Dave Thau, an old friend from the Wired days, sent me an email I thought was worth sharing:

I'm writing to report to you about a couple of Catalan Christmas artifacts you may not know about.

First I will describe the caganer - a wholesome and fun Catalan addition to the typical Christmas creche figurine family. The traditional caganer is an old Catalan man with a red hat and canvas shoes squatting and taking a dump in the manger. Over time, the theme has expanded to include sumo wrestlers, Santa, the Devil, the Pope, Dali, and soccer fans, just to name a few. There's a good site describing them, and selling about 60 different varieties: www.caganer.com. Here's a link to their shop.

In Barcelona there's a temporary market of stalls in the Placa Nova which sell the caganers and a host of other Christmas paraphernalia, including the next member of the Catalan Christmas family: caga tio. I've attached a picture of ours (click image for enlargement).

Caga tio comes in many sizes, but generally looks just like our new friend, sans the pipe. Customs surrounding caga tio differ, but all agree, caga tio means "shit log." Here I relay to you what I think is the full blown caga tio ritual.

Fifteen days before Christmas, caga tio makes his appearance in the dining room, where he must be fed at least once every day. He likes oranges, crackers and sweet wine. In some families, caga tio starts small, but grows as the days progress toward Christmas.

At some point, caga tio is moved out of the dining room, into the living room, and covered with a blanket to keep him warm. On Christmas Eve, before the traditional Christmas dinner, the kids are sent to their rooms to say three Our Fathers, which gives the elders enough time to stash presents under caga tio's blanket. After their prayers are done, the kids return to the living room and start beating the hell out of poor caga tio with big sticks. And they sing a song. One version goes "Shit, log, shit! If you don't shit well, we will whack you again!" Another goes "Log, log, shit candy! If you don't shit for Christmas, we will whack you once more!"

After the children have gotten their fill of flogging the log, the blanket is removed to determine caga tio's state of digestion. Typically, a miracle has occurred, and the log has pooped wrapped gifts, which are called "the shits." Often one of the shits will be something weird, like an egg, to let everyone know that it was the last one deposited by caga tio.

This is my understanding of caga tio, but I feel like there are probably many nuances I'm missing. If you know of any catalans, please let me know so I can ask them some questions.

Ah, another exemplar of Catalan Christmas coprophilia is candy shaped like poo. We got some of this stuff, but ate it all before we could take a picture of it. If you're interested, we'll hunt more down tomorrow. Acutally... it was GOOD - we're getting more tomorrow no matter what!

We're documenting all this, and other Barcelona extravagances in our blog.

UPDATE: Here are some more caga tio pictures from Dave Thau (click image for enlargement)

Malcolm sez: I found some great footage on the Prellinger archives page and put some of my home grown music to it. It's an electronic kitsch retro groove with just the right images... at least i hope." Link

A sad, sad screen; and yet it looks so fine in silkscreen. Sizes for both d00ds and chyxx0rs. Link (Thanks, Sean)

From Declan McCullagh at CNET:

When it comes to touting his company's software, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is never one to mince words. But when it's the principle of free speech versus the almighty dollar, the bad boy of Silicon Valley is a veritable shrinking violet. Earlier this month, the Chinese government decided to block access to Google's English-language news service, a decision that riled free-speech advocates. But Ellison wants nothing to do with this controversy.

"The Chinese government has the right to do it," Ellison said as he answered audience questions following his keynote speech at OracleWorld Wednesday afternoon. "It's a sovereign country... Oracle's job is not to encourage governments to change their policies," he said, adding that Oracle "was just a technology provider."

Link. Related post on Declan's politech list: Oracle's Larry Ellison lobbies hard for National ID card (Link)

BoingBoing pal John Parres points us to this news story and says, "Fuckin' lawyers. Fuckin' lawsuits. Fuckin' stickers. Fuckin' censors. Fuckin' V-chips. Fuckin' Free Speech!"

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims. The hit group's latest CD and DVD, "Anywhere But Home," don't carry parental advisory labels alerting potential buyers to the obscenity. If they did, Wal-Mart wouldn't carry them, according to the retailer's policy.

But the lawsuit claims Wal-Mart knew about the explicit lyrics in the song, "Thoughtless," because it censored the word in a free sample available on its Web site and in its stores. The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.

Link

PubSub is launching a new tool called LinkRank that tracks the popularity of blogs based on the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in those blogs. Steve Rubel from PubSub says:

Here's how this works. Here's the chart for BoingBoing (link), which right now is the leading blog among all of the sites that PubSub tracks. You can view the Top 100 list here (link). If you look at the BoingBoing chart, you will notice that over the last 30 days you ranged from as low as the 21st most linked to site to 17th most link to site. The lower the number the better since the actual figure is a site's ranking. Two examples of comparison searches you could run with the tool might be Gizmodo vs. Engadget, or Apple vs. Microsoft. This tool will be particularly valuable for people to size up which blogs are consistently influential and which are just flashes in the pan.

