAME ON YOU. Ban these before they catch on. I'm certain the marijuana dealers have already purchased a stockpile of these deadly deceivers. Maybe the metal detectors can be re-configured to detect lexan as well as metals.

But we can't stop with these glass knuckles either. There are, at this very moment, so-called legitimate wilderness suppliers selling lexan knives. These dealers are so brazen as to tout that their knives are "virtually unbreakable" and "tougher than steel" (http://www.wildernessdining.com/gs70x55.html).

Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me!

SCHMOD, Ironically, your reaction is more knee-jerk than that of the 'usual environmental groups' (whoever they are). There is enough legitimate concern over this that the use of the chemical is under heavy review right now.

I'd rather spend an extra $5 on a steel baby bottle than find out ten years from now that the plastic bottle was screwing with my son's hormones.

While these bottles seem pretty nifty, word on the street is that the hard plastic carries bisphenol A (though Camelbak doesn't seem to mention what their bottles are made out of). The jury is still out on this one but there is enough concern over the potentially harmful effects of bisphenol A that Canada's Mountain Equipmennt Co-op has actually suspended selling water bottles that contain it.

One of the alternatives my family is now using is called Klean Kanteen, it is a light weight steel bottle. MEC has a bunch of other brands as well.

In 1980 an artist in Edmonton (Canada) named Peter Lewis did a similar project called "The Great Divide Waterfall." The waterfall is turned on for special events in the summer (when the river is not frozen). I've always loved this peculiar feature of our river city as it activates the bridge and river as a part of the urban environment and it challenges the mundane experience of walking, driving or otherwise commuting through the city.

As an Albertan, I'd have to say that this is actually a reasonably funny criticism of Ed Stelmach and, given the mutability of the internet, could continue to be a criticism of it (or could lapse into something else altogether). I think that calling it puerile or stupid, or accusing the accused of being a jerk is pretty shallow.

I have a red corn snake that I called 'stelmach' back in the summer. I should threaten Ron Glen (a senior advisor to the premier) with litigation for having misappropriated my snake's identity. If premier Stelmach is nice, I'll give him the subdomain: ed.stelmach.ca