Wider Angle: Wider Angle Sunday Reader for 09.17.06

Why does Banksy have a fully-painted, live elephant in an art installation with no water and no room to move? Unless I misunderstand the situation, that's a really awful thing to do.

After ABC's 9/11 mockumentary lied about American Airlines, they are considering pulling their advertising from the network. Go figure.

Up to 4% of the population may hear voices, and it seems most tolerate the phenomenon without seeking treatment. "Some even said they found the experience to be positive or inspirational."

Taste in music is linked to drug use, proving that musical-loving Broadway fans like to get lots of sleep. "But followers of hip hop and dance music are more likely to have had multiple sex partners over the last five years and were among the biggest drug-takers surveyed. 'It comes out in the study that, in these types of music, fans score worse in various behaviours, such as criminality, sexual promiscuity and drug use,' said Dr Adrian North, who led the research." [via ArtsJournal]

Sex can be kinky, stylish, and beautiful in addition to raunchy. This multiple-sensation tickler can be yours for $95 from Kiki De Montparnasse. Cool Hunting has a rundown of some fancy new toys. (Here was their first edition.)

Blake Ross, one of the developers of Netscape 7, calls it his biggest WTF ever. Great stuff. "Mozilla 1.0 came out in June with popup blocking, and Netscape 7 came out six months later without it, but offered, as consolation, 12 AOL icons on your desktop." This classic WTF about a failed server also caught my attention and stayed in my brain.

Audi, BMW, and Subaru's respective ad agencies decided to start fighting via ad space. Much more creative than this very unfortunate placement.

Do gay people swear differently than hetero people? "Some people say the word c*ck-sucker like it's a bad thing which, frankly, I have just never understood." [via Wonkette]

Five very cool Michel Gondry videos.

Coming as a surprise to no one, "applicants [for government jobs in Iraq] didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration."

Owners of iPods and other portable devices are likely to buy more music than other people, but not with DRM. Most people still prefer CDs and MP3s.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the Emmys.

Borat responds to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry Spokesman's comments that he is a poor representation of the country to the world. By the way, for some reason, Kazakhstan needed to deny they would be discussing Borat with the White House. Now why would they need to make that clear?

Drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than non-drinkers. This is primarily ascribed to the networks one builds when drinking socially, so more contacts are available to present opportunities.

I would like this inflatable climbing iceberg and a swimming pool, please. [via BB]

Asterisk is a really cool open-source VoIP platform that looks to be gaining popularity for its quality, stability, and free-ness. "Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is moving 6,000 users off a Cisco VoIP platform to an open-source VoIP network based on Asterisk. One big driver, of course, is cost. From the article: 'We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,' says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at SHSU."

Woot Wine takes the concept of a great tech-related deal every day, for one day only, and makes it a week for groupings of wine.

Matt Damon should get to know Jodi Applegate. He also needs being-a-good-sport lessons. And a couch to jump on... for all the wrong reasons. But damn, anger is hilarious.

Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die. In case you don't pick up on subtleties, it's best to avoid the Amazon video service.

Some people actually don't understand satire. For the rest of us, there's Mike Judge's new film, Idiocracy, which I'm sure will be gigantic on DVD.

President Bush will not tolerate criticism. "It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective."