By Cory Doctorow at 10:41 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Jeshii, a teacher in Japan, discovered his students playing "battle pencils" ("Batoen") a game where you "roll" a standard-shaped hexagonal pencil and then gain or lose points based on the face that comes up. They're like long dice.
The rules are pretty simple. Your character starts out with 100 hit points (this is written on the pencil, so some characters might have more or less). You can play with 2-4 players. Start off by doing rock-paper-scissors. Winner rolls his pencil first. Then you do what it says on the side that faces up. Usually this is 'miss' or 'everyone takes 50 damage.' But it can also target certain types. Each pencil has a star or a circle band. So sometimes it will say, 'all circle banded characters take 40 damage.' Sometimes, the monster has special abilities. Like, 'roll one more time, and use the effects below' where there will be a different set of abilities. As you can guess, if you lose all your hit points, you are out. Generally, after you roll, it is the other guy's turn. When you gain hit points, you are capped off at 100.
Also, there is equipment, magical items, pets (all caps you attach to an end), and even helping erasers!
Link
(
Thanks, Jeshii!)
Update: Neil sez, "Pencil Cricket (cricket played with one or two six-sided pencils as "dice") has been around for ages, very popular with schoolboys in the UK at least, back when there weren't none of these fancy PSPs and internets.
"My dad remembers playing it aaaaaaages ago, complete with the fine detail of individual 'player's' careers, stats sheets and seasonal tournaments."
By Cory Doctorow at 10:37 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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This page documents what appears to be a crop of beans that are being sprouted in the cracks between the keys on a standard keyboard.
Link Real Link
(
via Digg)
Update: I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but Pesco blogged a similar prank back in June!
By Cory Doctorow at 10:35 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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The dog "laugh" (a kind of panting made by happy dogs) can calm other dogs when played over a loudspeaker:
They say the long, loud pant is the sound of a dog laughing, and it has a direct impact on the behavior of other dogs...
When they played the sound of a dog panting over the loudspeaker, the gaggle of dogs at the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of laughing, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute.
Link
(
via Neatorama)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:33 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Harry Eng, a former minister and elementary school teacher, makes these "impossible bottles" that are filled with objects that have been carefully squeezed through the necks of the bottles and arranged with tweezers and surgical haemostats.
Link
(
via Neatorama)
Update: Derrick sez, "Technically, Harry Eng _made_ these objects; he passed away in 1996.
However, other puzzle designers around the world have kept the tradition alive. See some of the entries at John Rausch's Puzzle World."
By Cory Doctorow at 10:26 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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DealHack has published a list of the Christmas delivery ordering deadlines for a bunch of popular etailers. I finished my Xmas shopping last weekend at Spitalfields Market in London, though I bought nearly all of my gifts destined for US and Canadian friends from Amazon this year. However, I also had great luck buying from crafters, artists and artisans on
Etsy and elsewhere.
Amazon
Standard Shipping 12/16 (super saver); 12/19 (standard)
Express/2-Day Shipping 12/20
Overnight Shipping 12/21
Gift Card Shipping 12/18
Email Gift Certificates? Yes
Customer Service 1-800-201-7575
Exceptions Special Delivery items deadline: 12/13
Link
(
Thanks, Michael!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:23 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Popular Aussie hiphop Hilltop Hoods band released its first DVD, The Calling Live. Partway through the disk, the band breaks off to call its fans thieves, and to promise that future musical releases will have DRM to protect the band from its listeners. Pete, a big fan of the band, has written an open letter in response:
Anecdotally, if I hadn't downloaded Left Foot, Right Foot in 2001(?), it is quite possible that I would have never purchased it, or The Calling, or The Calling DVD. It's also unlikely that I would have purchased tickets to several Hilltop Hoods shows. The same goes for my sister, and the several friends for whom I've burned copies over the years. If I had not discovered the joys of the Hoods, I may not have sought out (and purchased) music by the likes of Layla, Drapht, Downsyde, Clandestein, Hunter, Fdel, Pegz, the Herd, Bliss n Eso, After Hours, Funkoars, Art of War, Bias B, Lazy Grey, Mnemonic Ascent, Reason, Plutonic Lab etc etc etc....
So Suffa, I absolutely reject your accusations of theft, and am hurt that you reject me as a fan. I thought you were cool, and that you understood. Now, I'm not so sure...
Link
(
Thanks, Pete!)
