Monday, October 17, 2005

Linkage XV: BoingBoing Edition

I go away from the computer for a few days, and my Bloglines reader shows over fifty posts from BoingBoing. Here are five of the best:

LOTR/Warcraft Mashup - in which someone with way too much time on his hands has combined images from The Lord of the Rings films with captions from the very popular game, The World of Warcraft.

Why Maple Leaves Have So Much Color Variation Turns out the color change protects the tree from losing too much chlorophyll in exposed conditions.

Life Hacking - Revealed! I like "life hacking" sites, which tell you how to do things and how to avoid time wasting alternatives. The New York Times covers this growing type of website.

Wal-Mart Works with The Man A High School student made a mildly anti-Bush poster as part of a class project on civil liberties. When he took it to Wal-Mart to have it reprinted, they reported it to the Secret Service, which took the poster. Just a little bit of irony here, no?

More Mashups Well, not really a mashup, but folk singer Jonathan Coulton has covered Sir Mix-a-lot's classic booty paean, "Baby Got Back". Off the chain, yo.

2 comments:

Captain GoBart said...

I am trying to track down the WalMart story. It sounds fishy to me, like an urban legend. The only sources Google came up with were progressive/left wing opinion web sites. No credible news sources have cited this incident. Seems as if The Progressive was the original source, but they are about as reliable as World Net Daily, I would guess. I emailed the school district, and perhaps will call them.

Just because we want a story to be true, (or NOT true), does not make it so.

I like the blogosphere, but there must be some independent confirmation of the facts before we leap to our conclusions. Of the 30 web sites I have visited with these links, they all quote exactly the same story. It makes me wonder.

I doubt very much that if this turned into an urban legend that you would change your opinion of POTUS, though.

Bob Ramsey said...

Right, this story lacks the kind of rigorous sourcing that, for instance, the "Islamic suicide bomber" in Oklahoma had? Or are the "independent sources" for that story, Power Line and Michelle Malkin, still pitching the story even after the local authorities have announced that there was nothing to it?

The Wal-Mart story may not be true, but it rings true because this is the kind of thing which has been done repeatedly over the last five years.

And please think that perhaps it is not because I'm unhappy with the President that I'm inclined to believe these kind of things, but rather it is because this kind of thing keeps happening that I'm unhappy with our President.