MSNBC reports on discrimination in dog adoption. Evidently, black dogs are adopted in much less numbers than other colours.

To the uninitiated, the idea seems so strange — doggie discrimination? But among those in animal rescue circles, the phenomenon is commonplace enough to have earned its own name: “black dog syndrome.”

“There’s not a lot of that type of statistics on many aspects of sheltering,” says Kim Intino, the director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States. “But I think that every person that has worked in a shelter can attest that in shelters animals with black coats can be somewhat harder to adopt out — or to even get noticed.”

The Michelin Guide (the gold standard of chef and restaurant reviews) has recently expanded its breadth of consideration to include the restaurants of Tokyo and is also being published in Japanese. As welcoming as this may seem to local chefs, the guide is not finding favour amongst local chefs.

Many prominent figures of the Tokyo food world, however, are saying to Michelin, in effect: Thanks for all the attention (which we deserve), but you still do not know us or our cuisine.

Food critics, magazines and even the governor of Tokyo have questioned the guide’s choice of restaurants and ratings. A handful of chefs proudly proclaimed that they had turned down chances to be listed. One, Toshiya Kadowaki, said his nouveau Japonais dishes, including a French-inspired rice with truffles, did not need a Gallic seal of approval.

“Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it,” Kadowaki said in an interview. “How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?”

According to this rant in the January ‘08 issue of I.D. Magazine, 90’s style websites (lots of colour, flashing text) just might be the object of desire, again. Can it be true that some are nostalgic for the old days of web design?

Remember what the early web looked like? If you’ve forgotten, you could use Archive.org’s Wayback Machine to time-travel to 1996, when Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice and amateur web enthusiasts were still publishing “home pages.” Or you could roam today’s web, where designers are increasingly embracing the values and aesthetics of the Clinton-era internet.

This atavistic impulse is most apparent on the sites of a loose network of art geeks- including the programming ensemble Beige (www.post-data.org/beige), the artist collective Paper Rad (www.paperrad.org), and the web art club Nasty Nets (www.nastynets.com)-with a shared interest in reclaiming obsolete technologies. Their aesthetic, sometimes referred to as “dirt style,” is visually hyperactive and almost willfully antagonistic: a riot of animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, underlined blue hyperlinks, images with borders, and old-school blink tags. Used now, the graphics evoke the noisy amateurism of the early web, but they’re also a rejection of today’s glossy, professional site design, which tends to efface the medium rather than celebrate it.

Why, we ask, is this happening?

But when used on purpose, Lialina observes, primitive sites can be especially successful in “sending a message to those who know”-broadcasting to other insiders an air of conceptual playfulness for artists, a DIY ethos for musicians, a deconstructed avant-garde aesthetic for fashion houses, or a stripped-down simplicity for designers. It’s fundamentally a message that communicates that these creators exist “outside the neutral palette of web design,” Lialina says.

I for one will not miss the marquee scrolling text of early Internet Explorer designed sites.

Clive Thompson explores his recent experiences with Halo 3, which unintentionally mirrored the tactics of a suicide bomber.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I’m only making it easier for them to shoot me — and thus I’m marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I’ll whip out a sticky plasma grenade — and throw it at them. Because I’ve run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I’ll die — but he’ll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone “from beyond the grave.”)

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.

I caught this interesting post on Wired last week about the continuous phoenix rising of vinyl records. What makes this all the more interesting is how maybe, just maybe, vinyl (along with mp3’s) might do to the CD what the CD might have done to vinyl.

Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they’re right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs.

Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It’s the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can’t be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.

Looming over Tinseltown the iconic sign — which has drawn untold number of Hollywood wannabes — started its life as a real estate promotion. Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler erected it as an advertisement for his Deluxe Beachwood Canyon subdivision in 1923. At a cost of $21,000, it joined numerous other large-scale real estate signs spread along the hills of Hollywood.

Stop Smiling Magazine has a couple more nuggets of the signs history.

Judith Havermann writes in the Wilson Quarterly that “Women now hold half of all management jobs in America. Business books and magazines tout their superior leadership style. What’s really changing in the country’s corner offices?” Read on.

I do not quite get it. While this virtual walk fund-raiser raises money for a good cause, breast cancer research and related groups, it is a walk-a-thon where you do not walk anywhere.

Supporters design their own avatar for a $3 donation, add clothes and accessories and a personal story and then watch themselves walk from Boston to San Francisco against a changing daily landscape.

Fitzmaurice said the idea was to help busy women, no matter what their physical condition, lend their help in a fun, creative way during October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She hopes that 1 million walkers sign up.

The above headline is an arguable point that I will not chime in on (for a lack of caring - I’m Canadian, I have nothing to defend here). However, Jim Windolf has an opinion in Vanity Fair on the theme of America and laziness. Read the article ‘Lazy-Ass Nation” in full.

