SMITH has a jones for comics with intensely personal storylines. So no shock that we love Bee and her “bubblegum noir adventures,” the creation of Jason Little and his Beekeeper Cartoon Amusements. In Shutterbug Follies, Bee works at a one-hour photo lab in lower Manhattan, where she duplicates the weirdest photos she comes across for her personal collection. Little’s latest is Motel Art Improvement Service (here’s a panel below), a sequel to Shutterbug that follows Bee’s dark-ass and funny adventures on a cross-country bike trip. It’s been out for a while now, but I just found it via ACT-I-VATE, the storied webcomic collective that houses many legends (including Shooting War’s own Dan Goldman) and now has now welcomed Little into its ranks.

Big ups to Dan and Anthony for the hot write-up Shooting War received in the October issue of Wired. Dan’s got it here. And if you haven’t gone down this road yet, check out Dan’s sublime “Craigslist roommate caper” Kelly.

Everyone has a story: mine is that last week was Hell, and I had no time to find a video for Friday.

So I’m here to make amends, with not one but two videos to kick the week off. First up, an affront to all that YouTube stands for: a commercial for Burger King from P. Diddy. Can’t stop, won’t stop, I get it - but someone, please stop him.

Fortunately, YouTubers aren’t about to take this kind of thing lying down, and user LisaNova strikes back.

Oh, satire. Is there anything you can’t do?

Last year, one of the best events I went to was the Vendy Awards. I wrote about it here, and you can see pictures here. Good food, good cause, good time. The Street Vendor Project (SVP), which runs the event, will be presenting the 2006 Vendy Awards on Sunday, Oct. 22 at the St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery in NYC. Mark your calendars and buy your tickets now ($50 each). And also, take a moment to nominate your favorite vendor cart — the Vendy finalists are chosen based on your votes. The finalists will be at the event serving food, and there will also be an open bar. It really is just a great time, and it’s all for a good cause — The SVP is a legal project that advocates on behalf of street vendors. Read the excellent about us section at the SVP website to learn more about their good work. And be sure to also check out this article in the New York Times about the upcoming event and NYC street vendors.

Then you’ll be very happy to know of this resource: Midtown Lunch. The site features reviews of lunchtime eatery options in Manhattan’s Midtown area, and it’s an invaluable resource. For those who work in the area, like I unfortunately do, no explanation is needed as to why this site is so necessary, but for those who are lucky enough to be able to grab lunch elsewhere, I’ll sum it up: $9 subpar sandwiches at every soup/salad/sandwich joint, and a slew of restaurants of the overly priced/lowest quality variety. But clearly there are options, as Midtown Lunch is proving with its insightful reviews.

Some SMITHsters* and I went to a New York Society for Ethical Culture panel last night called “Ethics and Journalism: Should We Trust the Media?” The evening was in honor of magazine legend Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine, and a wonderful man who welcomed me into his home three years ago so I could show him the prototype of SMITH (the print edition). If you’re a magazine junkie, Clay’s your Michael Jordan. And I cherish the generosity he offered me with his time and advice.

The panel had an all-star cast (albeit one missing someone born in, say, the ’70s) that included legendary journalist Helen Thomas, CBS correspondent Randall Pinkston, Time mag’s managing editor Richard Stengel, NY mag’s Adam Moss, and Buzz Machine’s Jeff Jarvis.

The discussion took a few random directions, but the through line was: Is the media more or less ethical than in the past? That essentially became a discussion on whether bloggers and a more participatory reader/user experience is a force for good or evil. No one had much new or of note to say. As much as the crowd was applauding Helen Thomas’s every word  (and personally I was stoked to hear her speak, which I hadn’t before), she restated the obvious about the lameness of the press surrounding Bush and the war, and offered some grumpy old words about bloggers. By far the most interesting speaker was Jeff Jarvis, a former old-media guy (TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly) who’s become one of the biggest thinkers about our media future. Jarvis encouraged the assembled to quit trying to hold on to the old models (objectivity, as well as print newspapers, for example) and get excited by the new ones (user-generated content, in whatever shapes and forms and twists and turns it takes, and also bloggers).

He said that if you don’t believe in the power of the group to suss out the truth as well as to force quality to float to the top, then you don’t really have much faith in democracy. (I’ll blog to that!) “The media’s job is to let people judge the truth,” he said. “The natural state of media is not one institutional voice, but that we all have a voice and report together.”

Plus, you gotta love a guy who’s been watching Weeds on his ipod. (Note to fellow Weeds lovers: Click here for a great MySpace situation.) If I find a transcript of the event I’ll post it.

