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There are several things about Proposition 16 (on tomorrow’s California ballot) that just make me say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

1. The ad campaign is horribly misleading. They’re promoting it as “Your Right To Vote,” but it has nothing to do with your right to vote. I guess “Making it hard for local governments to get into or expand the electricity business” isn’t snappy enough, but that’s what it actually does: it requires governments to hold additional elections (or piggyback on already-scheduled elections) if they want to get into the electricity business.

Whether it passes or not, your voting rights aren’t affected at all.

2. It’s oddly specific. If you look past the main slogan, you’ll see them talk about making sure governments don’t spend large amounts of money without voter approval.* But it only applies to the power industry. And it’s sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest power company in the state.

That’s sort of like deciding that theft is a problem, but only making it illegal to steal from your house. If the problem is governments spending huge amounts of money, why focus only on one industry?

The whole thing comes off as being very self-serving, like Microsoft sponsoring an initiative to require a popular vote if a city wants to switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs or OpenOffice.org.

*Of course, when you think about it, we approved the people making the decision when we voted them into office.

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Photo of a door with a sign that says This Is Not a Door.So, remember this photo of a door labeled “This is not a door?” Last year, someone else sent a picture of the same door to FAIL Blog. Then a week ago, someone submitted mine to Friends of Irony, where Katie spotted it a few days later.

Here’s where things get interesting.

On both sites, people were absolutely convinced that it was “obviously” photoshopped.

*headdesk*

No, it’s real. It’s in a small business complex at the corner of Newport Ave. and Irvine Blvd. in Tustin, California. You can go there and look if you want. And of course there are the two photos taken from different angles.

The obvious conclusion is that people don’t really know how to tell whether a photo has been manipulated. At least on FAIL Blog, some of the doubters had reasons, even though they amounted to not understanding perspective.

I was tempted to post a comment linking to this XKCD strip (My hobby: insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped), but settled for requesting a photo credit instead.

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Remember the Battlestar Galactica cake? For last night’s LOST finale, Katie made an authentic DHARMA Initiative chocolate cake, and pizzas with the Swan and Orchid logos.

The cake is chocolate, with homemade buttercream icing (vanilla for the background, chocolate for the design). The pizzas have an outer ring of sausage, with bell pepper strips for the I Ching. The Swan logo is cut from a bell pepper. The Orchid is cut from a tomato, and placed on the pizza after baking.

For more views, including in-progress pictures, close-ups, and making-of commentary, check out the LOST finale food photos on Flickr.

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Mental Telepathy

I’ve always been annoyed by the phrase “mental telepathy.” It’s just redundant, like “big giant” or “fast speedster.” Is there any such thing as non-mental telepathy?

So it was nice to see someone taken to task in this panel from a Flash story in Adventure Comics #459…all the way back in 1978!

The characters pictured are two of Barry Allen’s high school classmates at their fifteen-year reunion. The woman, Rachel has just picked up that one of their classmates is the Flash.

Hijinks ensue.

Cross-posted at Speed Force.