Hey, The Sims *Online* flopped, and everyone thought that would be a big hit, so maybe that's just a partial miss.

I was in China last September; the first week we got there, Beijing was sunless, literally not a single moment all day where you could see the sun, let alone a patch of blue. We left Beijing for Shanghai and the countryside, then came back a week later-- and lo, Beijing was under a blue sky. At the time, the government had imposed rules where private cars with a designated series of numbers were not allowed on the road. But I doubt it was just cutting the traffic by half, something else they're doing seems to be working.

Jaysus Christ, I swallow *one* pill the wrong way and I have heartburn for the whole damn day.

Has someone explained to Ray that if you upload your consciousness into a computer (even if that's possible in our lifetime), your consciousness doesn't become immortal, it just gets *copied*?

I'll have to read the whole article, but this excerpt doesn't track to my experience being in China last year. There's a numerically large, technically savvy class of Chinese that already know how to get around the Great Firewall through various means, and doing so is so laughably easy for them, it's about as effective as a pop-up-- i.e., a brief annoyance that you click past without giving it much thought. What's more, a lot of them travel outside the country, where they get the full uncensored story.

If you're in London, don't go looking for a BLT sandwich, for god's sake, get a fast food shawerma for 2 pounds 50 pence. (I.E., five fucking bucks.) They're huge and insanely good, succulent meat and hot sauce wrapped with a variety of cabbage. Like so good that'll be the first thing I do next time I'm there. San Francisco has its killer burrito, London has its killer shawerma.

This is actually why Mitt Romney is dropping out of the race.

"Schlock?!" Xeni, I object: *Point Break* was directed by cult filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, who's highly regarded for her treatments on subcultures and identity. *Point Break* has that as a strong theme (the anti-establishment surfers whose quest for utopia leads to violence vs. the establishment FBI agent tempted by their reckless freedom.) And as a genre effort, *Point* has some of the best action scenes ever made. Lookit, she's got high falutin academic books devoted to her and everything:

http://www.wallflowerpress.co.uk/publications/directors/kathryn_bigelow.html

This is some anti-Keanu deal. Anything he's in is automatically (and often unfairly, as in this case) mocked as dumb dude kitsch.

Gloriously awesome news. I love the baby, love the parents... and love that you've included a link to every single name.

Actually, Oreo filling contains lard, so slapping pepperoni on it isn't entirely insane. Just mostly.

Wow, I guess he really *did* put his disease in here.

Mythbusters fucking rocks. They should repackage their shows for a high school physics curriculum, each busted myth demonstrating a specific principle.

For the Bay Area, here's a vote for Arizmendi Bakery, masters of what might best be described as "hippy pizza" (vegetarian, all organic, made in a worker-owned kitchen.) Got branches in Oakland and Sunset district of SF:

http://www.arizmendibakery.org/

Thin crust, insanely good. Like if I need to go to Oakland Airport, I'll take a 30 minute detour off the Lakeside exit to stop there.

You rock the good fight, Joel. Though what's the deal with the scarf?

I think it needs a few vegetable toppings. Like, say, a head of cabbage, an entire broccoli stalk, and several carrots freshly plucked from the ground.

Oh, I think Easterbrook is on to something. If kids today spent 14 hours a day pushing a plow or working at the cotton mill then walking 5 miles back to their village like they used to, they could totally burn off the calories.

"The only thing consistent about the MPAA's decisions is their unflinching support of major studio releases and their determination to suppress independent voices in film"

Uh, no: *Hostel* and *Saw* were put out by the indy distributor Lionsgate, not one of the big studios. And yet their posters got a pass from the MPAA. Also, indy filmmaker writer/director Eli Roth says *Hostel* is meant as an allegory about American imperialism, which may be bullshit twice over, but does at least reflect a stated belief to be political.

The MPAA does itself no favors by its lack of transparency, but creating conspiracy theories like the above doesn't help, either. Ultimately, however, this is an irrelevant issue: rare exceptions like *Fahrenheit 911* aside, there's a very small market for politically charged indy documentaries, and the few theaters which do show them usually show unrated movies anyway. ThinkFilm put out *The Aristocrats* unrated, which screened in those theaters, and it actually did quite well for an indy movie. So frankly, this all smells like a publicity stunt on ThinkFilm's part, trying to drum up buzz around a movie that would otherwise bomb as bad as *Redacted*. (And probably still will.)

It's more complicated than what the submitter suggests. If you look at the MPAA-approved posters for *Hostel* or *Saw*, they're abstract and suggestive, but don't depict the actual torture in those films. However, a gruesome movie called *Captivity* used posters which *did* depict torture, and the MPAA also pulled their approval:

You can object to the MPAA's policy on other grounds, of course, but not necessarily for inconsistency.

This is clearly a disinformation campaign to distract the Japanese citizenry from their government's failure to address the far more pressing giant robot/alien moth crisis.

The clip has some deceptive leaps-- for example, while it's true the US is the world's largest oil consumer, we only get about 12% of that oil from Saudi Arabia. The EU and Japan and increasingly China depend far more on Middle Eastern oil. The US national security concern is that a disruption in those nation's oil supply will devastate their economies and subsequently ours, and that these countries would then get involved militarily in the region.

