We are not afraid

• |

I've been feeling really impatient with citizens' media all day today.  The early cell phone shots from London seemed few and far between among the people taking pictures of their TVs.  The bloggers getting the most attention seemed to be simply repeating what was on the mainstream media.  And as stories started to come out about how neat it is that and can participate in news gathering, I couldn't help thinking, "Aren't we past this?  Didn't we already tell this story during the elections and the tsunami and the war protests and the Florida hurricanes and basically every news event that's happened to a group of people in the last couple of years?  Aren't citizens' contributions a given?"  But helped me gain a little perspective.  I too have an unopened newspaper sitting on my table.  While it may now be standard operating procedure for regular people to be part of the news gathering experience, it's important to have the patience to realize how far we've come in a very short time.

(And by the way, patience is also important when it comes to evaluating citizens' contributions.  As the article above points out, "It remains to be seen whether the best images were even on the Internet yet. Many of the best photos and video from the Asian tsunami disaster came days or weeks later.")

Additional 7/7 links:

• also has a London round-up
• is a nice tool for following blog commentary on big stories.
• Christopher Hitchens:

Speaking of Iraq... Commuter Click: (It's about the almost $9 billion dollars in Iraq aid that just kind of disappeared.)

"The blanket coverage of London terrorism is a terrible blow to Nancy Grace, Arubans, meteorologists, shark specialists, sexual predator experts, Tom Cruise, creationists, anti-sodomites and all other culture warriors and whackball fear-mongers who until now have owned the media."  it's all I can do to keep from excerpting the whole thing.

A bigger list of

-- A serious consideration of an estimable discography — because it’s time

-- Well, that makes sense.

Video of the Day: 

As if the Valerie Plame case wasn't complicated enough with the parts that we don't know, it's only going to be more confusing if people start .

?  After searching a bit I found .

-- LiveJournal blogware allows people to display an icon on their blog declaring their emotional state.  This site counts up all those icons to graph the general mood of the community.

is definitely upon us.

.  Not a hoax...

...He could do with a special .

in three minutes.

-- The folks at the Microsoft mothership recently announced that they're going to make RSS an important part of new software, including the new version of Internet Explorer.  What this means is that RSS is about to go as mainstream as it can get.  In case you've been putting off figuring out what it's about, this article may be helpful.  (I use Bloglines.)

• |

There's a lot of blog coverage of the events in London this morning, much of it an aggregation of what is being reported by mainstream news outlets.  No doubt you're finding a lot of live blogging on your own.  This is some of what I clicked:

• Some of the are polluted with shots of TV screens and other stuff, so it's hard to find a pure stream of .
• will be one of the more famous images to come from this.
• Compelling coverage from .
• has extensive link coverage including a significant covering the event.
• plotted on their subway map.
• I clicked a lot from
• Pondering the

• |

Blog Herald has a story of a , but they seriously bury the lead.  What makes the story a big deal is that this particular blogger has sent the country into a tizzy with her bawdy, immodest posts and photos (a must see/read, and safe for work).  The coverage in English language Chinese media is pretty funny.  See and for one perspective, and for a less approving perspective.  As I poked around for more I found with a China media round-up including a link to a somewhat frank explanation of the phenomenon from .

Speaking of China:  "Hackers, apparently Chinese, worked their way into the website of a Chinese government Internet security firm, and ."

Speaking of learning about Asia, here are interesting but .

Video of the Day:    (This is on a university server, so hopefully bandwidth won't be a problem.  If it is, I can try to put it on Putfile or something.)

Speaking of... um... dance...  You don't have to watch all of this if you're not into the metal scene, but in case you're curious about what those crazy kids are into these days, this is .  As you may or may not be able to hear the performer say, remember the scene in Bravehart when the two armies ran full speed at each other into battle?

It's interesting to see how much differently the show Lost is .

, but really impressive to see the community rally to support this blogger.  This side of blogging isn't often mentioned in articles about blogging.  UPDATE:    Well, that side of blogging has certainly been mentioned.  Tsk.  (Thanks to readers Sam Hall and John from Austin.)

