Top 10 dystopian novels (though one is the Diary of Anne Frank).  I’ve read five.

Real sign, real sign, fake sign.

The Milgram Experiment, which basically showed that Americans are perfectly capable of behaving like Nazis given the right authority structure, was recorded on video and is available on YouTube. I had no idea you could watch these tapes. Check out the subject of the experiment consistently object to what he’s being asked to do but continue, over the screams of his victim, when ordered to do so in an authoritative tone:

Part I:

Lost in Austen is a choose your adventure book in the style of Jane Austen. According to the back cover:

Your name: Elizabeth Bennet. Your mission: to marry both prudently and for love, avoiding family scandal. Equipped with only your sharp wit, natural good sense, and tolerable beauty, you must navigate your way through a variety of decisions that will determine your own romantic (and financial) fate. Ever wonder what would happen if Elizabeth accepted Mr. Darcy’s proposal the firs time around? Or ran from his arms into those of Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth? Now is your chance to find out.

Lost in Austen begins in Pride and Prejudice but your decisions along the way way will lead you into the plots of Austen’s other works, and even newly imagined territory.

At the end of each page, you must choose your path and that path will determine the outcome of the story, just like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of yore. I’m a little alarmed that someone combined these genres… but I like their moxie.

You have to keep score of points that you accrue throughout the book, including “Fortune points” and “Intelligence points.” You are also, like any good 19th century heroine, obliged to keep a list of your “Failings.” My list, I presume, would be lengthy and probably written in permanent ink.

Even though I’ve never actually read any Jane Austen (I read House of Mirth, is that close enough?) I think this sounds somewhat enjoyable. I’m started to regret that I didn’t buy it in the store. Hopefully we’ll see a whole new genre of this sort of book; I’m desperate to work my way through L. Ron Hubbard’s fictional universe.

My uncle, along with another man, was the second public person to examine the Beatle’s Paul is Dead phenom:

Fred Labour and John Gray, juniors at the University of Michigan, published a review of Abbey Road called “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light”, itemizing various “clues” of McCartney’s death on Beatles album covers, in the October 14, 1969 issue of the Michigan Daily.

My family is apparently pretty good at getting in on phenomenon’s early.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a dry cleaner in Los Angeles that hangs it clean clothes in a weird tunnel that has transparent walls and hangs completely outside the dry cleaner’s building. When they need to retrieve clothes from the system, passers-by get to watch the clothes spin around in the see-through tube. It’s not great for clothing privacy, but it’s fun to watch.

Before leaving LA, I took a quick video of the spinning action:

Right before I left the country, a reader suggested that he knew who posed for the “Where is Amy Pressman” photo. I’ve looked at the actress the reader suggested and posted some side by side photos in the original thread. What do you think?

The afore-mentioned Tufts/Primary Source decision is being cheered by the ACLU who took an active role in lobbying for the outcome.

I’m back from Ireland and have posted all my pictures from that portion of the trip. I’ve grouped the pictures into albums loosely based on the areas in which they were taken:

Dingle 2007 51 pics | 0 comments | 1 views	Cliffs of Insanity 2007 20 pics | 0 comments | 17 views	Aran Islands 2007 75 pics | 0 comments | 2 views
Galway 2007 87 pics | 0 comments | 0 views	Birr 2007 47 pics | 0 comments | 0 views	Dublin 2007 93 pics | 0 comments | 39 views

The actual name of the Cliffs of Insanity are the Cliffs of Moher, but they were used under that name in the Princess Bride and it sounds much cooler. Here’s a map showing where all of these cities are generally located.

Enjoy.

AltLaw is a laudable attempt to provide free public access to the nation’s legal rulings that ultimately define the law. These decisions are currently public domain but they’re difficult (and expensive) to access. This is a good idea.

I can’t help but wonder, though, what benefit the AltLaw folks think that anyone will gain through the use of their questionable “Browse All Cases” functionality.

Tufts University had a few issues with questionable articles published by the Primary Source, the campus’s conservative/libertarian magazine, over the past year. Through an internal disciplinary process, the magazine was required to provide bylines for all subsequent publications. That decision was, today, overturned and the president of the University, Lawrence Bacow, provided his thoughts on the matter.

They seem pretty coherent:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
From: OfficeOfThePresident <OfficeOfThePresident@tufts.edu>
To: TuftsCommunity <TuftsCommunity@tufts.edu>
Subject: Freedom of Expression at Tufts
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:02:27 -0400

Today, Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser ruled on an appeal
by The Primary Source of a decision by the Committee on Student Life
(http://ase.tufts.edu/undergradeducation). Specifically, Dean Glaser set
aside that part of the decision requiring The Primary Source to include
bylines on all future articles. Since Dean Glaser’s decision leaves open
other issues raised by the CSL decision, I thought I would take this
opportunity to express to the community my own views on freedom of
expression at Tufts.

First, some background: Twice last year, The Primary Source published
articles that many in this community, myself included, found incredibly
offensive. The first article, allegedly a satire of affirmative action,
suggested that African-American students admitted to Tufts were
academically unqualified. The second article, published in response to
Islamic Awareness Week, strongly implied that all Muslims were violent
and intolerant.

After the publication of the first piece, the community responded
collectively. In rallies, meetings, and pieces published in the student
press, people strongly voiced their own opinions. The editors of The
Primary Source withdrew the article and apologized.

After the publication of the second piece, I wrote a Viewpoint for The
Tufts Daily in which I strongly took issue with the substance of the
Primary Source article about Islam. Although The Primary Source had once
again offended a discrete minority within our community, I opposed any
attempt to censure or limit the publication. I repeated a statement I
have made often since coming to Tufts: The appropriate response to
offensive speech is more speech, not less.

