Thank you, Splendid, for posing the question on everyone’s mind (or, at least mine): what the hell happened to Komeda?

An exhibit from the American Gallery of Psychiatric Art of various prescription drug adverts from the 1960s onward. Contrast: 1997 vs. 1962.
The Firefly DVD Box Set is available for pre-order on Amazon, and has a release date of December 9. Shiny.

If you needed any more proof that no one cares if you have a Guinness World Record, I just saw the worst record ever on the television show: World’s Fastest Aerial Pencil Sharpening.11 seconds, if you care.

Has the world decided that it’s pointless to review consumer-level flatbed scanners nowadays? Just because I’m thinking of spending less than $200 CAN doesn’t mean I don’t give two shits about image quality! Not that it matters, since there are hardly any reviews period. Scanner reviews these days fall into two categories.1. Consumer magazine reviews. These are the kinds of reviews that usually say in the first couple of paragraphs, “you can think of one dpi as a pixel on your screen!” and then has to explain further what a pixel is. Another warning sign is when the kicker poses the question, “Is this the perfect scanner for the novice PC user?”No, I’m not looking for a scanner to digitize photos from my vacation with the kids to send to grandma. I’m looking for a scanner that will faithfully reproduce photos and line art for publication in a newspaper without paying through the nose. Apparently, though, there’s no such thing as “Budget-Minded-Newspaper PC Magazine.”Magazine rules do not, as a rule, explain their five-star system for image quality. Some don’t even have star ratings. No one ever thinks to actually show pictures of the output. I guess this is too much to ask.2. User-submitted reviews. For fuck’s sake, shoot me now.On second thought, let me explain why I want to die. Then you can shoot me.User reviews are usually good when a) there’s an intelligent expert community for the product category, and b) a lot of people are interested in seeing others buy a product they’ll be happy with. Neither is the case with the consumer scanner community, insofar as there is one. As a result, most scanner reviews look something like this:”I bought this scanner to send photos of the kids during bathtime to their aunts and uncles in New Haven, but then I got this weird stripey output from it and so I sent it back to Scan’R'Us Canada, but THEIR TECH SUPPORT IS HORRIBLE and we had to get them to send us three other scanners and none of them worked and now little Jimmy’s crying in the corner and I WILL GET YOU FOR THIS SCAN’R'US, YOU’VE RUINED MY FAMILY LIFE! AIUYEQGIJHDAGHLKAJSHFKH!!!”Once in a while, the review tells you what went wrong with the scanner before the author gets to the incoherent babbling and spewing of random letters and numbers. These cases are rare but somewhat helpful. As a general representation of the product’s reliability, however, user reviews give the impression—no matter what the product or its actual quality—that if you use Random Scanner B, you’ll unleash Judgement Day upon us all and the human race will be utterly destroyed in a torrent of dust artifacts and “weird stripey output.” Hell hath no fury like a stupid customer scorned.User reviews, as an unwritten rule, say nothing about image quality other than “it was great! ” These are the same kinds of people who are inclined to send those family photos to grandma as a badly compressed 2048×1440 JPG.Compare this to the digital camera arena, where you’ll find plenty of great review sites that give the prospective buyer tons of details on even the crappiest of the low-end cameras. Going from those in-depth reviews to… well, this, is a shock to say the least.

Consumer Whore Alert: Sometimes there are products that take that budget-conscious brain of yours and pounds it relentlessly until it screams uncle! and releases its crushing grip on your life savings. This is one of them.Way back when I was yea high, I used to build a lot of scale models. Because I was fifteen, and didn’t posess the fine motor skills necessary for such work, I had no business manipulating tiny rear-view mirrors and landing gear struts. Don’t get me started on the airbrush I’ve probably ruined by now, either. All you need to know is that I sucked at it, and only managed to work my way up to half-decent models. (It helps when the model is easy to paint, like the aircraft carrier that was pretty much all gunmetal and brown.)Why did I keep building models when they were obviously fit for a garbage dump? Because it was damned fun. What was the problem, aside from the crap quality? Well, obviously, it was the fact that I couldn’t fly or drive any of them. Half-decent models would look a lot better if they were moving at high speeds, plus they’re more fun that way. Even crap models that actually drove would be fun because then you could create spectacular car crashes in the comfort of your own kitchen.Kit-based radio control cars have traditionally been amazingly expensive; the radio controller alone could set you back a solid $100. Thankfully, someone came up with the bright idea of creating a ready-to-run chassis that you could mount a plastic body on and drive around.Kyosho makes their own series of plastic car bodies that can easily be mounted on a Mini-Z chassis. The real game begins, however, when you realize that almost any 1/24 or 1/25 scale car body will fit on the same chassis if you do a little scratchbuild work. This means you can grab that $12.95 Revell Pontiac GTO model kit from your local WalMart, build and paint the shell, and have a reasonable chance of successfully slapping it onto a Mini-Z chassis. Voila! Instant mini GTO racer!There’s even a set of documents that shows you what a custom body job entails. If I ever have a mid-life crisis, or a lot of spare time and money on my hands sooner than that, I’ll be all over these.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these.

