Electric Josh

Secure
Must stop riffing on this Homeland Security foolishness (why, oh, why isn't it called Domestic Security?), but the Sunday Times Magazine's main story this week is called Fortress America, and demonstrates that choosing fear is tantamount to choosing, among other things, economic ruin. Hmmm.
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Maps!
I've now spent the last 45 minutes looking at maps of Boston from three different points over the last 300 years or so at the aptly named mapsovertime.com. The maps instantly suggest, of course, that an enormous fraction of the city is built on fill. Try to imagine what would happen today if a group of developers proposed, as they did in the early part of the last century, to totally fill in an entire body of water in the middle of town? It was the Back Bay, which is of course now one of the nicest parts of town. Also check out the airport in the 1995 aerial photo with the 1775 map semitransparently overlaid. Lousy environmentalists. At any rate, there are several dozen maps to peruse and compare, so have fun.
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Mr. Potato Head
From across the ether of the magical internetwork come these many parodies of ready.gov, the Office of Homeland Security's one visible product, 18 months in the making. Check here and here for starters. The picture to the left is obviously the international sign for "Beware of falling debris, especially if you have a really old computer." Here's my favorite. Compare with the actual site and see if you can figure out which one is a parody, and of what.
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