Link to a more comprehensive explanation of PubSub LinkRanks works (includes intimidating mathematical equations that look like they came out of the geometry class I failed in high school).

Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Business 2.0 editor Todd Lappin says, "Upon returning home from my recent trip to Japan, where much yummy ramen was consumed, I immediately re-rented Tampopo, the classic Japanese film about the sublime pleasures of noodle soup. (That opening scene with the Japanese master teaching his young apprentice proper ramen-eating technique is still hilarious.) Anyhow, now comes this exciting news flash."

Today, [game company and Katamari Damacy publisher] Namco announced plans to open a ramen noodle theme park in the southern Japanese city of Nagoya. The "Nagoya Noodle Shop Alley," due to open for business on February 25, is meant to introduce visitors to the history of ramen noodles and the different types of ramen available around Japan. [ ...]

The visual theme of the park is intended to reflect Japan in the pre-war 1930s, but the ramen on offer are to represent the "new wave" of noodle development around the nation.

Link

The latest edition of the OED newsletter is online, and includes an "Appeals" section:

The Words or phrases which appear on the Appeals List are those currently being drafted or revised for the OED for which the documentary evidence is incomplete. Often these are slang or colloquial items which cannot be researched in specialist texts and are most likely to be found by a general reader in non-specialized or popular literature. (...) Please note: it is generally safe to assume that examples found by searching the Web, using search engines such as Google, will have already been considered by OED editors.

Words on this list include:

hoodie (n.: a hooded jacket, sweatshirt, or other garment) antedate 1990
posedown (n.: the final stage in a bodybuilding competition) antedate 1978
scrunchie (n.) antedate 1989
tikka masala (n.) antedate 1975

Link (via Elegant Variation, thanks Susannah)

Three years ago, I had the privilege of workshopping John McDaid's brilliant story "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals" (see the all-too-short excerpt here). I have never read a story that was its like, before or since. Just thinking of it today can render me stuporous. Finally, years later, the story has been published in the January issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on stands now. It's a little hard to find, but the publisher's website can give you some pointers. Stories like this are the reason that it's worth subscribing to the sf mags. Just getting to read a story like this once in a year, or in a decade, can make you a better person.

Aria

I'm an unreliable narrator. Everything I know about classical piano could be stored handily, uncompressed, in the lobotomized set-top box of an antique cathode television. Still, it falls to me to transcribe the events surrounding the Van Meegeren Piano Competition of 2023 and the alleged visitation by the late Stefan Janacek.

#

Variation 1

Stassy intro, nep?

Yar, yar, copied; 'swhatcha get when I type not talk. Gomenasai. Not a storyspeaker -- ich bin eine musicalische opster. I clip, I doop, I rap, I dub and shunt, pull leitmotifs from the noosphere 'n' singledoubletriple layer, pack and run the tuples, skiffy ins-n-outs wrapped moebial around sparse, selective, show-don't-tell syllables relevated from the subway and limousine earth. A hardwired hook sniffer: What edge will cut through the commodified wash of minute-15 Will-Have-Beens? Hafta lay down a tuff rhythm groove and scan for a tasty solo line; grimly practical, paratactical composition.

But a keyboard is needed to massage this medium. Got to force myself to sit down, sluice, educe the force that through these carpal tunnels drives the florid. Grep the keystroked sense of this, in at least a first approximation, before it evanesces.

Because I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. I never will. And yet, tonight...

And yet tonight, I saw one.

With my own eternally doubting fingers.

Link

Update: Richard sez, "Thought I'd write and mention that 'Keyboard Practice' is available for download in unencrypted ebook formats for $3.99 as part of the aforementioned Fantasy & Sci Fi Jan 2005 on Fictionwise (no affiliation other than being a customer!)."

Cuba's biotech program is a big-stakes gamble by the Castro regime on developing-world-appropriate pharmaceuticals. They're using sales of generic versions of patented drugs to fund research into Cuban drugs, which they're patenting and selling to America. Wow.

Faced with economic calamity, Castro did something remarkable: He poured hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals. No one knows how - Cuba's economy, with its secrecy and centralized structure, defies market analysis. One beneficiary was Concepcion Campa Huergo, president and director general of the Finlay Institute, a vaccine lab in Havana. She developed the world's first meningitis B vaccine, testing it by injecting herself and her children before giving it to volunteers. "I remember one day telling Fidel that we needed a new ultracentrifuge, which costs about $70,000," Campa says. "After five minutes of listening he said, 'No. You'll need 10.'"...