-- Like "who's on first" with blonde cable news anchors.  (I don't know them either, but it's still funny.)

Things get a little personal for even though the rules of the forum state, "It's fine to disagree with one another's opinions, but please attack ideas, not people."  This is the kind of thing that slows the acceptance of citizen media in spite of we keep seeing.

In his counter argument to the claim that war supporters should be willing to serve in the war or sacrifice a family member to it, highlights, among other things, an interesting point I hadn't heard before.  The military recruitment efforts are hampered by the fact that so many Americans are not fit enough or are too fat to pass entrance requirements, regardless of willingness to join.  (As is my way, I blurted this out to the cube farm here and our health editor who sits a couple cubes away pointed out that as well.  I must have missed it.

-- Some carnivals (blog round-ups on a common theme) have been running for over a hundred weeks, so it's exciting to see one at its beginning.  "The Carnival of Liberty’s goal is to promote blogging and thinking about liberty and freedom. How to advance the cause, where there are problems, what we can do, who’s saying what, historical trends and ideas, liberty in the news, and more."

Speaking of tension at church, the question of whether a church is is a hot one among some Canadian blogs.

" is a photomosaic of the famous painting 'Starry Night'. The image is made with over 210.000 tiny photographs and a total size of over 1.500.000.000 points."  A little heavy so loading takes patience.

Flash animation making fun of the idea of being workshopped in the UK.  Some impressive rhyming.

AOL has you may have missed.

" once you've eliminated all the screaming and running for your lives and whatnot that come with a real emergency."

Map corner:

• -- We've seen this idea before and maybe even in a more attractive way.  What strikes me is how it changes the presentation of news from being theme based (what page of which section) to geography based.  I wonder how extensively that will be incorporated in the future.
• overlays a smaller street map over the satellite view.
• How about ?  Is there no end??  (Update:  This does work.  All the cameras are off because of the terror attack.)
• : A ten minute presentation illustrates the growth of the U.S. from the original colonies.

Ever heard of ?  It takes twelve hours and makes a concentrated syrup that you're then meant to mix with hot water.  I'm not tossing my French press any time soon, but I'd try it if it was on the menu.

.  Now I wish I had a NYC2012 t-shirt.

.

Seeeeeriously .  Ooohhh the flashbacks... I need to sit down.

What is ?  it's mindblowing 3-D without the glasses.

Speaking of future technology, is ?  It's a P2P client that hides who you are.-- actually hides who everyone is.  The beta is out there but I'm going to wait until I hear more about it before I try it.

.  I've seen these around the city already.  It's based on the started by Shepard Fairey.  (and by the way, this blog has a lot of good stuff).

free eBook

offers advice on how not to totally screw up pitching a link to a blogger.

We've seen stories of role playing game money being sold for real money, so does have a ring of truth to it.  The new element here is that people are basically running sweat shops to earn them virtual money to sell for real money.  That is, real poor people earning lots of fake money so a real not-poor person can make real money to pay the real poor people very little real money.

PBS with a close look at

"The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa ."

paints an interesting picture of what may be going on with the Plame investigation -- although if it's this complicated, I have zero faith that most folks will bother to follow it and it'll end up a dead story except to historians and conspiracy buffs.

Speaking of conspiracies, on the Huffington Post blog is a good read.  This one's a parody, and a good one.

Speaking of Rove related conspiracy theories, more than a few bloggers are reporting rumors about .  Clicked isn't a rumor blog and I don't really break news here, so I'm perfectly happy to wait and see what happens rather than make a mess of guessing at things I don't know anything about.  What's interesting to me instead is how all of these bloggers are being tipped by "sources" to the same thing.  Will we look back on this as the story when the spin doctors finally learned how to use blogs as a tool?  Looking at all the bloggers who are reporting the same leaks, it sure looks like an organized campaign.  --Or else it's the biggest open secret in Washington, which I guess is entirely possible.

Engadget throws some cold water on this week's growing .

: The threat of unwanted software programs is changing the way people use the Internet.

• July 7, 2005 |

All mail, with a few comments from me.

