The NYT reports:

Determined to win the post-debate spin war on Tuesday night, the Bush campaign called on its supporters to flood the news media with quick declarations that Vice President Dick Cheney had come out ahead. Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, delivered the request in an e-mail message to supporters early Tuesday morning.

"Immediately after the debate, visit online polls, chat rooms and discussion boards and make your voice heard," he said in the note, sent to the six million supporters on the campaign's e-mail list. "People's perceptions are shaped as much by their conversations around the water cooler as by the debates themselves."

The note - which is a mirror image of one sent out by the Democrats just before the first presidential debate last week - also exhorted supporters to follow up by writing letters to their local newspapers and by calling in to radio talk shows.

Link

JM Nasim reinvents the Jew's Harp as an hallucinogenic aural drug worthy of any ambient chillout room or temporary temple:

"I create this music live. No multi-tracking, no playback of pre-recorded material, no sampling. The raw signal of voice and Jew’s Harp feeds into a portable bank of automated processors. Here, various programmatic, architectonic sound spaces frame rhythmic zones within which certain acoustic potentialities reside. These sonic holograms manifest my musical explorations as shape-shifted sound. Seminal acoustics are gestated into new aural forms to birth multi- dimensional soundscapes of interpenetrating pulses and harmonics."

Link (via MetaFilter)

Apparently, Constantin Mocanu, a 67-year-old Romanian gent, accidentally cut off his own penis. He thought it belonged to a noisy chicken that woke him up. From Reuters:

"I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it."

Link

Mark and I got a kick out of this cool bit of sleight-of-hand. Link (to video clip)

Snap is a new search engine (just unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference, which I'm attending this week in San Francisco) that combines JavaScript-based query refining, click-stream mining, and lots of other foofaraw (including a "transparency" system that shows their revenue, number of clicks, clickthroughs, und zo weiter). It's cool-enough looking and fun enough to play with that I'm actually gonna try using it for a day or two (switching search engines is painful!). Link

EFF and some the orgs we work with are suing the FCC's ass over the Broadcast Flag, arguing that they've exceeded their authority with the ruling.

When the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadcast flag mandate goes into effect next year, it will be unlawful to sell devices that can tune in digital television without imposing copy protection on the signal. Many groups have argued that the mandate will hobble people's ability to make fair use of their media. And late yesterday, nine public interest organizations -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK), and the American Library Association (ALA) -- told the US Appeals Court, DC Circuit, that the FCC exceeded its authority by imposing the broadcast flag regime.

Link

CDBaby has done a limited-edition pressing of a CD of the orchestration from FW Mirnau's original film, Nosferatu.

Described by the SF Weekly as "exquisite, lush, and positively poetic," the noirish compositions by Jill Tracy and The Malcontent Orchestra have developed a fervid following of devotees, critical acclaim, and multiple Bay Area Music Awards nominations. Their original score to F.W. Murnau's silent vampire classic "Nosferatu" has only enhanced the band's reputation of sophistication and musical virtuosity. The San Francisco Examiner described the score as "remarkable....lyrical and lovely." The Marin Independent called it "unforgettable." The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Nosferatu "deliciously macabre."

Link (Thanks, Armand!)

Patrick Costello's "The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo" -- a lyrical, engaging teach-yourself-the-banjo book -- is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license.

"What have you got, kid?" The old man asked me around his cigar.

A banjo!" I replied.

"I know that you little dipstick." He said rolling his eyes "You think somebody as old as I am hasn't seen a banjo before? What have you got? Play something."

I thought about trying to say something to get out of this. As I stood there fidgeting the old man shook his head, picked up his guitar and started to walk away.

Oh man, I thought to myself, I'm really blowing something here. It was an August day. The festival was being held on this big open field and the sun was just hammering down on us. I knew a total of three and a half songs. I didn't want to make a fool out of myself but I also had the feeling that if I chickened out here I was going to miss out on something. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, moved my banjo strap a little bit on my shoulder and started to pound my way through a tune called "The White House Blues".

The old man cocked his head and nodded a little before he turned around. He stood there holding a beat up guitar while cigar smoke billowed around his head. He seemed to enjoy listening to me ruin a perfectly good song.

Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

My cow-orker Lee Tien, one of the country's great free speech and privacy lawyers, is working on a case for EFF in which the California Supreme Court is threatening to revise the immunity for libel liability borne by people who host message-boards. Today, if you or Yahoo host a message board where one of your users libels someone, you're off the hook: it's not your problem. The court is considering changing this, on the grounds that Yahoo has enough lawyers that if it got spurious takedown notices over material that wasn't libellous, it would be able to tell the difference between a valid and a stupid claim.

