Page Six wins Nickname of the Month - I nearly fell off my chair laughing:

Winona "Scissorhands" Ryder wants to keep the stuff she stole from Saks Fifth Avenue...

Tipsters say she plans to auction the clothes off for charity and burnish her image in the process. Ryder is said to feel that since she has to pay Saks restitution, the duds are rightfully hers.

Winona Wants to Auction Loot [via Gawker]

An interesting late addition to the what-to-do-with-Ground-Zero proposals - build this amazing skyscraper as originally planned and designed for Manhattan by Gaudi:

...the hotel was to have been rainbow-hued in tile and marble. The hotel would have been a group of clustered towers, of reinforced concrete over steel, in Gaudi's sturdy trademark parabolic shapes

[...]

In the central tower there were to be five monumental dining rooms dedicated to five continents; each was to seat 400.

Yet another dining room on the sixth floor was to be topped by an exhibition hall, and above that was planned a theater and conference room.

Atop that was to be a cathedral-like 375-foot-high space honoring all the American presidents, in a hall decorated with stained glass windows, mosaics and frescos.

The starlike top, which Matamala said was called the sphere of all space, would have afforded a panoramic view...

Postmodern? In a Manner of Speaking [New York Times]

Flash put to good use: over-the-top anime. In this case for Kikkoman Sauce, although I'm more of a WorcestershireZilla supporter myself. Be sure to check out the 'Song of Foolish Monsters' too.

Fight Kikkoman!

Whilst walking through my old college in London the other week, I spotted this van:

Robotic Demolition! Sawing! Chasing! Crunching! I really want this job!

It seems that the RIAA just can't secure their site - the Register claims that they've been haX0red yet again!

Reader reports are flooding in that the RIAA.org has been defaced - again. At time of writing, the site appears to be down, And several readers have been kind enough to include screen grabs, showing that the front page today carried the following message:

RIAA - 0wn3d by....
;p
oooh riaa want's to hack Filesharing Users / Servers ? - better lern to secure your own server...
Sorry Admin - had to deactivate ur accounts - they'll be reactivated after 2 hours

RIAA Defaced - again! [The Register]

Mr. President:

My idea is that the whole "Homeland Defense" thing is too cost-ineffective to be plausible. The lifetime cost of, for example, preventing each airplane-crash fatality will be the order of $100,000,000—and we could save a thousand times as many lives at the same cost by various simple public-health measures.

Conclusion: what we really need is a "Homeland Arithmetic" reorganization.

Yours truly,

Marvin Minsky

Homeland Arithmetic [Via Kottke]

"The Royal Tit-Watching (Ornithological) Society of Britain is the oldest of the British Tit-Watching Societies. The society was formed in 1824, by Lord Roylott of Stoke Moran, Surrey. Lord Roylott was himself a distinguished ornithologist, and author of 'A Comparison Of The Short-Distance Migratory Patterns of the Blue, Long-Tailed & Bearded Tits' - a book which Sir Charles Darwin acknowledged was "of immense importance in the formation of my theory of natural selection."

And their website? www.nice-tits.org

In the wake of Enron, Worldcom et al. and the renewed idea that corporate financial reporting should actually be truthful, Marc Kasky has sued Nike for false advertising (really! I was amazed it was apparently against the law too):

While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation.

Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, "The check is in the mail," or, "That looks great on you," then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.

Now Corporations Claim The "Right to Lie" [via Kottke]

Although we didn't get into much of a confrontation inside the $cientology compound, the people there were undeniably creepy. They were all too-much-eye-contact and helpful-on-the-verge-of-intrusive. Our maid was Beatrice from Hungary; most of the low-level staff seemed eastern-European. They were very eager to please. We had Beatrice's pager number in case we needed anything - it seemed like she was on call 24/7 for our every need. She showed us laboriously how to use everything in the room including the TV and explained that since it was cable we might see things we wouldn't normally expect to see in a church (LRH propaganda perhaps?)

What was extra creepy was that we were asked by three different sets of people on the way in to confirm that it was just the two of us staying in our room - Susan thought this was suspicious too - like they wanted to be sure that if they killed us both then they'd be done.

When we mistakenly got out of the elevator on the second floor there was a room full of identically uniformed people fussing over papers and a large sign saying 'Shhh!, Auditing In Progress'.

Downstairs there were placards offering courses on 'How to talk to your friends about $cientology', 'How to spot a ruin', as well as 'Take the Purification Rundown!'