Will,
The hot dog lady was okay, but the header on the was better!
Kate

Will's preface:  Looks like there was a lot of publicity around the Rubber Johnny video (yesterday's video of the day) because folks found links from all over:

Found this on the strange video you blogged today:   Freaky, but you can't stop watching.
DB

please,
searched from that clip for the text from one if its images:
"black dog rsa"

and 70 others
regards,
dlr

As you may have found out, this rather disturbing bit of video art was first seen, albeit very briefly, just on the Warp Records site just before Aphex Twin released the album 'Drukus.' The creature can be heard gurgling the word 'aphex' at one point. I was wondering if there was more than that clip.
-KMontgomery

You can find info for this at [].
Scott

Hi there-
Your video of the day, it appears to have come from .  There's a bit more of an explanation there.
-Adam Bancroft

Hi again-
The real life transformer is fake, there was even a book “segment” in Motor Trend, which I have somewhere, if you’d like it. A discussion and .
Want to see a real car transform (well, still CG, and not as convincing as the Mini)? New beetle transformer, .
-Adam Bancroft

Hi Will.  The "Transformer" video you clicked was part of a snazzy viral-ad campaign launched by the folks who make the Cooper Mini.  The campaign took place a year or more ago.

Magazines like Rolling Stone contained a small booklet with excerpts from an "upcoming novel" about a reporter investigating an English scientist who has made. in secret, benevolent machines that can sense auto accidents before they happen and stop them (as seen in the video).  The booklet contained URLs leading to a  page that looked convincingly like a university scientist's home page (plain, to-the-point, html). 

I was very surprised that several of my friends thought the whole thing was real, despite the "novel" being full of references about Mini's being "over-engineered," (whatever that means).
Take care,
-Davin

Will replies:  I knew it was a hoax when I saw the video of it stopping a moving car.  That and the fact that I couldn't find a video of it transforming.  Interesting to learn that it was an ad campaign.  A successful one I'd guess.

Will (I assume),
I read your blog as time permits. I find it quite entertaining and interesting.

a while back while doing research on the transatlantic telephone cables.  I found it very interesting.  But I'm left thinking "Is this some sort of elaborate prank!?"  I'm not quite sure what to make of it.  Maybe you could make some more sense of it.

I thought you might like to add it to your blog.

If you decide not to it add it to your blog, I still hope that you find it interesting, as I did.
-Dave Kennedy

Will replies:  Dave, yes, 'tis I.  Interesting indeed.  I was really excited about it at first and was only a little suspicious at how certain they were of the opening date, which is closer than the completion date for the Freedom Tower, so that seemed off.  Anyway, then I saw the timeline and the part about it starting back during WWII and I knew it was false.  Good one though.  Real convincing.  I wonder if this, like the transformer site, has a product of some kind attached to it.

Thanks for the link to the trailer for yokai yokoku.  It reminded me a lot of the trailer for but it looks like they were made by the same company-- so I guess that explains the similarity.  Or maybe it is because I don't understand what they are saying so I pay more attention to the way it sounds.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting how much the two trailers 'sound'
alike.
Thanks,
Ron

A reader mentioned SendThemBack.net as a web page about direct mail.

Unfortunately for the author’s plan, the direct mail company doesn’t actually have to pay for envelopes sent back with extraneous material in them.  Not a penny of it.  Why?  Postal regulations on what the mailer has to pay for. 

The regulations were put in place because of people gluing return mail forms to bricks and sending those.  (Think about it: If that guy’s plan worked, why would you limit yourself to packing junk mail in an envelope?  If you wanted to “get revenge on a marketing company”, you could stick the return postage form to a Mac truck and make them pay the postage for that.  Doesn’t work.)

If you really want to fight direct mail, get yourself on the .  Most direct mail lists come from companies like Equifax and Experian, and putting yourself on their do-not-mail lists will get you off of most mailing lists.

