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15th Anniversary: Best Headlines We Slipped Past the Bosses

These Are Definitely Not Scully's Breasts (November 2003)Me So Nerdy (September 2006) Cool Whip: A Delicious Blend of Sugar, Wax, and Condom Lube (May 2007) Nobody Fucks With the DMV (February 1994) Data Dicks (October 1995) The Dumbass, the Daytrader, and the New Democracy (April 2000) The Wired Scared Shitlist (January 1995) Reminder to Steve Case: Confiscate the Long Knives (September 2000)

Ask Hadley on fringes and white suits

I am a thirtysomething brunette and increasingly tempted by the idea of a fringe. Is this a good idea, or will I end up looking like Dannii Minogue?Diane Sharpe, LondonPoor Minogue. Truly, the woman is like an entire Shakespearean cast in her own super-shrunken body: the jealousy, the bitterness, a life lived in the cold shadow of a more beloved sibling. She's not a celebrity, she's a psychological experiment. To quote Mugatu from the greatest ever film about fashion, Zoolander, we must not get distracted by the beautiful celebrities (for the moment anyway). Your point is wise, both in making the Minogue comparison, and in your desire to avoid it. I admit, I do love a fringe - on hair, that is, though I shall never understand fringing on items of clothing, which merely makes you look as if you need a wax, are wearing a merkin, or have a misguided liking for cowboy fashion. It's hard to say which of these three causes the most visual offence. There are two downsides to the style, though. For one, you always look the same: put your hair up, put your hair down - you have still got a fringe. And for those of us who have had a fringe since the dawn of time, with the exception of an unwise break in our early 20s, such uniformity, although reassuring, can occasionally feel a wee bit monotonous. But monotony is nothing compared to accusations of cheap Botox.I'm sure we all remember the charming name for the similarly charming tight ponytail. Oh come on, Guardian readers, admit it. You know we're all thinking it: "Croydon facelift". Well, the fringe now has similar connotations, albeit in a more upmarket context. Many a beauty editor has recommended getting a fringe as a pain-free, credit-crunch-friendly alternative to Botox (urgent note: this is just for the forehead - presumably you still need to get the cheeks, eyes, nose and neck done, otherwise you would resemble Cousin Itt from the Addams Family). It's actually not bad, as beauty editor's suggestions go, but it does tar all of us fringers with the same brush. Are we lunatics with a phobia of wrinkles, yet too cowardly to actually do anything medical about it? Or are we mere innocent fringe fans, who were once told by a callous hairdresser that a fringe was crucial because "your face needs softening"? A very different kettle of fish, I'm sure you'll agree.Back to your question specifically, Diane. I think at this point, it's too late. La Minoguette is now the highest profile befringed thirtysomething in the land: jumping on the bandwagon at this time will make everyone think you are an improbable fan. Instead, I recommend taking inspiration from a different D Minogue look: the punk one she so impressively worked as Emma Jackson, niece of the irreplace-able Ailsa on Home and Away back in the day. With the eyeliner of Marilyn Manson, pompadour of Amy Winehouse and acting ability of Andie MacDowell, it's no surprise we are still discussing her, nearly 20 years on. I have a white suit. I recently saw a shot of Brad Pitt in a white suit, looking dashing and splendid in a brown loafer. I have, however, fallen foul of this mistake before: it is not the shoe or the outfit that I'm taken in by, but the face of the man who wears it. I am also tempted by a brown leather brogue, spiv though it might be. Please advise.David, by emailI have included David's query in full because there are so many valuable components to be Onaddressed. First, big up for the use of the fashion singular: "A loafer", "a jean", "a trouser", "a stocking" - this is the proper way to describe all normally plural garments (garment?), although the jury remains out on whether the rule should be applied to pants: "a pant". Second, you should be congratulated for your open acknowledgement of the havoc celebrities wreak by wearing clothes. They should all be forced to go naked so that no one is misguidedly taken in. Finally, the word "spiv": no fashion lesson here, just enjoyment of the word's debut on this page. Tally-ho all round. But to your question. To be honest, David, I struggled to get to your question as my eyes were caught by your opening gambit. You have a white suit? Are you planning to write The Bonfire of the Vanities? Of course, you might be David Hockney, though it seems unlikely since he has probably perfected his coordinating footwear, after working the look for half a flipping century. If you really must wear the white suit, and I'm not wholly sure I approve of this, then I would recommend the spivvy brogue. Loafers are just too Mediterranean playboy. And anyway, as you say, Brad Pitt wears them. Spiv over Pitt any day of the week, and Sundays, too.FashionBeautyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A life in art: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor's studio, a sprawling collection of warehouses in a quiet street in south London, is both artistic crucible and thriving workshop, the kind of place where charts stuck to the walls indicate what kind of hot beverages are preferred by the employees (should Kapoor ever pop round, offer him black coffee, not tea). Twenty-five people labour here, either coolly in the fresh white offices above, or in the sweat of masks and overalls below. As we meet, Kapoor has just designed two stage productions: Pelléas et Mélisande for La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called in-i for Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London. He is also preparing to open an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London; and he has a clutch of projects, ideas and commissions simmering away - not least Britain's largest piece of public sculpture, for the Tees valley, and a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts next year.Kapoor stands alone in the British art world: he is a touch younger than the so-called New British Sculptors such as Richard Deacon and Richard Wentworth, though he has often been spoken of in the same breath since he is represented by the Lisson, the gallery indelibly associated with that group of artists. And, when he won the Turner prize in 1991, aged 37, he was the senior artist on the shortlist, a decade or so older than the other contenders, who included Rachel Whiteread - this was a new generation of Young British Artists snapping at his heels. But he