Update: The band responds:
Our only problem is with people who download mp3s, like the music, and don't follow it up by supporting the artist (and this only applies to people who can afford to). These people are effectively stealing our music. This music costs us money (studio equipment/promotion/lawyers/accountants/blah blah blah) and time (a couple of years of our lives per album) to make. We are independent artists and whether you agree with me or not I can tell you for a fact that music piracy has hurt us financially. Don't get me wrong, I'm not crying poor, the album did well and for the first time in my life I am able to make a living as a musician (and trust me, this is an amazing feeling for me as I've spent most of my life working in factories). But if you think we're 'rich' from this shit you'd be mistaken as well.
By Cory Doctorow at 10:19 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Tristan's written up a simple HOWTO for converting the neck of a magnum-sized plastic soda bottle into macho ring, using a Leatherman, a Dremel and a sanding sponge.
Link
(
Thanks, Tristan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:15 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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The Library of Congress's National Recording Preservation Board commissioned this research paper into the copyright obstacles faced by libraries that attempt to preserve and make available musical recordings:
Preservation efforts with respect to pre-1972 sound recordings are hampered by legal restrictions. For example, a work is considered to be in an "obsolete" format, eligible for preservation copying, only if the device necessary to play it is no longer "commercially available." Under this formulation, even LP and 78-rpm records are not eligible for copying as "obsolete," since turntables can still be purchased, even though they are no longer commonly used.
Preservation efforts are also hindered by significant ambiguities in the law. State laws govern copying and dissemination of pre-1972 sound recordings. A detailed survey, to be conducted by the National Recording Preservation Board, will likely clarify the scope of state criminal laws, but given the amorphous nature of common law and the variations among states, considerable uncertainty about what is allowable under the civil law of the various states is likely to remain, even after the survey is completed.
Link
(
Thanks, Betsy!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:13 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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This site rounds up several designers' efforts to build folded cardboard chairs that are sturdy enough to sit on. Some are absolutely ingenious.
Link
(
via Crib Candy)
By David Pescovitz at 3:51 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Donald Watson, founder of veganism, has died at age 95. From an obituary in The Times:
While staying at the farm run by his much-loved Uncle George, Watson was shocked to see his uncle direct the slaughter of a pig. Its screams remained with him ever after. “I decided that farms – and uncles – had to be reassessed: the idyllic scene was nothing more than death row, where every creature’s days were numbered.” He became a vegetarian, but continued to worry about dairy and other animal products and the way in which their industries were linked to the slaughterhouses...
Towards the end of the war, Watson formed a committee of “non-dairy vegetarians”, who wanted to remove animal products entirely from their diet and initiate a new movement. He was keen to capitalise on the tuberculosis reported in Britain’s dairy cows, and the scarcity of eggs. He laid out the first issue of his Vegan News in November 1944, over 12 typed and stapled sheets of A4. The word vegan he took from the front and back end of “vegetarian”, expressing his belief that this new, absolutist diet was in fact the first impulse and the final destination of the vegetarian journey. He asked for other suggestions, and “dairyban”, “vitan”, “benevore”, “sanivore” and “beaumangeur” were offered, but most of the 25 members were happiest with vegan.
Link (Thanks, Candice D'Orsay)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:33 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Christopher from Düsseldorf says: "In a Boing Boing article today you wrote that you couldn't remember the 'click
trail' that led you a specific page. I think you should have a look at the
wonderful 'How'd I Get Here' firefox extension by Jesse Ruderman that solves just that problem."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:12 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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For the third year in a row, my friend Colin Berry is producing an event in San Francisco called Unsilent Night.
Unsilent Night is a massive mobile boombox concert that snakes through the Mission District, each volunteer holding a boombox playing a *part* of the overall piece. It's written and orchestrated by a composer named Phil Kline, whom I fly out from NY to help me with it. He does Unsilent Nights all over the country these days, although he's done it in NY for 14 years.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:09 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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RU Sirius
interviews Jay
Babcock, the editor of the great new
counterculture newspaper, Arthur, on his show this week. Also, on
NeoFiles, they've got a
conversation with BB
pal Douglas Rushkoff about
his new book, "Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:59 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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The late cartoonist Basil Wolverton is best known for his drawings of hideous-looking people: teeth with holes through them, blood vessels bulging out of foreheads, warts on warts, cavernous skin pores, tongues with grotesquely large taste buds, and so on. (One of Wolverton's claims to fame was winning an award given by
Life magazine for the best drawing of Lena the Hyena, a character from Al Capp's
L'il Abner, whose face was never shown in the strip.)