Sending return mail back with extra junk in it just raises the cost of regular postage (since the post office ends up eating the cost of shipping).  It doesn’t do anything to stop direct mail.  Putting yourself on the correct do-not-mail lists works.  (Companies that continue to mail to you after you have asked them to cease are liable for serious criminal and civil charges, up to possible prosecution for criminal trespass in a few cases.  The problem is that asking one company to stop mailing to you doesn’t stop 10-million other companies from mailing to you.  Getting yourself off the lists at the source – DMA, Equifax, Experian, et al – actually works.)
-Gus

P.S.: I’m not a lawyer, don’t assume what I wrote here is legal advice.  Do the research yourself or, if it matters that much to you, get a lawyer to look at your situation.

Will replies:  Gus, Lawyer or not, that sounds like good advice.

Greetings,
This is to let you know that this weeks installment of medical bloggy goodness is up at [].
Happy reading!
Tim

Re: 'Continuous partial attention'
There is nothing new or surprising about this concept.  All brains operate this way.  A brain that doesn't operate this way can only focus on one thing at a time, and can't notice the predator about to eat it.
Successfully applying it to technology just means our brain still works the same when using technology as it did when we were digging grubs out of a dead tree while keeping an eye out for big animals with big teeth. Thankfully, pagers, call phones and pop-up ads do not have big teeth, and so we can successfully learn to apply less attention to them and relieve our attentional burn out.
Dennis McClain-Furmanski PhD
(experimental psychology)
Arlington TX
(who owns no pager or cell phone)

Will clarifies:  Thanks Dennis for your insight.  I think they were talking more about a philosophical/cultural paradigm than actual brain function.  --although it's interesting to think of the parallels between primitive and modern multitasking.

Will,
You wrote about my Cat Brain Video blog entry, thanks.  But is FAR more important and will have a major impact in science.
Thanks,
Chris.

Suggestion, check out the technology enabling profiling ranking, not only blogs, but stories-of-interest on .
-Charlie

Will replies:  As a matter of fact I was there just the other day to look at his list of milbloggers.

Hi there,
Love your work. Clicked is great.
You probably get sick of people sending you URLs of favorite blogs, but thought I'd pass along.
Guy supposedly works for a big magazine (he sure can write like he does). Very funny, but also touching.
His latest entries about nearly being shot by his father had me in tears.
Anyway, keep up the great work and enjoy.
-Lori

Will adds:  The "nearly being shot" story she refers to is .  I read the whole thing in spite of myself.

Hi Will...when will you get your very own RSS feed so we can all know the minute you post anything new?!
Fay

Will replies:  Hi Fay, I think I could work that out, especially now that our tech team is not tied up in the new site design.  Something I've been trying to work out is how I could post the links as I click them rather than as one big post.  The main obstacle is that I need to put a headline on the page to show up in the various boxes around the site and I'm not sure I have the mental energy to come up with a new headline every time.  The reason this is relevant to your question is that if I end up posting a few times a day, an RSS feed would be that much more handy to have.  Anyway, I'm working on it.

• |

Folks are saying of the recently arrested suspect in the .  Even if it's not, it's pretty creepy.  "My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die."  This is the second time we've been able to look at the blog of a person arrested by police in connection with a missing person.  When will we see our first blog crime fighters?

Speaking of high profile crimes and blogs, a friend of Columbine shooters Harris and Klebold writes about .

, the old guys in the balcony from the Muppets review movies on Movies.com.  I can't help but think they'd be heckling themselves if they were watching this.

Video of the Day:  ?  This might be too weird for some folks, but in this case I think it's a good thing.  Anyone have any idea where it came from?

.

Speaking of which, just when NASA thought they had taken all the variables into account in planning their comment Deep Impact mission, they forgot poor Marina Bai and her .

Alternate Video of the Day:  Boing Boing brings us:

Commuter Click:  "" turns off a lot of younger women. Is it time to retire the word -- or reclaim it?

Speaking of feminism, Capitol Buzz is of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's new book.

While I keep reading about how the nominating of a new Supreme Court justice could have on the Republican party, I was interested to read about a potentially divisive effect among liberals.

-- How come China gets the cool Coke commercial?

Speaking of cool stuff in Asia, looks fun.  I wonder what it's about.  (.)

Step on into the freak show tent.  No children allowed.

