kottke.org posts about theft
Why is meat the most shoplifted item in America? “So, more innovation is required in the battle against meatlifting. Meat-sniffing dogs pop to mind, though some shoppers might object to having a Doberman nosing around their crotches in search of stolen steaks. But you know what they say about civil liberties in a time of crisis.” That must have been a fun article to write.
This is going to sound like an Onion article but isn’t. David Copperfield got held up at gunpoint after a show last weekend and when the robbers asked him for his valuables, “he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them”. Copperfield’s got a gun pointed at his head and he’s doing an impromptu magic show for the thieves! What’s better than that? Nothing. (via the superficial)
My pal Judith lost her camera on vacation in Hawaii and tried to make the best of the situation by starting a project using other people’s Flickr photos to reconstruct a trip journal. Now, a family has found her camera but won’t give it back to her because they don’t want to take it away from the 9 yo kid that found it. “We can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card”. The dishonesty displayed here is maddening.
Odd story of one astronomer possibly “stealing” another astronomer’s discovery of a large trans-Neptunian object. The original discoverer alleges that the usurper looked at a couple of Web sites that detailed the discovery and where the discover’s telescopes were pointed…the astronomy equivalent of stealing signs.
To protect against wholesale theft of words (theft of words? I feel silly just writing that…), dictionaries insert fake words in their listings. The article says that the New Oxford American Dictionary’s fake word showed up on dictionary.com, but as of today, it’s gone.
Stay Connected