It's like Castro said: They don't really like patents. They like medicine. Cuba's drug pipeline is most interesting for what it lacks: grand-slam moneymakers, cures for baldness or impotence or wrinkles. It's all cancer therapies, AIDS medications, and vaccines against tropical diseases.

Link

The Ama DivX-Pod is a pocket-sized media player that can grab video (MPEG-4, DivX, WMV, Quicktime) off your hard-drive or digitize your videos and DVDs. Its got a 20GB hard drive and a little screen, and it's intended to allow you watch you movies, free from DRM, wherever you are. Link (via Wired Magazine)

The Discovery Channel has released a CSI-branded "facial reconstruction kit" toy so that kids can play forensic scientist, reconstructing notional corpse faces. Man, I wish I'd had one of these as a kid. Link (via Wired Magazine)

Two images of notional "homunculi" -- the first, a Sensory Homunculus, shows "what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception" (on the left). The other, the Motor Homunculus, "shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its movement." Link

Time-Warner is arm-twisting cable companies into agreeing to a scheme to automagically erase your saved episodes of Six Feet Under from your cable-company-provided PVR after a month or so. This is the danger of sucking up to the studios in the first place: they say, "Suuuure, we'll 'let' you build a PVR that will tape the shows you cablecast to your customers, but that permission is contingent on our ongoing goodwill. So if in the future we decide, for example, that your PVR can't record certain shows, or can't skip certain commercials, or can't store certain recordings for more than a few days, you'd better implement it. Or else. So what if your customers can't figure out why their PVRs don't work properly? That's your problem, pal."

Why do cable operators think they have to get a studio's permission to build a PVR? Since when do studios get to have a veto over the design of TV-recording technologies? In a way, I can sorta feel sorry for the cable operators, whose utter lack of spine has put them in a position where they have to face the wrath of angry, $70/month cable customers whose PVRs have stopped working because some Time-Warner exec's astrologer has told him that four weeks is the longest anyone can hold onto a copy of Six Feet Under without driving their business into the ground.

But I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the cable operators. It's hard to work up a big mouthful of warm feeling for a company that makes you feel like you were just traded to another inmate for 2 packs of menthol cigarettes. After all, if they hadn't sold us all out in the first place, they wouldn't be in this position.

A middle-level executive at Time Warner has approached several cable companies and broached the idea of restricting the ability of customers who use those company's Digital Video Recorders to record several popular Time Warner TV programs...

Viewers would be able to record an episode with their DVR, but there would be a time limit on how long it would be available for viewing. The executive was pushing for an expiration date that coincided with the premiere of the next episode. The consensus of the cable executived was that it needed to be between 2-4 weeks.

Of course, you can just get around this problem by following the advice of Microsoft's senior DRM engineers and downloading your Six Feet Unders from a P2P network like Kazaa. They won't expire, you can watch 'em on any device, and you don't even need to sign up for a $70/month cable service. Link (via Copyfight)

Someone tried to break a prisoner out of a slam in Sweden by firing a cellphone over the wall attached to an arrow.

The suspect, whose name was not released, taped two cell phones and a battery charger to three arrows, and fired them over the 12-foot wall into Mariefred prison outside Stockholm on Friday night, police spokeswoman Susanne Abrahamsson said.

The man was not spotted by guards when he fired the arrows, but was arrested after police found his car parked about 650 feet from the prison walls, with a bow hidden underneath it, she said. After the man returned to his car, police dogs traced his scent back to the prison wall, and guards were able to find the arrows in the prison yard, where inmates go for exercise.

Link (via Engadget)

These Japanese briefcases will fit a 17-inch laptop. They're hand-made from cedar and lined with linen, and cost about $240. Wow. Link (via Gizmodo)

One of the books I took on holidays with me was Wallace Wang's "Steal This File Sharing Book," just published by No Starch Press. It's a great, thorough, easy-to-read guide to all the different ways to acquire files over the Internet, from sharing by email and IRC to getting the most out of multiprotocol P2P tools to seeking out and using ratio-based leet warez boards.

This is unquestionably the best book on the subject that I've read. It strikes the perfect balance between factual -- "Here is what is available, here is the law, here is the means by which you can download, here is how to minimize your legal risk" -- and philosophical -- "Here is a breakdown of music industry sales, here is Harlan Ellison's opinion on bookwarez, here's what crackers have to say about zero-day warez trading, here's the dumbass laws that have been proposed to allow rights-holders to remotely shut down your computer via secret kill-switches, isn't that crazy?"

Wang is an accomplished tech writer and a stand-up comic, so Steal This File Sharing Book is both funny and lucid. It assumes almost no technical knowledge and it walks the reader through everything from file-compression protocols to anonymizing proxies to the notorious cross-stitch-pattern-trading underground.