Here's a PDF file with several Powerhouse Pepper stories, a humor comic strip that Wolverton wrote and drew in the 1950s.
Link (Previous Wolverton coverage here)
By David Pescovitz at 1:56 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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My latest issue of Lab Notes, a research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, is online. Contents below. I hope you enjoy it!
* Mind Machines: controlling robots with our minds
* Nature's Nanoshells: using diatoms for nanotechnology
* Robot Cameras in the Wild: telerobotic observatories-in-a-box
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:26 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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As the parent of a two-year-old, I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on the floor, playing with her. After about five minutes, my back and hips are stiff and burning. The Salubrion Chair, designed to support your lumbar, looks like it might be just the ticket. Of course, I'll have to buy two of them, because my daughter will insist on sitting in it when we play.
Link
Reader comment: Jenn says: "About a year or so ago, I got rid of my desk and chair and set up office at a coffee table on the floor. I use a traditional zafu meditation pillow to provide the same kind of support the Salubrion Seat does. Made from cotton canvas and filled with lentils, the zafu is a far more environmentally friendly option than anything made from dyed molded plastic. (Though admittedly not as cool looking.) It also allows for a greater variety of sitting positions, important to avoid the burning sensations in the hips and knees. I spend four or five hours a day sitting on the floor now.
"I switched to sitting on the floor after reading a piece in a yoga magazine about how weak and underutilized westerners' lower back and stomach muscles are from receiving the constant support of our expensive ergonomic chairs. I can definitely report that after so many months, my back and stomach are stronger and I've become far more flexible in my hips and knees. It's not always comfortable, but that's a good thing as well. Sitting at a computer all day often seems to make us numb to our own bodies. Working in this way, I find I can only ignore my body in ten-minute increments and then I have to shift.
"I should add that it's a very bad idea for people with weak knees or back. Even I go and sit at my dining table or at a cafe at least a day a week. Too much of anything is never good."
Reader comment: ToddZ says: "Hey Mark, I just noticed the floor-chair article, and reader Jenn's response.
"A while back I discovered another alternative for better seated posture. Sissel makes those inflated excercise balls that you see in the Pilates commercials, and they also advocate sitting on them as a chair replacement. The constant slight body position adjustments it requires serve to strenghen the back and torso muscles. Replacing my office chair with a big rubber ball was just a tad extreme for me, so I opted for the Sitfit, another product from Sissel. It looks like a fat inflated frisbee, and you simply drop it on your current chair and sit away! It causes the same kind of mandatory good posture as sitting on the ball does, and is much less obvious. I found it very effective, so I like to spread the word.
Reader comment: Peter Orosz says: "The office where I work is crammed with hideous office chairs and people with back pain constantly booking chiropractor appointments. Kati is a biker girl who sits next to me on a big purple ball she got on her physiotherapist's advice after she had to get lower back surgery. For a while, it was her single ball in a sea of office chairs, then last week, another girl got a ball and now there's a list of some 30 people signed up to get big rubber balls to sit on, which should make the office look rather Googleesque. I'm getting one myself after giving Kati's ball a try and liking the fact that I have to constantly readjust my sitting position. My intervertebral muscles can't wait."
By Xeni Jardin at 1:00 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Boing Boing reader
Pierre Nel says,
"I just uploaded a few flyers I scanned of a local witch doctor aka 'traditional healer' in my home town of Grahamstown, South Africa.
The guy claims to be able to cure AIDS, and other less serious (but strange) ailments."
Link.
Check out the large size of this image for a list of healing services which includes "bewitched," "women who can't ejaculate," and "promotion at work." The presence of a pipe there may indicate a connection to Bob Dobbs. Also, he has a cellphone.
By Cory Doctorow at 12:42 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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This alarm clock launches a small, noisy helicopter to hover over your bed when it goes off:
One thing that sometimes wakes you up at night and prevents you from sleeping is the mosquito or blowfly when flying around your room. You can't and don't want to fall asleep again until you've caught it. These produces adrenalin and requires movements. The alarm clock blowfly works like a "blowfly" that at the desire time it escapes from a cage in your room. It starts moving and producing sound around you - to turn it off you should catch it and put it back in the cage.
