Inspired by the grim news that abortions may soon be banned in South Dakota, one female blogger posts detailed instructions -- MAKE magazine style -- on DIY backalley abortions. Not a recommendation, and not reposted here with the belief that this would be safe or advisable for any woman.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, when abortions were illegal in many places and expensive to get, an organization called Jane stepped up to the plate in the Chicago area. Jane initially hired an abortion doctor, but later they did the abortions themselves. They lost only one patient in 13,000 -- a lower death rate than that of giving live birth. The biggest obstacle they had, though, was the fact that until years into the operation, they thought of abortion as something only a doctor could do, something only the most trained specialist could perform without endangering the life of the woman.

They were deceived -- much like you have probably been deceived. An abortion, especially for an early pregnancy, is a relatively easy procedure to perform. And while I know, women of South Dakota, that you never asked for this, now is the time to learn how it is done. There is no reason you should be beholden to doctors -- especially in a state where doctors have been refusing to perform them, forcing the state's only abortion clinic to fly doctors in from elsewhere.

No textbooks or guides existed at that time to help them, and the equipment was hard to find. This is no longer true. For under $2000, any person with the inclination to learn could create a fully functioning abortion setup allowing for both vacuum aspiration and dilation/curettage abortions.

Link to "For the women of South Dakota: an abortion manual." (Thanks, Siege and Happler, seen on MeFi)

Reader comment: Neurofuture says,

Here's a post that's compiled other approaches, costing less than $2K. Some nearly free. Bitch PhD features a DIY herbal abortion/miscarriage inducer requiring only parsley and vitamin C. It's generated quite a bit of attention from the academic and science community so she's updating her post to reflect some of the safety concerns around DIY abortion as well as more techniques.

It also includes a link to DIY emergency contraception, or the "morning after pill," using your regular birth control pills. Planned Parenthood provides this easy, medically safe info: Link. Information wants to be free. :)

Bitch PhD also links to feminists now organizing around this issue; personally I'd love to see an onslaught of women bloggers worldwide posting this kind of free, democratic and empowering info.

(Thanks, Andrew Gammell)

Link (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Less than Human (The Cunt, The Gun, The State)

Jasmina Tesanovic

BELGRADE, 22 February 2006

I refuse to speak the name of the Bad Guy Who Became the Good Guy. When Milosevic was in power, for years on end, his words and face everywhere, his and his alone, while those of us, the political idiots, the victims, were so baffled and mute, I gave a vow to myself: the Word is power. I will never mention his name, privately or publicly.

This Bad Guy who became a good guy, because he pleads guilty in front of his God: he wants attention.

He gives long speeches, speeches full of himself and his new way out of prison: out of himself. He pleads for our sympathy, for compassion as though this lessens his guilt, and the victims' relatives feel disgusted. So does his boss, the number one indicted, who gave the order, who conveyed those orders from somebody else... He, who plays the game of the big Serbian hero from past centuries, and displays his grandeur saying literally:

I care for only three things in life: the Cunt, the Gun and the State.

God knows how many women he raped, whispered a relative sitting next to me...

Link, $35 plus shipping. (Thanks, Robb)

Futurismic has posted its latest story, "The Jiminy Device," by Lisa Mantchev and it's one of the finest comic stories they've posted to date. It's the story of a kind of hyper-Paris-Hilton who is attended by an entourage of sycophantic primpers, whose antics results in her total dispossession and the implantation of a digital conscience device. It's a sweet, short, funny little story, with lots of laugh-out-loud techno-speculation:

Shock and disbelief clouded London's brow (despite the neurotoxin injections) as she stared at her lover. Marcel only shrugged. When one of his people scribbled a note and handed it to him, he read it cold.

"We're drifting apart. It's not you, it's me." He took the cigarette out of his mouth and glared at the hapless scriptwriter. She withered visibly behind her cheap haircut. "This is what I pay you for?" He shook his head and his stylist adjusted the tousled locks with a comb.

London sniffed, trying to muster some tears. Her special effects guy produced a squirt bottle of saline when she couldn't quite manage it on her own. Her personal trainer (Tony... or was it Toby?) glared at Marcel. "You can't leave me. I'm an heiress for god's sake. I'm leaving you."