also stands apart because his work is entirely sui generis: strongly voiced, unmistakably his. Kapoor conducts a vigorous tour of his studio. The first thing he shows me is an enormous, deep resin tube, on which one of his masked accomplices is working amid the noise and dust of the workshop. It looks like an enormous semi-erect penis, I cannot help observing. "But it isn't!" Kapoor laughs . "It's the opposite. I'm interested in the opposite, and in the not-opposite. It's both. It will have a very, very dark interior. The idea is that a person will be able to walk in ... I have always been interested in antiphallic form - the opposite of which, of course, is deeply phallic. Hahahaha! It's not onwards and upwards ..."It is inwards and downwards: Kapoor is a psychic tunneller and excavator. Seeing his sculptures en masse in the studio, it makes one almost queasy sensing how many of them are concerned with feminine holes, clefts, entrances, slashes - often sculptures in a deep, primal red that screams of female human flesh, menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth. But Kapoor has never been interested in anything other than abstraction. The exploration of the feminine bypasses a lurid fascination with the specifics of the female form; it is more, perhaps, to do with an investigation of the dark places of the imagination. Not for him the world of art as commodity; not for him irony. He says: "Donald Judd used to say that art doesn't get made, it happens. The implication of that is that the studio is a place of a certain kind of practice. And there things occur that hopefully have deep quotidian recall - but are not directed by the quotidian world. So the post-Warholian notion that everything in the world is all art - it's fine, but what it avoids is the truly poetic, or the poetic of a slightly different order. And it's that order I am interested in."Figures such as Damien Hirst represent one branch of post-Duchampian art; Kapoor, however, takes on that history in a rather different way. "If Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art," he says, "then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by Beuys in some way - that all the objects in the world are symbolic. Now Duchamp, to be fair, was very careful about what was the found object; the found object was always deeply symbolic. So the arguments in fact come together and they don't get confused by the idea that you can put anything in a glass case and it's art. It isn't. It is the artist's duty to find poetic meaning in things." More baldly, he declares of the Hirsts on sale recently at Sotheby's: "It's just stuff , you know. It's not an artistic challenge. it's just stuff ... It's completely irrelevant." Later he adds: "It's almost not art. I'm going to go as far as to say it's not art."From the Hephaistian busyness of the artistic forge, Kapoor now ushers me into another large warehouse, silent and empty but for a number of tables covered with maquettes and models for large-scale sculpture. This is normally Kapoor's private space, the thinking place. The models are laid out in preparation for display at the Riba headquarters in London. "All these projects are about a certain kind of architecture," he says. "Many of them are thoughts about a certain kind of almost religious space. This, for instance, is a very crude model of a piece made in a museum in Japan - a void in the floor - called L'Origine du Monde, for obvious reasons." He laughs. This, he says moving on to a model of a silvery bridge that resembles an elongated bead of mercury, "is a bridge that we've been working on for years and years and years. Whether it happens or not is another matter. It's a kissing bridge. It opens in two halves, and both parts open and slide across the channel." Where is it? "I'm not allowed to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because it's still a bloody confidential pain in the backside, but anyway. It's quite a heavy shipping route in the UK."He's off again, to another model. This seems to be pure fantasy: it is an enormous circular hole in a valley in a mountainous landscape, a deep void leading to nothing and nowhere. "It's massive. It's kilometres across - and completely dark," he says. "One of the things that has emerged out of my work over all these years is this idea of the non-object, the absent object, the immaterial part of the material."Kapoor is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present. He recalls: "I made a work at Documenta [the five-yearly sculpture exhibition at Kassel, Germany] many years ago. You walked inside a building like a bunker, and inside there was a hole in the ground. It was completely dark - so dark that the hole resembled a carpet on the ground. One person was let in at a time. And there was a man who waited for 45 minutes, and when he went in he was absolutely furious. 'I've done many things in the cause of contemporary art,' he said, 'but I have never stood in line for all that time to look at a piece of carpet.' And he took his glasses off and flung them on to the carpet - and, of course, they disappeared down the hole. And then he was truly terrified. That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole, it is a space full of what isn't there."Kapoor has also investigated this notion by way of his mirror pieces - a large group of sculptures of varying scale that include concave, circular wall-mounted mirrors several feet in diameter, and the huge Sky Mirror that was mounted near the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 2006. His Cloud Gate, a 110-tonne sculpture with a reflective surface for the Millennium Park in Chicago, also perhaps falls into this category, though it is a three dimensional piece, shaped somewhat like a kidney bean. He talks about these objects in terms of painting: the effect, he explains, of a traditional painted surface is to draw the viewer into a space that apparently recedes beyond the picture plane. In the mirror pieces, by contrast, "the space doesn't recede - it comes out at you ... a new sublime that's forward of the picture plane."We are now in a quiet warehouse, where various sculptures sit awaiting their fate and the scrutiny of their creator. One mirror has a surface made up of a tiled pattern of squares and hexagons. Looking into it, parts of your reflection seem to dance in the space between you and the mirror; others seem to float back in the distance. Kapoor says: "I'm interested in the almost idiotic phenomenology of this. On one level you might say it's not art, it's a silly game. But I think there's something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal."Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, his mother an Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi, his father a hydrographer in the navy. He went to the prestigious Doon School, in Dehra Dun. "The good thing about education in India in the context I knew it was that it was really cosmopolitan. We learned just as much about Jahangir and Akbar as we did about Louis XIV and Elizabeth I." His parents were "modern, wonderfully modern"; and for Kapoor, there was a deep sense - as a Jewish boy with a white mother growing up in a household speaking English in India - of being an outsider.Kapoor's parents were keen for both their sons to see something of the world. "In those days, a plane ticket cost more than my father's salary for a year. So we were both encouraged to emigrate to Israel, because they paid for the plane ticket." It was there that "being an artist became not only an option, but something I could actively do something about". He moved to London, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and at Chelsea School of Art, as it was then known. College was "a total liberation" - partly from a state of deep psychological disturbance that afflicted him in his late teens. "I was seriously fucked up, full of inner conflict that I didn't know how to resolve." To tackle this turmoil, he eventually went into psychoanalyis, which lasted for 15 years and ended just before he met his wife Susanne (they now have two children, and have just built a new family home in Chelsea).Art college was a "kind of respite" from his psychic turbulence. He recalls his student work, much of which was performance-based. "The pieces were all very symbolic and they normally involved interaction between two people. They were non-narrative, but there was a process; and it was normally left to the two people to enact the piece with props. The props were really important - quite sexual. All the language was there already, dammit!" He left art school in 1977. At that time, Kapoor reckons there were perhaps 10 artists in Britain who were able to make a living just from selling their art: he assumed he would find some kind of teaching post. He rented a studio in Wapping, and for a while scraped money together by making furniture for the society decorator Nicky Haslam."Then," he says, "in early 1979 I went to India . . . and I suddenly realised all these things I had been making at art school and in my studio had a relationship to what I saw in India." And this relationship? "It was a certain attitude to the object. I was making objects that were about doing, about ritual. It was that 'doingness', that almost religious doing, that I saw everywhere ... It felt like a huge affirmation."It was from this idea of ritual that his first significant works sprang: his pigment pieces ? bright shapes set on the ground covered in pure pigment. "I would almost ritually lay on the pigment; they are very much performed," he says. "I made them all in three years. It was an incredible time of discovering something new every single day. I really didn't know where they came from; I felt that they had tumbled out into the world."This feeling of unforced creation still happens, once in a while, for Kapoor. He shows me something he has been working on over the past couple of days: a model for a huge installation for the Grand Palais in Paris for 2011. What eventually gets seen in that vast space may bear no relation to what he shows me, he says, but what has come to him is a scenario in which the glass roof of the space is covered over with red gel, JCBs busily tunnel into the ground, and a large inflatable sphere, 25 metres in diameter, hovers over proceedings. There is something hellish about it."It's got a sense of being an excavation of the interior. I would never have made a model like this 10 years ago. I would never have allowed this kind of apocalyptic moment." The mess and the chaos of it have an imaginative relationship with the recent works he has been making out of gunky, visceral, blood-coloured Vaseline and wax, such as My Red Homeland (2003), 25 tonnes of the stuff in a circular container constantly formed and unformed by a large steel arm. "After years and years of looking for a kind of wholeness in my practice, I find myself over the past couple of years dealing with tragedy and anxiety - with things that are fragmented," he says.The sculpture for which Kapoor is most famed is Marsyas, the trumpet shaped structure, like a flayed skin stretched over a framework, that occupied Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002. It was seen in some quarters as a triumph of size over substance. "Every idea has its scale," he says. "Marsyas wouldn't be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture."While vast, Marsyas will seem small in comparison to Temenos, the first of a five-part installation known as the Tees Valley Giants, which will be the largest public-art initiative ever, the design for which was unveiled in July. Has public art become a clichéd response to the urge to regenerate post-industrial cities? "I think we've gone totally public sculpture mad," he says with vehemence. "I hate public sculpture." So why are you doing it? "It's really a problem, I've got to say it's really a problem. Public sculpture ... oh God, even the phrase makes me feel tired. Why I am engaged in it? Well, I think, as a sculptor, that is something of one's lot. Because scale is a tool of scultpure, and it needs to be worked with."He shows me the model for Temenos, which will be 100 m long. It is a tube of nylon cut from a pair of tights stretched between two rings, one of them propped on a pole - blissfully simple. Temenos is the Greek word for a sanctuary, a place set apart; and Marsyas is also a reference to ancient Greece: he was a man flayed for daring to challenge Apollo to a musical contest. "It is a myth of conceit, the conceit of art," Kapoor laughs. "The conceit of the artist!"Kapoor on KapoorThere had been a long tradition in sculpture that said that materials have to be what they appear to be ? this thing of truth to materials. I couldn't deal with that. Even as a student I didn't know what that meant. It seemed to me that art's all about illusion and the unreal. "Truth to materials" ran, and runs, contrary to everything I want to do. Quickly I realised that when you make an object and place pigment on it, the pigment falls to the ground like a halo around the object. And the implication is that it's like an iceberg: that most of the object is hidden, is invisible.And so I became more and more interested in the invisible object. There was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them. Sometimes I long for that kind of ebullient outpouring. That year I started making them was unbelievable. I didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't think them up, they popped into my head.Anish KapoorArtguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Zoe Williams: Getting the kids in shape

