A hotel in Kenya is situated in the middle of a giraffe preserve, and the tame giraffes lean their heads in through the windows of the second-storey breakfast room and get fed by the guests:

The Giraffe Manor, built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, is situated on 120 acres of land just a few miles from the centre of Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. In 1974 Jock Leslie-Melville, grandson of a Scottish earl, and his wife Betty, who also founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife (AFEW), bought the Manor. They then moved five babies of the highly endangered Rothschild giraffe to their property where they have been successfully reared and they now have their own babies.

Link (via Neatorama)

Update: Matt sez, "I've been! I spent the first night of my Kenyan honeymoon in the Giraffe manor. A truly amazing experience. We were lucky enough to be hosted by the current owners of the house as opposed to the house sitters. Not only do the giraffes poke their heads in, you can stand on the front veranda and feed the giraffes, whilst the owners dog's chase warthogs around the grounds. "

The concluding volume of a new young-adult horror trilogy -- Midnighters -- from Scott Westerfeld has been published, concluding a wonderful, spooky romp that brings together the best of HP Lovecraft with Westerfeld's great talent for telling adventure tales that capture teen problems perfectly.

I've written about Scott's YA novels here before: So Yesterday (a YA Douglas-Coupland-esque book about a cool-hunter), Peeps (a vampire novel built on hard-science parasitology) and Uglies/Pretties (the first two books in a trilogy about a future where teens are forced into cosmetic surgery at 16) -- he's a consistently sharp writer whose well-turned books zip along at speed.

The Midnighters trilogy is about a small group of misfit teens in a conservative town who all share the ability to inhabit the secret hour between 12 midnight and 12:01 AM, a secret hour when time stands still for everyone but them, when the light turns blue, when they gain special powers -- the power to run tirelessly and leap buildings, even to fly.

This is pure wish-fulfillment for the kids, who are picked-on losers in their straight-laced school, harassed by the law and stuck in bad home situations. But it turns out that the secret hour is also inhabited by Cthuluesque Old Ones -- ancient monsters trapped forever in the darkness of the secret hour. And these ancient ones must escape.

The trilogy tells the story of the kids' defense of the town that rejects them, and of the ancient, wicked secrets there. If Lovecraft had a sense of plot and character, he could have written these.

Now the final volume, Blue Moon, has come into print, and it ties the story up nicely. If you're looking for three books to give to a kid in your life (or looking for a romp of your own), these would be a great choice.

Midighters 1: The Secret Hour, Midighters 2: Touching Darkness, Midnighters 3: Blue Noon

A photographer has reconstructed and remixed the pinup pictures of Art Frahm using women in contemporary goth/alternative garb. Frahm was the famous 1950s painter who created bizarre pinups of women holding bags of groceries, stepping out of cars, or otherwise busy, with shocked expressions and their panties around their ankles, apparent victims of sudden elastic failure. There was nothing NSFW in these pictures, except the implication that somewhere under those modest 1950s dresses was an un-pantied set of nether-regions.

The remixes from "dklo" on Flickr feature faithful copies of the setups and facial expressions, but with women in huge gothy platform shoes, leather corsets, and fishnets. Link (Thanks, John!)

Alex Wilson, proprietor of Telltale Weekly -- a DRM-free audiobook store that releases all its recordings under Creative Commons licenses after a certain period -- sez:

In celebration of Telltale Weekly's 2nd Anniversary, I'm giving away a bestselling recording of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" for one day only in DRM-Free MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC formats.

The recording reverts back to 75 cents tomorrow, and--as part of Telltale's "Funding a Free Audiobook Library" program--will be free again with a Creative Commons License in October of 2009.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Update: Elias sez, "A few weeks ago I discovered Poe Podcast Project, a project where people from the theatre business and the like are reading several tales from E. A. Poe, usually putting good dramatization on them." Here's the feed URL.

Another bumper-crop of anagram maps!

Miami (I):

Miami (II):

Dublin:

Government of Ontario (GO) rail:

Dallas:

Glasgow:

Portland, OR:

Ottawa:

Houston:

(Thanks, Alesh, Mackers, Daniel, Owen, Andrew and Ethan !)

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map, Stockholm Transit Anagram Map, LA Red Line Anagram Map, Maps for Cleveland, St Louis (x2), BART, and Singapore, Maps for Berlin, Copenhagen, Baltimore (x2), Maps for Calgary, Vancouver (x2), Philadelphia, Buffalo, Rochester, Hong Kong (x2), Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit

I've begun podcasting another story, "Return to Pleasure Island," a dark and mean fantasy story that was originally published in Realms of Fantasy in 2000, and reprinted in my 2003 short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. It's in four parts, and should be fully posted by the end of the week.

George twiddled his thumbs in his booth and watched how the brown, clayey knuckles danced overtop of one another. Not as supple as they had once been, his thumbs -- no longer the texture of wet clay on a potter's wheel; more like clay after it had been worked to exhausted crackling and brittleness. He reached into the swirling vortex of the cotton-candy machine with his strong right hand and caught the stainless-steel sweep-arm. The engines whined and he felt them strain against his strong right arm, like a live thing struggling to escape a trap. Still strong, he thought, still strong, and he released the sweep-arm to go back to spinning sugar into floss.

A pack of boys sauntered down the midway, laughing and calling, bouncing high on sugar and g-stresses. One of them peeled off from the group and ran to his booth, still laughing at some cruelty. He put his palms on George's counter and pushed against it, using them to lever his little body in a high-speed pogo. "Hey, mister," he said, "how about some three-color swirl, with sprinkles?"

George smiled and knocked the rack of paper cones with his strong right elbow, jostled it so one cone spun high in the air, and he caught it in his quick left hand. "Coming _riiiiiight_ up," he sang, and flipped the cone into the floss-machine. He spun a beehive of pink, then layered it with stripes of blue and green. He reached for the nipple that dispensed the sprinkles, but before he turned its spigot, he said, "Are you sure you don't want a dip, too? Fudge? Butterscotch? Strawberry?"

The boy bounced even higher, so that he was nearly vaulting the counter. "All three! All three!" he said.

George expertly spiraled the floss through the dips, then applied a thick crust of sprinkles. "Open your mouth, kid!" he shouted, with realistic glee.

The boy opened his mouth wide, so that the twinkling lights of the midway reflected off his back molars and the pool of saliva on his tongue. George's quick, clever left hand dipped a long-handled spoon into the hot fudge, then flipped the sticky gob on a high arc that terminated perfectly in the boy's open mouth. The boy swallowed and laughed gooely. George handed over the dripping confection in his strong right hand, and the boy plunged his face into it. When he whirled and ran to rejoin his friends, George saw that his ears were already getting longer, and his delighted laugh had sounded a little like a bray. A job well done, he thought, and watched the rain spatter the spongy rubber cobbles of the midway.

Podcast page, Subscribe to Podcast Feed

Octavia Butler, the brilliant science fiction writer, reportedly died on Saturday following a fall that was followed by fatal bleeding in her skull gave her a fatal concussion. Butler was the incredible writer who was the first genre author to win the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" grant. She was the first prominent African-American woman in the field, and her novels and short stories were an inspiration to a generation of writers of all backgrounds and both sexes (I was ready to give up writing after a five-year bout of writers' block in my mid-twenties when I read the introduction to her short story collection in which she recounted her own block and decided to keep trying). I recently reviewed her wonderful novel Fledgling here, a vampire book that, like all of Butler's work, was a disturbing, light-touch allegory about race and sex politics skinned with a fast-moving, heart-wrenching storyline.

Butler was only 58 when she died on Saturday. Her oeuvre is too modest, but will never be forgotten. She had many amazing books left in her. I only met her once, very briefly, and I was tongue-tied in her presence, but she was gracious and friendly. The field and the world has lost someone wonderful this weekend.

Several people have confirmed this now, though nothing authoritative has been published. I'll update this post if something firmer emerges. Link (Thanks, Bill, Jeff and Steve!)

Update: Here's the Seattle Post Intelligencer obit, and here's the Chicago Tribune -- thanks, Robn.

(Photo from NikolasCo/Flickr)

I'm not usually drawn to graffiti, but I dig the work of San Francisco artist Bigfoot One, natch. Along with the urban artworks he's been, er, exhibiting since the early 1990s, Bigfoot One paints on wood panels and recently created an exquisite vinyl action figure for STRANGEco. Link to Bigfoot One's site, Link to a 2005 interview from the San Francisco Bay Guardian (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

My cryptozoologist pal Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo is the subject of a long profile in today's Boston Globe. The reporter visited Loren in his wunderkammer home, also known as the International Cryptozoology Museum. From the article:

To believers, doubters, even skeptics, Bigfoot makes a big impression. The replica 8 1/2 - foot hairy hominoid -- crafted from the fur of musk oxen and buffalo, a hulking presence on the porch of a brown-and-yellow home in Portland, Maine -- scares the bejesus out of the UPS man. Still, it's right at home here on the doorstep of a man who has spent a lifetime investigating mysterious animal sightings. "I don't particularly feel like a strange person," Loren Coleman says. "It's the subject I study that's strange."

He is a leading figure in the world of cryptozoology, a field whose legitimacy is disputed. Coleman has trekked to 49 states, as well as Canada, Mexico, and Scotland, gathering physical evidence and eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, thunderbirds, and other legendary beasts not verified by conventional science but storied enough to make us wonder: What if?

"Eighty percent of all the accounts that come to me are misidentifications, are mundane animals - a few fakes, a few hoaxes," Coleman acknowledges. "But it's that 20 percent of the core unknowns that keep me going."

Link (free reg. required or BugMeNot: me@privacy.net / boston)

Don Knotts -- AKA The Incredible Mr Limpet, Deputy Barney Fife, and Ralph Furley -- has died at 81 from pumonary and repsitory complications. Good night, Barn, and sleep well. Link

John remixed clipped a Kraftwerk song into a Boing Boing "themesong" (it's more ringtone- or arpeggio-length) -- "Boing. . .um-chakka Boing Boing . . . um-chakka." It'd make a good sting if we ever had a talk-show or something. 73K MP3 Link (Thanks, John!)

Lovely, lovely anagram transit maps!

Calgary:

Vancouver (I):

Vancouver (II):

(See also this map of Vancouver)

Philadelphia:

Buffalo:

Rochester (defunct/planned):

Hong Kong (I):

Hong Kong (II):

Seattle (proposed):

Minneapolis:

(see also this alternate Minneapolis map)

Detroit:

(Thanks, Mike, Rock, Pyrop, Enno, Alex, Allen, Nootropic, Ian, Nathan and Watty!)

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map, Stockholm Transit Anagram Map, LA Red Line Anagram Map, Maps for Cleveland, St Louis (x2), BART, and Singapore, Maps for Berlin, Copenhagen, Baltimore (x2)

Update: Lindsay made an alternate Vancouver map

Update 2: Here's an alternate Minneapolis map from Ben

Four of the messages encrypted with the Nazi Enigma machine were never decrypted; a distributed computing project (like SETI@Home) is harnessing the power of the Internet's many computers to break them. One has already fallen!

The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia. The signals were presumably enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4 - hence the name of the project.

This project has officially started as of January 9th, 2006. You can help out by donating idle time of your computer to the project. If you want to participate, please follow the client install instructions for your operating system...

Link (via /.)