• Is this guy a or is this a good old fashioned magic trick?  Note:  It's video of a man having a sword put right through his body.
• Also in the carnival freak department is this site proving that anything can be taken a little farther even if you think you've seen it all.  Note:  This is weird and kind of gross, but basically safe for work, but OTHER PARTS OF THE SITE ARE NOT.

You don't hear about them much because linking isn't what they're about, but knitting blogs are huge.  So it's no surprise to see a lot of links to the new issue of .  (It's the man issue.)

"Oooh ahhh" gadget of the day, wooden iPod, and .

.  It's been a while since I've been in a McDonalds, but I've certainly had my experiences with corporate uniforms and I can't imagine ever feeling cool in one.  Not mentioned, who would have to pay for a Tommy Hilfiger McDonalds uniform?

The guy who coined the term 'Weblog' never made a dime on it and .  But .  You wanna get lost in some (mostly news) links?  This is a good place for it.

African bloggers with the idea of Live8.

How'd you like to have your driving controlled from outer space?  Sounds almost like a luxury.  How about having your driving policed from outer space?  .

Perhaps in relation to the falling lady we saw last week, bloggers are pointing to this "" animation of a creepy rubbery guy who follows your cursor.

speculates about an answer to a question I've been wondering.  "What Does the Government Really Want from Miller and Cooper?"  .

Speaking of Josh Marshall, he has seriously Representative Duke Cunningham.

If you could choose between everything working out well in Iraq and the war never having been started in the first place, ?  (This essay also has some interesting insights into what it's like being a guest on cable news.)

-- A nice way of displaying which countries you've visited and which you'd like to visit.  But....

The map tool of the day definitely goes to .  Did you ever spend the day walking and wonder how far you'd gone?  The Gmaps Pedometer lets you retrace your steps and measure the distance -and it's super easy to use.

.

is meant to tell you what's going on with your body by reading its state and symptoms.  One example that applies to me is .  However, I already eat lots of everything on their recommended list to fix the problem, so I'm feeling a little cheated.  Still a fun site for hypochondriacs who think everything they feel is a symptom of a larger problem that needs treatment.

Complete collection of .

what's going to be popular, post-filters "channel consumer behavior and amplify it, rather than trying to predict it."  By definition, Clicked is a post-filter.

Do you mooch off someone else's wifi signal?  Now there's a service by which you can .

Speaking of mooching wifi, there's a now.

New racing video game is so realistic its .

" is the project in which Gastón Caba offers his Ping Pong characters in order to be recreated by some of his favourites illustrators."  To be honest, I don't much care for the Ping Pong characters, but what's cool about this site is that you can click on the links to the sites of participating illustrators and there's a lot of neat things to be found there.

" is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world."

Some amazing photos from

Folks are linking to this as a .  I'm not sure what recent development has brought it to light.  Naturally, the thing you want to see is it turn from a car to a robot, but I don't see that demonstrated anywhere.  BUT... you must check out the car stopping test video.  Whether this is a hoax or not, that's cool.

A quick trip to the mailbag:

Will
The Iraq casualty count map page is macabre and fascinating. Focusing on the West and letting it work until it overloaded, noticed that no fatalities showed in Montana or New Mexico. Curious, I ran their totals against populations and found, like a Keno board in Vegas, that fatalities there evened up to where the one percent of the US population in those states eventually became one percent of the causalities. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be a soldier in Iraq; like one of those Keno squares, waiting to light up when your number is decided by fate.
Dave

Will,
Are you on to something that no one else is?  I was viewing the representations on a US map of the deaths in Iraq.
Is this factual?  If so, please do more on it!!!
Could it be that the Red States are so supportive of the war because they are not the ones dying in it?
Pat Rowe

Dear Dave and Pat,
Here's another link that I've seen around today that shows , plotted on a map of the U.S.  The death do seem to correspond pretty closely with general population distribution.  I'm not sure how the Red State theory holds up, but you're definitely not alone in thinking that supporters of the war should be .
Cheers,
Will

• |

--  That's shooting "with," not shooting "from," which would probably be even cooler.

