“My name is Wicket of Endor, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Just one other thing. I don't know about wombat paper, but panda paper is expensive and very brightly colored. It's not white -- it's not for jotting down your weekly grocery list.

The only real use that comes to my mind for it might be for origami. If you're going to make complex works of origami art that you plan to keep for a long time, it makes little sense to use the cheapest, most ordinary paper you can buy.

The zoo in Chiang Mai, Thailand sells paper made from panda excrement as well:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17799869/

Why would anybody want it? Just for a souvenir, I guess. I didn't buy any, because I've already got enough touristy, uh, crap already.

As for whether it's environmentally-friendly, I can't say. It's billed that way of course, but it would seem to me that they'd have to use a lot of energy and harsh chemicals to sanitize it in the initial phases.

Big Figure. Small world.

Thomas Edison invents the replicator. (An April Fool's prank from 1878. Listed as #53 on a list of Top 100 April Fool's Jokes)

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/P50/

@Noah Kleihman

Didn't know he'd done another album.

But his first one (1968) was ranked #45 on a list of the 50 worst albums ever made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transformed_Man

Glad that HollywoodBob mentioned the DS9 episode, "In the Cards," because that one REALLY demonstrated the utter absurdity of Roddenberry's ST:NG economic vision.

Jake wants to buy his father a real, authentic 1951 Willie Mays baseball card. But his society is "far too advanced" to use money anymore. So instead of a single cash (or latinum) transaction, Jake has to waste DAYS of his life engaging in elaborate barter schemes.

BARTER. When confronted by scarcity, the best the poor citizens of the HIGHLY ADVANCED Federation can do is resort to economic practices used by civilizations existing in PREHISTORY.

And forget about the scarcity problem -- what about the misallocation problem? Given the subject, let's use William Shatner as an example. The man's an actor, a sci-fi writer, and a LEGENDARY singer . How should he allocate his time, talents and efforts?

In a cash economy, he knows that society values his acting skills quite highly, his writing skills somewhat, and his singing skills -- well, very little. He knows that he'll probably starve if he spends his life trying to cut albums. Society provides him with the incentives to devote his life to acting and writing.

Contrast that result with the results under Roddenberry's moneyless utopia. Even if William Shatner were a 100% altruist, how would he know how to spend his time to maximize the benefit to society? He might very well err and torture us all with more of his albums. And that's the sort of mistake that would happen ALL THE TIME in the Federation of a ST:NG universe.

Heard about this way back when in university in a freshman psych or sociology class. The results are interesting of course, but I seem to recall the prof saying these types of experiments on children are now considered unethical.

(The children never gave their consent to be used as the teacher's lab rats. Moreover, the teacher had no idea if there would be lasting effects.)

"Anyone who hates children and animals can't be ALL bad."

-W.C. Fields

The best were the Christmas lights, ketchup packets, foam and soap. (The crayons were kind of cool too.)

Biggest disappointment: the pineapple.

I was expecting some kind of major-league explosion, and...nothing.

No one's mentioned that only virgins can ride unicorns. So the shirt could be interpretted as a dig against Obama's political inexperience.

Yeah, these were pretty funny in a shocking sort of way. Although I don't really think that the World War II ("You can't fight the Axis if you have VD" ad was particularly misogynistic.

Remember, penicillin production really didn't start ramping up until 1944. So until that time, there was really no safe and effective treatment for STDs. Prevention, in the form of army-issued condoms and educational films and ads were all that they had.

Interestingly enough, the (possibly over-frank) discussion of the VD problem during World War II can be contrasted with the puritanical avoidance of the issue during World War I.

World War I broke out a decade and a half after the Victorian Era, so there were no army-issued condoms. No educational programs. But the army DID have sky-high syphilis rates.

(Interesting trivia note: I once read that French prostitutes during World War I that had syphilis actually charged MORE for their services than the girls who were clean. Apparently, malingering soldiers sometimes intentionally contracted the disease in order to obtain a medical discharge - no pun intended.)

A time-line of the death of the Ancient Games (from Tony Perrottet's "The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games", p 190-191):

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Olympics-Story-Ancient-Games/dp/081296991X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221384630&sr=8-3

312 A.D. Emperor Constantine makes Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire; as paganism fades, the prestige of Olympia declines rapidly.

394 A.D. Emperor Theodosius I bans all pagan festivals. The Olympics are officially disbanded -- although archaeologists now suggest they kept going in some form, perhaps in Christian guise.

426 A.D. The Temple of Zeus [at Olympia] is burned on the orders of Theodosius II. Christian fanatics destroy the rest of the sanctuary.

522 A.D. The first of a series of devastating earthquakes hits Olympia.

I typed in "Bin Laden" as a test.

Never knew that was such a popular name in Europe and the United States...

Are you sure it wasn't Doc Ock who built that thing?