Day: June 24, 2006

Regarding the furor over Alan Moore’s new Lost Girls, Neil Gaiman makes an interesting point:

And I keep wondering what would have happened if Shakespeare had given the revenue to Romeo and Juliet to the Cheap Street Home for Indigents and Mendicants, and Parliament had enshrined some kind of perpetual copyright in the law for that play. I don’t think it would have been a good thing in the long term, even if many mendicants and beggars were helped by it, because it would have removed a piece of world culture from the table.

I don’t mind watching ads to view free online content. I don’t like it, and I’ll try to avoid it whenever possible, but for the most part I understand and accept it.

But does it have to be the same ad, over and over and over again? Sheesh.

Via Boing Boing comes this story of a Montclair, CA, man digging for gold in his front lawn:

When firefighters pulled up at the home, workers were dumping paint cans brimming with dirt scraped from the bottom of the hole with a shovel and a pick ax. To pull the dirt out, Mora had devised a rope-and-pulley contraption with a plastic wheel and a metal rod.

The worker at the bottom of the crater had shimmied down, a rope tethered to a belt, and was sucking on a garden hose for oxygen, neighbors told the emergency responders….

Mora had failed to apply for the required permits for that type of project.

That implies that there are permits for digging 60-foot shafts in your front lawn.