Today designer and illustrator Frank Chimero decides that Boing Boing sucks now, in implied form, by way of an "oh-so-shocked" list of that site's recent headlines. ("HOWTO make a motorcycle out of cigarette lighters"! "Insects made of human hair"!) Efficiency expert and consultant Merlin Mann chimes in: "I’m the last person to begrudge a talented person his success. But, it’s hard not to begrudge the deliberate perversion of that person’s talent in the service of gavaging a profitable but pathologically undemanding audience." He closes with an editorial observation on Boing Boing: "Yuck." He also makes the classic observation: "I haven’t deliberately visited the site in question in [...]

Seven or eight years ago, when I wasn’t yet old enough to feel embarrassed about it, I saw Conor Oberst play at a bar downtown. Before he went onstage—a stage that was really just a foot-high platform with a stool—he sat drinking in a booth with some friends. Having been drinking myself, I made my way to his table, where I stood as if I were a waiter, and, realizing too late that I ought never to have come over at all, I sputtered some combination of the words love and music and so much. He gave me a much friendlier look than I deserved, signed a scrap of [...]