The problem is that bloggers and other individual and small-time message-board hosters don't have plenty of lawyers on tap to tell them whether they'll be safe in ignoring a takedown notice. The fear is that if liability shifts to message-board hosts, then the little guy will have to become overly cautious, treating every libel claim as valid, censoring his message boards willy-nilly.

In order to change the court's mind, EFF is looking for stories about small-time message-board hosters who've been threatened with legal action because of allegedly libellous remarks on their boards (we had one such incident, back in the old days).

Have you been threatened? Email Lee and help keep the net free! Mailto Link

Is Bush Wired? is a site that speculates on whether the President has a teeny earphone that prompts him during speeches and conferences.

"Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off."

Link (Thanks, Pointer!)

UPDATE: I was tricked! Matt Katz sez: "RTMARK is a way to provide funding for activists in a way that mirrors the stock markets. Looks like mark frauenschadenfreude's piece means that this particular fund is going to pay out! Link

My pal and old neighbour Roger Wood is a mad sculptor/clockmaker in Toronto who builds fantastical clocks out of garbage and thrifted bits and bobs. His mailing list features the latest of his creations, and every now and again, one comes along that's so pretty, I have to share it. Today is one of those days: isn't this wonderful? Link

Many thanks to Gavin Stokes for helping me to get rid of the "white space" in Boing Boing, in which big hunks of text were invisible!

I just got a copy of Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art, a wonderful new book about Lowbrow art, which my friend Kirsten Anderson edited. Kirsten is the owner of the Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle, which features the kind of underground art in this book. Many of my favorite artists are included here, such as Tim Biskup, Mark Ryden, Shag, Robert Williams, Isabel Samaris, Charles Krafft, Glenn Barr, and Todd Schorr, plus several artists I've never heard of, but am happy to have discovered. The book's design is excellent. There are also essays by Robert Williams, Carlo McCormick, and Larry Reid. Link

Todd Lappin sez: "Did you catch this? A lot of it is dreck, but the first track is fantastic." Link

In an effort to halt his deteriorating ratings, President Bush has announced that'll he'll be giving a major speech on Wednesday. "The president is said to be eager to rebut Kerry's attacks on [the] issues." I'm imagine he is, since Kerry won't be able to respond. Will Kerry be given equal time on the networks? Link (Thanks, Kevin Slavin!)

UPDATE: Brian Carnell sez that Bush's speech will not be shown on television. If that's the case, then I take back my comments about equal time for Kerry: "Okay, now you're just getting plain out there with the knee-jerk anti-Bush stuff. 'Will Kerry be given euqal time on the networks?' Um, Mark, the broadcast networks don't run campaign speeches like this live -- why would Kerry need equal time?"

Updated below

The Motion Picture Association of America is demanding an NC-17 rating for South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker's new film : Team America: World Police, in part over a puppet sex scene mentioned here on BoingBoing over the weekend. Link to previous BoingBoing posts: Team America preview, tech backstory in Wired.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. I've seen the movie, and the scene, and the puppets don't even have any genitals. The scene doesn't read horny or icky, just really goddamn funny. Were someone to leak a clip online, it wouldn't be one-handed material -- unless you were a particularly desperate puppetophiliac. In which case there are far more explicit destinations for your type, anyway.

This is particularly tough for Stone and Parker, because the filmmakers are contractually obligated to deliver an R film to the studio. In related news, Paramount announces that the film will be sneak-previewed for a one-day-only release in 800 US theaters on October 9, followed by its previously scheduled wide release on October 15.

Quoth the film's producer, Scott Rudin, in the LA Times:

"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated movies, and our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they'd get is splinters," Rudin said.

Link to Guardian story, Link to LA Times (reg reqd). (Thanks, Ernest Miller)

Update: Reuters reports that film has been granted an "R" rating by the MPAA, pending scene modifications. Link

There's a trailer for the Bushisms DVD that Xeni wrote about, and it is hilarious. Link.

Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has a doozy of a piece in the current issue, now online. "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts," it begins, "The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." Mr. Anderson tells BoingBoing:

Short form: The rise of online distribution and its unlimited shelf space is leading to a dramatic shift in the entertainment business from hit-driven economics to niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences. The interesting work is now in finding way to push demand down the Long Tail.

Link

From The Lantern, a student publication at Ohio State University, via Joi's blog:

LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five.

Link. In contrast, the wikipedia site says:

Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators.

This is certainly news to me if it's true. I always thought wikipedia was created by googly-eyed, multitentacled alien overlords, instead. As always, I invite responses from Wikipedia... or Mr. LaRouche... or the alien overlords.

BoingBoing reader Nick Brogna, who joins me in saluting our alien overlords adds, "It's rather amusing that, aside from the part about him, er, founding Wikipedia, the other lines have been copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on him."

