This ten minute mini-documentary showcases footage shot in Disneyland around 1956, a year after the park opened. It's lovely stuff -- just the colors are wild! Link (via The Disney Blog)

Update: Kirby sez, "This is an excerpt from the same Disneyland U.S.A. film that was listed on BB last year. Although the file is gone from the original location in that post, a torrent is still available. Quality is much better. Also there was a Jim Hill article about the film. I really wish Leonard Maltin would put this film in a Disneyland pt. 2 collection."

Big Bad Boomin Bugs is a $18 science toy that provides a panopticon through which you can minutely observe your captured insect specimens: a magnifying bell-jar with sensitive amplifiers that magnify the insects' sounds, too:

Collect some insects and place them inside the unique sound chamber. A powerful 3X magnifier enlarges your performers so you can see every detail. Put on the headphones and listen as a microphone under the special sound stage picks up and amplifies every move and noise your bug makes!

Link (via Geisha Asobi)

This $60 tote-bag contains an integrated FM radio and an amplifier/speaker rig for an iPod or other player; best of all is that it looks like an old-timey luggable Fisher-Price turntable! Link (via Popgadget)

From Dale Dougherty, publisher of MAKE:

Five 60-foot dish antennas at Stanford, known as the Bracewell Observatory, are about to be demolished by the school. Bob Lash organized the Friends of the Bracewell Observatory Association to help rescue the dishes and he's done all that he can do to persuade Stanford to stop the demolition...

The Bracewell Observatory is named for Professor Ronald Bracewell, a father of radio astronomy, who created this site and built the dishes that have been used to monitor sunspot activity and measure the speed and direction of our solar system. Since federal support for the Observatory was cut-off and redirected to other sites, the dishes have been idle. Now the brush growing up around them is considered a fire hazard and has served as an excuse to remove them. Bob Lash thinks they offer a wonderful opportunity for citizen science, a site that could be used by Stanford, high school students and the public in a variety of ways, including over the Internet.

Bob put together a team of volunteers who offer to maintain and repair the dishes. He's gotten support from NASA/JPL for use of the Observatory in its Deep Space Network with "little or no cost" to Stanford.

Saving these dishes should matter to all of us. They can be part of a new world of "open-source hardware" infrastructure that can be managed and shared, just as open-source software projects are done today.

Link to more at MAKE: Blog, Link to Friends of the Bracewell Observatory Association where you can help

Following up on earlier news this week of violent raids by government authorities on newspaper and television offices in Kenya, the Kenyan blogger mentalacrobatics writes:

Here are some stills taken during the raid from internal CCTV cameras. The raid were carried out by a rapid response unit code-named the Kanga Squad, detectives from Nairobi provincial CID headquarters and officers from the General Service Unit. They are wearing bright orange reflective vests with “QRU” for Quick Rescue Unit/Quick Response Unit which indicates their day job of fight hardcore criminals like carjackers, bank robbers and murder hit squads.

These pictures are very disturbing. In some of them they have an employee spread eagled on the floor with a gun pressed against his/her head and a boot in his/her face. Remember these are NOT criminals being man handled like this. These are Kenyan men and women who went to work only to be pistol whipped and roughed up by an elite police squad.

Link.

And investigative blogger Kathryn Cramer tells BoingBoing,

There's some really great stuff in Demosh's photostream (photos by Fredrick Onyango)that I think gives a good sense of why the existing kenyan government seems to want to put an end to the press. Just look at the expressions on these faces. Here are photos w/ captions & links. What it seems to come down to is that the government has been caught at really widespread corruption and they've been caught, and so they panicked.

Link, and here is another Kenyan corruption scandal photostream: Link.

(Thanks, Kathryn Cramer!)

Previously on BoingBoing:
Media shutdown in Kenya -- TV station, newspaper torched

no smoking in this theatre | my new movie | radio ads | trailers | feature films | the day the clown cried | shannon plumb | say nothing | kill bill mario style | kungfu | los angeles reviews movies | celebrity chemistry

Image: production still from the long-lost Jerry Lewis movie about a clown in Auschwitz, The Day the Clown Cried.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reverse Cowgirl says, "I'm pretty sure the secret key to answer all the questions in the universe is in this video." Link.

The government of Pakistan blocked access to hundreds of blogspot.com-hosted blogs on March 1.

Pakistani bloggers are appealing for help, and ask fellow bloggers overseas to join them in condeming this act of internet censorship. Some resources:

• A support banner from Help-Pakistan.com (Link)
• Action Group Against Blogspot Ban in Pakistan (Link)
• Digg the story: Blogspot Censored in Pakistan.

And check out the amazing collective blog karachi.metblogs.com while you're at it. (Thanks, Dr. Awab Alvi, thanks Sean Bonner!)

Amateur science tinkering -- another casualty of the war on terror? Boing Boing reader Josh says,

Popular science and chemistry supplier United Nuclear (known by many for their amazing neodymium magnets) is faced with legal action from the United States CPSC. The CPSC proposes that all people attempting to purchase a slew of common chemicals, some of which are in children's chemistry sets, must have a current license to manufacture explosives issued by the ATF. This would extend to people who do not and will not have anything to do with explosives.

The list of controlled substances includes aluminum, titanium, zinc, zirconium, and sulfur. Link to petition for help from United Nuclear.

Previously on BoingBoing:
Dangerously strong magnets

Image: via theodoregray.

Here are two torrents containing a total of nearly one thousand free songs from bands at the 2006 SXSW Music Conference: one, two. Here's a link to more, including torrents for some of the film trailers at the SXSW film conference. (Thanks, Hugh)