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 With the advent of the convenience of digital photography, people are forgetting about hard copies. Few people print out their pictures, and are looking forward to complete loss of the pictures with one swift "Delete" click or a crash of a hard drive. Also, digial encourages deleting the 'bad' ones, those pictures that in the filmified days got stuck in a box and forgotten about. "It turns out that 'mistakes' are what make many photographs, especially snapshot photographs, because they represent the human element," says Westin Naef, photography curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. "Some of the most interesting pictures are being deleted because they seem 'imperfect,' so the concern is that future snapshots are going to become more conventional, more perfect - and less interesting."  One of the most memorable sounds I know of is the ring of the Bell Trimline telephone. It was commonly leased to customers from the mid 20th century, and is still found bolted to the walls of older homes, most often near the stove or in the front hallway . Phones don't 'ring' anymore -- they bleep and bloop, play your favorite hip-hop song, or imitate any number of jungle birds. The Smithsonian has a guy devoted to saving these old sounds, the ones we remember from history, no matter how tiny. With his help, the sounds that have defined your world will not be lost, even once we've advanced to a world without gasoline lawnmowers, dot-matrix printers, creaky doors, and manual camera shutters.  In a sad story of collectible theft, a piggy bank (the kind with ears and a curly tail) went missing from the Design Exchange, a Toronto museum. Adding insult to injury, the piggy bank was on loan from a private collector, who had used it to hold their children's coins up until the breakthrough show. The museum had thefts in the past, which were returned on a "no questions asked" basis, and they hoped the piggy would return in similar fashion. The piggy, however, did not turn up. Security tapes were reviewed, the public was begged for help, but the little piggy did not find it's way home. There was a happy ending, though -- Reliable Toys, the defunct manufacturer who originally minted the plastic piggies, passed the original molds on to Viceroy. A son of an original Reliable founder, Herb Samuels, got Viceroy to run off a small batch of the old piggies, and delivered a brand-spanking new one to the piggyless collector. There's still a little piggy missing, and we all hope it's safe and warm.  Demonstrating a case where anything can be bought on eBay, a person tried to sell the prison uniform of a "flight risk" prisoner. While extremely rare and (presumably) valuable to collectors, having one of these is about as effective as wearing an "arrest me without asking questions" sign. Plan on wearing the prisoner uniform out on Halloween? I doubt any police would have a sense of humor about it -- and having it hanging in your closet probably means, "I'm the one who got away" to any suspicious coppers. Police, as you might guess, are not happy with this eBay seller.  And, while on the subject of eBay, we have a product that didn't make it. In 2003, the Town of Amboy was auctioned on eBay, with no successful buyers. Amboy is an old Route 66 icon, and like most of the old towns along 66 it has fallen into disrepair. Two years passed since the failed eBay auction, and now the town is up for auction once more. On February 3rd, you can have the chance to own an entire town -- complete with diner, and a stone's throw away from an extinct volcano. How can you pass this up?  And, finally, 'William Shatner's singing career' is one of the most kitschy phrases ever uttered in the era of humankind. Who knew he came out with a new album? Inappropriately titled Has Been, the album is actually pretty good. The college radio station here has played "Common People" and "I Can't Get Behind That" a couple times, and they've grown on me. The style is less self-important, and much more fun than his earlier works -- it almost sounds more like a Saturday Night Live skit than an actual release, and it works. Article by Derek
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