The late Sir Richard Doll, who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer, was ruminating some years ago on Desert Island Discs about how to stop children smoking. He said: "Find out what the tobacco industry supports and don't do it, and find out what they object to and do it." The tobacco industry, then as now, loved nothing more than a chance to sound decent by bugling its commitment to keeping children away from cigarettes. But however much you go on about the purity of young lungs, it is meaningless if you go on to make your bread and butter by polluting old ones. If you take Doll literally, this means encouraging eight-year-olds to smoke, then stepping back to see what happens. But given that he averted as many cancer deaths as any scientist in history, he's the boss, even posthumously. I bring this up because the parallel between the media and its relationship to body image, and tobacco giants and their relationship to fags, is striking. A survey of 150,000 children, undertaken by Ofsted, does present some worrying data - it's troubling to learn, for instance, that 39% of respondents had been bullied at school. But the headline "concern" for the Daily Mail is that a third of 10-year-old girls are worried about their body image. "Just 10 years old ..." reads the headline, "and already anxious about body image."Culture focuses relentlessly on three things: sex, buying pointless things, and how to eat and drink incessantly without getting fat. That's the beating heart of our collective existence, and the more shaming and trivial it is, the more call there is to protect children from it, from the very news sources that trivialised it. Their argument: children are insufficiently mature to process complicated and sometimes conflicting body image messages. But it is unrealistic to see childhood as, ideally, existing in a chamber of purity, insulated from the murky impetuses of the adult world. Who could live in this culture and not imbibe any of it? Who could read, day after day, about X's cellulite and Y's paunch, about carbs, sweeteners and pear shapes, and breathe none of this in? We should be pleased that 10-year-olds are fixating on their body shapes, because not to do so would make them alarmingly unobservant or else sociopathic. Now I wouldn't mind that headline if it were followed with: "It's probably our fault; after all, we're the ones who just won't stop going on about sodding calories." But no, anonymous "critics" apparently blame "super-slim models in the fashion and advertising industries". It just gets more and more otiose. Does one blame a slim model for being slim? Nope, in all likelihood, she was born like that and, in the unlikely event that she is anorexic, you would no more blame her than you would blame anyone else with a mental illness. If you must find someone to blame, at least go to the industries rather than the clothes horses, but the idea that you could blame fashion and advertising, while ignoring a middle-brow medium that is pretty much kept afloat by those titans of thinness is daft. It's just hypocrisy shovelled upon wilful myopia. But - and here's where the tobacco analogy is truly forceful - the more money an organisation makes out of a full-blossoming adult pathology (whether that's smoking or being on a constant, not very effective, diet), the more sincerely they wax about protecting the young from this same toxin. Find out what the Daily Mail supports and do the opposite, in other words: actively encourage 10-year-olds to worry about their body image. They are far more likely to end up fat than they are anorexic. Address adults instead: get them to stop worrying about their love handles, and see whether, somewhere down the line, 10-year-olds don't follow. mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.ukYoung peopleChild protectionSmokingHealth & wellbeingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ray-Gun Maestro Zaps Steampunk Convention

