I got my copy of The Mischievious Art of Jim Flora, by Irwin Chusid (Fantagraphics 2004), a couple of days ago, and have been admiring it greatly.

The press release about the book describes his work better than I can:

In the 1940s and ’50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins fingering cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives.

Up until this book, my exposure to Flora's work has been limited to several smallish reproductions in a book about album cover art, a record cover I bought at a garage sale, and Irwin Chusid's web site about Jim Flora.

I already thought Flora was one of the greatest illustrators ever, but I wasn't prepared to have my mind blown all over again. This 11" x 10" book has hundreds of large, clear, bright reproductions of Flora's work, and Chusid has done an amazing job of compiling a bunch of great stuff about Flora, including interviews with him, and remembrances from other artists who loved his work.

I can relate to what Tim Biskup said when he first saw Flora's work: "'This is going to change the way that I draw,' I said out loud in a record store. I was holding a copy of Shorty Courts the Count on LP." Link

Teenage Zen. Click image for a better view. (Thanks witz and my friends who pointed us to this!)


UPDATE: Brandon Lee directs us to the captivating story behind this amazing image, taken last year at a junior college in Singapore. It's a tale of two pranksters, a grouchy principal, the school's Photographic Society, and an online auction. Link

New Scientist has a nice survey of the 2004 Intelligent Robotics and Systems conference in Sendai, Japan this week. Accompanying the text are video clips of humanoid robots unleashed by Fujitsu and Sony. In one clip, HOAP-2 from Fujitsu practices some very surreal looking sumo wrestling moves.

Max Lungarella, of the University of Tokyo, believes one of the more noticeable themes at this year's conference is the way robotics is feeding into areas of research relating to intelligence. As roboticists succeed in making ever-more intelligent machines, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and even behavioural psychologists are becoming interested in studying their creations, he says.

Link

Presidentiary flip flop parody. Snark couture. Super funny. Click this Link (Thanks, Sean!)

This stunning carved skull is on eBay right now with a starting bid of $7,960. It would make a wonderful addition to my cabinet of curiosities.

"This antique real human skull  from private collections is estimated at least 500 years old. It is HEAVILY carved with mysterious buddhism objects, symbols and Tibetan letters.... Sold for the purpose of educational and medical purposes only."

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

As part of Spirit Week, students at Hastings High School in Westchester County, New York, held Cross-Dressing Day. The school administration was not thrilled, asking students to change the theme to "New York Pride Day." From The Journal News:

Cross-dressing students said their freedom of expression was violated and that the prohibition sent the wrong message to transgender students who may want to cross-dress regularly...

Josh McConchie, 16, who wore a pink skirt and high tops, said that "certain students in the school feel it's derogatory towards gays or cross-dressers because they feel we're making fun of them, but actually we're trying to make them fit in."

Link (via Fark)

For today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day" I interview South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Hollywood about their new movie, Team America: World Police (previous BB posts: Team America preview, and MPAA freaks over puppet sex). The film -- "acted" entirely by live-action marionettes -- will open in selected theaters this weekend.

Stone and Parker talk about some of the many creative challenges they encountered while producing a comedy action flick with puppets. Here's one snip from the interview that didn't make it in -- the film lampoons world leaders, and pokes bitter fun at the so-called "war on terrorism." I asked Trey Parker whether or not they timed the release in relation to the upcoming presidential elections. He replied, "(laughs) -- People assume we're trying to affect the election. But if you're going to change your vote based on what you see in a puppet movie, honestly -- you really should not be voting in the first place."

Link to today's "Day to Day" show, with archived audio. Includes streaming video clips of Kim Jong Il singing a reflective ballad, then feeding weapons inspector Hans Blix to live sharks.

Image: Trey Parker and "Kim Jong Il" -- the marionette, not the actual North Korean dictator -- on the set of Team America: World Police (Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount).

Acacia (the patent-squatters that EFF is fighting over a bogus patent that purports to cover all streaming media) has come up wiht another bogus claim of ownership to a basic, obvious and important part of the Internet: captive portals that redirect people who use WiFi hotspots to a login screen. They've announced a $1000 "license" shakedown, and companies that won't bend over will find themselves staring down the barrel of a lawsuit.

The licensing pact demands hotspot operators pay Acacia $1,000 a year for up to 3,500 redirected connections. After which, operators would have to pay 5 to 15 cents for each redirected connection.

"Anybody who operates a hotspot with redirection can assume they'll hear from us," Acacia's executive vice president of business development and general counsel Rob Berman told Wi-Fi Networking News.

Link More here (via Copyfight)

David sez, "A European indie music label [!K7] is taking an unusual approach to the issue of CD copy protection - it is branding all its releases with a sticker proclaiming the absence of any such control measure.... 'Copy protection kills customer relationships,' the label says on its website. 'That's why, from now on, !K7 releases will carry a new logo: 'NO copy protection - respect the music.'... The company believes it's all a matter of trust. 'Only those to whom respect is given show respect themselves,' it notes. In other words, treat your customers as potential pirates and they'll soon tell you to f**k off and not buy your product.'" Link (Thanks, David!)

Seth has been exploring the DRM used by Google to disable your browser's key functions while you're browsing the new Google Print service -- while you're at those pages, your print, cut, copy, and save functions are disabled, even in Mozilla and even with Javascript switched off.

Seth's notes suggest some avenues toward breaking this DRM (beyond screenshotting, of course, which still works just fine!). This is a good avenue of research, possibly even worthy of a Mozilla variant optimized to circumvent the Google DRM.

If you wanted to write a proxy that would make Google Print pages capable of being saved to disk, you would presumably want to match

background-image:url("http://print.google.com/\([^"]+\)")

(although you'd need to be careful to match only the one in the definition of ".theimg", because it looks like there may at least one other background-image:url) and then replace

<div class="theimg"

with

<div class="x"

and somewhere nearby (I'm not sure how many tags up you'd need to go) insert a plain old

<img src="http://print.google.com/$1">

I haven't tried this because it felt like too much work relative to the previous two methods.

Contrary to what I expected, Google Print does not seem to check referer, so it seems to be possible merely to extract the URL from the definition of .theimg, and then to load it directly. Perhaps that will change in the future.

Link