Avon and Somerset Police are running the recordings of telephone calls from foolish (and probably drunken or drugged) people who want to report trivial problems, such as losing eyeglasses, wanting to know when the Internet started, or having sore feet.
The thing that surprises me is the politeness of the emergency line operators.
Avon and Somerset Police publish 999 (911 in US) calls from foolish people (via Arbroath)
To promote the Beijing Olympics, a city in China has erected several statues depicting a cartoony athlete mouse with curious square holes punched in its ears. Here's the YouTube video.
Fake Mickey Mouse statues at the Beijing Olympics (Japan Probe)
Link has audio clips from show, as well as a NASA spokesman's bemused response. Edgar Mitchell says aliens are real (Kerrang Radio, thanks Avi Solomon!)On July 23, 2008 Edgar Mitchell was interviewed on Kerrang Radio. Mitchell claimed the Roswell crash was real and that Aliens have contacted humans several times but that governments have hidden the truth for 60 years stating "I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real". In reply, a spokesman for NASA stated "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."
Parents whose children download music and films illegally will be blacklisted and have their internet access curbed under government reforms to fight online piracy.Link (Thanks, Jen!)Households that ignore warnings will be subjected to online surveillance and their internet speeds will be reduced, making it very difficult for them to download large files.
The measures, the first of their kind in the world, will be announced today by Baroness Vadera, who brokered the deal between internet service providers and Ofcom, the telecoms body.
Update: Danny sez, "ORG has links to the consultation, the memorandum of understanding the ISPs have signed, and how to get involved."
Link (Thanks to Amanda and all the other people who suggested this!)
They say Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, should be put on a secure financial basis like other "great museums"...Many of the buildings on the Bletchley estate were in a state of serious disrepair, she said. One building, where code-breakers worked during World War II, was falling apart, said Dr Black, and was protected by a blue tarpaulin that was nailed down over it.
Describing Bletchley as a "gem", Dr Black said it was a "national disgrace" that such a historic site was being allowed to fall into ruin.
"I do not know why they do not have funding as a national museum," she said.
See also: Bletchley Park kicks so much ass
Binyam Mohamed - an Ethiopian national, and a former resident of the United Kingdom – has been detained at Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.Link (Thanks, Damien!)Amnesty International is seriously concerned for Binyam Mohamed’s health and well-being, particularly following the US government's announcement that it has charged him for trial by military commission. His mental and physical health are reported to be precarious after years of indefinite detention, and alleged torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.To raise awareness of his plight we are asking people to visit the Unsubscribe action page and Digg it.
On 24 July 2008 Binyam Mohamed is 30 years old. To mark this day, the London Guantánamo Campaign are holding a demonstration to call on the UK government to do more to secure Binyam’s release from Guantánamo Bay and return to the UK.
Link (Thanks, Jason!)Security guards collected garbage bags full of sunblock at the entrances to Yankee Stadium over the sweltering weekend, when temps hit 96 degrees and the UV index reached a skin-scorching 9 out of 10 - a move team officials said was to protect the Stadium from terrorism...
"I was really pissed because, since I am Irish and I have a bald head, I need my sunblock," said Sean Gavin, 40, who had to toss his SPF 30 at the gate Saturday.
"After they saw me dousing myself with it, it should have been obvious to them that it was sunblock and not some explosive."
The team contends that sunscreen has long been on the list of stadium contraband, but there is no mention of it on the Yankee Web site.
Four weeks ago, Stadium officials decided that sunscreen of all sizes and varieties would not be permitted, a security supervisor told The Post before last night's game...
The Stadium does sell 1-ounce bottles of Arizona Sun SPF 15 for $5 - a huge markup that makes its beer seem cheap.
Continuing in the Blade Runner theme of our most recent Boing Boing tv episode, today BB Gadgets editor Joel Johnson speaks with artist and futurist Syd Mead about this rare treasure -- the only one in the world! -- spotted during a BBtv shoot in Mead's home and studio.
A one-of-a-kind official LEGO version of Mead's "Spinner" flying car from Blade Runner, presented to Syd by LEGO when he attended a design summit in Billund. Syd let me pick it up and swoop it around my head like a child.
LEGO and Blade Runner, two great tastes that taste great together. More iPhone snapshots from the shoot here.
If you like this BBtv episode, you might want to pick up:
Previous episodes in BBtv's Syd Mead series:
(Footage from the movie Blade Runner courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment / Warner Home Video; Artwork courtesy of Syd Mead Inc.)
Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we found the best places to buy the worst gadgets, reviewed D-Link's DSM 330 Medialounge, and wondered how someone can retrospectively patent something and then shake down an entire industry.
Joel wants to know if miniature swamp coolers are any good; Brownlee spotted an Algebraic wall clock that implies its own answers; and Rob found a Tetris pain box.
There was an aluminum lego key chain; 365 free games; emo Qtips; a carbonite George Lucas; and a terrible, awe-inspiring no-console-required controller game knockoff of Guitar Hero..
There's the Ripple, a sort of poor man's Mac Mini; the ornithopter-cam; the spherical PC' and the bad battery life of handheld PCs.
"Coincidentally, this all began in May, shortly after I began a series of investigative reports critical of the TSA. Eleven flights now since May 19. On different airlines, my name pops up forcing me to go to the counter, show my identification, sometimes the agent has to make a call before I get my ticket," Griffin reported. "What does the TSA say? Nothing, at least nothing on camera. Over the phone a public affairs worker told me again I'm not on the watch list, and don't even think that someone in the TSA or anyone else is trying to get even."LinkThe TSA, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, said Griffin's name wasn't even on the watch list, and the agency blamed the airlines for the delays the reporter experienced. The airlines, on the other hand, said they were simply following a list provided by TSA.
Crooked Little Vein in paperbackWarren Ellis's first novel, "Crooked Little Vein" is about what you'd expect from the Internet's most gonzo celebrant of the kinky, deviant, gross, hard-boiled and manic. Like Hunter S Thompson with an Internet connection, Ellis's hard-boiled detective story veers into hilarious gross-out turf from the first page, when a heroin-addicted presidential chief of staff charges the narrator of the book to retrieve a holy relic. The relic is a record of the "true" constitution of the United States, containing the mystical spell that Benjamin Franklin composed after killing an alien who had been sodomizing him in a hotel room in Paris. The book -- bound in the alien's skin -- has the power to restore America to colonial morality, banishing its Internet-era perversions. But first it must be retrieved from its current owner -- whomever has inherited title from the hooker to whom Nixon gifted it as a hush-up bribe.
This storyline - a hardboiled dick and his h4wt, tattooed, polyamorous sidekick -- is the perfect vehicle for a blazing, hilarious tour across America and its myriad daytime talk-show perversions (the narrator has his balls injected with saline in the first fifty pages). Ellis is a connoisseur of the weird and squicky, and he's saved his best material for us in this volume. This is a book that would make Goatse blush in places, and laugh in others, and do some discreet mail-order shopping in others.
But there's more to this book than just chuckles. Slyly hidden in this book's depths is an absolutely brilliant little message about the how and why of Internet perversity, the reason that America and the world have found themselves getting magnificently weirder in the last decade, and why that's a Good Thing. This is a celebration of following one's weird, one that is open-eyed to the pain and problems of that path, and one that embraces it anyway.
Ellis is a great storyteller, and this little sucker just rips along. I just finished it in 90 minutes on an airplane and it left me hungry for more. Go on and read this one, it's NSFW-ariffic.
They’re falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.LinkAdvocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they’ve been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.
By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides’ arguments, however weak. (That’s sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)
Of course, transparency is essential in this process, and for the most part we get it from advocacy groups. The one we can’t trust are the ones who take positions that echo the views of financial patrons. The think-tank business is known for this kind of thing, and it’s an abysmal practice.
LinkBeta users can sign up via http://www.shapeways.com/beta
BetaCode: BoingBoing
Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression? Please use the comments over on The Googlization of Everything to tell me stories. As Mudbone (Richard Pryor's character) used to say, "you only remember two times, your first and your last."Link (Thanks, Siva!)
Neatorama found this photo of a 2nd Century AD bust that bears a resemblance to The Hillbilly Cat.
Roman Elvis (Neatorama)
In the late 1990s, Jeff Simmermon formed a band with two chickens as members. This is his story.
The keyboard players in my band were spacier than Sun Ra, more abstract than John Coltrane and brought more sheer, squalid anarchy to the stage than GG Allin and the Sex Pistols combined. When they weren’t playing music they were either feeding, fighting, or shitting on the floor – and they managed to do a lot of that onstage, too. But they didn’t just act like barnyard animals, they were barnyard animals: the keyboard players in my band were two chickens named Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline.Brainless Barnyard Keyboards: The Short Saga of Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band.I played percussion on a modified vintage typewriter miked up loud enough to sound like the thunder of an angry God. At that volume, the space bar and shift keys rumbled like a kick drum, and the letter keys snapped like a tight snare. My friend Tim, the band’s other human being played the guitar and bass semi-simultaneously, wearing the guitar up by his collarbone and the bass slung low at his hips – he’d loop the bass notes through a pedal and play rhythm guitar against himself while I thumped and cracked the typewriter. Once we hit a stride of sorts, we’d pull a blanket off the top of the cage where Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline sat with two little Casio Keyboards.