Neil and Susanna, their respective PR generals, glowered at each other. Index fingers hovered over cell phones, ready to speed-dial the Associated Press.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

This old Something Awful photoshopping contest challenged participants to remix the covers of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books -- some of these are sheer genius, like this Schrodinger's Cat C-Y-O-A with TWO exciting endings! Link (via Neatorama)

WiFiNetNews has an open forum for travel-geeks to talk about which airports are dumb enough to lock travelers out of recharging their laptops on lay-overs, following on from yesterday's post about Montreal airport putting locks on its AC outlets. I've heard from a reader that London Stansted, which I use about 20 times a year, has started to lock down its electricity too. If it's true, I'm switching to Gatwick.

Frequent travellers need juice between flights, and airports that sell WiFi without providing the electricty to use it are like coffee-shops without toilets. They're missing out on the revenue they'd get from people who'd buy the WiFi if only they had the power to use it.

Link

What could be more breathtaking than a collection of intricate, traditional landscape paintings?

Intricate, traditional landscapes painted on a female model's posterior.
Link to Flickr user Wallace's photo set, translated from the Chinese tags as "Human Body Art." (Thanks, Mark Mauer)

A great HOWTO explains an ingenious method for creating a homebrew humane mousetrap out of common household objects:

1. Get a toilet paper tube and crease two lines to form a flat sided tunnel.
2. Put a treat on one end of the tube: A cracker and dab of peanut butter works great.
3. Get a tall (at least 20 inches) bucket. A trash can works well.
4. Balance the tube precariously on the edge of a table or counter with the treat hanging directly over the tall sided receptacle...

Link (via Make Blog)

These unappetizing, government-issued warning posters in Hanoi read, more or less -- "To minimize the risk of contracting bird flu, please boil the absolute living fuck out of all poultry before you eat it."

Stickyrice blog says, "These billboards have been erected outside markets in the capital in the past week or so. The WHO and the Ministry of Culture and Information are corroborating on this 'no-pink-bird-meat-decree.'"
Link (Thanks, Armand)

Here's a HOWTO explaining the best ways to rewire the old phone lines and phones in your house or office to use them as an intercom. I haven't had a landline I used regularly since 1999, but every place I've lived has had tons of landline wiring, and old style phones are cheap like borscht. Once you've got this rigged, you can pick up that bat-phone on your desk, ring your loved one in the next room, and bark, "Schweetheart, get me rewrite!"

Talking over the phones is easy. You put DC current through the phone and it transmits and receives audio. So two phones and a current source (about 25mA) all in series will give you a talking circuit. A suitable current source can be as simple as a 9V battery and a series resistor whose value is adjusted (with both phones offhook) till about 25mA flows. You can then bypass the battery and the resistor with a capacitor to couple the audio straight across and get a loud and clear connection.

What is much harder is signaling the other end. To ring the bell you need to put 90V (RMS) 20Hz AC into the phone (nominally). Lower voltages will work (down to about 40V) but different frequencies won't. You can't ring the phone at 60Hz. I have a ringing circuit in a PBX I built but it consists of a 20Hz sinewave generator, a push-pull power booster and a big transformer. Much too elaborate for a simple 2-phone intercom circuit, and anyway the ringing voltage could painfully zap a kid.

Link (via Negatendo0

The 2005 Nebula ballot is out!

Air - Geoff Ryman (St. Martin's Press, Sep04)
Camouflage - Joe Haldeman (Analog, Mar-May 04, also Ace book Aug 2004)
Going Postal - Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins, Oct04)
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, Sep04)
Polaris - Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov04)
Orphans of Chaos - John C. Wright (Tor, Nov05)

Link (via Futurismic)

Shock Absorber, a UK line of sports-bras, has a Flash-based boobies-physics simulator. Plug in a cup-size and a level of activity, and it produces a 3D animation of breasts of that size bouncing free, bouncing in a regular bra, and hardly moving at all in one of their sports-bras. Extra geeky bonus points for including a 3D wireframe view, so you can see the pure physics of the jiggle. Link (via Plasticbag)

Two oil companies have signed on to Mohamed Al Fayed's plans to open a hotel on an oil rig off the east coast of Scotland.

The Harrods owner wants to create a 50-bedroom country-house style hotel on a platform in the Cromarty Firth (...) by 2008. If approved, the attraction would also boast a visitor centre, a shop and a restaurant. Two unidentified oil companies have approved the use of their platforms.

Link (via Better Living Through Miles)

Reader comment: Vetnoir says,

I thought it might intrest you to know that there is already a place like this down here in SE Asia. Link.

Reader comment: Cholten99 says,

Sounds a lot like Christopher Brookmyre's book "One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night".

(Thanks, David Neill, and Dave!)

Michael sez:

The Anonymizer company has a contract with the Voice of America to provide anonymous internet access for users in a number of foreign countries, including Iran and China. Here's how an Anonymizer sysadmin describes the Iranian portion of the service: "It's based off of PrivateSurfing [...]. Added features for the Iran proxy is full time SSL, URL encryption, Farsi language support, and we switch the proxy website about once a month (every time the Iranian government blocks us). We perform checks on the service from within Iran to see if our site is actually blocked (yes, it works), and we maintain a database of all known e-mail addresses that we can detect as being located in Iran. Every time we switch the proxy site we send an e-mail informing them of the new free proxy location so the citizens of Iran can find it. The sites are also broadcast via radio and TV into Iran by the VOA. To be honest, we're usually about a day behind the blocks, due mostly to time zone differences."

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

See also: Defeat censorware

BoingBoing reader Jay James says, "To the USENET phone geeks this, is a fairly big deal." Snip from post by John Levine on comp.dcom.telecom:

Mike Sandman reports that Telecom Digest moderator Pat Townson had a heart attack early Saturday morning (around 6AM). They took him to the local hospital, and then transferred him to a hospital in Oklahoma that's supposed to have the best heart department around there. At the moment he's in a critical care room with no phone, with luck he'll be moved to a regular room with a phone in the next day or two. Readers who want to send him a get well card or note can send it to:

Pat Townson
Jane Phillips Medical Center
3500 E Frank Phillips Blvd
Bartlesville, OK 74006

Two more anagram transit maps trickled in yesterday. March 1's the cutoff for new anagram maps -- I'll blog all the ones I receive by midnight, Eastern time! Get anagramming!

NY/NJ Path:

Sydney:

(Thanks, TehDiplomat and Chris!)

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, Maps for Miami (x2), Dublin, Ontario, Dallas, Glasgow, Portland, Ottawa, Houston, Maps for Montreal (x2), Helsinki, Monterrey, San Diego, Mexico City

Anonymous BoingBoing reader says,

YouTube user "aretired" posted a clip from Thursday's CBS Evening News showcasing Jason McElwain, the autistic highschool basketball player who scored 6-3 pointers in the final four minutes of the game. The video clip shot up to #15 in alltime viewings on YouTube with 1.5 million hits in just three days -- then, it was suddenly and inexplicably pulled.

User "aretired" reposted the clip and was again pulled within a day, still no explanations.

CBS sent DMCA complaints for not just that McElwain clip, but all 11 of the user's other CBS-related clips that had up till now gone fairly unnoticed, by anyone. And, despite their huffing and puffing and pulling over a 2-minute feel-good piece of the year, you can still catch your fill of Oprah, Letterman, Degeneres, Dr. Phil and other CBS content at YouTube.

And, I'd add, at other popular user-submitted video-sharing sites. Here is a mirror to online video for the enormously popular CBS segment on Jason McElwain (wmv).

Reader comment: Gaynelle Grover says

As the parent of autistic identical twins who play on an NJB basketball team, I found this story incredibly moving. I wasn't alone. The link to the spot on YouTube made it's way around various autism online discussion groups--and undoubtedly disappointed many when it was pulled. However, you might let readers know it's available on Google Video: Link

Reader comment: Anonymous says:

hbo's real sports ran an almost identical story last year on a special ed student that got in a game and knocked down some 3s. watching the CBS piece was like watching a rerun. Link

Ren and Stimpy creator John K has posted the pilot outline to his new cartoon, The Heartaches. It's called "Curly Fuzz Trauma."
Link

While it would seem that men in hunter-gatherer societies who are good hunters have an evolutionary advantage because their mates would stay with them longer and their kids would be better fed. It turns out though that the dangerous and exhausting act of hunting is also a good way for men to show-off. A study of the Hadza tribe of Tansania in the scientific journal Current Anthropology looks at this so-called "showoff hypothesis." From a press release:

"When asked where they would like to reside, [Hadza] women preferred the camp of good hunters, where more food would be shared with their families," explains Brian M. Wood (a graduate student in biological anthropology at Harvard University). "The choice was not so clear for [Hadza] men: living with bad hunters would showcase their own hunting prowess. Living with good hunters, however, would bring more food to their family, at the cost of lowered relative hunting status."

