@SSWAAN 13 : www.faircopyrightforcanada.ca is a good place to start if you're looking to find out about the state of the Canadian copyfight. Their Links box a little ways down the page on the right is a good info resource, but you might also try contacting a local Fair Copyright chapter for a person to person explanation.

As for LSD being more or less dangerous than psilocibin mushrooms, it's important to be clear how you mean "dangerous." Both substances have very low effective doses and very high lethal doses, so it's unlikely a person could poison themselves though taking either substance recreationally. (However, you should obviously use caution, especially with shrooms, if you can't be certain that you're actually taking what you think you're taking.) How a person could get brain damage from taking either of these substances is a complete mystery; there is no clinical evidence of this ever happening. And while there is some evidence of psychological problems arising from psychedelic use, this has been blown out of all proportion by the anti-drug crowd. I think it was Terence McKenna who said something like "psychedelic drugs cause psychosis in people who don't take them." Food for thought.

So how are psychedelics dangerous then? They're clearly most dangerous as inoculations against groupthink. If you are a part of a cultural agency that promotes group thinking over free thought, then psychedelics can be very dangerous. LSD and psilocibin, in the words of McKenna, "dissolve bounderies," meaning agencies that promote divisive paradigms ("Us vs. Them" agencies like religions and many political and nationalistic groups) are at risk when youth, the pool of people they are most likely to recruit from, use these substances. So they're pretty dangerous in that sense.

Great stuff--there's even a cameo by Rick Doblin! (Yay, MAPS!)

If there's one thing I don't like, though, it's the shoehorning in of the term "entheogen," which is a total PC cop-out replacement for the already appropriate "psychedelic." I'm an atheist, so excuse me if I don't think "mind manifesting" substances "generate the *god* within." Is it too much to ask to leave god out of LSD? (Not that I don't believe psychedelics can give a *spiritual* experience, in the manner Sam Harris uses the term.)

I found the first story of the podcast, on Internet addiction, to be interesting too. But I think Jesse (and his producer) mixed up two different meanings of "addiction": 1) the medical meaning, where the body has a physical dependancy on a substance and suffers physical withdrawl symptoms, which internet addiction clearly is not, and 2) the "pop" psychological meaning, where the addiction is psychological, like a gambling or pornography addiction. I think there are a couple of times where the second definition is used, but is misunderstood by Jesse to be the first. The doctor whose trying to get it classified as a mental disorder even says he prefers not to use the term "addition."

Still, it's a great show, and my favorite CBC podcast after the "Ideas: How to Think About Science" podcast. Good stuff, Jesse. (And why am I not surprised you're a BoingBoing reader?)

And great job breaking open the "Joey Chaos" scandal too. :)

If you enjoyed this, may I recommend you go check out this post from Mark Evanier's excellent blog, newsfromme.com, where he writes a little about the history of Hot Dog and shares another clip with Woody and Jon.

@ #4 - Actually dude, lower. The U.S. population is just peeking over 300 mil right now. If you think they were talking about *world* population, then they were off by about 1000 years.

How is it that the organizers recognized Myers and not the far more prolific Dawkins? Wadda buncha maroons! This is why the religious right should never be put in charge of--let alone have influence over--anything important. "You say your name is Bim Ladem? That's not on the watch list--welcome to America!"

If they think evolution is a flawed theory, then by extension they must think that the scientific method is equally flawed. Why they don't reject science completely and go off to live in huts and hunt for game with spears is beyond me.

This is excellent news. When my allowance couldn't handle my comic collecting anymore, I got my sister to start buying ElfQuest for me so I wouldn't miss an issue (the Marvel Epic reprint run--the first of a few series that I managed to pass the cost on to her for).

Minor correction though, ElfQuest is not even close to being the oldest indy comic (nor the oldest indy that's still being published--which is perhaps what they meant--since it's not being published anymore). The underground comix scene, R. Crumb and the like, were putting out stuff a decade before the Pinis.

So two decades sharing their house with bees and nobody there's an expert on the damn things?