Link
(
via Gizmodo)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:01 pm Thursday, Dec 8
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Phil says: "The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your list. When you type latest, he will give you the latest headlines from Makezine.com. You can type subscribe 1 and he'll deliver the latest news each hour, lastly - if you type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he'll search the Makezine.com site and pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to help you find what you're looking for... You can also type help to get a list of commands."
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 11:50 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Yet another Christmas Story parody, this one animated and re-enacted in less than 30 seconds by bunnies. Link (Thanks, John Mathot)
Previously:
Video mashup: A Christmas Gory (inspired by Shining remix)
Reader comment: Jason Pitzl-Waters says,
You might want to also point to Angry Alien's portrayal of that other Christmas favorite "It's A Wonderful Life". It is spot on. Link.
By David Pescovitz at 11:48 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Saint Mary's College of California is offering a course called "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism." One of the assignments is for the students to try to get a fake news story picked up by the news media. None of the students succeeded, but the class, taught by artist
Ray Beldner, still sounds like it should be a requirement at all universities (and high schools). From Contra Costa Times:
Beldner said he wanted to teach students how to bring issues to the public eye using creative methods. His course syllabus defines "culture jamming" as "a resistance movement to the perceived hegemony of popular culture."
"These are serious-minded pranks," he said. "It's not just about people goofing around."
But journalists already have their hands full sifting facts from fiction without having to worry about deliberate misinformation, said Austin Long-Scott, who teaches journalism ethics at San Francisco State University. He compared the hoax to a computer virus.
"He is teaching students to try to screw up an important system that has enough trouble getting things right," Long-Scott said. "It's a destructive thing to do, and it violates a general societal ethic."
Destructive or not, Beldner said he would not stop his students from continuing to perpetuate a fictional issue, even if it led to an incorrect news story being published.
"We'd have to cross that bridge when we got to it," he said.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 11:35 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Thomas Hawk, the blogger who
previously outed PriceRitePhoto, a sleazy Internet-based camera store that practices bait-and-switch (order a camera from them and they'll call you up and bug you to buy overpriced accessories; if you decline, they cancel your order), has news on another bunch of dirtbags. These sleazo-s are Brooklyn's WaWa Digtial, and they called up a blogger and
left him a voicemail threatening to
break his neck:
"You better not pick up, bitch. I’m gonna to come down there and break your god damn neck. You heard me, alright? Kid, you better hear me, bitch. Do you hear me, BITCH? Yes, you’d better believe it. You’re in biiiig trouble, my friend." This was the voicemail reportedly left on a customer's voicemail after he refused to buy overpriced accessories and instead wanted to cancel his order when he was abused by a salesperson at WaWa Digital in Brooklyn, New York...
By the way, the BBB reports the parent company of WaWa Digital as Starlight Cameras at 295 Avenue O, Brooklyn, NY. 866-621-1697. They also do business as Accessories Land, I.N.S. Digital World, Stargate Photo, and The Camera Whiz.
Link
Update: Kelly sez, "The 866 phone number you have for Starlight Camera (parent company of the assault-oriented WaWaDigital) does not work. However, they do have a regular phone number which is 718-627-7111."
Update 2 LO2 has remixed the MP3 of the threatening voicemail.
Update 3 Dan took some pix of WaWa Digital, but got chased off by the store's violent nutbar clerks. Sure looks like a class establishment, though.
By David Pescovitz at 11:00 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Henry Stokes, the Anonymous Philanthropist, has compiled a mind-blowingly massive online gallery of Yeti ephemera, from abominable snowman art to stunningly strange toys.
Link (via Cryptomundo)
By David Pescovitz at 10:50 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Heather Kelley, a videogame designer with Ubisoft, wanted to create a game to "teach techniques of female sexual gratification to a target audience of females." The result is "Lapis, A magical pet adventure." You can download and play Lapis for free from Kelley's site. From her description of the game:
Depending on how you touch the bunny, it reacts to being touched.
Players manipulate the creature (bunny) on the touchscreen, which gives them magical energy to fly
You can touch the bunny in different ways – stroking, scratching, tickling, etc
Also can use the microphone to talk, sing to, blow on the fur…
The bunnies are analogous to female anatomy… not literal looking, but evocative
Link
And from a CanWest News Service article:
The more (players) stimulate the bunny, the happier he becomes until eventually he begins flying through the air. But Lapis is also an unpredictable creature who needs a variety of sensations. Sometimes, no amount of stimulation is going to work.