As long as you're looking up tonight, see if you can spot .  (I'm not sure there's anything to see still, but my colleagues Lori and Alan have got of the event going on in our Space section.

uses a hydrogen fuel generating launch system to generate enough lift to blast these rockets up to 200 feet in the air.

-- This looks like such a fun idea to do with kids I can't even stand it.

, () has thrown the doors open on speculation about Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame case.  Though he didn't exactly give the scoop to the Huffington Post, I think this is the kind of thing they had in mind when they launched this blog.

-- Can you resist the power of the yawn?

I think , who has been blogging for about a month, is about to get his .

Some guy took a of 9 meters of the inside of his G.I. tract

Related?:  -- Black-conscious hip-hop deals with an overwhelmingly white live audience

Run out of reading material this weekend?  is now being offered for free (ignore the $16 at the top of the page.)

I've never heard that a takes the hurt out of a sunburn, but I'm in a position to test it.  Note: Blogs aren't doctors.

:  Longstanding mystery solved

tracks movie contests and giveaways so you can be one of those sneak-preview people.

from the Web.  The short answer is that you already do because your computer loads it into your temporary internet files folder, so you just move it from there and open it using your Internet browser.

Friday we clicked free Latin lessons.  If that's a bit too much for you, you can also just look up .

Advice on preparing and protecting yourself

I love the idea of a and I think it's really neat that someone actually came up with one, but like the more efficient keyboard, I just don't think I can bother to learn a new system when the old slow one is really working pretty well for me.  (How is this different from shorthand?)

-- This is not a new link, and I'm not sure how it ended up drifting onto my radar, but if you're still learning it's a handy page.

-- actually Blogging 1.0 continued.  A look at how blogs have exploded in readership in the last 5 months, with lots of charts showing how blog traffic rivals that of established media.

, mapped on the U.S. 30 at a time.  I think these are just deaths.  I never made it to the end because it got too heavy for my machine, but it's an interesting way to see the people from your area who died in Iraq.

Family Guy fans are happy to play with the Family Guy multimedia archive.

I clicked a few links about building radios today that reminded me of the old kits my father used to build when he was a kid.  stood out, however.  I didn't realize it, but if I understand what they're talking about, some folks are looking to mini FM transmitters for their iPods to play the songs on the stereo or particularly in the car.  In this link Doc talks about the strength of FM signals and how to boost the signal from a little transmitter.  So (again, if I'm understand this correctly) imagine you have songs on your iPod that you want to hear in your car.  With your cigarette lighter as power, you plug your iPod into a transmitter and tune in your songs on your radio.

brings us news of the U.S. signing a major 10 year defense pact with India.  The U.S. and India have so many ties and so much in common, it's always surprised me that we don't hear more about the two working together.

Though it's become the popular understanding that Iraq was not connected to 9/11, there are a good number of people who still make that argument.  does a good job of summing up the elements of the case.

-- This is another one of those stories that reminds me of how little I understand the underpinnings of the Internet.  It's about who owns the Web's root servers.

"" -- That's the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling on file-sharing technologies, says Creative Commons chair and law prof Larry Lessig

-- I'm almost positive this is not a parody.  It makes sense that some people would have a problem with this.

-- Sign, sign, everywhere a sign... literally.  It can be hard to open your eyes and not have a sign in your field of view.  Actually, my complaint is that it can be hard to look and not have a car in my field of view.  Cars are so ugly, and it seems like they're always in the way.

aims to be the Web’s most complete source of information on San Francisco taquerias.

• |

The FEC/blog issue as I understand it (and I trust someone will write in if I'm missing something) is that blogs have value and therefore if they give support to political candidates they are essentially making a political donation.  If that's the case then the FCC wants to be able to regulate them.  What some bloggers are not objecting to is that there is a "media exemption" - a loophole that doesn't subject things like online magazines to the same regulations.  So now, everywhere I click I'm finding bloggers the .  (The idea is that if you don't call yourself a blog, you won't be subject to blog regulations.  What's the difference after all?)

"Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behavior."  That sentence actually makes sense if you .  It's a little awkward because it's someone's notes from a conference, not a proper essay, but the notes are pretty extensive.  And you'll agree that this is a really profound sentence:  "The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus."

