BoingBoing reader Dav says:

JapanToday has an article about an unlikely hit pop song. The song is the official song for a demolition company, composed and performed by one of the workers. After it was picked up and played on a TV show, the company began getting so many calls that they started to sell recordings of it. I usually don't suggest links to my own blog, but in this case I haven't found a better link, since I've collected the english translation of the lyrics and the link to the original Japan Today article together. I've been looking around for an MP3 to no avail. I figure a post about the song on BB might help in that search :)

The sound is, like, really fast drum-n-bass mashed up with a bad TV show theme. Link

update: Oliver Schnarchendorf says, "This site contains a flash animation containing the construction company song."

Jim Spurrier says, "This link contains the mp3 file for the Japanese NBK construction theme song. I don't know how stable the site is, but it oughta hold long enough for you to d/l the thing before the boing-dotting commences."

BoingBoing reader Owen Williams points us to:

.... a short article asking reviewers of hardware devices to add a score to their reviews: the openness factor. For instance, when I buy this mp3 player, what will it let me do, and how am I restricted? I've come up with a simple 4-point scale of openness from crippled products that subvert standards to lock you in (remember DivX?), to complete freedom (palmOS or modern hardware).

Link

Derek Powazek says:

Come read Fray's special holiday story by Beth Lisick: Kathy's Annual Ladies Luncheon. It's about her family's annual Christmas gathering, and how it went very, very wrong one year. Have you just had a harrowing holiday? Tell your story!

Link

BoingBoing reader Clive says:

Chris Allbritton was the first truly blog-created journalist -- a former Associated Press guy who raised $13,000 in donations from the audience of his blog Back To Iraq, to pay for a reporting trip to Iraq during the war. With no editors to please, he was able to cover whatever stories he and his audience wanted. Now his readers have asked him to do another trip -- so he's started another fundraising drive. If you want to support truly independent war reporting, drop by his site and throw some change in his Paypal jar.

Link

BoingBoing reader Alex Steffen points us to a new exhibition opening in January at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Jan 17–Apr 4, 2004:

In conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Center presents an exhibition that addresses the pervasive influence of video game culture. The program explores a variety of subject areas, from the evolution of the game and its roots in military training applications to its contemporary features and cross-fertilization with artistic endeavors. Among the anticipated projects included in the exhibition are: an interactive lemon tree-powered hand held games by acclaimed artist and graphic designer, Amy Franceschini; renderings of historic events in the isometric perspective of video games by John Haddock; and a curated show in a virtual Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in The Sims Online created by Katherine Isbister/Rainey Straus. Also on display is an interactive video game created by the youth from YBCA's education program, Young Artists at Work. An exhibition plug-in by KOP, Game Commons, will accompany the exhibition.

Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Seth claims the exhibition's title is a case of unfair name-poaching:

Just a bitchy complaint to say that the title of this art exhibition poaches directly the name of a preexisting documentary film on Street Fighter videogame players (which was at SXSW, Sundance, etc. about 2 years ago). The film's producer (my friend Peter Kang) has been inundated by emails and calls asking whether the film (understandably very popular with gamers at festivals, but not yet in full release due to music licensing issues, and therefore more tantalizingly difficult to see) is playing at this show, to which it has no connection at all.

The Center seems to have poached the name. Even among hardcore players given to obscurantism and inbred slang, this phrase is (or was, pre-documentary) totally obscure. The festival organizers ignored totally repeated attempts by Peter (who ran the fabulously successful boutique design co. Kioken, and is too nice/busy to think about really pushing them, though he is understandably really upset- he's got a very expensive property which they're obfuscating) to at least clarify the situation, before finally responding to say "We came up with it on our own" (???- seems uncontroversially a reference to *something*) and "it refers to pinball". The "pinball" followup at least makes the "we came up with it on our own" sound remotely plausible, though in fact those answers (from the same person) are simply mutually exclusive. Further "pinball" is a pretty implausible inspiration for a naming a show that has no connection whatsoever to pinball. Like most arts center people trying to stay on top of the ever-cresting wave of cool, they probably asked someone whom they adjudged "hip", who coughed up the last sexy-sounding game-related phrase they'd heard. And even if they had somehow come upon this themselves, it doesn't seem really to matter- there's still the copyright stemming from the creation of a known property. I guess being an arts center means you're free to give actual artists the finger?

According to a NY Post article, referenced in this CBC.ca article, William Shatner will soon release a new album -- produced by Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five fame. Guests are said to include country star Brad Paisley and former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins, whose performances have also been described from time to time as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."

The new album isn't the first foray into recording for the Montreal-born actor best known for playing James T. Kirk, the captain of the starship Enterprise on the original Star Trek series. In 1968, Shatner released his first album The Transformed Man, which includes spoken-word cover versions of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man. Although Shatner intended The Transformed Man to be taken seriously, it's become something of a camp classic. The Hip Surgery Music Guide, an internet guide that celebrates offbeat musical genres, says the songs can be taken as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."

Link (via pho)

Jason Calacanis, founder of Venture Reporter, Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., etc., blogs thusly:

Phil [Kaplan] (aka PUD) of FuckedCompany.com fame has started an anonymous moblogging project. Basically you send your photo to pics@mobog.com and a minute later they are on his site ready for users to make comments on them.

Jeff Jarvis calls it anonymous instant photophone moblogging, a phrase which is giving me a heavy wallop of jargon vertigo right about now.

Telecom providers in Australia, Japan, and Europe are bracing for a bumper crop of text-messaged new year's greetings:

Mobile phone companies are bolstering networks in anticipation of a record 35 million text messages New Year's Eve revellers will send tonight. The figure would surpass the record estimated 29 million text messages on Christmas Day. With many texters in places where it will be hard to hear a phone ring, never mind hold a phone conversation, some are predicting the volume of text messages could eclipse voice calls for the first time. A Telstra spokesman said that on Christmas Day customers made 15 million voice calls and sent 11.8 million text messages. Virgin, which has the smallest, but youngest and most text-mad customer base, expects to carry about 4 million messages on New Year's Eve - an average of 10 texts per customer.

Link

Right here: Link.