Weta Workshop's Greg Broadmore will wax eloquent on the nature of his Infallible Aether Ocillator and other faux Victorian weaponry at California's steampunk gathering, Steam Powered.

HOWTO Make a purse out of a stack of old books

LiveJournaller Penwiper337 set to explore the "librarian side of steampunk" by turning a stack of old crummy hardcover books into a beautiful purse: I had my eye on some attractively bound Reader's Digest Condensed Books (I have no pity for them) that were in the local library book sale, but wanted a little more space than one book could give me. So I made a box-type purse out of three. I started by cutting out the attractive endpapers for future use, then coated the text block edges with thinned-down school glue (using wax paper to keep them separate from the covers). Use plenty of weights on the books while they dry or they will warp! I then hollowed out the text blocks, as well as the bottom cover of the top book, both covers of the middle book, and the top cover of the bottom book. I gave the interiors of the text blocks several cots of thinned down glue, then glued them to their respective covers with school glue (leaving the top cover unglued to act as the lid of the purse. E6000 glue was used to glue the stacked books together into a solid block. Book purse (via Craft)...

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney's Wax Head Found In A Bin By A Homeless Man (AHN)

(AHN) - Sir Paul McCartney's head has been found in a bin by a homeless man. Anthony Silva has found the waxwork of the Beatle legend's head and earned himself a reward of 2,000 pounds [around $3,200]. - Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:30:19 GMT

WEEK IN PHOTOS: Fastest Car, Wax Obama and McCain, More

A supersonic car, a brand-new mosque, and Los Angeles wildfires are captured in some of the week's best photos.