We’d glue chicken feed to the keys we wanted them to hit the most, the ones in tune with Tim. But really, whatever the chickens played was up to them – we just tried to follow along as best we could. We told ourselves that we were influenced by classic country, John Cage, dub reggae and Gonzo the Great. But really, we just tried to create listenable backing rhythms while two birds with brains the size of your pinkie nail took center stage.
Looks useful if you plan to sell your old iPhone.
(Disclosure: I'm editor-in-chief of MAKE, which is published by O'Reilly.)This book shows the reader how to recover sensitive information from the device and perform disaster recovery, and walks the reader through various scenarios for recovering different types of information. With this guide, the reader will be able to effectively recover live, lost, or deleted email, photos, voicemail, Google Maps searches, typing cache, and other sensitive data retained by the iPhone. The reader will learn advanced techniques including data recovery, properly preserving and preparing evidence, and technical techniques such as bypassing basic passcode security or recovering data even after a full restore (by say, a disgruntled employee). Finally, the reader will learn how to properly wipe an iPhone clean of all data for resale or reissue - something Apple's own restore process fails to do.
Last night, the Imaginary Foundation presented me with this beautiful gift, "Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti Sculpture." Available from Design Toscano, it stands almost two and a half feet tall and is made from hand-painted resin. My 2.5 year-old-son was slightly scared of the creature at first, but then he cautiously walked up, examined him closely, and finally patted him on the head and said "Nice Bigfoot! Bigfoot is nice!"I enjoyed this video of Keith Barry performing feats of "brain magic" at TED.
First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.Link (Thanks, Wellington!)
Here's a nice appreciation for the work of Minnesota artist Jeffrey T. Larson. His work reminds me of my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent.
My favorites of Larson’s paintings, though, are his landscapes (bearing in mind that most of his figurative paintings are also landscapes in effect). These force me to resort to those overused terms “fresh” and “immediate” because nothing else sums them up quite as succinctly.Art of Jeffrey T. Larson (Lines and Colors)His landscapes evoke the dappled sunlight on an intimate creek or the cool haze of a winter sky with beautifully efficient brush strokes and a subtle handling of color variation. He’s chosen a position on the spectrum of tight to loose rendering that I find particularly appealing.
Something I found of special interest in Larson’s work is they way he constructs the image with the direction and shape of his brushstrokes. He isn’t just dabbing color in, filling in shapes with slapdash blots of paint, he’s drawing with his brushstrokes, defining the shapes of objects in same way lines and textures applied in a drawing can follow and define the form. (This is a characteristic I particularly associate with painters like Sargent or Cecilia Beaux.)
This aggressive little tortoise is unstoppable in his determination to keep cats off his territory.
On Instructables, The Raven shows how to make a high-pitched tormentor that most mature adults are immune to:
This is a little device that I designed for the simple purpose of being discreetly annoying. It waits for a predetermined amount of time, and then it starts emitting high-pitched beeps. I have programmed mine to take advantage of an interesting property of sound. That is, in general most people above the age of 25-30 can't hear very high-pitched tones (say, 17 KHz for instance). This means if you were to (hypothetically of course) place it in a classroom, it would start bugging the heck out of the students while the teacher/professor will (most likely) be completely unaware of the source of the disturbance.
Why are these news anchors smiling? Because they've been given cups filled with a solid plastic material that resembles coffee.
Two cups of McDonald’s iced coffee (BUY!) sit on the Fox 5 TV news desk, a punch-you-in-the-face product placement (BUY!) to chase down your morning news.(I want this fake cup of espresso.)They’ve been on the Las Vegas station set for about two weeks, following the lead of a few TV stations across the country, and they’re still looking every bit as frosty and tantalizing (BUY!) as they were the first day you laid your eyes on them.
But wait, here’s the best part: They’re not real. Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain.
