my.bicycle

Disney Rejection Letter, 1938 , originally uploaded by sim sandwich . My, how times change...

Boingo sells out, and manages to make an unfailingly BOINGOESQUE Budweiser ad: Best. Beer ad. Evar. And here's a great video for an under-appreciated album, I think it may have been their last one; I'm posting this because it's got great images of Danny in it. According to my dear friend Boneyard/Darth Bobo the rocket-riding redhead in The Gong Show post, below, is Richard Elfman - Danny's brother, and the band' manager at one point, IIRC.

The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, a staple of my adolescence, performing on The Gong Show , a staple of my childhood. ( KD Bryan )

Cheese Vader , originally uploaded by mckibillo .

From The Magazine : Radar Online : Cory Doctorow imagines a world in which Google is evil in Scroogled . “Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu “We don’t know enough about you.” —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

- Anton Chekhov (thanks, lauren mccubbin )

APPLESEED_BEARBRICKS , originally uploaded by toysrevil2 . ... as superdeformed, modular, bear figures.

A mess of screenshots for Saints Row 2 are available . If you peer hard enough, it looks like Johnny Gat will be returning.

Jack Black has his own coffee in Japan. , originally uploaded by chronovore .

We Has Troubles , originally uploaded by benchilada .

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question - is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say 'Hey! Don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.' And we...kill those people. Ha ha ha. 'Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: it's just a ride. A...

It is sometimes said that a surprisingly tiny problem can ruin an otherwise sublime experience. A grain of sand in an oyster, a small amount of grit in some spinach, a smudge on a perfectly white wall, While nowhere near as pricey as the Bose Quiet Comfort series of headphones, I'm pretty enamored of my pair of Er-6i Isolator earphones. Unfortunately they're somewhat fragile, it turns out. After a year of heavy use, staying plugged in to my iPod while traveling and bumping around in luggage, the wires at the jack became loose. What's really stunning is that with as well as they isolate my ears, that feature just makes variation in sound quality that much more jarring and distracting. Here I was on a plane, getting ready for a 12 hour flight, and suddenly the music is cutting out in my right ear but not in my left. Wiggling the jack made it come back, but if I relaxed my hands, the position of the wire would change, and zzzap the sound would cut out again. Or cut in-and-ou...

I finished Saints Row last weekend; I think it's the first game I've ever cleared to 100% completion, and I've scored all the Xbox Live Achievements except for the online ones. Gameplay-wise, it really is the game that Rockstar should have produced as either of the sequels to GTA III . The crew at Volition managed to take what worked best in GTA III , then looked at the core actions a player engages in, driving, running, shooting, turret-gunning, managing wanted level (and divided that between law enforcement and rival gangs), item collection (cars, people, graffiti tags, and CDs) and went through all the permutations looking for compelling gameplay. I'm not sure how they managed to do it, but the difficulty curve seemed to follow a neat, flow -centric model. Though the game is not without its problems: Buggy Saints Row, The Musical

Brain-Eating Amoeba Kills Arizona Boy - CDC: Cases Are Spiking In 2007 PHOENIX -- A 14-year-old Lake Havasu boy has become the sixth victim to die nationwide this year of a microscopic organism that attacks the body through the nasal cavity, quickly eating its way to the brain. (...) "This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases." (...) The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up to the brain. People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes. Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have been effective stopping the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said. "Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two week...

( boingboing and the other michael )

(thanks, The Other Michael )