Oct. 22, 1938: Xerox This

1938: Inventor Chester Carlson produces the first electrophotographic image. It's the precursor of the Xerox machine. Carlson was an engineer who couldn't get a job in his field during the Great Depression, so he took work in the patent department of battery-manufacturer P.R. Mallory. A bottleneck in the work was making copies of patent documents: You had to copy them by hand (time and labor) or send them out to be photographed (time and expense). Carlson set out to make a dry-copying process. He got his inspiration from the new field of photoconductivity: Light striking the surface of certain materials increases the flow of electrons. Carlson knew he could use the effect to make dry copies. Project an image of the original document onto a photoconductive surface, and current would flow only where light stuck. Four years of tinkering in his kitchen and in his mother-in-law's beauty salon in Astoria, Queens, in New York City finally produced results in October 1938. Carlson's research assistant, Otto Kornei, put a sulfur coating on a zinc plate, which was rubbed with a handkerchief to give it an electrostatic charge. A glass slide with the words "10-22-38 ASTORIA" was placed on the plate in a darkened room and illuminated with a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds. Lycopodium powder (made from waxy moss spores) was sprinkled on the sulfur and then blown off. There it was: a near-perfect mirror image of the writing. Carlson and Kornei heated wax paper to fix the image. Carlson had taken law courses at night while working at the Mallory patents department, and he protected his new invention with a web of patents. He needed development money to make the process commercial, but World War II made funding tough. More than 20 corporations, including IBM, Kodak, General Electric and RCA turned him down between 1939 and 1944. He finally struck a deal with the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute in 1944. Battelle gave Carlson a 40 percent stake in the invention and assigned physicist Roland Schaffert to work on perfecting electrophotography. Battelle licensed the technology in 1947 to Haloid, a Rochester, New York, photographic-supply manufacturer founded in 1906. Battelle and Haloid publicly demonstrated the process Oct. 22, 1948, precisely 10 years after Carlson's first successful experiment. The photocopiers introduced in 1949 were a logistical mess: The user had to follow 14 steps, it took 45 seconds to make one copy, and you couldn't make more than a dozen copies from one exposure. More work was in order. Haloid also asked a professor of Greek at Ohio State University to coin a better name than electrophotography. He devised xerography from the Greek for "dry writing." In 1958, Haloid officially changed its name to Haloid Xerox, more than coincidentally parallel to another Rochester firm, Eastman Kodak. Haloid Xerox had its first big hit the following year with a pioneering automatic photocopier, the Xerox 914 ? named for its ability to handle paper up to 9 inches by 14 inches. The company simplified its name to Xerox in 1961. Revenues reached $60 million that year and $500 million (about $3.5 billion in today's money) by 1965. The Xerox machine and its eventual xerographic competitors had a profound cultural influence. The machines increased the efficiency (or perhaps the paper-wastefulness) of offices around the world, but cheap copying was also an early step in the democratization of publishing. If you wanted to publish a fanzine or any of the new generation of zines, no longer did you need to run the copies on the sly on the school, church or office mimeograph, or take them to an expensive print shop. Likewise for posters announcing band gigs, political demos and missing pets. On the serious side, the Soviet Union tightly restricted access to photocopying machines lest they provide a new technology for distributing forbidden samizdat (self-published) literature and nonfiction. On the lighter side, in less-controlled societies, before there were office printers and before there was e-mail and internet humor, there was xerox humor: Copies of unofficial and often off-color cartoons and jokes circulated hand to hand and through postal mail. Xerography also presented a serious, pre-digital challenge to the practical enforceability of copyright laws. Why laboriously hand-copy the terrific summary page from a library book when you could just photocopy it for a dime? Why indeed pay $8.95 to buy the 72-page monograph your prof assigned, when you could get a copy photocopied on 37 pages for just three bucks? Using a cassette recorder to copy your friends' LPs was just around the corner. The floodgates were open. Chester Carlson collapsed and died while walking on New York City's 57th Street in 1968. He'd earned an estimated $150 million ($950 million today) from Xerox and had given two-thirds of it to charity. Source: Steve Silverman's Useless Information

Video: Google Phone's OS Has Serious Chops

Joe Brown and Daniel Dumas of Wired's product reviews team sit and wax elegant about the oft-touted, relentlessly hyped, finally realized Google G1 with Android. Our main findings? Great OS ? remarkable for version 1.0 ? but still in need of some better hardware.