The Fish on the Facade

As this story reports, they're starting to take the medallions off the front of the Strib World HQ. One comment on the story asks:

"If they don't care enough to preserve the building, why bother with the medallions and lettering?

Because . . .

. . . they're art, that's why. More:

"All work to remove, save and reinstall on a new building seems pointless to 99% of the people using, visiting or looking at the new building."

Yeah, who cares.

SUCKERS Bitcoin dealer invents a game: send me bitcoins, and I will give you more bit coins later, after other people give me bitcoins. Those people were promised more bitcoins in the future, after other people were brought into the game. Sound familiar? Now the users are claiming the originator of the game stole all their money.

ADVERTISING Most British advertising headline of 2014: "Mr Kipling gets ready to drop 'exceedingly good cakes' slogan."

SIGNAGE A collection of 1960s signs in Washington DC, taken by employees of a sign company, collected on this Flickr page:

The death of the big metal-and-neon signs was one of the saddest plagues to hit cities in the end of the last century. (via Coudal.)

FRIEND WANTED Where could a poor Hydropath Phrenologist go to find companionship in the 19th century? Slate looks at "The Exquisite Wistfulness of 19th-Century Vegetarian Personal Ads."

TECH Oh great: a new disc standard!

HEY YOU To the list of irritating YOU headlines, add this: "What You Think You Know About the Web is Wrong." I will read it just to spare you the effort, because either you thought "no way, pal, I'll show you that what I know about the web is completely accurate," or "gosh, what strange misconceptions have mislead me all these years?" and clicked.

A decentralized, sprawling global network of addresses that point to sites which, in the aggregate, reflect the entirety of human civilization? That's what I think. It's a road - not a superhighway, but a two-lane intersecting and branching off to other two-laners, with innumerable towns along every road, with libraries and shops and homes. You never get to the end and every left or right turn takes you someplace different.

It is not a real road, so you're not troubled by people who stand on the shoulder with a sign that says EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT HITCH-HIKERS IS WRONG AND HERE'S WHY.

Alright, here comes the wisdom.

Well, none of that was what I thought about the Web. Let's continue.

He's serious. There are people in the business of making money on the internet who believe that people read what they click on? Or are they just telling that to clients who are too awed by Internet Geniuses to apply their own experience to other visitors?