Grapevine Fires

Great new Death Cab video - love the animation! (found on BoingBoing)

Coulter v. Franken

Franken 1, Coulter 0
Via BoingBoing:

Comment Snob Plug-In

New Firefox plug-in "comment snob" filters out misspelled, profane, poorly capitalized YouTube comments. If only they would make a plug-in for the entire internet!

Capitalism Stole My Virginity

(from Boing Boing)

Olympic logo cops enforce stupid rules with masking tape

Olympic logo police workers are tasked with vigilantly going around all facilities and putting masking tape over the logos for any product where the company is not an official sponsor.

7 To ensure that only the companies that pay millions of dollars to be official Olympic sponsors enjoy the benefits of exposure in Olympic venues, organizers have covered the trademarks of nonsponsors with thousands of little swatches of tape.

In media centers, dormitories and arena bathrooms, pieces of tape cover logos of fire extinguishers, light switches, thermostats, bedroom night tables, soap dispensers and urinals. The Taiden Industrial translation headsets in a large conference room have had their logos covered, as have the American Standard faucets in the bathrooms nearby, and the ThyssenKrupp escalators down the hall.

At the Athens games, people wearing logoed t-shirts were asked to remove them or turn them inside-out before entering the stadia. Nothing says "incorruptible international competition" like a bunch of bullshit rules about what your t-shirt is allowed to say and whether an elevator can display its manufacturer's mark. Ignore That Logo Under the Tape!

Bizarre News Story Of The Day

A cloned dog, a Mormon in mink-lined handcuffs and a tantalising mystery

found on: BoingBoing

Sometime Around Midnight

Ok...so the six barking dogs next door to me don't look nearly as bad after seeing this story and video posted on BoingBoing today (below). Click here for the LAWeekly full story.

Rat-owning animal-hoarding rapture-obsessed twin elderly ladies versus the family next door

Posted by Cory Doctorow, August 2, 2008 2:17 AM | permalink

The LA Weekly has a long, gruesome feature about a dispute between neighbors in the affluent area of Pacific Palisades. It all starts when a young family moved into an expensive little bungalow and discovered that the elderly twin ladies next door were animal hoarders who'd raised tens of thousands of rats. Then it gets interesting, as it transpires that pretty much everyone -- the realtor, the town, the former owner -- all knew about the rats and had not bothered to mention it to the new owners.

When he crept closer, the odor — “a urine stench” — was “unbearable.” By the end of their first long weekend in the Palisades, Liz was stressed out, peering at shadows. The more she peered, the more rats she saw. Standing in her own master bedroom, she found herself at eye level with a group of rats who clearly had a routine, slipping methodically in and out of drains and cracks on her neighbors’ outside wall.

She saw three rats squeeze out of a roof drain in a precision, shoulder-to-shoulder group, Ratatouille-style. Another rat pack traveled along the dusty, reeking hedge on the property line. The hedge was a rat highway, and it swayed under its commuters’ weight.

Liz knocked on her neighbors’ rotting front door, but no one answered. They soon learned from other neighbors that the owners were 78-year-old twins Margaret and Marjorie Barthel, who rarely left the house — and never at the same time. When one of them did go out (and many people could not tell them apart), she wore heavy clothes, a wide-brimmed hat and large glasses as she pushed a shopping basket from Ralphs. It was always filled with large bags — of dog food. They haven’t owned dogs for years.