@#10 : Teresa, let me see if I understand you right: because of the way Valkyrie was drawn, Dave Stevens was sexist? Or his art is? Or is it that sexism is in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the context or the intention of the artist? I'm not sure I follow the nuance of your logic.

Cool interview. I love Jaime's Rockets stuff, and know what he means about Frogmouth--she seems like a character that practically writes herself. Jaime is a lot less prolific than Beto these days (in producing comics anyways), even in Love & Rockets, so it's nice to see where he's at.

@#2 - Grow up. Are you even making sense? Do you even know who Dave Stevens is, or who his artistic influences were? His role in the Bettie Page renaissance in the 1980s? The only blatantly sexist thing here is your bizarre knee-jerk reaction to this cover. Sexism is certainly common in comics, but you won't find it in Dave Stevens' work. If you're looking for a soapbox, at least have the decency to find a post your qualified to comment on.

That Airboy cover was my first introduction to Dave Stevens, which I saw in an mid-80s issue of Comics Scene magazine. As a young teenage boy I was, of course, immediately struck and wishing once again we had a comic shop in my hometown. Once I had the access and the income to get a wider range of comics I was always on the lookout for Dave Stevens comics, but he just didn't seem to publish that much. A few Rocketeer issues was all I managed to get. I pulled them out the other day when I heard of Stevens' death and flipped through them again. He will be missed.

Wadda maroon.

#5 - I know what you mean--I have that the exact same problem with cats. And yet my neighbors all seem to know which cat belongs to them (or so they claim). Weird, huh?

What an uptight school! My guess is that this rule was motivated by "inappropriate" (and possibly same-sex) romantic-like hugging but the school officials were reluctant to explicitly say that because they're a bunch of redneck prudes. So instead, to save themselves some embarrassment, the blanket-ban on all hugging. Welcome to America, land of the free.

@#2 "Like a deadly floating log of death."

Heh. Seen a few of those "down under" in my days...

Nice. Would it be in bad taste to request a Tiananmen Square remix?

I'm curious to know how successful the polluted birds are at actually impregnating the females, and how healthy their offspring are....

I hear you, Arkizzle, but please note that it wasn't even Cory who I was talking about. If you read the post you'll see it was a guy named Phil. (I'm sure Cory knows enough about comics and collecting to sound impressive if he wants to.)

Not to mention that both Watchmen and Sandman are available in collected form at pretty much every library that carries comics. But, just to be clear, I wasn't trying to "piss" on anyone Arkizzle, I was just joking around. (And it's "Cory" without the "e")

Wow, entire runs of Watchmen and Sandman! Some of those came out almost 25 years ago! Gee, grandpa, did they really make comics back then? I love it when people who don't know what they're talking about try to sound impressive.

(Not to say that I'm not impressed - 40,000 comics is a hell of a donation and I'm sure there's some good stuff there - I just had to laugh at the examples given.)

What an amazing track! Thanks, Xeni! It's funny, but when I heard this track I immediately thought of RU Sirius' old podcast and all the great music it turned me on to. A compliment to your fine taste. More please!

I'm glad the writers got a halfway decent deal, even if it doesn't add up financially to all the money they lost in striking for 3 months. I think it was important for them to take the stand they took, since if they had caved in this time, they could have looked forward to an even worse deal next time.

"[A]nd when the seventh line is severed, and the world plunged into darkness [...] then shall arise Leviathan"
-Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon

Skype is listed at a node linking several lines together--maybe an argument could be made for this--but Paypal, a much better candidate for that spot, is one stop away. Hmmm... neat idea, but it could have been better thought through.

Yes it should be a bolt rather than a screw, but the important thing is to get one with the same thread as your camera's tripod mount. Instead of using a washer at the bottom, I made mine with a stirrup that I could slip my foot through which made it easier to move around and reposition without having to find the washer to step on each time.