Is Mozilla fucked? Aside from the fact that AOL has given the new Mozilla Foundation $2 million there is very little in the way of a silver lining to the news that AOL has basically laid off everyone they had working on Mozilla.Mozilla certainly isn’t dead, not from this move. What AOL has done, however, is turn a corporation-blessed marquee open source project into what is essentially a highly-visible Sourceforge project. Thankfully we don’t have to deal with the subpar Netscape product that was based on Mozilla anymore; on the other hand, without the branded version of the product Mozilla may sink yet again into the quagmire of nebulous open source projects that just don’t get much respect outside a tiny minority of uber-geeks. And no, I’m not going to switch from Photoshop to GIMP, either.What differentiates Mozilla from GIMP, of course, is that Netscape brand or no, Mozilla can be fairly easy to use and offers some real advantages to a wide audience. It’s hard to imagine ever using Internet Explorer on a regular basis solely because of Mozilla’s near-perfect pop-up blocking.This may all change, however, if Mozilla 1.4 becomes the last real stable build. Firebird is a great browser now, but there has to be a very strict form of discipline imposed in terms of feature creep. No one cares, for example, if Firebird supports a crazy-ass video format developed in Lower Carthage for Victorian-era snuff porn videos. If the only people with the time and the effort to develop modules for Firebird decide that’s what they want to do, however, then watch as Firebird becomes a great snuff porn viewer and a crappy browser because no one thought to upgrade the rendering engine to support CSS 3.0.Now, most of these fears may be (and probably are) unfounded. What is clear, however, is that Mozilla development will never be the same. Hopefully, as the optimists hope, shaking off the shackles of AOL will be a good thing. Only time will tell.Addendum: Various Mozillazine forum posts have pointed out a number of other problems with the loss of the Netscape brand. Developers who were only recently convinced by Netscape 6.0 to offer plugins that worked with Mozilla may balk at continuing to do so. (Macromedia’s Flash plugin already causes a tiny bit of havoc with Firebird, for example.) It also sets back the push towards web standards compliance and puts us that much closer to a two-world model: the Microsoft-controlled internet protected by Digital Rights Management and a plethora of other proprietary safeguards, and the open-source internet.
Junior Senior are my golden gods.

New Pornographers w/ the Organ
July 8 @ Phoenix Concert TheatreI’ve decided that the Organ remind me the most of the Smiths. They rock out more than you’d expect from the record, but I can’t get over how straightforward and serious they seemed on stage. Even the fact that they were openers for a show like this seemed incongrous—it must be that they’re labelmates with the New Pornographers.Speaking of which, the New Pornographers were fantastic. Played nearly everything they’ve put to tape, plus a little more. As good as the records are, sometimes they sound more like a collection of singles rather than a unified piece. In concert, of course, this sort of thing helps a lot because there isn’t really a weak song in the bunch to avoid.Two encores, which is refreshing after the last concert I saw at the Phoenix. (no, Polly Jean Harvey, you can’t go out and play another encore, we’ve got some pissed-off clubbers who need their fix of Darude right-fucking-now!) Lots of fun stage banter as well, including a fun story about baby ducks, and then the late highlight of the concert—a stirring acapella rendition of Heart’s “These Dreams” courtesy of Neko Case and Kurt Dahle. They took it much further than any sane individual would have, and it’s that little hit of CHFI goodness that put this show over the top.

Read the recap of the latest Trading Spaces… and then read the responses of the homeowners who were on the show. Really, I honestly can’t think of a better combo than Gen, Vern and Amy Wynn.