Ultimately though, most men in the study chose to live with the good hunters so they could best provide for their families. Link

Here are 84 photos from the Tokyo Wonderfest. My favorite photos are the ones of this figurine of a woman who is holding her own head and spinal column so she can kiss herself.

Josh says: "I recently went to Wonderfest here in Tokyo, a twice yearly (winter and summer) celebration of all things otaku. In other words, robots, cosplay and lots (and lots) of tiny figurines having tentacle sex. I went only equipped with my keitei (cellphone) so the picture quality isn't the best and I must warn you, most of the pix are definitely NSFW as I basically tried to document as much obsessive peversion as I could. Hope you enjoy them!"

(Obviously NSFW) Link

EFF has coordinated a massive effort to push back against AOL/Yahoo's proposed email tax that will only guarantee delivery of email if the sender pays AOL/Yahoo for every message they deliver:

A pay-to-send system won't help the fight against spam - in fact, this plan assumes that spam will continue and that mass mailers will be willing to pay to have their emails bypass spam filters. And non-paying spammers will not reduce the amount of mail they throw at your filters simply because others pay to evade them.

Perversely, the new two-tiered system AOL proposes would actually reward AOL financially for failing to maintain its email service. The chief advantage of paying to send CertifiedEmail is that it can bypass AOL's spam filters. Non-paying customers are being asked to trust that after paid mail goes into effect, AOL will properly maintain its spam filters so only unwanted mail gets thrown away.

But the economic incentives point the other way: The moment AOL switches to a two-tiered Internet where giant emailers pay for preferential service, AOL will face a simple business choice: spend money to keep regular spam filters up-to-date, or make money by neglecting their spam filters and pushing more senders to pay for guaranteed delivery. Poor delivery of mail turns from being a problem that AOL has every incentive to fix to something that could actually make them money if the company ignores it.

Way more impressive than the letter is who signed it:

AFL-CIO, AIDS Foundation of Chicago, American Academy of HIV Medicine, Association of Cancer Online Resources, Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome, Common Cause, Communication Workers of America, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Consumer Federation of America, Craig Newmark, Democracy For America, Democracy In Action, Democratic National Committee, Donor Digital, Drug Policy Alliance, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Gun Owners of America, Human Rights Campaign, Humane Society of United States, Michael Geist, Moveon.org Civic Action, Oxfam America, Peacefire, RightMarch, RiseUp Networks, Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media, United Farm Workers, Working Assets, American Rights At Work, Brothers In Action, Californians Against Waste, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Center for Digital Democracy, Chicago Media Action Chin Music Press, Cleanpeace.org, Connecticut Parent Power, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Earthworks, Englewood Ob/Gyn, Equality North Carolina, Free Schuylkill River Park, Life-Zone, M+R Strategic Services, Maryland League of Conservation Voters, Media Alliance, National Video Resources, North Carolina Harm Reduction Center Prometheus Radio, Roots of Promise, Sinapu, Working America

Link

This inexplicably funny video features a portable tape-player playing back panicked screams as it slides down a clothesline, hung from a carabiner, across a variety of settings. It's amazingly funny and freaking weird. Link (via JWZ)

A newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, has unearthed a collection of dozens of never-published, haunting photos from the civil rights movement. They've republished many on the Web and are hosting a gallery show of some as well:

Hundreds of photos from that era were lost, sold, stolen or stored in archives. Some of those pictures appear today for the first time in the newspaper, in an eight-page special section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten."

The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."

