Merriam-Webster has announced its 2008 "Word of the Year." The winner? "Disemvowel" "Bailout," which "received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time." And the next four in the Top Ten list:

2. vet
3. socialism
4. maverick
5. bipartisan

#1 Word of the Year for 2008 (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Pets.com's Sock Puppet asks Congress: "Why are you talking about bailing out the auto companies when you let all us tech companies just crash and burn?"

(Instead of giving taxpayer's money directly to the automakers, why not pass a law that requiring every US citizen of driving age to buy a Hummer, Tahoe, or F250? Those unable to pay cash can get a pre-approved AIG-insured payment plan. That would keep Detroit busy, help the oil companies, and give AIG another excuse for a cash infusion down the road.)

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Where's Sock Puppet's Bailout?

Monster trucks look even cooler when they are miniaturized via tilt-shift videography. Metal Heart by Keith Loutit (Via Telstar Logistics)

Der Spielgel profiles a 42-year-old woman who has perfect "episodic memory"

"People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it's also agonizing."

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button."

She's constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic "internal monitor," sometimes displacing the present. "All of this is incredibly exhausting," says Price.

An Infinite Loop in the Brain (Via Mind Hacks)

The Book Design Review blog's top book covers for 2008 are up. This is one of my favorite annual features -- and this year's includes some drop-dead gorgeous designs. I'm insanely jealous of Austin Grossman for getting that brilliant cover for his excellent book Soon I Will Be Invincible. I've mentioned Jordan Crane's wonderful cover for Chabon's Maps and Legends and the new edition of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, but why did no one tell me about the beauty that is the cover for Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

My Favorite Book Covers of 2008 (via Kottke)

In some parts of the US, there's been reports that trees aren't bearing acorns this year. "We're talking zero. Not a single acorn. It's really bizarre," said Greg Zell, a naturalist at Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington.

Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.

But [field botanist Rod] Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

Simmons thinks the reason could be that the unusually heavy rainfall in the spring washed the pollen out of the air before it had time to pollinate the acorn blossoms. But Ed Zimmer, a regional forester for the Virginia Department of Forestry, doesn't think that's possible. So far, no one knows for sure what's going on.

Where'd all the acorns go? (Via Neatorama)

( Image above by Peter Beste. You're welcome! ) The LA Weekly has a feature up about a new book with portraits of very serious Norwegian Black Metal dudes. In True Norwegian Black Metal, photographer Peter Beste captures the "blackest of the black: apolitical and anti-Christian separatist self-preservationists who’d sooner make a lampshade out of their own skin than to try to convert fans." Snip from Siran Babayan's piece:

Take, for example, Immortal singer-bassist Abbath strolling through the woods surrounded by moss-covered emerald trees (“That’s essentially his backyard”), or Gorgoroth singer Gaahl standing in front of a snow-capped log cabin. Every turn of the page is a moving postcard of brooks, lakes and forrests. Which begs the question: With all the serenity and breathtaking views, what’s to rebel against? Apparently, Mother Nature makes mean Vikings out of little boys. If Black Sabbath were a product of bleak, industrial Birmingham, it should be no surprise that music this extreme thrives in a country with such high precipitation and so many months of either uninterrupted daylight or darkness.

So don’t let the scenery fool you. These are some disturbed and disturbing fuckers, whether it’s guitarist Ymon of Perished with his arms covered in branding marks, or Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest smoking heroin off tin foil or a nude female model being painted in cow’s blood before she’s about to be hung from a cross for a Gorgoroth show in Krakow. Nearly everyone is wearing a scowl, corpse paint and spikes. And Beste’s grossest moment has him shooting Nattefrost smeared in his own shit.

Of all the bands featured, Beste focuses on the Tolkien-inspired Gorgoroth and its lead troublemaker Gaahl, who’s been arrested twice for alleged assault and torture, and whose face, with its sunken cheeks, looks even creepier without makeup. And that Krakow gig in 2004 not only included human crucifixes but sheep heads mounted on sticks. (Dude, one photo of decapitated sheep heads would’ve been enough.)

Images of Satan (LA Weekly), and there's a terrific slideshow here (NSFW). Here's the Amazon link if you'd like to buy the book. (Thanks Richard Metzger)

We've posted before about the "Wilhelm scream," the singular screech heard in hundreds of movies and TV shows since it was recorded in 1951. Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon notes the scream's transition into the video game world.
"The gamer's guide to the Wilhelm Scream"

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John links to a fantastic Crave piece about master Vietnamese phone-unlockers, virtuosos of desoldering who manage the painstaking business of unlocking your iPhone so that you can choose which network you run it on.

