I don't get it. Certainly it's possible to fly commercially without bothering with all this TSA stuff. The TSA stuff is all completely optional.

All you have to do is charter a plane. Really. No TSA inspectors, no security lines, no nothing. Climb in and go. See? Your civil and constitutional rights are all intact.

Call me crazy but this poster reminds me of the "Superflat" movement coming out of Japan, influenced by manga and anime.

The Royal/T Gallery in Culver City has a pretty good exhibit of Superflat art...and also an Akihabara-style "maid cafe".

#6:

Good question. I think the reason the site isn't under CCTV surveillance is that they've done their level best (pun intended) not to wreck the view of and from the stones over the sweep of the Salisbury Plain. The car park and the museum are both very low-profile.

Most people, btw, are unaware that it's still possible to wander at will among the stones. Reservations are taken by the National Trust for a certain number of people each day to be granted "private time" among the stones. They take down the stakes and ropes each day and turn you loose to wander around on your own, just as people used to do. I highly recommend it. I didn't "get it" about Stonehenge until I was up close and personal.

I read somewhere that Cisco is claiming that this was a low-level Chinese employee who wrote this, and they then proceeded to cut the rug out from under him. "This is not Cisco policy," blah blah.

Antinous is right; Islamic Egypt (and Coptic Egypt!) are not nearly so crowded as Pharaonic Egypt. I was in Egypt nine months after 9/11, and didn't run into really severe crowds anywhere except Edfu. Edfu is designed for gridlock anyway.

The mosques we went to weren't empty by any means, but we were often the only tourists in sight. Everybody else was just there to pray.

BTW the Coptic Museum is worth a look. "My, that's an interesting-looking manuscript there. I wonder what it is? Hmmm....'Nag Hammadi Codex...' GACK!"

I visited the Hunterian Museum in London a few years back. I was on a tack of visiting lesser-known tourist attractions: the John Soane's Museum instead of the Brit, the Hunterian, a few others.

The Hunterian is the first medical/surgical museum ever, and is located, if I remember rightly, in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. There are varying reports as to whether or not it's open to the public, but I wandered right in without let or hindrance, and the one fellow on duty smilingly showed me how things worked.

I was the only person there. And it's a big place.

It's not as big as it once was, though. It took a direct hit from a largeish bomb in WW II, and while I don't remember the exact numbers, its 50,000 items were reduced to about 3,000 by the damage. One exhibit shows photos of the aftermath. It's surprising they got anything back. The roof was the new floor and the walls were non-existent.

Ok, there may be spookier museums on this planet but I don't know what they might be.

[Scratch that. I do know. My Egyptology teacher told me she once went to the Cairo Museum during the aftermath of the Six-Day War. There was no power and the building was sandbagged and bunkered, but as a matter of national pride, the Egyptians insisted on keeping it open. They handed you a flashlight at the front door. Now that museum was spooky!]

The museum is set up differently than a museum which gets a large number of visitors. There is no over-arching flow-control crowd management in the layout. The display cases are unlit. There are large brass electric switches on each case which will turn on the light while you look at it, and you're expected to turn the light off before you move on. There is one laminated plastic card per case for you to pick up and read.

This is not a museum for the masses. And it has things in it you will never, not ever, forget.

I could be wrong but I think it has to be a bucket of oil, not water. So I was told by the guy who was making these at a fair.

To me, the most remarkable thing about this is that they got the cooperation of the mall management and of one of the merchants. They're right, that made it possible to embed players in positions which no one would have suspected. When's the last time you saw a singing security guard?

Kiyohiko Azuma's comic "Yotsuba&!" is one of my personal favorites. (The "&" on the end is because each story arc is titled "Yotsuba and the XXX".)

Yotsuba is a young girl of about age 4 to 6. When asked her age, she'll hold up some number of fingers, then say another number. When asked where she's from, she'll say, "Way to the left!...And a little to the right." Her hair (green on the color covers) is in four identical pigtails pointing in the four compass directions. In Japanese, Yotsuba means "four-leaf", as in four-leaf clover.

