Boingboing roundup

1. Ray Bradbury has insisted that Farenheit 451 was intended as a jeremiad agianst television, not a fable about censorship; Cory Doctorow (and no doubt many others) are disappointed. I'm actually not surprised - everyone thinks it's about censorship (and I'm pretty sure I do recall even Bradbury going along with this in some interviews, but he's got grumpy in his old age) - but it always seemed to me that it was about apathy - the key point of the story was that the government had been able to ban all books with no public outcry because most people had given up on reading anyway (which also makes it one of the more realistic examples of the #40 on the Grand List of Overused SF Clichés. Actually, it would be interesting to do take-off on this in which it turns out that the gov't is benevolent but cunning, and has outlawed reading to fight aliteracy by making reading seem cool and rebellious.)


2. For owlfish, which was talking about size-comparison clichés a while back: Weird Converter