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone's motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh's turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

As a last step, the technician put the phone back together, and it looked like nothing had been done to it.

Unlocking an iPhone 3G the Vietnamese way Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Over at the parsarts.com blog, Sepideh Saremi* has a post up about Colorado-based artist Tom Loughlin. His portraits of Iranians inside Iran are featured in an installation project currently traveling across the US, "Pictures of You: Images from Iran." Snip:

PA: The photos in Pictures of You are printed on translucent silk. You’ve written that the silk is intended to allow viewers to see each other as well as the photographs, and to remind them that “something beautiful is in jeopardy.” How have viewers reacted to Pictures of You?

TL: There have been a wide variety of reactions. In fact, the one commonality seems to be that no one is indifferent. Everyone seems to have a powerful response to the show.

So far, the overwhelming majority of responses have been positive. Viewers thank us for putting a human face on Iran, and many of them have powerful emotional responses. It’s quite amazing for me as an artist to see people emerging from the installation in tears, or emptying their pockets into our donation boxes because they want to see the show travel to other venues.

We have had a variety of negative responses as well. At our installation in Denver, we were picketed by a Christian group that wanted to express the view that Muslims were going to hell. Interestingly, they all agreed that the subjects of my photographs looked like very nice people. At the same installation, we had a visitor tell us that he wanted to go and get dynamite and destroy the artwork. One of our staff members engaged him in conversation about the show, and within ten minutes he had changed his mind completely.

Pictures of You: Images from Iran (Pars Arts)

* Diclosure: By day, Sepideh works with DECA, the company with whom Boing Boing partnered to launch Boing Boing tv.

I love the band Styx in a non-ironic way. That's why I was delighted to stumble upon this curious ukulele cover of Styx's "Come Sail Away" by Uke enthusiast Sirant who lives in China. He looks like quite a character.

The man known most widely for his Radiohead-related artwork (album covers, posters, t-shirt and merch designs, stuff that lives on the web) is launching an independent record label. Stanley Donwood explains:

'SIX INCH RECORDS' is a project that may take a little explaining. The story begins around the time of Christmas 2006, when I drunkenly decided to become a record label boss. Every man needs a hobby, or so the cliché has it, and if I was going to make a late-stage attempt at normality then that was one of the things that I should do. So, still reeling from red wine, I typed out a email to three musicians that I knew, suggesting that I release their music on my as-yet-unnamed record label.

Do read the entirety of Donwood's own introduction. Like everything he does, the project sounds kinda complicated, a little crazy, most intricately conceived, and very interesting. I'm a big fan, and I can't wait to hear the music he's curated here. The Six Inch Records launch party takes place in London on January 30th; tickets are £6.66. LOL, Satan. (via the excellent Radiohead fan-blog GreenPlastic, and Rex -- thanks!)

One of my favorite spots in San Francisco is the Musée Mécanique, a magnificent penny arcade filled with dozens of old timey arcade machines, mechanical music instruments, bizarre automatons, and, of course, a photobooth. It's a truly wonderful place to visit. Proprietor Dan Zelinsky is a terrific guy who restores and maintains the machines himself. The Musée's David Gallagher just emailed to update me that one of Dan's pet project, a book titled Lost And Found At The Musée Mécanique, is now complete:

Over the last 30 years Dan has been collecting and saving photobooth strips left around the Musee in hopes that the owner would try to retrieve them… of course the large majority of them (ok, all of them) never get picked up.

So in addition to the large collection of machines in the Musee, he’s a got a huge collection of orphaned photobooth strips, the best of which he’s collected into a book called “Lost and Found at the Musée Mécanique”. the book is pretty cool, the pages are the size of strips themselves and the whole thing is bound at one corner so it can be fanned out like a pinwheel.