If you want to figure out how to file-share safely, avoid spyware, not get busted, and learn about the morality and ethics as presented by all sides of the file-sharing debate, this is the book for you. Link

The Knock-In Lock is a car add-on that unlocks your doors if you knock the correct combination of a five-to-twelve-digit knock code. It's intended for use in the event that you lock yourself out of your car.

# Estimated that nearly 1 million lockouts happen every year in Australia alone
# Highly secure, user defined, five to twelve digit AUDIBLE KNOCK code
# Shuts down for an hour with three wrong attempts
# Easily installed onto your existing central locking by auto electricians or car alarm installer with no drilling required
# No waiting around for hours for road rescue
# Avoid damage to your vehicle whilst breaking in to retreive keys
# 2 Year Manuacturers defects Warranty
# Extremely convenient to have even if you never get locked out
# Buy it NOW! Before You Desperately Need a Knock-In-Key!......

Link (via Engadget)

The Humunga Tongue is a doggy fetch-ball with an enormous, hilarious rubber tongue attached to it, so that while your hairy pal is masticating it, it looks like he's got a huge, Gene Simmons-esque tongue. High-larious! Link

Michael Geist has written a column targetted at Canadian academics, calling on them to get involved in the copyfight before it's too late.

First, these institutions should call on the federal government to reject the proposal and instead adopt a balanced copyright approach that encourages the use of the Internet in Canadian schools. One possibility would be the establishment of a limited educational user right to publicly available work on the Internet. In keeping with longstanding and widely accepted practices on the Internet, publicly available work would include materials that are not protected by passwords, encryption or other means, i.e., information the author would appear to want to make widely available.

Second, the education community should stop wasting millions of dollars each year by paying unnecessary copy licenses to copyright collectives such as Access Copyright. While copyright collectives claim that education institutions need licenses to compensate for faculty and student copying, many copying activities are permitted under Canadian copyright law without the need for payment. The Copyright Act contains an explicit user right for copying for research or private study purposes (surely the most common uses of works on university campuses). The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that this user right must be interpreted in a liberal fashion such that copying full articles may be lawful in certain circumstances.

Link

Really cool paper examines the underlying software design principles that are rendered in the meatspace protocols for Starbucks barristas.

Starbucks, like most other businesses is primarily interested in maximizing throughput of orders. More orders equals more revenue. As a result they use asynchronous processing. When you place your order the cashier marks a coffee cup with your order and places it into the queue. The queue is quite literally a queue of coffee cups lined up on top of the espresso machine. This queue decouples cashier and barista and allows the cashier to keep taking orders even if the barista is backed up for a moment. It allows them to deploy multiple baristas in a Competing Consumer scenario if the store gets busy.

By taking advantage of an asynchronous approach Starbucks also has to deal with the same challenges that asynchrony inherently brings. Take for example, correlation. Drink orders are not necessarily completed in the order they were placed. This can happen for two reasons. First, multiple baristas may be processing orders using different equipment. Blended drinks may take longer than a drip coffee. Second, baristas may make multiple drinks in one batch to optimize processing time. As a result, Starbucks has a correlation problem. Drinks are delivered out of sequence and need to be matched up to the correct customer. Starbucks solves the problem with the same "pattern" we use in messaging architectures -- they use a Correlation Identifier. In the US, most Starbucks use an explicit correlation identifier by writing your name on the cup and calling it out when the drink is complete. In other countries, you have to correlate by the type of drink.

Exception handling in asynchronous messaging scenarios can be difficult. If the real world writes the best stories maybe we can learn something by watching how Starbucks deals with exceptions. What do they do if you can't pay? They will toss the drink if it has already been made or otherwise pull your cup from the "queue". If they deliver you a drink that is incorrect or nonsatisfactory they will remake it. If the machine breaks down and they cannot make your drink they will refund your money. Each of these scenarios describes a different, but common error handling strategy:

Link (via Salad With Steve)

(Photograph by Carla Allen) This 1,082 pound Mako shark was caught in August during the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia Shark Scramble. From an LA Times article (free reg. required):

The shark battled for 40 minutes before angler Jamie Doucette, 28, of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, saw its enormousness. "She felt pretty big," he recalls, "but it wasn't until she started pulling the boat off course that I started to worry..."

...Doucette reeled it in and other anglers wrapped it in ropes as the shark chewed through the knots. One loop circled its torso, the other the tail; one man leaned over the boat and slit its throat as Jaws thrashed for something to bite. It died 20 minutes later.

Kind of sad, really. More info toward the middle of the Mako page from Captain Tom's Guide to New England Sharks. Link (Thanks, Justin Ried!)

Joesph DeRuvo Jr. took a dead iBook and hacked it into a tablet Mac with a touch screen usually used for interactive kiosks. Link (via Engadget)