I loved the Pac-Man game too (the good one with the marbles). We also had the Frogger game, and I remember liking it, but I can't imagine why I did now. Last we even had the Donkey Kong game, and that one I didn't care for, but I think it was because my sisters could beat me at it. One thing we didn't have, mind you, was a decent video game system--we had a Texas Instrument where the best game was Hunt the Wumpus--so these board games were my main experience of Pac-Man, Frogger and Donkey Kong when I was little. *Sigh*

"...embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music."

Yeah, hippies, don't you know the true value of music? No, it's not about touching your spirit or any of that horseshit, it's 99¢ per download! Haven't you heard of iTunes?

Ellis is also currently writing Thunderbolts for Marvel, and while it may be a more nuanced study of the genre than you usually get, it is certainly a bona fide super-hero comic. He's not as anti-super-hero as he's been made out to be. Even Nextwave, for all its ribbing of the genre, betrays such an intimate knowledge of all the Marvel super-hero tropes that it could only come from someone who loves the stuff (or who has at least read quite a bit of it).

Both Ellis and Immonen only committed to the twelve issues, and they are a self-contained (and very excellent) story, so there's not much to be upset about. It's unlikely that we'll see any Nextwave in the future unless at least one of the creators is involved, but quite frankly I'd much rather see something new from Ellis for his next Marvel project (he's still fishing through the vast Marvel archives for characters and concepts right now). Some of the characters have already been grabbed by other writers : Machine Man is appearing in the Ms. Marvel series now, for example.

On another note, if I could air out a peeve of mine, I am getting more than a little tired of Cory's insistence on using the term Underwear Perverts all the time. Not because I don't think it's appropriate, but because it's a joke, it's not funny anymore, and it wasn't even his joke to begin with. Ellis doesn't use the term anymore--and he never used too often anyways--because he has the good sense to know the mileage he could get from that kind of joke.

Enough already please, Cory. You're beginning to sound like the guy who thinks "We are the Knights Who Say 'Ni!'" is still a good line.

A question : Was it okay for the BMC to make the calendar even without Ford's permission because they weren't intending to sell it? Or would have it been okay for them to make a profit off these calendars even over the objections of Ford?

With the kind of exposure it's recently been getting in the press and on the internet, I don't think salvia's going to be legal for too much longer...

The fallacy of Randi's $1M Challenge is the assumption that anyone would could prove paranormal phenomenon exist would want a million bucks. I've been a fan of theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake (www.sheldrake.org) and his "Seven Experiments That Could Change the World" for years, long before I'd heard of JREF and the challenge, and I think that if anyone could devise an experiment to meet that challenge, Sheldrake could. Randi's thrown down the gauntlet to Sheldrake before, but I get the strong impression that Sheldrake, Cambridge Trinity College's Perrott-Warrick Scholar and a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, honestly isn't interested in Randi's money.

His experiment that tests to see if dogs know when their owners are coming home through some kind of telepathy or paranormal intuition is probably the best candidate for the challange, and Alex Tsakiris from the Skeptiko podcast thinks so too. He's trying to put together an experiment to claim the million dollar prize, and I encourage everyone here who's interested to see if he can mount his challenge in time to subscribe to Alex's podcast (www.skeptico.com). You might also enjoy the excellent Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast from the New England Skeptical Society (www.theskepticsguide.org) who will doubtless be watching Alex, who's been a guest on their show, as he makes his bid for the money.

It's not that the Church of the SubGenius isn't a joke. It is, and I think that's pretty obvious to anyone who spends even 10 seconds flipping through that book. It's that all the other religions are a joke--a big, stupid, sick joke--and they just won't admit it.

Well, in the immortal words of our savior J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, "F*ck 'em if they can't take a joke!"

As somebody that works in TV news and has seen many VNRs, I can't imagine any major station wanting to run this particular item too badly. Ethics of running manufactured news aside, the production quality for the item is particularly bad. From quick, choppy edits to constantly moving camera shots, to brief flashes of black (wtf?), it all makes it pretty disorienting to watch. Most viewers will retain very little information from the item, and that which they do retain--billions of dollars from selling pirated music? come on--are too fantastic to be credible. While technical standards have generally dropped in the television news industry over recent years, I don't think they're quite this bad yet.