But the same rough-and-ready spirit that helped the pioneering settlers to carve new hometowns out of an untamed and gnat-infested land began applying itself to less pressing matters starting around 1850, as the necessary invention gave way to the comic innovation. In 1863, James Plimpton of Medford, Massachusetts, won a patent for roller skates. Why walk when you can glide? Even as the Civil War raged, Plimpton’s invention ushered in one of the first consumer-culture crazes. In 1896, James Boyle of Spokane, Washington, patented the “saluting device.” Tucked inside a man’s hat, this gizmo performed the annoying job of hat tipping so you didn’t have to. In 1883, Charles Stillwell of Philadelphia invented a machine to produce the brown paper bag—or, as he called it, “the Self-Opening Sack, the first bag to stand upright by itself.” Without Stillwell’s invention, the self-service supermarket, created in 1916 by Clarence Saunders, of Piggly Wiggly fame, might not have amounted to much. The sometimes startling transition from a class of invention that solved serious problems to the type that made life a little more convenient was already apparent with the 1891 creation of the escalator by Kansas-born patent holder Jesse W. Reno: those reaching the top of this “inclined conveyor belt” were offered brandy to help them get over the shock of rising 45 feet above ground level.

• -The first season of the NBC TV show Friday Night Lights is out on DVD. The notable point is that it comes with a money-back guarantee (via pop candy).

  -There has been a lot of talk about the rise of China as an economic beast (maybe, maybe too much talk). The American has an article that takes us back to when the US was in fear of Japan and its economic power (via arts & letters daily).

  -Looks like I missed this one - Sustainablebusiness published (a month ago) its top 20 sustainable businesses list, comprised of the top 20 publicly traded companies that make this world a better place.

  -Here is how to carve a life-sized skeleton pumpkin.

  -Aston Martin has something special coming in early 2008 - the DBS. You might remember it from Casino Royale.

As you may be aware, author and literary icon Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week. Stop Smiling Magazine published a wonderful and personal interview with Kurt in their August issue. Any fan of his will appreciate this piece.

Whitney Matheson, aka PopCandy, has put together a list of the 40 greatest internet “superstars”. I am actually glad that I do not know from several of those on the list or what they are known for.

How about you, do you know all of them?

The Oxford English Dictionary has added a few words to its collection: wiki, ta-da and irritainment, bimbette and tighty-whities. Oh my.

Eric Idle’s, of Monty Python fame, cousin is Peter Oundjian, the conductor of the Toronto Symphony. Elizabeth Renzetti of the Globe and Mail talks to them about how to mix classical music with comedy.

Success took them in different directions, and music brought them back together when Oundjian was guest-conducting the philharmonic in L.A., where Idle had settled. In 2003, Oundjian took up the baton at the TSO and the discussions about a collaboration in comedy began in earnest. “It was a series of conversations,” says Oundjian, “that got him wondering, ‘What can I do with an orchestra that’s more than just singing my funny songs? What can we do that creates a plot?’”

Is this the begining of insanity bubbling up through the streets? Someone has asked Helena Echlin of Chow.com whether vegetarians have the right to ask for a meat free eating environment.

Dear Helena,

A big group of friends and I were trying to figure out a bar to go to. The obvious choice was Zeitgeist, a popular San Francisco bar with a giant outdoor beer garden. But I nixed the choice, because I’m vegetarian and that place always stinks of hamburgers from their outdoor grill. My one friend and I got into a big fight about it. She said, “But you used to eat meat and not mind the smell. You make everybody’s life difficult because of your personal choice.” Yes, it was harder to decide on a bar because of me, but I feel that because the first-choice bar made me gag, that was a legitimate reason to not want to go there. Is it OK for vegetarians to insist on meat-free environments, even if it means distressing nonvegetarians? And what’s the best strategy for getting your way without alienating your friends?—Ooh That Smell

Click here to read the answer.

Chow.com has a nice piece on how there are many wines with great names and snazzy labels and packaging, but which only offer up a lackluster product.

Good Magazine has compiled its list of the 51 greatest magazines ever. Topping the list is Esquire. This Good piece is not just a list of the magazines, featuring the editor’s take on the publication. No, oh no. The piece also features a smart essay on magazines generally. For that alone, it’s worth your attention.

A very, very interesting article from the Telegraph on whether the global music superstar is to become a thing of the past.

But as the music industry struggles to come to terms with collapsing sales, diverging international markets and the internet-fuelled emergence of highly personalised and parochial buying patterns, is the era of the global musical superstar drawing to an end?

Mergers, profit warnings and cost-cutting at the ever-shrinking number of major labels (currently down to four: Universal, SonyBMG, Warners and EMI) have demonstrated that the music business is struggling to come to terms with the challenges of download distribution.

But there is more than just new musical delivery systems and the problems of piracy at play - there is a change in the whole culture of how music is consumed.

By now I am sure that you know that Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, Rick Blaine, did not say “Play it again, Sam”, nor did Captain Kirk ever say “Beam me up Scotty”. These quotations, however, have taken on a life of their own in our common lexicon and phraseology. Louis Menad considers the question of whether we should care is in this interesting New Yorker article.

Cory Turczyn, over at PopCul Magazine, has put together a list of the top 5 worst “as seen on TV” products. Topping the list is the Cellphone wave scrambler, which was to protect us from harmful electro-magnetic frequency waves by scrambling them. Note, this list is dated to 2002! It still is good for a laugh or two and a nice trip down memory lane.