Oh, well, yes, I suppose it’s also for Android phones. I’ll happily plug Google’s phone platform too. Actually, I’ll happily drive to Google’s house and clean the dead leaves out of their gutters. Google is officially The Coolest Company On The Planet.

Why? Today they’ve released Google Books for Mobile. Plug http://books.google.com/m into your mobile browser and look what happens:

Google Books for Mobile: Top page

Yes, all 1.5 million public-domain texts in the Google Books project are now available to mobile users, behind a fairly awesome, slick interface. I’m in the mood for some PG Wodehouse, I think:

PG Wodehouse, on a whim.

And I scroll down a bit and find many titles of interest. I give one of ‘em a tap, and soon I’m looking at a very credible little mobile book reader:

The reader. Basic, but hey, a reader ought to be clean.

And the reader isn’t bare-bones. If I zoom to the top I can go to specific pages or search within the text. It doesn’t seem to “bookmark” your place automatically but you can use the browser’s built-in bookmark tool to mark that specific vague section of the book (the “hunk” that Google has just downloaded and is displaying).

Good golly. If Google is evil, then they’re a Doctor Doom sort of evil. What’s a little evil, when the totalitarian dictator takes such wonderful, indulgent care of his subjects?

Huge, hulking, armed Googlebots may suddenly appear on every street corner one morning but I’ll be inclined to think “Well, yes, that’s annoying, I won’t lie. But I do get to keep Google Books for Mobile, right?”

I’m a man who drinks lustily from the heady draught of adventure. So obviously, I’ve bookmarked ModBlog. This is a nearly-daily dose of photos of stories about people’s tattoos. And piercings. And brandings. And…well, apparently there’s this new thing where you actually have a design cut into your skin, and then the artwork turns into a raised scar.

I could continue, but there’s an orange DPW sign posted in the road just past the scar art and it reads “ENTERING ANDY IHNATKO’S PERSONAL CREEP-OUT ZONE” and I don’t really hazard to proceed any further. Up until this point, I am full of respect and admiration for some fantastic artwork and for the sort of person with such a firm handle on their personal identity that they can upgrade their personal hardware with complete confidence and with stunning effects. No need to screw that up.

(All I’m saying is that when THE MODBLOG decides that a photo is so “out there” that it needs to be concealed behind a link or a blurred thumbnail…well, that really has to influence your decision whether to click through or not.)

I was interested by this little collection of Spider-Man tattoos that they posted this week. Each of the tats are very well-executed and tastefully-chosen. But isn’t it amazing how quickly I blipped past the “this isn’t a rub-on; this is a permanent part of the landscaping” bit and immediately dropped into Comic Book Geek mode?

“Frenz, McLeod knockoff, original art based on stock Romita pose, classic Romita…oh, they took the Mike Zeck Spidey figure from the cover of ‘Handbook To The Marvel Universe’ and replaced the black costume with his red-and-blues, very nice work, there…”

There are plenty of sites devoted to mocking awful tattoos (and I wouldn’t be surprised if I discovered the blog through one of those “Oh, get a load of THIS guy!” links from Fark or somewhere). But man alive, ModBlog has really done a fab job of promoting tattooing as an artform. Every now and then they post a shot of a piece that’s truly stunning…in which the design, the execution, the placement, and the personality of the owner are in perfect harmony with one another.

No, a tattoo isn’t in my future. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out completely. But I’m not the sort of person who’d ever get a purely decorative tattoo and I’ve never had a single image that had such totemistic power for me that I’d want to wear it for life.

Which is too bad, because I had an awesome idea for a nerdy Mac tattoo a few years ago.

A Happy Mac. “Wow, Andy…yeah, that’s utterly original. You’d totally be the only one who’s ever gotten that image tattooed!” Crankiness is a bad color on you, sir or Madam. Stick with me: you get this icon tattooed somewhere high up on an arm or a leg. Your hip or your shoulder, say. Or you get it in a spot where there’s plenty of real estate.

Your goal in life, from birth to death, is to continue to expand your capabilities as you go. Right? Okay: so you celebrate this with an ever-expanding sequence of startup icons, mimicking the classic Mac OS’s startup screen in which every time a new driver was successfully loaded, it’d draw a representative icon next to the previously-drawn icon, filling the screen with a long line (or even a full mosaic) of little pictures.

