By The Power Invested in Me By the Internet, I Hereby Declare Today International Mona "The Hammer" Shaw Day

Tales of treachery and torment abound in this week's Goo report, but if you stick with it and then smash it with a hammer, you will be vindicated come the post's end.

And also, ten points to anyone who can tell me the origins of the quote ""We turn him into a flea, put him in a box. Then put that box in another box, then mail it to ourselves, then smash him with a hammer!!" And no fair googling it or turning to any alternate sources, cuz it's really not that arcane at all; I just like it.

• "Forbes is reporting that despite Radiohead giving their latest album away 'for free', more copies of the album were pirated than downloaded from their site. Commentators offered up the opinion that this was probably more out of habit than malice." Shenanigans. You're reading too far into it. People like being pirates. I keep an eyepatch at work for just such occasions. Case closed.
• "AT least 99.9 per cent of all Radiohead fans are the worst kind of musical snobs. These pseudo-intellectual cultural elitists still pretend to like the unlistenable and inexcusably indulgent Kid A and Amnesiac records."
  Why thank you for the compliment; I do have better taste than you. Wait a minute... can you be a cultural elitist when you're joined by more than a million of your nearest and dearest? In that case, can Columbia open its graduate admission to more than 10 candidates for PhD in history?
• Sigh. Can't we all just get along? Pepsi and Coke, I'm looking at you. Or do we have to bring Pepsi Clear and Zima back?

Fun with optical illusions:

• Is the woman spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? You answer determines the career you will be pigeonholed into for the rest of your life! (Tip o' the Goo to Manifest Density)

• Pope? Or KKK grand Dragon in full Regalia?

I suck at this magic eye shit. Optical illusion time is OVER.

• I appreciate that Arkansas legislators are willing to give lip service to the children when it comes to harmful tobacco products. But more pressing than Randy Stewart's concern about children's longterm health, "We need to set an example in here for all the kids who sit in the gallery and watch us work," simply focuses on children's long-term health. Somewhere in the AR legislature, some lowly page pukes every night when he has to clean that shit up. I can't imagine that's too healthy.
• As the Object pointed out, the nice thing about the Nobel Prize? Instant gravitas. In every media mention. Ever: "The president's top science adviser said yesterday there is no solid scientific evidence that the widely cited goal of limiting future global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avert dangerous climate change, an assertion that runs counter to that of many scientists as well as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." That's right boys, until you come back here with a Nobel Prize, you're about as credible as the chica up there claiming all Radiohead fans are elitist.
• That said, honestly, I'm not so sure anymore that Al Gore should have won the Nobel Peace Prize. After more consideration, it probably should have been Mona Shaw. Which one of us hasn't been screwed waiting for Comcast? Mona Shaw, a real American Hero, we salute thee.