Musée Mécanique's Lost And Found book

A captivating, internet-inspired music video for "Yellow Fever," from the band Levelload. Directed by Babanuki ( = Tom Palliser and Ian Anderson). According to the YouTube summary, "Both song and video are about men who are obsessed with japanese/asian girls. The video also features robots, flamethrowers, credit verification systems & web browsing, all hand drawn." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have developed a novel microscopy technique to generate "digital embryos," 3D visualizations of early embryonic development down to the position of individual cells and the division of those cells. Their first big success, published recently in the journal Science, is a reconstruction of the first 24 hours of a Zebrafish embryo's development. The resulting movies are quite spectacular. From an EMBL press release:

Two newly developed technologies were key to the scientists' interdisciplinary approach to tracking a living zebrafish embryo from the single cell stage to 20,000 cells: a Digital Scanned Laser Light Sheet Microscope that scans a living organism with a sheet of light along many different directions so that the computer can assemble a complete 3D image, and a large-scale computing pipeline operated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology...

"The digital embryo is like Google Earth for embryonic development. It gives an overview of everything that happens in the first 24 hours and allows you to zoom in on all cellular and even subcellular details," says Jochen Wittbrodt, who has recently moved from EMBL to the University of Heidelberg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

The Zebrafish digital embryo(European Molecular Biology Laboratory), "Digital zebrafish embryo" press release (EMBL), "Reconstruction of Zebrafish Early Embryonic Development by Scanned Light Sheet Microscopy" (Science, thanks Mark Pescovitz!)

I collect antique medical illustrations from the 18th and 19th century. My collection is small, mostly because the really beautiful pieces are usually quite pricey. For a more affordable option, Transmission Atelier is a fine art printer in Chicago that also reissues antique medical, religious, mythology, and natural history illustrations. They've picked some fantastic pieces to reprint. I haven't seen Transmission Atelier's work in person, but they describe their products as "extremely detailed limited edition digital pigment prints." Small prints (8" x 10") are $49.99 and the large ones (16" x 20") are $119.99.
Transmission Atelier Editions

JBooks has an audio interview with pioneering underground comix writer Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor. In discussion with Brown University cultural historian Paul Buhle, Pekar talks about being a secular Jew, speaking Yiddish, and Studs Terkel. Buhle is the editor of Jews And American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, and is currently working on a biography of Pekar.
Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle in Conversation

Obama's Change.gov site has dropped its "All Rights Reserved" notice and switched to the Creative Commons Attribution license, the most liberal of the CC licenses. change.gov set free (Thanks, Simon!)

Michael Geist sez,"One year after launching the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, I've just released a new film that explores why copyright emerged as such a high profile issue. Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law, which I produced together with Daniel Albahary, features a wide range of Canadian voices - artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason's Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record's Terry McBride, Lulu.com's Bob Young, and Skylink Technologies' Philip Tsui; government appointees like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Ian E. Wilson, the Chief Librarian of Canada; and many, many more. Given the emphasis on the benefits of the Internet as a distribution channel for creators, the film is available in multiple ways online at newly designed page."

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law (Thanks, Michael!)

Here's the final installment in this year's Boing Boing holiday gift guide: a compendium of the top sellers from the last year's reviews. Today we wrap up with DVDs and one CD.

Don't miss the previous installments: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets, comics and nonfiction.

Freakazoid - The Complete First Season

The best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Tekkon Kinkreet

Absolutely extraordinary comic fuses manga and French comics in a story of violence and lost boys in a surreal Japanese cityscape
Original Boing Boing post

DAVE MCKEAN'S KEANOSHOW

Surreal gorgeous short videos on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Masters of Science Fiction: The Complete Series

Stephen Hawking hosts a science fiction TV show
Original Boing Boing post

Alphabutt
(Kimya Dawson)
Weird, jangly, hilarious awesome music for kids
Original Boing Boing post

Our pals at Watchismo have launched a new store to highlight their kick-ass line of reproductions of LIP diode watches -- replicas of Roger Tallon's 1973 timepieces that were among the first (and coolest) digital watches made. I bought my LIP back in September and I've been wearing it ever since.

Watchismo has offered to give away a LIP watch to one Boing Boing reader (and to offer a 20 percent discount to BB readers on the entire store, which includes dozens of superb vintage and new watches -- just use the discount code BBWATCHISMO) in a giveaway drawing that's scheduled for the 22nd of December.