Update (03-06-2005): Joktan (Joe) Kwiatkowski says:

Xeni: I am the journalist that you referenced in your blog entry for October 05, 2004 titled "Lyndon LaRouche founded Wikipedia?" -- The issue was over this portion of my story on the LaRouche political action committee:

"LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five."

The change was done by a copy editor at our newspaper without explanation, and not myself. This was the correct form:

"LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five, according to Wikipedia.com, a free online encyclopedia."

As you can see, there is absolutely no way that anyone could have confused a reference to Wikipedia.com with that of an individual founding the web site. That editor had personal problems and was known for changing information without telling others. She also had conflicts with other editors, and I was not the only person she affected. She is no longer at The Lantern.

This was an extremely sensitive issue for me, since it was the first time I had submitted an article for The Lantern, and I was unfairly characterized as inaccurate.

Stories at newspapers go through the hands of different editors before they are printed on paper. However, I understand that not many people know this, and therefore it is easier to ridicule the writer rather than investigate the issue.

You also said that a reader of yours, Nick Brogna, observed that lines from the Wikipedia article on LaRouche were copied “verbatim,” which also is unfair and inaccurate. I paraphrased information from the article and I also attributed it in my original copy, as you can read above, but because the editor changed it, people were not able to see this.

Japanese aerospace sci/tech incubator HASTIC is marketing a $19,000 hobbyist rocket that can hit an altitude of one kilometer. The Camui-50P, developed by researchers at Hokkaido University, is 1.6 meters long and uses liquid oxygen as its fuel.

"(The rocket's) commercialization will have the effect of familiarizing people with space research," said HASTIC, which is selling the product.

Link

Danny O'Brien's guestblog on Worldchanging describes the mixed success of the Jhai project, which promised to bring ruggedized, bicycle-powered WiFi to remote villages in Laos.

The Jhai PC, meanwhile, appears to have exposed an odd little niche. There appears to be quite a few places on the earth which are tantalizingly close to Net connections and telephony, but have no electricity, no cellphone coverage, and no landlines. Think of it as the developing world's equivalent of the last-mile problem.

Parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, although unlikely to get electricity or telephony, are within ten miles of the IP network built out for the DRC's university system. Again, the villagers there want to stay in contact with the extensive ex-pat network that war-torn countries inevitably create, as well as improve their finances. A Jhai PC network seems like it may be the most affordable way to do this. There's a project, led by a Congolese graduate working out of South Carolina, using funding raised by from the Congolese themselves, to build this network.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Chris sez, "EarthLink just released their free SIP-based phone service for members: EarthLink Online Calling. I really like the fact that they'll send voicemails to the account's email address. This should open the door to interesting integrations between their voice and other services. Meanwhile, I guess I now do have a good reason to hand out those 7 online accounts to remote friends and family so we can all chat." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

An anonymous reader sez, "Ian Clarke points out a delicious piece of Schadenfreude - Just days after Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz said 'I continue to believe in the protection of ideas conveyed by patents [...] As does every company that expects to build a durable asset on behalf of its investors ...', Kodak wins their software patent case against Sun which could cost Sun up to half their operating profit between 1998 and 2001!"

Hey Jonathan, why did Sun need to steal Kodak's precious intellectual property - and if you didn't, perhaps, having experienced the wrong end of US patent law, you can reconsider your position on software patents?

Link

I try to read everything Internet security consultant Bruce Schneier writes. The good news is, he now has a blog where he'll probably make links to his essays.

He has two recent essays available from his blog, which he describes thusly:

The first talks about terror threat warnings -- both the color-coded kind and the more specific ones -- and how they're both an ineffective security countermeasure and a political tool. It appeared in a magazine called "The Rake."

The second (published today in the "International Herald Tribune") discusses RFID chips in future passports, and how that endangers the security of people who carry them. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing them for both American citizens and foreigners, and the only possible reason I can think of is that they want surreptitious access to identity information.

Link

This company makes laptop bags that feature bits of landing parachute fabric from the 1990 Soyuz TM-8 Space mission, or the latest International Space Station Soyuz mission in April 2004. I am dying to own one immediately! These are so badass! Around $195.00 US or €165.00. Link

Eric says,

Juan Valdez has his name and likeness on a bunch of new Cafes, one of which just opened in NY. I went down there today and took some pictures and did a write up on my impression. I braved the front lines in the war on Starbucks to bring you this special report. Enjoy!

That's right -- we're gonna stick it to the corporate man, by supporting another corporate man! Link

BoingBoing reader Stefan Jones says,

In this clip (wmv), a wonderful bit of video from a camera in Peter Clay's two-staged Quantum Leap rocket. A few seconds into the flight, the fins appear to warp and distort. There's a raging debate over whether this was an optical illusion or an actual spasm in the fiberglass as the model plows through the "sound barrier."

Link