"Sex is a perfectly natural part of the human experience and there has to be a way to handle it meaningfully and tastefully in games,'' said Kelley, who took first prize for the prototype at the Montreal International Games Summit last month.
Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)
By David Pescovitz at 10:39 am Thursday, Dec 8
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BB pal
Jim Leftwich says: "Huge, long-anticipated news in the mobile wireless world! The IEEE-SA Standards Board
approves Mobile WiMAX 802.16e standard. Now comes the hard part - building it out, which is going to be a massive and long-term undertaking."
Link to an article in The Register,
Link to Om Malik's first take on the news
By David Pescovitz at 10:30 am Thursday, Dec 8
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SiliconValley.com is hosting a weeklong online roundtable about all that is Google. Along with
Om Malik,
Cindy Cohn, and other experts, BB band manager
John Battelle, author of
The Search, is weighing in.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:23 am Thursday, Dec 8
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For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on the brouhaha brewing in Alaska over a nuclear particle accelerator destined for a science enthusiast's home.
Civil engineer and nuclear technician Albert Swank wants to build a circular particle accelerator, or cyclotron, in his garage in a well-manicured residential area adjacent to downtown Anchorage, Alaska.
But some of his neighbors aren't too comfortable with the idea, and they've convinced the city assembly to propose a law specifically forbidding the cyclotrons in residential areas.
Swank wants to rebuild a cyclotron being decommissioned at Johns Hopkins University to create radioactive isotopes for Alaska hospitals. The isotopes are used to treat cancer and are also used in imaging machines.
Link, archived audio online after 12PM PT/3PM ET.
Here's a report I filed for Wired News, and here's a related /. thread
By Xeni Jardin at 10:17 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Snip from Defensetech blog:
The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "The Green Side" (...) describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: “We could not understand why they kept coming but they did.” The reason, it turned out, was drugs: “…these ‘holy warriors’ are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive.”
BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It’s a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This weird concept originated in the 1950’s when “better living through chemistry” was a slogan to live by and warfare without blood was the goal.
Link
Reader comment: Nigel Hall says,
Use of drugs to amp up Islamic attackers isn't exactly news. This from the Wikipedia entry for "assasin": "The term Assassin originally referred to a heretical Islamic order known as the Hashshashin. According to one derivation, the word means "those who use hashish" (cannabis resin) in Arabic because, according to Crusader histories, that group used to ingest hashish before carrying out military or assassination operations, in order to be fearless."
By Cory Doctorow at 10:11 am Thursday, Dec 8
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T sez, "OhNoRobot is a search engine for the words in webcomics that works off distributed volunteer transcription, collecting the efforts of fans and cartoonists alike to build its database. In a few short weeks, even with the distractions of the holiday season, it's grown to 15,000 transcriptions of over 180 series."
If you make a comic and put it on the Web, it's because you want that comic to be read. And if a comic deserves to be read, it deserves to be found. Especially by people who are looking for something like it. It deserves to be searched. If it can't be searched, a feeling of futility condenses in the air.
And webcomics have a serious searchability deficit.
Google is comics-illiterate.
Link,
Link to manifesto
(
Thanks, T!)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:44 am Thursday, Dec 8
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The Motion Picture Association of America released a media advisory to journalists this morning "Offer[ing] tips to holiday shoppers to steer clear of counterfit CDs, DVDs" and to "stop Grinches from stealing copyrights." Snip:
“The holiday season is a time to for people to enjoy quality entertainment with family and friends and we want to make sure that consumers are safeguarded against pirates peddling counterfeit products,” said MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. “With so many people buying movies and music for their friends and loved ones, we want to ensure that buyers are getting the real Chicken Little and not some pirated turkey.”
The advisory goes on to list helpful pointers for determining whether the DVD you're buying is legit or counterfit. Strangely, "back of dude's head in middle of screen throughout movie" and "store consists of worn cardboard box in gutter on Canal Street" are not among them.
Here at Boing Boing, we'd like to do our part to edumacate vulnerable consumers, so we now point you to the Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers pool on Flickr for furthr schooling.
See exhibit A, above. If the DVD you bought from that guy in the alley contains all three Lord of the Rings, all three Harrys Potter, and Earthsea to boot -- well, let's just say Hollywood would never be that generous with you.