Speaking of the power of bloggers, here’s a word from the one who broke the Mark Foley scandal.

*We need a better name for people who write for SMITH: SMITH People? SMITHspacesters? The SMITHS? Whoever comes up with it wins one of our groovy limited-edition T-shirts, modeled here by my niece—despite my sister’s concerns that Foley will somehow now find her.

Bad news folks — apparently Forrest Gump had nothing to do with the creation of that iconic smiley face on the bright yellow background.

Grieve. Move on.

Anyway, in honor of “World Smile Day,” which Harvey Ball (and the man actually responsible for the face) declared in 1999 to promote good vibes everywhere, the Worcester Historical Museum in Massachusetts will open, “Smiley - An American Icon” to the public this Friday.

50 bucks says the toilet seat will be the most photographed item on display.

And why is this even happening? The Museum’s executive director:

“Just as you’d want to know the biography of General Washington, we realized we didn’t know the comprehensive history of the Smiley Face.”

You know, that’s kind of cool.

You can read learn more about the famous Smiley Face here.

Given that today is World Animal Day, it might not be a bad idea for Smith readers to get in touch for a moment with their bestial sides. Few of us feel much connection with our inner knuckle dragger anymore, having traded fur for pressed slacks and social lice picking for instant messaging — not altogether for the better, might I add.

Anyone eager to bond with their inner troglodyte might consider some old style hunting and gathering. Barely practiced anymore except by fishermen, the wild-catching of food is actually what all humans did before we had jobs. Most of us have at least a shred of experience with it, whether it be picking blackberries or digging clams. I proudly recall many sun dappled afternoons hunting morel mushrooms as a hippy child in Northern Michigan.

As it turns out, foraging has undergone something of a resurgence in the popular mind of late. In the U.K., excitement over what promises (based on weather) to be a banner mushroom season has mushroomed (pardon me) into lenthy point/counterpoint columns in the Guardian. (The interest in foraging is also tied to concerns over the ponderous and precarious length of contemporary food chains, and the global movement to shorten them. What better means to that goal than plucking lunch from your own yard?)

Should you wish to gather edible weeds, berries, fungi or whatever may be in season in your neck of the woods, there are a number of resources at your disposal. I’d go into some hunting resources here, but we both know if you weren’t raised shooting deer, boar or bird, odds are you’ll die never having done it. I grew up in a town where the first day of deer season was a reasonable excuse to miss school, and it makes me sort of sad now that I was always one of the kids yawning through a substitute-taught class on that day.

Nobody does it better than Jon Stewart. So leave it to Stewart, our nation’s most-trusted anchor, to tweak the bloomin’ age of user-generated content, perhaps when it needs it most. CNN’s new I Report could be user-gen’s Jump the Shark moment, in which the cheesy, mainstream media barrel onto the bandwagon without really knowing how, why or to what end. But don’t believe me, click this video below, possibly the best two+ minutes of your day.

It’s a mega-project, indeed, but Dr. Melissa Hope Ditmore has done just that. She’s the editor of the Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, a years-in-the-making, one-of-a-kind reference work just published by Greenwood Press. The encyclopedia collects and details information about a complex subject matter that is often viewed or thought of in very narrow, cliche-ridden terms. It’s a serious work, but not just for academics. Here’s what Fleshbot had to say, and be sure to check out this interview with Ditmore that I posted at 52projects.com.

Who owns your story if you share it? How much is it worth? Timed with the revival of A Chorus Line, the New York Times revisits the story behind stories of the dancers who may have signed away their life stories for a song.

In 1974, choreographer Michael Bennett summoned 19 of Broadway’s best dancers, had them to sit in a circle on the floor of an exercise center, pressed record on a tape, and asked them for their life stories. “For the next 12 hours they spoke about their lives,” writes Campbell Robertson, “telling stories of divorce, child abuse and the plight of the professional dancer.” We know how this story ends. The dancers sold the rights to all that they spilled on the tape for $1 each. And these stories became the blueprint of one of the most successful musicals of all time. Bennett later set them up with royalties from the show (reportedly up to $10,000 a year) but these storytellers have long questioned whether they’ve received short shrift (at best) or completed ripped off (at worst). “I knew it was wrong,” Priscilla Lopez told the Times reporter, “But I thought, ‘If I don’t sign this, I’m not going to be a part of it.’ ” Read this terrific piece here.

Photo courtesy of Logan Cody > Flickr > Creative Commons.