This hollow toy axe, filled with cherry candies, bears the historic George Washington quote, I CANNOT TELL A LIE. It is offered for sale in historic Mount Vernon, VA. As a commenter to the Flickr stream notes, "So patriotilicious!" Link (Thanks, Riffola!)

You can spend this Christmas break assembling free papercraft models of the Haunted Mansion and its environs.

Ray Keim has created detailed virtual 3D models of the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, and of the crypts and entrance gate at the Florida Haunted Mansion.

He's been converting these 3D models into cut-and-glue papercraft models. I blogged in May about the Disney World Haunted Mansion model. Now it's joined by papercraft versions of the crypts and entrance gate that can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com. Link (via The Disney Blog)

The Digital Village podcast conducted a wide-ranging, 45-minute phone interview with Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and author of such important books on copyright and technology as Code and Free Culture.

We interviewed Larry Lessig yesterday for an hour and he was (no suprise) terrific. He talked at length about Google Print (which he thinks is VERY important), Sony's fiasco and the DMCA's part in it, as well as the latest on the Creative Commons.

Link (Thanks, Doran!)

In this little animation, Indiana Jones flees from a giant rolling ball from the brilliant video game Katamari Damacy, while the little prince happily rolls it along. Pure hilarity! Direct link to animated Gif, Link to page with GIF, music, Mirror

Q-Unit is a delightful mashup album combining 50-Cent and Queen -- with tracks like "This is How We Bite the Dust," "Bohemian Wanksta" and "We Will Rock You in Da Club."

Now, two questions about this album:

1. Will people who download this decide that they don't need to buy Queen albums or 50 Cent albums because this album gives them everything they'd need from both?

2. Will Queen or 50 Cent's label go after the people who host this anyway? Link (Thanks, Mark and Scim!)

Snip from WaPo report:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth's Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

Link (Thanks, Clay Shirky)

Snip from Damon Darlin's story in the NYT:

Million-dollar renovations of multimillion-dollar homes are not uncommon along this university town's tree-lined streets. But spending that kind of money to fix up a garage? And a 12-by-18-foot, wood-frame, one-car garage at that?

When the garage in question is one of the most famous in the business world, that kind of investment may not be so odd. The little brown building with green doors at 367 Addison Avenue is often considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

David Packard and William R. Hewlett set up shop there in 1938, cutting a template that thousands of fresh-faced entrepreneurs, just out of school, would use in hopes of building products and companies that could change the world - and make them rich.

Link (Thanks, Mister Jalopy, who says "Never underestimate the power of a modest garage.")

Declan McCullagh recently interviewed Axel Pawlik, a managing director at the RIPE regional address registry who operates the "K" root server -- which, with other root servers, maintains the list of top-level domains on the internet. Declan says, "Axel's views are noteworthy because the root servers effectively serve as a check on the power of the Bush administration, which said this summer that it wants to be the only one to 'authoriz[e] changes or modifications' to the list of top-level domains."

Snip from their Q&A:

Q: What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to approve a new top-level domain--say .xxx--and the Bush administration decided to veto it?

Axel Pawlik: In that case, I don't know what the root server operators would do. Likely they would publish whatever is approved by ICANN. There is a difference between the content and the publication. We're only publishers of the root zone file. We take it from IANA (a function of ICANN) and we publish it.

Q: Let's say the Bush administration accuses Syria of fostering terrorism and decides to invade. And it demands that ICANN remove Syria's .sy domain from the Internet. What would you do?

Axel Pawlik: I don't believe that the U.S. government would be that stupid. Seriously, this has never come up. But I am quite certain that the Internet community at large would not like that decision and I'm not sure it would be carried through.

Link. Declan has some great posts this week at Politech, following his return from WSIS in Tunisia.

WSIS-related bonus link:
Richard Stallman's tinfoil beanie adventures

Bonus bonus link:
Real Ultimate Power

Bonus facts:

1. Root servers are mammals.
2. Root server operators fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the root server is to flip out and kill people.

And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Internet Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boing Boing reader Kevin Murphy points us to more amazing MP3s of late 19th-century recordings, including what may be one of the earliest bad-girl tunes in audio-recorded history. Kevin says:

There are four recordings here, the most amusing of which is I'M A NAUGHTY GIRL: Miss Beatrice Hart and Chorus from Daly's. Berliner 3078, Recorded in London, 18 January 1899.

It's a bit scratchy at first, but the full lyrics sheet is here: Link.

As an extra note, the song makes an appearance in "The Boarding House," chapter 7 of James Joyce's "The Dubliners," circa 1914: Link. Something Cory especially might be interested in, as an example of the time when authors could quote popular song lyrics in their stories without being hounded by packs of rabid ASCAP lawyers.

MP3 Link to "I'm a Naughty Girl." Here's more about "A Greek Slave," the risqué little musical comedy in which this song appeared: Link.

Previously:

MP3 of 1878 recording on lead cylinder

w00t is an online store that lists a single, deeply discounted item every day and leaves it there until midnight or until supplies run out -- the store sports really, really good bargains on great serendipitous stuff.

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been.

Link (Thanks, Ranjani!)

These $15 plastic piranha dental floss dispensers come in five colors and turn the loose end of floss into a bit of gristle caught between the piranha's fearsome teeth. Link (via Popgadget)

At nearly $400 a pack, these stainless steel playing cards are probably too much to actually own (let alone shuffle). Nevertheless, it gives me great comfort to know that they exist and would cause an almighty kerfuffle at a Transport Security Agency checkpoint. Link (via Neatorama)

The Ecologist Magazine is holding a £2500 essay contest. The essay question: "What is humanity's worst invention?" Link (Thanks, Al!)

If you're in San Francisco on December 8, you can attend a court case where the constitutionality of America's creeping war on anonymity will be challenged.

My friend John Gilmore, co-founder of EFF and inventor of many key Sun Microsystems technologies, is suing the US federal government over the constitutionality of a secret law that requires Americans to show ID before boarding airplanes, a back-door to mandating Soviet-style internal passports for travel.

The TSA and airlines claim that the ID requirement for travel is a law, but the law isn't published anywhere. If it were published, it would be subject to Constitutional challenge; previous Supreme Court cases during the anti-Segregation fight established that the Feds have no right to condition citizens' ability to travel across state lines.

Now the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing John's case, and the hearing is open to the public. I wish I could be there -- this is history being made, and John deserves all our support for having the guts to put his money and liberty on the line to fight for the Constitution.

Friends and supporters of John are welcome to attend this historic hearing, but are asked to please dress appropriately for court. John would like nothing more than to have the public gallery filled to the brim with fellow Americans who care as much as he does about the US Constitution.

What: Oral Arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzalez
When: December 8th 2005 at 9am
Where: 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Third Floor, Courtroom 3
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Link (Thanks, Bill!)