Link. Image: one of the snapshots you'll find in the Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers pool, "DVD Dork" by amalthya.
Reader comment: Jemal says,
I know how to tell real from pirated: pirated DVDs don't take over your DVD player to keep you from skipping through the 60-second anti-piracy movie.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:22 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Think of them as the nerd equivalent of "I'm with Stupid" t-shirts. The terms "master" and "slave" refer to relationships between computers in I.T. parlance, but slap those words on a decorative rosette (to be worn on a tux, perhaps?) and... Link (Thanks, JK)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:56 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Designboom has announced a competition to design an affordable, functional art for homeless people.
Urban homeless use carts to carry their possessions and to
collect goods (like bottles, cardboard, etc.) that they then return
to various recyclers in exchange for cash. This provides a small
and valuable income. It is essential that your cart design not only
accommodates all these functions but that it is affordable
(for production and for private parties or charity organisations
who wish to donate them).
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 8:29 am Thursday, Dec 8
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What if
A Christmas Story was a horror film? "No, Ralphie -- you really *will* shoot your eye out with that Red Rider BB gun." Boing Boing reader
Darryl explains, "It's part of our agency's holiday greeting card. On the ChristmasGory website, we've included a link to our inspiration for the piece, which of course is the Shining remix."
Link to online streams, and a handy version for your video iPod (or similar pocket player).
By Xeni Jardin at 8:15 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Named after the "thirty mile zone" that defined Hollywood in the 1930s, AOL's new entertainment site
TMZ.com goes live today. Expect many illicit "stars-behaving-badly" viral videos to follow.
One item on the site this morning relates to an eBay auction purporting to offer "The old Hollywood sign" for sale. The listing generated so much confusion in recent weeks that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce issued a news release to reporters last night, which reads in part (sorry, no copy online):
Hollywood Chamber President and CEO Leron Gubler emphatically affirms: “The existing Hollywood Sign (...) is not, and never will be, for sale. When the Chamber rebuilt the Sign in 1978, we built it to last, and it is now being well maintained by the Hollywood Sign Trust.”
The confusion began Tuesday evening, when during an EBay auction, fragments of the “HOLLYWOOD” Sign, built in 1949, were purchased for $450,000. The seller was a West Los Angeles entrepreneur who had acquired the Sign from an individual who had obtained the remains of the Sign in 1978, and who had kept it in storage for decades.
By Xeni Jardin at 7:46 am Thursday, Dec 8
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A geography textbook for "Dixie Children," printed in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1863. Here's a snip from the accompanying lesson plan:
Q. Which race is most civilized.
A. The Caucasian.
Q. Which are the most ferocious and savage?
A. The Indian, Mongolian, Maylay and African.
Q. Is the African savage in this country?
A. No; they are docile and religious here.
Q. How are they in Africa where they first come from?
A. They are very ignorant, cruel and wretched[.]
Link to "The Geographical Reader, for the Dixie Children" (
Thanks, Mick)
Reader comment: Pat Beighley says, "Did you see the description of the Trail of Tears? Unbelievable!"
4. The Cherokee Indians occupied part of this State, and had learned to live much like the white people. They had fine farms with slaves to work them, good houses, much cattle, sheep, hogs and horses. They also had a newspaper, and sent their children to good schools. But in the year 1836 the white people made a treaty with them, to pay them 5,000,000 dollars to remove to Indian Territory, where they were to have seven millions acres of new land. So most of them went away, and now live in the west, where there are more hunting grounds, and where the white people will not molest them. This tribe and others take sides with the South in the great struggle for independence.
Reader comment: Paul Jones of the University of North Carolina says,
The textbook Dixie Children was printed to provide "education" during the Civil War. UNC holds a lot of material from that period. People who read it are outraged. They should be. These texts are evidence of what the war was all about and of the thinking of the Confederate elite.
At a time when a church school in Cary (just beside Raleigh where the 1863 book was published) is teaching from a pamphlet titled "Southern Slavery:
As It Was" which tells us that "slavery was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence", we need to blunt force of historical evidence to impell us to face the sad facts.
See this on the Cary school: Link. The authors have tried to hide their book but Amazon's "search inside" feature lets you know what's in it.
By Xeni Jardin at 7:04 am Thursday, Dec 8
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Hot pink resin set with pink and white Swarovski crystal. Bad. Azz.
Link (
via this Village Voice article, thanks Dahling)
