A large cemetery and crematorium in Adelaide, Australia reports that Frank Sinatra's "My Way" has become the most-played funeral song. Second on the charts is "Wonderful World" sung by Louis Armstrong. Only two traditional Christian hymns are in the top 10. From the Associated Press: "Some of the more unusual songs we hear actually work very well within the service because they represent the person's character," Centennial Park chief executive Bryan Elliott said. Among other less conventional choices were "Always ...

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After Christopher Hitchens wrote a Slate article suggesting that waterboarding wasn't really torture, readers suggested that he try it himself. He did. So what did it feel like? Hitchens recounts how he was lashed tightly to a sloping board, then, "on top of the hood, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose ... I held my breath for a ...

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Speaking for all the Boingers-- Boing Boing has been caught in the middle of a real internet shitstorm and pile-on over the last few days. A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her. Some people wanted to know why. Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted ...

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Matthew Harding spent 14 months visiting 42 countries in order to produce "Where the Hell is Matt?", a four-and-a-half minute video featuring Harding (and anyone else he could rope into it) doing an incredibly silly, high-energy dance in some of the most breathtaking scenery around the world. This may be the best four minutes and twenty-eight seconds of your week. Matt is a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life ...

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Yoder sez, "Bill Jakob, a former trucking company owner with law enforcement experience, spent 'several months' pretending to be a federal agent in the town of Gerald, MO. Jakob apparently spent his time aggressively busting drug suspects, with the complicity of the local police department, claiming 'he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.'" Gosh, I guess that spending seven years telling everyone that the War on Terror demands that we ...

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The US's "Terrorism Liaison Officer" program is being expanded -- this is a program that trains utility workers and other government employees to snitch on people whom they deem "suspicious" and embroil them in a never-ending round of Orwellian surveillance and background checks. Because nothing helps us find the terrorist needles in the haystack like inviting every junior G-Man in the land to make the haystacks larger! In Colorado, TLOs report not only illegal but legal activity, such as bulk ...

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The funny people who run the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site are so frightened of gays that they've set up a filter to change every instance of the word "gay" to "homosexual." And while they may have fixed this particular instance, it looks like they haven't gone back through their archives and corrected other articles where this happened, such as this article where professional basketball player Rudy Gay is referred to as "Rudy Homosexual." The Dangers of Auto-Replace (Right Wing ...

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Devo is suing McDonald's over New Wave Nigel, a toy that the fast food restaurant gives away with some Happy Meals. New Wave Nigel is part of an American Idol-related line of freebies based on various genres of music. From AAP: "We are in the midst of suing them," (Devo's Jerry) Casale told AAP. "This New Wave Nigel doll that they've created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed, ...

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Here are the top 10 most-viewed TED Talk videos from June 2006 to May 2008) Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight Jeff Han's touchscreen foreshadows the iPhone and more David Gallo shows underwater astonishments Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth Arthur Benjamin does "mathemagic" Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do Al Gore on averting a climate crisis Johnny Lee demos Wii ...

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Kathryn sez, "American Eagle returns a plane to the gate to kick off a toddler and his mom. Apparently, the flight attendant kept yanking on the autistic toddler's seatbealt to make sure it as tight, touching off a temper tantrum. Doesn't this make you feel safer?" "She kept coming over and tugging his seatbelt to make it tighter, 'This has to stay tight'. And then he was wiggling around and trying to get out of his seatbelt. And she kept ...

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If anyone expects President Obama to roll back Bush's illegally-gained dictator powers, they are smoking rope. From Salon's Glenn Greenwald. It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its ...

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The Large Hadron Collider slated to be fired up in September isn't likely to accidentally generate any Earth-devouring black holes. That's according two new reports, including a safety review by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The world's most powerful particle accelerator may crank out black holes, but they'll be so tiny and vanish so quickly that we shouldn't worry. I wonder if these reports will appease those who filed a lawsuit against CERN fearing that the machine might ...

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The Boulder Daily Camera reports that residue from the spill of a "small amount of plutonium" last week at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado has been found on the floor and tabletops. The plutonium may have been released into the sewer system after two employees "washed plutonium-containing powder off their hands and into a sink" on June 9. Traces of plutonium from the June 9 spill were found in a laboratory sink, where the radioactive ...

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Senate House Democrats covered themselves in shame today, joining with Republicans to pass a bill granting amnesty to the cowardly telephone companies who helped the President's office with its illegal bulk-wiretapping campaign that spied on every American call and email without any judicial oversight. What's more, the bill also allows this to continue going on in the future. Who needs the fourth amendment? The bill (.pdf) could be voted on as soon as Friday in the House, given its backing ...

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CBC Radio's Search Engine just posted/aired its interview with Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice about his Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They've been trying to get him on the air for months now and he finally consented to ten minutes, but he delivered nothing but spin and outright lies about his legislation and ended up hanging up on Jesse Brown, the interviewer. You have to listen to this -- in it, the Minister lies, dodges, weaves and ...

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The Associated Press has promised to meet with some organization I've never heard of called "The Media Bloggers Association" to work out the details of its frankly insane proposal to sell licenses to quote five or more words from AP stories. Who are the Media Bloggers Association? Turns out it's mostly one guy, some right-wing attack-blogger who hangs around on the lecture circuit and ran a blog devoted to pissing on Keith Olbermann. Our Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blogged an extensive ...

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A uniformed police officer went to 20 classrooms El Camino High School in California on Monday and announced to students that several of their classmates had been killed over the weekend in alcohol-related car accidents. He was lying, and he and the school continued to lie about it for two hours to the grief-stricken students. Why? To teach the kids an important lesson about the dangers of drunk driving. I imagine the students learned another lesson -- that cops and ...

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Wear Science's line of "Teach the Controversy" tees invite Creationists to consider other "scientific controversies" that might be taught in school. Link (Thanks, Gus!)...

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In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money ...

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Will McGree got a letter form Virgin Media (his cable provider) and the British Phonographic Institute (the UK version of the RIAA -- of which Virgin -- also a record label -- is a member) telling him that he could be sued and disconnected from the Internet because someone used his open WiFi to download music. It wasn't Will -- the program used for file-sharing is a Windows app, and he runs Linux. It was one of his neighbours. Virgin ...

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