I love watches -- my grandfather was a watchmaker and I grew up surrounded by them -- and I discovered Watchismo through a friend's recommendation. Since then, I've bought two watches from the site, and been given two more as gifts, and each one is an absolute treasure: beautiful, functional, and distinctive. There's an early digital that you adjust by rubbing a magnet (hidden in the bracelet) against the back of the case. There's another early digital whose numbers are actually printed in bright orange LED font on hidden cardboard wheels and then reflected on a disguised curved mirror that makes it appear that they are lit from within.

The craftsmanship and aesthetics of Watchismo's stocks really hit the sweet-spot for me: they're gizmos that are meant to last for the ages and be used every day.

Welcome to the BoingBoing LIP Diode Giveaway!

Sarah sez, "BBC radio is doing a piece about the influence of Yiddish on American culture - they have a great clip describing the ways in which Yiddish songs made their way into jazz (see blurb below). My grandma - the last surviving member of my family who remembers hearing Yiddish spoken in the home - got a real kick out of it."

Hell, I get a kick out of it! My father's first language was Yiddish, and I grew up taking Sunday Yiddish classes at the secular Workman's Circle school in Toronto. It's still the language I use to communicate with my family in Russia (they don't speak English and I don't speak Russian). It's a fantastically expressive, ironic language made for joking and tummeling and kibbitzing. It's a kind of weak Sapir-Worf: it's nearly impossible to speak it without turning ironic and funny.

And of course, Yiddish jazz like Mickey Katz (brilliantly covered by Don Byron) and the Yiddishisms in Slim Gaillard's music (Matzoh Balls, anyone?) just plain kicks ass.

Yiddish - a language once spoken by more than 10 million Jews - had a profound effect on American culture in the first half of the 20th Century.

It originated in central and eastern Europe - and spread to the United States when thousand of immigrants arrived in New York.

Zalmen Mlotek is the Artistic Director of the city's last surviving professional Yiddish theatre - the Folksbiene.

With the help of his piano, he has been telling Radio 3's Dennis Marks how the language influenced jazz music - and the likes of George and Ira Gershwin.

Audio slideshow: Inspired by Yiddish (Thanks, Sarah!)

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we endured Black Friday (which turned out to be Gray Friday for gadgets) and mundane gadget spam to bring you delights like humping USB M.U.S.C.L.E men.

John spotted Stephen Fry's laconic review of the BlackBerry Storm, a tiny computer that screws into your monitor's VESA mounts, and new wireless earbuds from Sennheiser.

With netbooks threatening to cannibalise general computer sales, Intel would prefer you bought things with profitable hi-performance chips. TechCrunch hates 'em, too: or at least 7" ones with 256MB of RAM running Vista on Via Nano processors.

Lori Drew, who taunted a youngster on MySpace, was convicted of computer hacking.

Boing Boing Gadgets

Here's a nice little variant on the traditional 419 scam letter that showed up in my inbox this morning:

THIS IS TO OFFICIALLY INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AMONG THE 40 LUCKY VICTIM OF SCAMMED TO BE COMPENSATED WITH $500,000.00.FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS,THIS WAS CONCLUDED BY THE SENATE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA,SENATOR wALLIS KELLY WITH DELEGATE FROM THE UNITED NATION AND WORLD BANK AT THE AFRICAN UNION SUMMIT WHICH TOOK PLACE IN ADDIS ABABA IN (ETHIOPIA) AIMED AT REDEEMING THE COUNTRY'S IMAGE AND ALSO TO TRY TO PUT ANEND TO THE INCESSANT SCAM REPORTS BY FOREIGNER ESPECIALLY FROM USA AND AROUND THE GLOBE.YOU HAVE BEEN LISTED AND APPROVED FOR THIS PAYMENT AS ONE OF THE SCAMMED VICTIMS TO BE PAID THIS AMOUNT.

In David W. Maurer's classic 1940 book The Big Con (the basis for the movie The Sting), he describes how con-men would put their victims on the hook again and again, fleecing them, then convincing them to go home and borrow or steal everything their could from their friends in order to get their original money back. Like a desperate gambler doubling down, the poor marks would get deeper and deeper, and at every stage, it got easier for the grifter to con them again.

So here's the modern variant of it -- fleecing people who've been burned by scammers.

As we're approaching the end of what is a nice four-day holiday break for some of us, I want to talk about getting back to work. This will also be my final guestblog on Boing-Boing, for now. [Blogging here has been a welcome distraction and a delight; thanks for allowing me to share this wonderful space with so many of you.]