Following publication of the second article, a student organization and
an individual student petitioned the Committee on Student Life,
asserting they were harassed by the publication of the two articles. The
CSL held a hearing and ruled that The Primary Source had harassed these
students given the definition contained in our student handbook, the
Pachyderm. In response, the CSL imposed the byline policy which Dean
Glaser vacated today.

In retrospect, I think that the CSL was ill-advised to hear this case.

Universities are places where people should have the right to freely
express opinions, no matter how offensive, stupid, wrong headed,
ill-considered, or unpopular. To say that people have the right to
express such views does not mean that we condone them or that they
should go unchallenged. Rather, it means that the responsibility to
respond is shared collectively by all members of the community and not
vested in the action of any administrative body.

We modeled an appropriate response to offensive speech after The Primary
Source published its parody of a Christmas carol questioning the
academic qualifications of our minority students. This approach – people
speaking strongly and clearly in response to offensive speech – was far
more powerful than any decision of a student-faculty committee. It was
through our collective voice that we affirmed our community values.

While Tufts is a private institution and not technically bound by First
Amendment guarantees, it is my intention to govern as President as if we
were. To put it another way, I believe that students, faculty, and staff
should enjoy the same rights to freedom of expression at Tufts as they
would if they attended or worked at a public university. With the
exception of the recent CSL decision, we have operated in the past as if
such rights applied. I will work with the Board of Trustees to formalize
this policy.

During the McCarthy era, a number of university presidents in the United
States failed to defend the principle of freedom of expression.
Students, faculty, and staff paid for this equivocation as the
government sought to purge college campuses of those expressing
particularly unpopular opinions. We must be vigilant in defending
individual liberties even if it means that from time to time we must
tolerate speech that violates our standards of civility and respect.

Lawrence S. Bacow
President

I saw this car a few days ago on the streets of Los Angeles:

It’s a little bit blurry, but it’s Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) praying to a shadowed cross. Here’s a slightly different version to give you an idea of what it looks like close up.

Someone should make a sticker of Hobbes worshipping the devil at some sort of a naked midnight coven.

Chaka and Mecca are confronted by a disturbing subway salesman and his unusual wares, from episode 3:

More Downtown Clips.

Look, I understand that your name is Craig, and you want to make a list of your favorite movies, but you just can’t call it Craig’s List.  I recognize that it’s not your fault that another guy named Craig came up with the same name for his idea a few years before you, but you’re just going to have to go with something else.  Like I’ve said previously, sometimes you just need to acknowledge that the internet is smarter than you and you’ve got to move on.

The poster for the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter/Borat Sweeney Todd is amazing.

Jen thinks she’s found a way to empty a disturbing club, quoting from Taxi Driver and referencing the Beastmaster all in one short speech, from episode 3:

More Downtown Clips.

How great is the sign for this burger place in Indiana?

Via 28bytes.

Some enterprising individual spent $200 enticing users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to produce, at 2 cents a pop, images of a sheep facing left. They collected 10,000 such images and now offer them to you, the consumer, at the low low price of $20.00 per sheet of adhesive stamps featuring your preferred sheep.

Baa.

In celebration of the Princess Bride being released approximately 20 years ago, here’s a collection of images of the actors/actresses then and now. Here, for example, is Westley/Carey Elwes:

Somehow Carol Kane managed to not age in the intervening time.

Jen is exceedingly upset about the advance of trendy hipster culture and slips into Planet of the Apes parody, from episode 3.

I should currently be airborne on an Aer Lingus flight towards Ireland. I’ve post-dated this, and a series of blog posts, so I will appear to be here over the next ten days. I, in fact, will not be. Currently I’m probably watching, for the second time, Shrek the Third. Pity me.

To get everyone in the mood for my flight, here’s an exciting old ad from Aer Lingus showing how their flight staff can magically transform you from one type of person into another, for no clear reason. I hope I get to be a hippie!

The previous post reminded me that I wanted to start a blog dedicated to the unnecessary use of quotation marks (or “scare quotes”) in public signage and general communication. This was a funny and easy idea, and would have been amusing. You can tell all of this, of course, because somebody else thought of it several year ago. (Somebody else bough ScareQuotes.com for their own nefarious needs.)

The internet consistently ruins my sense of self-esteem by showing me that ideas that I think are original, like Pandasaurus and an alphabetocracy (a society led by those whose names come first alphabetically), have not only already been thought of, but often have already been used in British Parliament or by MySpace punks.

If you can’t beat the House of Lords or MySpace punks to the punch on a new idea, you might as well get out of the thinking game altogether.

I was sending a friend a threatening message from a serial killer when I was confronted with this unusual advice for how to enter that person’s email address:

if you can’t see @ -> press “Shift” + “2″

Haven’t we all been using the internet long enough at this point that we’re able to enter an email address into a form without having to be prompted as to the location of the @ symbol?

Also, if someone is so befuddled by their modern keyboard that they can’t handle entering the @ symbol properly, don’t you think they’d be equally befuddled by that little cross-shaped math symbol between the “Shift” and the “2″? They’ll probably hit the shift button, then the equal button (since it has the plus symbol on it), then the 2 button causing all sorts of chaos.

Man, I wish I was in town for this, it sounds like a prime photography opportunity:

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance campus safety and security Georgetown University will host a tactical emergency response drill with the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) on Thursday, August 16 from 10am-1pm. . . . Due to the drill you may see a heightened police presence on campus as well as witness teams of officers entering facilities as if responding to a real emergency. Please know that while we do anticipate sirens and loud noise associated with police activity, MPD will use no real weapons during this scenario in order to avoid the risk of unintended injuries.

No real weapons… probably a good choice. I really, really hope they’re going to mime having guns by sticking out their index fingers, holding up their thumbs, and occasionally yelling “bang!”

This webpage freaks me out.