Do people remember boredatgreen.net? I saw little fliers for it around Meyer Library and other places last year, especially around finals weeks. It featured very crass inane comments - the kind of stuff you see in bathroom stalls. I thought it was a the pet project of a entrepreneurial Stanford student. Well it's back - now as boredatstanford.net with the tagline "anonymity liberates".

Turns out, according to IvyGate, the site the brainchild of a guy named Johnathon Pappas '06 from Columbia. He started BoredAtButler in 2005, presumably for a library at Columbia. It was a hit and over the past 2 years he's expanded his project to a network of schools - BoredAt. The BoredAt network reminds of Facebook back when it was exclusive - the Ivies + UC's + Stanford and a few others. The site wants to be "it's a place to post your thoughts anonymously, share, and discuss anything and everything "

But as Professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo and others have shown us, anonymity can also lead people to be more aggressive, and I might add, more obscene as well.

Still there is an kind of perverse pleasure gain from reading the threads on girls who accept random propositions for sex ("back row at FlicKs"), the best way to break up with someone ("I need some independence peeeeaaace") or getting what you want ("academic success, not to be alone, and for the red sox to win")

Check it out - BoredAtStanford. What do you think about it?

Unless you've been living under a rock (and a big one at that), you've no doubt seen the viral video sensation, Miss Teen South Carolina, who shocked America with her pontifications on what we should do to help "U.S. Americans" and "the Iraq" find the United States on a map -- for our children. It's yet another big moment for internet video, and it's clear that this particular video (and this particular Miss Teen South Carolina) is lucky enough to be entering into the second phase of viraldom: replication with modification. This could very well be as big as the Dramatic Chipmunk. Check out one of the first knock-offs, "Miss Teen South Carolina Calls 9-11":

Once upon a time, according to my husband, when he was about 12, he saw a cartoon or movie in which Mark Twain takes a series of kids through time and space in a magical steam engine.

Years later, he found a clip of this Sunday morning adventure on YouTube and was forced to revel in its magnificence. In particular, this claymation cartoon features Mark Twain taking the kiddies to visit Satan, an angel (my question was where in time and space was the angel? Another planet?). Hubby forced me to watch the surrealness that was this epic and I have to agree, this episode, loosely (very loosely) based on the Mark Twain unfinished novella The Mysterious Stranger (in which Satan visits some guy in Austria) features a mash-up of surreal- someone must have been on acid - blow your mind philosophy and caused the cartoon to get banned.