Another fudge: While it's true Bin Laden declared war on the royal family after they chose the US as its protectors, the Al Qaeda leader's main objection is that the American military has Christians, Jews, and women in it, all of whom are supposed to be forbidden from being in the Holy Land, according to his bigoted nutbag salafist version of Islam.

"I guess he also goes by (went by?) 'Cory Linden'"

All Linden Lab staffers' official avatars have Linden as a surname, so in SL, Cory Ondrejka is Cory Linden, Philip Rosedale is Philip Linden, etc.

If you don't agree with the vegetables in the stir fry Wikipedia, you can remove them and add your own, and your changes will be tracked with a grease pencil on the tablecloth. Careful, because the kitchen staff will vote on your additions, and if you can't provide a source for your veggies, they'll quickly restore your plate to its original form.

The point is valid, but to be slightly pendantic (OK a lot), there's probably more like 2.5 million Warcraft players in the US now. It was 2 mill back in January when it was 8 million total worldwide (it's now 9 mill):

http://www.blizzard.com/press/070111.shtml

World of Warcraft has also achieved new regional subscriber milestones, with more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China.

I'm sure it's already been asked, but:

Doesn't it consume more power to turn a bunch of lights off all at once and then turn them back on an hour later, than to just leave them on?

Hang on, that blog links to a Financial Times article dated 10/11, which quotes a Music Week interview with Edge from 10/8, *before* the album was online:

http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storycode=1031810

So maybe they intended this as a CD promotion before it went online, but then, Edge had no way of knowing how truly huge the download sales would be when he said that. Perhaps they assumed they'd get a few hundred thousand bucks at most, in which case it made sense at the time to position this as a promotion. I have to think they're re-assessing those assumptions now that they've cleared somewhere close to $10 million.

And in the end, it really doesn't matter: if not in intent, certainly in effect it *was* groundbreaking.

I like the Ninja idea, but we also need a Ninja Itinerary Agent who orders the ticket beforehand, and a Ninja Temp who takes care of all the shit you need to do before leaving (pay bills, complete deadlines, etc.), and a Ninja Houseboy who takes care of your house while you're gone (water plants, walk dog, etc.), and finally, a Ninja Personal Assistant who gathers up all your receipts and faxes them off to whoever is supposed to pay for the whole thing.

Get all that, then sign me up!

I'd like to make Ms. Nazemson's immortal words the standard response to any stupid/banal/annoying question. Example:

Q: Hey, can you re-submit your TPS forms in triplicate?

A: [Hurling noises] Whooo, OK!

I distinctly remember reading a Clarke short story from the early 50s where the hero meets a Soviet agent who admits to him that their satellites are going to broadcast hours and hours of video depicting Indian sex statues into the televisions of America, and thus turning us into masturbating zombies ripe for takeover. (It was the Cold War, son, you had to be there.) Anyone remember the title?

So let me see if I understand the economic math: If the cost to produce album and host the retail site is $500,000, and a million fans pay an average of $5 each, then Radiohead walks away with $4.5 million in pure profit. That sound right?

Wait a minute, Boing Boing had a squirrel jerkoff video? Plz post link kthnxbye.

My question is, why did the hospital take the time to X-ray a chair sticking out a guy's face, instead of, oh I don't know, IMMEDIATELY TAKING THE CHAIR OUT THE GUY'S FACE.

Oh I'm sure they'll say something like "precaution, pre-op preparation" blah blah blah. But you know the X-ray crew was saying "OMFG THIS PIC IS TOTALLY GOING TO GET US BOING BOINGED!"

I'm thinking new viral category: LOLperps. "Im in ur flickr, tagging my tattooz"

11. Maintain single party rule over all branches of gov... oopsie.

You'd think it would be impossible to violate Godwin's Law for an entire book, but evidently Naomi Wolf proved us wrong.

Wow, Nazi references even after Godwin's been invoked?

The tasering seems totally unjustified in this context and protocol leading up to it should be reformed. That said (and since he's OK), I do have to wonder if this wasn't all intentionally contrived as a YouTube viral video from the get go. The kid's voice doesn't seem genuinely alarmed or panicked, the video is extremely well recorded for something that was putatively unplanned. Also, the cops claim he shut up and apologized after the cameras were off him, and fellow students say the dude has made other would-be viral videos:

http://www.starbanner.com/article/20070918/NEWS/70918007/1053/BREAKING_NEWS

The other problem with her thesis-- Klein actively advocated the rise of Moqtada Al-Sadr and his "Mahdi" army in Iraq, depicting them as freedom fighters:

http://marccooper.typepad.com/marccooper/2004/08/najaf_to_new_yo.html

Any place Al-Sadr has dominated in Iraq, his thugs have enforced a kind of brutal Islamized mafia rule over the people, making them pay protection money for the price of their violent *sharia* enforcement. Saying this is neither a pro or anti-war point per se-- indeed, Bush's inept removal of Saddam enabled Sadr's rise to power-- but it also deflates Klein's point. She's not really against with violent war profiteering, she's just opposed when multinational corporations are involved. Let a bloodthirsty religious fanatic engage in it, and she'll happily look the other way.