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.”

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.