Cardbo, here, is classic Yotsuba&!. Yotsuba&!'s motto might well be, "Yesterday, this day's madness did prepare."

The strip sure isn't for everybody. It's about as far from edgy as it's possible to get. "Ghost in the Shell" it's not. I love it.

Well, except for Yanda. He's obviously evil. :-)

I've always been fascinated by the notion of anterograde amnesia. In reality, there appear to be all sorts of types, as Google tells me: one man with anterograde amnesia as severe as that mentioned above - a short-term memory lasting only seconds - is nevertheless able to draw a map of the house he lives in, which he moved into four years after the accident which produced his amnesia. The theory is that he is able to remember the geography of the house because he has learned to navigate it by "muscle memory," just as people with this sort of event-related amnesia are still able to learn new skills, new words, etc.

Gene Wolfe's _Soldier in the Mist_ and the movie _Memento_ are probably the best-known fictional examples of this sort of amnesia. In both of these, short-term memory lasts about thirteen hours.

In the realm of the completly obscure, I can recommend an anime currently showing on Japanese television, _ef - a tale of memories_ (yes, it's titled in English and yes, all in lower case).

In this show, the character Chihiro suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia identical to that of Latro in _Soldier in the Mist_, and even carries, as Latro does, a diary whose first entry reads, "Read this every day." Beyond that the treatment is quite different. The show does a superb job of portraying her feelings about her condition: "I live at the end of a chain twelve years long, the length of my life at the time of the accident. My arm has a reach of thirteen hours. Everything beyond that is forever out of my reach..."

To Teresa N-H: Alas, no photos. Servicing that old safe lock, taking it apart, cleaning the wheels, admiring the chasing, showing the parts around to the family, was all too much fun. I never thought to photograph it. The safe had been around for my entire life, and a good deal longer than that, too. The office dated from sometime around the mid-Permian era. It was beyond my ability to conceive that someday the safe would be gone, and the office would be a roofless ruin, as it now is.

I do not know where that safe is now. I do not know where I might find one like it. I do know that the doors were full of concrete, and that although it was on (large iron) wheels, the office had obviously been built around it - so even if I found another one, there's no way I could move it or take possession of it.

Modern combination locks, like S&G door locks, are really dull and boring inside.

Alas.

It's true: I hadn't contemplated it before, but this technology was the real-world apex of what is now the steampunk aesthetic. And bank vault doors are the only place the general public will ever be able to see it.

Support your local locksmith. He's seen things you can only dream of. :-)

Being able to actually get my mitts on things like this is the biggest reason why I became a locksmith for a while.

It was a heady time but not something to make a living at when you can do the same kind of intellectual work on computers and earn a lot more.

Locksmithing and programming are pretty much alike. I suspect that, had I lived several hundred years ago (and not died instanter), I'd've been a watchmaker.

The thing is, bank vault doors have always been gorgeous on the inside. Even modern ones are polished within an inch of their lives (so to speak). Older ones have the most gorgeous chasing you'll ever see. My family company had an office safe that dated from around 1910 or so. It was dull on the outside - had probably been painted several times so God knows what it looked like originally - but on the inside, the inner side of the outer doors and the outer side of the inner doors both sported intricate, scenic oil paintings.

Being at that time a bonded locksmith, I took the lock apart once. The wheels themselves were all intricately chased, even though they'd never be seen by anyone but a locksmith.

Bank vault doors are gorgeous because they are designed to impress customers and potential customers with the wonderfulness of the vault that's guarding their money. It's pretty direct salesmanship. But century-old combination locks were gorgeous where no one but the trade would ever see, and I think it was out of pure pride of workmanship.

That, or to convince any locksmith that saw it that this was a lock they might want to install for their own customers. Or maybe both.