The new Freedom Tower gets in today's New York Times:

"There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one."  , an entrepreneurship blog.

.

  In this case they mean after the Grokster decision from the Supreme Court.  The answer seems to lie in how the legal uses of the software stack up against the illegal uses, but there's a lot of discussion here, so I can't really sum it up in a sentence like that.

(A quicktime video will start playing automatically.)  Imagine if you mixed an old fashioned computer printer with a paint roller.  Will graffiti artists of the future program their whole piece into a single roller and just run up and roll a wall?

-- The host site looks pretty jokey, so I think this is a satire.  And heck, I didn't think those buttons were even plugged in, I thought it was just something to keep you busy while waiting for the light to change.

(Also found on that site, .)

Last time I heard about was during the presidential debates.  Now they have a factcheck of President Bush's recent speech.

Who needs terrorists when we have simple rainstorms and our own befouling of the earth ?

Remember the guy who did the DJ scratching to the Star Wars theme?  He's got a now as well.

Video of the Day:  .

-- Yes, there are photos.  Totally not worth it.  And it's weird that she keeps saying it's for her son.

A Swede who was help hostage in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to .

-- Reworded comic book frames.

, the best food idea since purple ketchup.

?  If that question has an answer, then my follow-up is why aren't they all classic?  By that I mean, why are there boring cars?

New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous,

-- "A special, free news feature in Science explores 125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century; accompanying the feature are several online extras including a reader's forum on the big questions."  This is bigger than a commuter click.  Hopefully the blogosphere will begin to point out the more interesting ones.

thinks Tom Cruise and his recent ranting is dangerous and shouldn't be entertained by the media.  I'd be more inclined to agree with Drum if I hadn't see our letters to the editor.  Almost to a letter, no one is buying what Cruise is selling.  I read one letter supporting Cruise and it was from a karate blackbelt who said Cruise does a good job with "moves" in his movies.

  Giving a whole new meaning to social search.

NPR reports on the .  (I don't know if anyone else is calling it that, but really, the government making lists like that is scary.)

Among the results in is the conclusion that America is tired of divisiveness in Congress.  Regular readers of Clicked know that I am among those Americans.  The subject is something I think a lot about, however, because it's so difficult to extract relevant political news from irrelevant and actually damaging partisan bickering.

blog, whose research on the George Soros/baseball story was actually better and more effective than the other coverage I read, took exception to my calling the story partisan noise and was particularly bothered by the fact that I didn't think it was a story until conservatives were also chiming in.  I think he gets the last laugh because the story was on the cover of the New York Times yesterday and this has been heavily linked for days.

But to my mind, a story about Americans of all stripes criticizing divisive partisans is worth highlighting.  A story about partisans fighting with each other (over partial ownership of a baseball team no less) is not.  Whether there's something more sinister to the baseball story than simple partisanship I'll leave to you to decide.  I still can't make up my mind.

Mailbag!  Mailbag!

Dear Will,

that maybe you and your readers can help solve.

Love the blog!
-Allisa

Dear Allisa,
Thanks, I hadn't heard of that one.  The only thought idea I had that wasn't mentioned in the pages was to check the for possible public art projects.  No luck.
Yours,
Will

Here's something that might catch your fancy:

(a Web site devoted to fighting Direct Mail).

Keep up the great work (I've got about a dozen windows open that were in your last post)!
-George

Dear George,
I know a lot of spam haters who would really love this idea.  I wonder what the Post Office thinks of it.  I guess it makes them money in the end.
Cheers,
Will

Did you know that they have eBay categories for "Weird Stuff"?  They break them down as follows:

Slightly Unusual
Really Weird, and
Totally Bizarre

It's fun just to browse through this category.  For example, one eBayer with a pretty good rating decided .

I'm going to track it jus to see if anyone actually buys it or not.

Love your column and wouldn't miss it
- Deb

Dear Deb,
I don't use eBay very often so I wasn't familiar with that section.  Maybe the solution to New York City's garbage disposal problems is to just auction it all off.
Regards,
Will