“In the meantime we need to know why some of the patients don’t respond at all,” says (researcher Helen) Mayberg. “Are we missing the target, or are there different subtypes of the disease?” Her team is now trying to find out how to identify those who will respond to DBS, and those who won’t. “Brain surgery is not like getting your nails done, so it is important to try to find out who will benefit..."Deep brain stimulation for depression (Nature)
Neurologists think that the therapy works by activating or damping down particular brain circuits. At the moment, no-one knows which of the targets within these circuits will eventually prove to be the most optimal...
The centres are also investigating the value of DBS in other psychiatric disturbances, such as obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction.
Are all companies that sell search engine optimization services swindlers and crooks, as I've heard? Surely not, but my own experiences with a firm called eBoost Media quickly turned surreal, so I'd like to share the saga here — and in return invite your wisdom.
Let me cut right to the heart (and the height) of the bizarre goings-on: on Friday evening, I received an anonymous, sneering, jeering voice-mail from an eBoost Media customer service rep. She called me a "faggot" and a "queer." I shit you not. This was her apparent retaliation for my demanding a refund due to the fact that the company had, for multiple weeks, not delivered one iota of what they said they would. I got tired of the excuses and wanted out, and they were giving me the runaround, so I laid it out simply enough by phone and e-mail: either you give me my money back or you'll be looking at a fraud investigation.
Here's the message I received in return. Actually, there are two. The first one (relatively polite, though the strained friendliness is pretty evident) is from an eBoost Media customer service manager called Denette. The second message, left just minutes later, is the fascinating one in which I'm addressed as, let us say, a flamboyant friend of Dorothy's. Is it the same woman on the recording, times two? Sounds like it to my (musically well-trained) ears.
Listen to the voicemail messages as a WMA file, or an MP3 file.
This is the text verbatim:
"Hey Roger van Backel [butchering my name with obvious relish], you are a faggot! So listen to this, queer!" [unintelligible background noise and talking, then the name 'Roger' again, then she hangs up]
When I called him yesterday, eBoost's acting CEO Michael Luvano agreed to listen to the recording. He then acknowledged that the second call had come from someone at eBoost Media, but curiously enough, he denied it was Denette. The mystery culprit, he said hours after hearing the messages, had already been "dealt with" — she'd been "severely reprimanded." When, puzzled, I suggested we ought to let other people listen to the messages on the Internet and solicit their opinions on whether or not it's the same voice, he got huffy and accused me of being out to badmouth his company.
Nonetheless, Luvano offered to have the CEO, Kevin Johnson (who he said was on vacation) write me a personal apology. He also said the company would finally refund the dough, which I appreciate.
Let's see if the money arrives. And Johnson's note, too.
Anyway, help me out here: Isn't the woman on the two voicemails one and the same? I'm curious what you think. (Remember, Luvano has already admitted it's someone who works for him at eBoost Media, and that that person has been disciplined, but that was all he would say on the matter.) Does anybody else suspect, as I do, that he's just blowing smoke by denying that the deranged individual who left message number two is the very same woman as the caller who left the first message?
Listen carefully and take the poll!
Curse of the Crying Boy (Fortean Times)Rotherham fire station officer Alan Wilkinson who, it emerged, had personally logged 50 ‘Crying Boy’ fires dating back to 1973, dismissed any connection with the supernatural, having satisfied himself that most of them had been caused by human carelessness. But despite his pragmatism, he could not explain how the prints had survived infernos which generated heat sufficient to strip plaster from walls. His wife had her own theory: “I always say it’s the tears that put the fire out.” The Sun was not interested in finding a rational explanation. It ignored Wilkinson’s comments and claimed “fire chiefs have admitted they have no logical explanation for a number of recent incidents.”
Soon afterwards, it emerged that the ‘cursed’ prints were not all copies of the same painting, nor were all the prints by the same artist. The picture that survived the fire in Rotherham that initially triggered the scare was signed by the artist G Bragolin. The Sun claimed the original was “by an Italian artist”. In fact, Giovanni Bragolin was a pseudonym adopted by Spanish painter Bruno Amadio, who is also known as ‘Franchot Seville’. Attempts to trace him floundered as art historians said he did not appear to have “a coherent biography”. To make matters more confusing, further ‘Crying Boys’ that had featured in the fires, part of a series of studies called ‘Childhood’, were painted by Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen, who died in 1976. The only common denominator was that all were examples of cheap, mass-produced prints sold in great numbers by English department stores during the 1960s and 70s.
In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not aloneFliers Complain About X-Rated Security Screenings"It's humiliation," Perry said.
Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.
"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.
At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.
"She was yelling 'I have power, I have power, I have power," Perry said. The power to stop him from flying to Florida with his wife that day to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