Next to the Happy Mac, you design an icon representing your first breath. Then the ability to process food. First steps. First words, Learning to read. Entering school. First real friend. First kiss. First real job. You learned to play guitar. You wrote your first novel. Lost your virginity. Hopefully nearby to that, an icon representing the first time you made love properly.

On and on. Over the years, more and more icons appear. True, you’ll be busy for the first few months as you fill in all of the individual icons representing the first couple of decades of your life. But after that, it becomes a far more leisurely pace. You only add an icon when it becomes compellingly and irrefutably clear to you that you’ve experienced something that’s made you a bigger and better individual.

The tricky part — and here’s where you’ll need to choose the executor of your estate properly — is that you won’t be able to go into the shop and have the Death tattoo put on:

So you’ll have to have the artwork printed up and inserted into your will. Ideally, accompanied by a link to a Python script you’ve uploaded to your website that can convert a date and time of death into hexadecimal, so that the artist can ink it into the proper spot under the icon.

It isn’t the most brilliant idea for a tattoo ever. That honor goes to the convict on “Prison Break” who had the blueprints and technical data for the prison inked all over his body before he was incarerated, concealed as geometric designs. But give me credit: this idea is definitely up there.

This is one of those heroically-stupid ideas that I feel compelled to encourage, with a link: “The Nothing Show” is an improv MP3 in which two performers read Tweets from two separate people.

Episode 3 features the Tweets of you-know-who. I don’t know if I can say “I thought it was funny” without sending the implied message “Good God, even when I’m just writing casual 140-character snippets, I am one talented sunofabitch” so I’ll just ahead and send that message explicitly instead.

Josh Middleton has absolute crazy talent. I could pull up a chair and gawk at a piece like this for an hour.

Gawker.com runs one of my favorite online columns: The UnEthicist. It’s technically a parody of Randy Cohen’s “Ethicist” column that runs in the New York Times.

The original is sort of an academic twist on the classic advice column. Instead of asking “I spilled red wine all over the carpet during a party at my boss’ house; should I just have the rug cleaned, or should I pay for a whole new rug?” readers ask “Of course, I blamed the spill on an associate who joined the firm a few months ago. He got fired for not being ‘enough of a man to admit what he’d done.’ I would never have intentionally gotten the guy canned, but now that he’s out, is it ethical to lobby for my cousin to get hired for the vacant position?”

It’s a fine column and it’s good to know that the subtle topic of ethical behavior is being discussed in a paper as prestigious as the New York Times. Week after week, Randy Cohen makes the point that ethics usually comes down to just one simple idea: considering the feelings and points of view of other people.

And many of the questions are absolutely fascinating ethical dilemmas. An artist friend of yours has died. She’s left instructions that all of her artwork must be destroyed. Is it ethical to ignore the request, in the interests that her creative legacy lives on?

But oftentimes, the questioners take the most trivial of issues and make them seem like Sophie’s Choice. Or, they’re asking a question like “I donated $3.2 million dollars plus both my kidneys to charity last year; is it ethical to have donated only one lobe of my liver as well?” which is clearly just engineered to get their name and their good deeds published in the international newspaper of record.

Gawker publishes a new edition of “The Unethicist” after each column appears in the Times. Gabriel Delahave answers the exact same questions as Randy Cohen…informed from a slightly different worldview.

I’m plugging this column because it’s usually a great read, but also because this week’s outing is exceptional. I read his response to the second question and thought “You know, the problem with the sort of people who even consider doing something like what this woman is considering is that they never get called onto the carpet as surgically and effectively as Delahave just has.” Usually, they hear something diplomatic (like Randy Cohen’s original answer)…which isn’t a hard enough slap to knock any sense into them.

Instead, they usually hear something diplomatic. Like the original response.

Head on over to Macworld.com. I’ve posted a long piece in which I attach a dollar value to every major new feature of Leopard.

Macworld Feature: What’s Leopard really worth?

So how much is Leopard worth? If it were a collection of third-party utilities, I’ve got it at $409. And I’m sorry to have to tell you that you could have added a zero to that if your uncle hadn’t cleaned off that rich, 250-year-old  patina. Because collectors die for that sort of stuff.

I’m usually pretty critical of my own stuff, so I’m always pleased when I find myself laughing at something I wrote just 48 hours earlier:

And now we have the de-wussification of Mail. Mail was once a candy-apple red Mazda Miata. Now it’s a Ford pickup with a gun rack and a rear-window decal of a cartoon Calvin peeing all over the Microsoft Entourage icon.

Y’know, every now and then, the Plinko chip lands in the $10,000 slot.