Ask and ye shall receive.

I was just saying over in yesterday's Canadian copyfight post how it would be nice if boingboing could post something about this bs bill in the Senate. Thanks Cory!

...and another thing, to all the people who've been commenting all week on how *cute* Canadian politics is, it's not half as cute as a country of 300 million plus people who think that rigged corporate elections every four years somehow make it the greatest democracy in the world. Maybe if everyone in the country wasn't so preoccupied doing their best Statler and Waldorf impression they might wake up to the possibility that they have an oportunity to affect some kind of change for the better.

I know Cory is a fellow Canuck, and therefore has a vested interest in what happens with this proposed Canadian copyright bill, but I think the story in this episode of Search Engine that's really worth noting is the one about the missing White House emails. I've been following the Canadian copyfight story here since the start of this most recent round--and I can't thank boingboing, and Cory in particular, enough for pointing me in the right direction to do something positive about Canadian copyright legislation--but I am mystified that I rarely can read this much about similar calls to action in the States.

Is the American democratic system so broken and its citizens so cynical that it's going to take another "series of tubes" foot-in-mouth moment before boingboing rallies its largest audience take political action again? Aside from the missing White House emails (which isn't the kind of story boingboing usually covers, I admit) there is that FISA amendment bill on the Senate floor that provides for blanket telecom amnesty that boingboing readers might be interested in doing something about....

Cool stuff, but this guy's ripping at least one of these diagrams off without credit. Namely "Fig. 4-A: Unified Bitch Theory" (found about a quarter of the way down the page) which comes from Chris Sim's infamous geek blog, The Invincible Super Blog. You've even linked to his post with the stolen diagram before here.

This is just another plot by the Conspiracy to try to steal our slack and sell it back to us! Well it ain't gonna work you friggin-fraggin Pinks! If I don't want to pay for the things I buy, I damn well won't! I love my slack and I ain't never gonna let it go!

Praise Bob,
Reverend Dr. Shortfatsteve

I believe the correct term for that girl helping Spider there is filthy assistant.

I don't think this Canadian law is as stupid, weird or bizarre as the American law that insists that any winnings from gambling, game shows or lotteries are *taxable income* (and often subject to additional hidden taxes or fees).

In Canada your winnings are tax free. Not looking so stupid now, eh?

Nice cover, but I think there's a grammar problem with your tag line. "Who's watching back?" implies that "you" from the first line (or something else in the second person) should be the answer, not the titular (third person) "Little Brother." Wouldn't it be better to ask "Who's watching him?" or another question that implies a third person answer?

Cool stuff. It reminds me of a short experimental film by Canadian filmmaker Ian Toews, the name of which I forget, where he essentially shot through the window of a speeding Japanese bullet-train to get his footage.

In Graham Hancock's book, "The Sign and the Seal", he says that these monks have a pretty short lifespan once they're chosen to be the Ark's guardian. The monk he visited in the book has cataracts and is visibly weakened from what Hancock assumes is prolonged close-quarters exposure to the Ark. The Ark has been thought by some Biblical historians to be some primitive form of battery/electrical discharge unit, and the condition of the guardian monk seems to confirm that whatever it is they're guarding emits some kind of radiation.

You can see from the illustration here that the far side of the building is open beneath the (semi-transparent?) roof. So the monument should still be visible to the public, but still, yuck. I don't think this modern building is going to do the fire monument as many aesthetic favours as it's going to do for the building.

I can't help but notice there are two right arms in the video and no left arms... proof of the right wing conspiracy that I've talked about for years with all my sinister friends.

Ha ha!

ps - your "(see here for a thorough bashing)" link ain't working.

I'm still warming up to the new look--it doesn't look as good on my work computer (Firefox, Windows) as it does at home (Safari, Mac)--but as they say the only sure thing in life is change. One teensy suggestion to consider might be a way to view the two blogs together so that you don't have to go to two pages to catch up on everything. But you guys do excellent work, so I suppose if an extra mouse click is all it takes to see the gadget blog I can live with that.