Anytime we strayed from the straight and narrow there always seemed to be a crisp-shirted attendant on hand 'Can I help you with anything?' We also couldn't help noticing the cameras watching each elevator door.

Inside our room there was no Gideon Bible - only two weighty tomes of $cientology. The first expounded the miraculous life of L Ron Hubbard himself, and his exploration of the mind, and the second was a book of services including 'Group Training Sessions'. I was dispppointed to find that the wedding service came straight from this book, with the normal legal service tacked on the end. In situ this service wasn't as unusual as the rest of the group services included, which mostly seemed to be endless repetitions of questions laid out over and over again in different permutations. Largely, they consisted of simple repetitive instructions from the minister repeated over and over for pages at a time along the lines of:

Visualise the left wall of the room

Visualise the right wall of the room

Visualise the left wall of the room

Visuallise the right wall of the room

Visualise the left wall of the room

Visuallise the right wall of the room

Are we in a room?

Are we in a room?

Are we in a room?

Are we in a room?

Can you see the room?

Grasp the left had side of your chair

Grasp the right hand side of your chair

Do you have a left foot?

Do you have a right foot?

Have a head

Have a head

Have a head

Have a head

Have a head

Be

Be

Be

Be

...except each item was repeated much, much more. It was certainly good enough to send me straight to sleep.

Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) relates his latest run-in with Airport Security - being famous, he wasn't just thrown in jail:

Last Thursday I was flying to LA on the Midnight flight. I went through security my usual sour stuff. I beeped, of course, and was shuttled to the "toss-em" line. A security guy came over. I assumed the position. I had a button up shirt on that was untucked. He reached around while he was behind me and grabbed around my front pocket. I guess he was going for my flashlight, but the area could have loosely been called "crotch." I said, "You have to ask me before you touch me or it's assault."

He said, "Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want."

I said that wasn't true. I say that I have the option of saying no and not flying. He said, "Are you going to let me search you, or do I just throw you out?"

I said, "Finish up, and then call the police please."

Federal V.I.P. Penn [via Boing Boing]

This is by no means his first encounter; he previously wrote about this handy travel tip while carrying his Bill of Rights, Security Edition cards:

I set off the metal detector and then used another trick of mine of walking over to the person wanding and saying, "If I didn't set off the detector where do I go?" and they just dismiss me and save me some time.

Security Edition Penn

As early as 1991 he was clearly not going to play along with the charade:

All they ask you to do at security is to turn on the laptop and show something on the screen. They just want to see it print something to the screen (We all know that a bomb with a laptop taped on top of it could print something on it's screen but that's not important now). That's all they want to see, something on the screen. So let's give them something on the screen. Add this to your autoexec.bat after it's loaded everything else:

echo READY

echo ARMING . . .

echo ARMED

echo 0:17:00 UNTIL DETONATION

Go ahead, do it.

A Good Idea That You Might Go To Prison For

I think the above image says it all...

We spent New Year's Eve at a party overlooking the Hollywood hills, and still managed to get up in time for the wedding the following morning.

I was looking forward to the ceremony. Since the bride was Mormon/Jewish and the groom's parents both $cientologists, it was going to be an extremely interesting mixed affair.

In the end, there were candles and wine, readings and rings and vows; all of which were very tasteful and beautiful. Clearly they were unable to reach a consensus on which prophet or supreme being to obey, so they avoided them all, a bit like the whole mealy-mouthed mish-mash 'happy holidays' greeting that people over here use this time of year.

There was nary a single mention of Thetans, Xenu, The Sea Org or an invitation to a free 'personality' test. In fact the only time I heard $cientology mentioned was when I overheard some old dears saying they were pressured into finding out more whilst waiting in line for the bathroom.

I was most disappointed. The only conversation that came anywhere near a disagreement came when I foolishly launched into an explanation of how I'm working on Evangelistic Atheism: "Verily, don't believe in anything! And now go forth and tell all those other people not to believe in anything either" (I've not quite perfected it, as you can tell.) The people I was explaining this too turned out to be a Jew and an ex-Buddhist turned Catholic (whom I could no longer look at without hearing the words of John Cleese: "He IS the messiah, and I should know, I've followed a few"). Luckily I was able to pass the baton to the Catholic woman who by then was trying to explain Transubstantiation to the Jewish woman ("But of course it's only bread and wine all along, surely?")

I did see Isaac "Chef" Hayes though, so I felt better about the whole 'Celebrity' part.