Link (Thanks, The Divine Goat!)

progosk says: swedish gamer/machinima forum snoken has produced a wonderful revisitation of that lovely bravia ad (set to the same infectious josé gonzález cover of "heartbeats).
Link

Wireless Nomad, a cooperative WiFi network project in Toronto, has signed a deal with Fading Ways, a Creative Commons-licensed label, to distribute music free on its network:

Toronto's Fading Ways Music and Wireless Nomad Co-op are pleased to announce that the Fading Ways Share sampler series, licensed under Creative Commons, is available free on the Wireless Nomad wireless Internet network. 30 full-length songs are now available to download anywhere on the Wireless Nomad network, completely free, completely legal, and completely in support of our communities and artists.

Link (Thanks, Damien!)

Here's a giant Flickr gallery of GIFs from the golden age of BBSes, when every board had a file-repository of low-rez color images, just so that you could download them and experience the coolth of having a color! picture! on! your! screen! Link (Thanks, Mat!)

Japanese construction company Shimizu and Sharp electronics plan to build a transparent office complex that's tricked out with thin solar panels and LEDs. The structure is planned for Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, in southeast Japan. From New Scientist:

Sections of the office's walls look transparent, but actually contain incredibly thin solar panels and as many as 320 light-emitting diodes that release whitish-blue light at night. According to NikkeiNet Interactive (paid psubscription required), the walls can convert 7% of solar energy into electricity and illuminate the building for an average of 4.6 hours every night.

Link

This week on the RU Sirius Show, they have a fun conversation with photographer Timothy Archibald talking about his stunning new book of photos and interviews, Sex Machines , all about suburban men who build dildo-bots.

And Craigslist's Craig Newmark is on this week's NeoFiles. Link

I'm sorry I'm going to miss this show, featuring paintings by Ryan Heshka, Davey, and Brian Despain. It opens Friday, March 10th and runs through April 8.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) All three painters work in extremely different styles, yet present similar ideology in their subject matters undertones, mainly the strife between man and the natural world.

Ryan Heshka is rapidly becoming well known for his “Vintage Pulp” style paintings. Using the themes of technology vs nature, Ryan presents his work in a retro type format, drawing visual inspiration from 40’s –50’s science fiction magazines and old B monster movies. Layering luscious jewel tone colors alongside cut out text from various sources, Ryan’s work tackles environmental themes while remaining slyly humorous.

Davey (aka Dave Wong) paints fanciful, dramatic scenarios using animal characters inspired by film (King Kong, Planet Of the Apes, Ray Harryhausen films) and comic books (such as work by legend Jack Kirby). His works contains a dark tension and undercurrents of hidden aggression, mixed with a dreamlike vision of an untamed prehistoric world.

Brian Despain's paintings combine science fiction sensibilities with a nod to retro mechanics. Surreal creatures powered by early Industrial Revolution era technology are rendered in a precise, perfectionist manner, dipped in a rich, dusty color palette.

Link

Here's the new guess-what-this-is quiz on Random Good stuff. If you think know what this is, post your guess here (don't email me about it, please).
Link

Encyclopodia is a snapshot of Wikipedia as an 800MB ebook for your iPod. Link (Thanks, Ted!)

Raph Koster -- lead on Ultima Online, creator of Star Wars Galaxies, Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment, and author of A Theory of Fun (a kind of Understanding Comics for games) -- has published an hilarious series of aphorisms under the title "What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?"

Lone heroes can't slay dragons. It takes an army.

People are only good at one thing.

That's why it takes six people (all doing different jobs) to kill most anything.

You never, ever, ever change jobs. If you want to, you probably need to die.

You can be the best in the world at your job.

But so can everyone else.

And you will all do it exactly the same way.

Intelligent beings who have civilizations and languages of their own are generally evil and should be slain.

Many, if not all, wild creatures are highly aggressive and will attack on sight.

Evil is not redeemable; good is not a choice. Your morals are innate.

Link (via Wonderland)

Podzinger is a service that aggregates hundreds of thousands of episodes of podcasts, converts the entire text of the casts to text, and then delivers a searachable index. You go to Podzinger, search for a search, and you get back all the podcasts that have mentioned that term -- along with embedded players that can play you back the whole podcast, or just those segments where the keywords are mentioned. In a nutshell, this lets you do Tehcnorati-style full-text searching of podcasts, treating them like textual blog-entries. It's way slick.

Podzinger will deliver you an RSS feed of any search result -- you can bake in a search for your favorite keywords and get an alert -- with timecode! -- every time the keywords show up in a cast.

This is all de-militarized technology from DARPA's EARS (Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text) program, and it's been developed by the venerable BBN company, which was also part of the initial development of the Internet.

Podzinger only works in English right now, but they're rolling out "North American" Spanish and Mandarin shortly.

The only downside is that Podzinger doesn't run well on Firefox for the Mac, because of known bugs with the way that Quicktime and Firefox play together. Mac users have to switch back to Safari to use it. Still, it's a small price to pay for a killer free service. Link

Update: Dave sez, "Our product, Podscope, is like Podzinger, except that we also index video blogs and have a Firefox-friendly design."

Amazing inventor Athanasius Kircher designed this cat piano in in the 17th century. Kitties with differently-pitched voices were placed in the pens and then "triggered" to meow with a sharp poke in the ass. From Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650):

In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.

Link (via Neatorama)

If you're in London on Sunday March 19, there's a public event at my office that I'd like you to come to: we eat brunch, go to Speakers' Corner, and give impromptu speeches about copyright in between the Marxists, god-botherers and loonies.

Since January 2005, I've hosted a series of EFF-sponsored monthly-ish brunches at my office in London's Stanhope Centre. These "London Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop" events have been semi-open: anyone who showed up was welcome, but I didn't advertise it much because I couldn't afford to feed an army.

But Stanhope Centre's lost its lease, I'm retired from EFF, and spring is upon us, so for the very last of these events hosted at Stanhope, I'm throwing it open to the wide world. If you're interested in issues of copyright, patent, trademark, free information, access -- that kinda thing -- you're invited to come to Stanhope on March 19th for an 11AM-1PM brunch and then to come and give a speech at Hyde Park's legendary Speaker's Corner, just over the road.

Giving a speech at Speakers' Corner is wild -- it's the ultimate soap-boxing experience, and everyone who's done it swears by it. You can check out pictures of previous declaimings, too.

Come April and through the spring and summer, the Open Rights Group will continue to run Copyfighters' Brunches as picnics in Hyde Park, and it's hunting for a nearby indoor home for the autumn and winter of 2006.

March's event is co-sponsored by EFF, Open Rights Group, the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure and the Open Knowledge Forum Network.

The Smithsonian Institution has launched a national collecting initiative to gather objects related to hip-hop culture. According to a Smithsonian press release (PDF), the initiative, called "Hip-Hop Won't Stop: The Beat, The Rhymes, The Life," is seeking "objects from all aspects of hip-hop arts and culture, including vinyl records, handwritten lyrics, boom boxes, clothing and costumes, videos and interviews, Disc Jockey equipment and microphones, personal and business correspondence, and posters and photos." (Seen here, a mixer and cap that belonged to Grandmaster Flash.) The ceremonial launch begins today with hip-hop icons Russell Simmons, Ice T, Crazy Legs, and others expected in attendance. From the Associated Press:

"Hip-hop was born in New York but it's now a global phenomenon," said Valeska Hilbig, a National Museum spokeswoman. "It's here to stay, and it's part of American culture just like jazz is part of American history. It's part of the narrative we tell at the museum..."

Hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, scheduled to attend Tuesday's announcement at the Hilton New York, wouldn't say what he planned to donate. But he called the Smithsonian's recognition a "great statement for hip-hop."

"It's not a signal to the end of hip-hop," Simmons, co-founder of the venerable Def Jam label, said of the Smithsonian's undertaking. "We know it will be a lasting fixture. And it should be. All over the world hip-hop is expression of young people's struggles, their frustrations and opinions."

Link

BB pal Jon Lebkowsky and his colleagues at the Digital Convergence Initiative are sponsoring a Mobile Content Festival. You still have a few days to enter! Categories include Applications, Games, and Films. From the call-for-entries:

The DCI is looking to address the current influence of mobile devices on our culture. Mobile devices have had a tremendous effect on our society and we are interested in how that new audience might best be communicated to in this new medium. It is our belief that this new medium offers special consideration that have yet to be suitably identified; the least of which is viewing size. Other considerations for this new form are cost per download, as well ergonomic concerns, etc.

The Festival is looking for mobile content submissions that explore the mobile lifestyle.

Link