While traveling recently, I came upon "The 4-Hour Workweek" in paperback, prominently displayed in an airport bookstore. I started wondering how the book is selling today. (The hardback was released in 2007). Its subtitle says it all: "Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich." Author Timothy Ferriss, not to be confused with Timothy Ferris, the science writer, considers himself a "lifestyle designer." He reveals how to cut your time at work by 80% and spend more time doing things you really enjoy such as skiiing or scuba diving.

The book's title, "The 4-hour Workweek", suggests the least amount of work you could get away with. However, in this economy, I kept thinking the title might suggest the most work you're lucky to find. Ferris' pitch now seems out of tune with tough times, a bit like books that guide you to "Invest in Real Estate with No Money Down."

Ferriss promises to reveal the secrets of the "New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who have abandoned the "deferred-life plan" (aka "slave - save - retire") and create luxury lifestyles in the present." It seems like the book was written for NY investment bankers who don't enjoy what they do but they can't bring themselves to walk away from $500K salaries and seek a new lifestyle. Ferris notes that it's not the money of the millionaire that most people want; it's the freedom that it buys them. So what keeps us from being free and enjoying it? It's a valid question but I had to ask its opposite: what keeps us from enjoying work?

With the investment banking lifestyle fast disappearing, like a lot of good deals gone bad, this book might represent the apex of the boomer fantasy -- the self-absorbed vision of abundance and personal prosperity, and its pre-occupation with retiring early and leaving the work world behind.

Ferris does have good things to say, but times have changed. Most of his advice applies if you don't like what you do for a living. Ferris says that most people see their "job description as self-description". We get trapped answering the question "what do you do?" Yes, that happens but it's what you do, not what you say that defines you, and that's why work is important. Work is where you can do a lot of things that you can't do on your own. Work is where you can do something that matters, not just to you, but to others. We don't have the luxury of ignoring the problems that face us and the people around us. (The economy, education, health care, climate change, etcetera, etcetera).

Ferris writes that "the perfect job is one that takes the least time." I beg to differ. I love what I do because it demands more and more of me. So, the perfect job is one that requires the most of you -- more of your talent, more of your time and more of your will to make something happen. It challenges you to grow and learn more about yourself, often through the people you work with. I realize not everyone has a job they love and nowadays, a lot of people are happy just to have a job, even if they don't love it. Nonetheless, I feel fortunate not only to have a good job but to be in a position to make a difference in other people's lives. I want more hours, not fewer.

I like poet Frank Bidart's words in "Advice to the Players."

“The greatest luxury is to live a life in which the work that one does to earn a living, and what one has the appetite to make, coincide - by a kind of grace are the same, one.”

Here's to a full workweek ahead, not merely four hours but forty plus.

Itsumishi sez, "A few weeks ago it was mentioned that the Australian Labor Government will be trying to introduce mandatory internet filtering despite promises before the election that any filtering would be on a voluntary basis. The whole insane proposal has received very little mainstream media attention despite vocal opposition from the Opposition, some smaller parties, industry experts, ISPs, consumers and even Child Welfare Groups! With trials due to start December 24th (while everyone is distracted by the holiday season) the time to speak up and let Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy as well as the Labor Government know how Australian's feel about this very important issue. GetUp! Campaign Actions (who helped abolish Work Choices and free David Hicks) have set up a campaign to Save the Net in Australia. I urge all Australian's who care about free speech, the internet and our economy to sign up now and stop this insanity before it has real impact on our daily lives."

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children's rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was "fundamentally flawed" because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

"Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people's view," she said.

"The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it's going to throw up false positives - many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation."

Children's welfare groups slam net filters, Save The Net petition

Wired's Joshua A Davis has a great profile of my pal Dan Kaminsky's work on discovering and then helping to fix a net-crashing DNS bug earlier this year. Davis really captures the excitement of discovering a major security flaw and the complex web of personal, professional and technical complications that come to bear when you're trying to disclose the research in a way that minimizes harm to the net.

Dan does a lot of fun security-related stuff that doesn't get talked about in public. There's this one thing he does --

But that would be telling.

The next morning, Kaminsky strode to the front of the conference room at Microsoft headquarters before Vixie could introduce him or even welcome the assembled heavy hitters. The 16 people in the room represented Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and the most important designers of modern DNS software.

Vixie was prepared to say a few words, but Kaminsky assumed that everyone was there to hear what he had to