3 Things You Don't Know About That Candy Snipe

The Beeb asks: "Is Google Autocomplete evil?

That's easy. No. Genocide is evil. Child abuse is evil. Autocomplete is not evil. For that matter, I don't know why anyone should have gone all gooey-knees in the early days when they learned Google's unofficial motto was "Don't be evil." You'd like to think that goes without saying. But we continue:

The entire piece is here, and concerns the sexism reflected in some search results. Women in Saudi Arabia might be more worried about auto driving than autocomplete.

HEY YOU io9 says these abandoned toy factories will haunt YOUR dreams. Quite the assertion. Feel free to write them and tell them they were incorrect, and that the images, while occasionally unnerving, have not replaced the standard dream imagery at all, and they're confusing "dreams" with "sets from a cliched horror movie that use disembodied child-like voices and tinkly music boxes to impart a sense of dread we associate with imminent horror, thanks to other movies.

As long as we're on the subject, here's a New Republic headline:

One Man, 1.7 million Square Meters

My day in the world's biggest building - a Chinese mall you've never heard of

YOU should still read the article, though, unless YOU already did.

The author likes the place, and it does sound interesting. But you have to wonder whether the article would be so kind if the mall was in, say, oh, Bloomington. The Mall of America is regarded by some as a blight, a symbol of misplaced priorities, a place where people put their faces into buckets of Cinnabon frosting before waddling off for more goods they don't use, and so on. Imagine a travel writer eating at a Chinese restaurant at the Mall of America and writing something like this:

A bad Chinese restaurant at the Mall of America would be emblematic of the homogenized, insular culture of the place. But I'm criticizing the author for something he didn't write, like the defensive rubes we are up here. I'm not that crazy about the MOA myself, but only because its main function - distributing garments incrementally different from last year's garments - is not of great interest. I'm interested to see what it looks like when they finish the expansion. We had a Japanese exchange student staying with us last month, and she was overwhelmed by the MOA. When I told her they were building more, and it would be two-times-bigger, she thought I was kidding. Such a thing was almost inconceivable.

The author of the Chinese Mall piece has many interesting pieces on China; anyone interested in urban design, alleyway culture, architecture and the grim business of Chinese Public Toilets will be interested in this.

MEANWHILE Yesterday we had bad behavior on Venezulean subways; today we take a trip to St. Petersburg.

Clean your palate with KLIK's retake on the old concessions reel. (via Cartoon Brew.)

The original:

Of course, it has a Wikipedia entry:

A snipe? "Any material before the feature presentation other than a trailer." Now you know. As for the song: