I just saw "This Film is Not Yet Rated" and boy, is it a fantastic piece of work. As you've no doubt heard, TFINYR is a documentary about the MPAA's censorious ratings system, whereby a secret group of "parents" meet to determine whether a given film is safe for kids to see. If they give a movie an NC-17 (no children under 17 admitted), it's a death-sentence: studios won't promote these movies (sometimes they don't even release them), most cinemas won't exhibit them, and Wal-Mart and Blockbuster won't carry them.

The MPAA's excuse for this is that it's an alternative to government censorship of films, but as director Kirby Dick shows, it's wildly implausible that such censorship would be found constitutional. The MPAA system treats independents as second-class citizens, issuing gnomic pronouncements about a film's suitability, while treating the big studios that own the MPAA with more solicitude, lavishing editorial suggestions on directors who've come under the thumb of the big six.

This Film is Not Yet Rated makes a compelling case for MPAA ratings system as a form of institutionalized, homophobic puritanism. The ratings board is quite relaxed about violence, especially extreme, gory violence, but takes a dim view of sex, and won't tolerate sex out of the missionary position, nor gay sex of any kind, nor any suggestion of women getting real pleasure out of sex. It's an eye-opening look at America's hidden values, where you can take your kids to see bad guys gunned down by James Bond, but not a lightweight teen-comedy about lesbian girls sent away to anti-gay brainwashing camp.

The movie revolves around the mystery of the MPAA's ratings process. Kirby Dick hires a likable middle-aged lesbian private eye who stakes out the MPAA's LA headquarters, writing down license plate numbers and war-dialing the MPAA voicemail system until she gets the names and addresses of all the "parents" on the ratings committee, some of whom are childless, or with grown children.

He then submits his film for rating, and it receives a predictable NC-17 rating. As this is an indie film, the MPAA won't provide him with specifics about their decision. He asks to have his rating appealed, and is put through an Orwellian process whereby the arbitrators of his appeal (who unanimously vote against him) are kept secret from him. Here his private eye comes to the rescue again, revealing that the neutral arbitration committee includes executives from the major studios (who are presumably easier on their own products than on those of powerless indies), and, incredibly, two members of the clergy.

The most incredible thing about this film is the filmmakers that Dick interviews. The creators of Team America, Boys Don't Cry, Gunner Palace, Dirty Shame, But I'm A Cheerleader, Jersey Girl and other movies that received NC-17s from the MPAA recount the incredible heartbreak of slamming into the immovable wall of MPAA ratings. They talk about making movies that they hope will change the world. They talk about having hope snatched away from them by a little clique of oligarchs who control 95 percent of the films released in the US.

After watching this movie, I wanted to support these creators. I walked into a video-store across the way and bought Boys Don't Cry, a transgender teen who was raped and beaten to death; Gunner Palace, a documentary about life in the US military in Baghdad; A Dirty Shame, a gross-out sex-comedy from John Waters, one of my favorite filmmakers; and But I'm a Cheerleader, a lighthearted comedy about a sexually curious teenaged girl sent to an anti-gay rehabilitation camp.

They all look like great movies, and they didn't get the chance they deserved.

The movie's got a special treat for copyfighters -- a whole section on copyright and piracy, featuring an interview with Larry Lessig (the movie made the news recently when the MPAA revealed that it had made pirate copies of TFINYR to distribute to its executives). Link

Update: Here's the producer's blog -- thanks, KC!

Here's a great little Make video of a guy in his workshop scrambling the eggs on his hotplate with a plastic fork stuck to a power-drill. Link

Scott Beale says, "Rob Levin ('lilo'), the founder of the popular IRC network Freenode, passed away today at the age of 50 in Houston, TX." Link

"Banksy, Banksy, Banksy! Enough, already!" wrote Defamer. A hella-hyped LA warehouse show by the self-described British "art terrorist" is taking place this weekend in LA. And in it, there's an actual live elephant, painted pink.

A lot of people are upset about that, and the timing is somewhat sensitive. Just three months ago, an elephant at the LA Zoo named Gita died amid allegations of neglect. If the LA Zoo wasn't a hospitable environment for such an intelligent, wild critter, is a downtown warehouse full of Brangelina and chardonnay better?

The technicolor elephant lives on a private reserve in Southern California. The paint she's wearing doesn't hurt her, says her caretaker, and Nelly has appeared in a number of commercials and movies so she's "used to wearing makeup." Stil, others believe her inclusion is exploitative and abusive.

Blogging.la has more here on the controversy. There's an LA Times article here. Snip:

'I think it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only OK, it's an art form,' said Ed Boks, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services. 'We find it no longer acceptable to dye baby chicks at Easter, but it's OK to dye an elephant.' Boks found himself decrying the presence of the elephant in the exhibit even though his agency had issued the two permits necessary to have the elephant there - 'to my chagrin,' he said. He tried late Friday to revoke the permits on grounds of public safety.

'Some of the experts I've talked to have told me there's no way of predicting when an elephant will go berserk,' he said. 'We want to do what's right by the public and the animal.'

However, Boks would have to give five days' notice to revoke the permits. And in five days, the exhibit will be gone. It is to run today and Sunday from about noon to 8 p.m. 'This situation is causing the department to rethink its permitting procedures so there will be more scrutiny, so permits will not be issued for such frivolous abuse of animals in the future,' he said. Although people may be drawn for artistic reasons, he added, 'they don't understand what the animal is suffering. I think we're dealing with the psychology of an animal that needs to roam over large areas of land.'

(thanks brian)

Reader comments: Paul Mitchum says,

Where's Peter Sellers when you need him? Link.

Edith says,

Despite one photographer's poorly exposed (or deliberately adjusted) photos, Banksy's elephant is not pink - It's red and gold, painted to match the walls in another part of the show. We saw it entering the warehouse in the full light of day and it's definitely red.

I know people reference the "big pink elephant in the middle of the room", but the point of the installation is that the large elephant in the room has been painted to try to make it seem like part of the room, as if people wouldn't notice. Thanks for reporting on it - it was a great art show to see.

Dave Bullock (eecue) says,

Last night I got a private tour of the Banksy show in Downtown LA. The elephant was probably either sleeping or working in the factory making ground corn, but I did spend some time and photograph nearly every piece in the show. Link.

Over at ultrabrown, Manish says,

The activists would have a fit over elephants in India.

Bob Cooley writes,

Just a quick note of little consequence; but as a photog of 20+ years, I wanted to correct a comment. In one of the reader comments posted on boing boing regarding banksy's "pink" elephant, a reader replies:

Despite one photographer's poorly exposed (or deliberately adjusted) photos, Banksy's elephant is not pink - It's red and gold, painted to match the walls in another part of the show. We saw it entering the warehouse in the full light of day and it's definitely red.

The photographer (lucinda) didn't expose the image poorly, nor did she deliberately modify the color of the elephant; this is simply a matter of the image being shot indoors, without flash (because that probably would have freaked out the elephant) and likely in the evening. Tungsten lights (which includes most indoor lighting that involve bulbs and in this case the clearly-seen chandelier) illuminate at a color temperature which is actually quite yellow/orange to film (or in digital that is set to white balance as film). The human eye naturally adjusts for this and makes any indoor scene you view seem correctly colored, but film captures the scene as it actually is (including the true color of the light).

The only mistake the photog made was to not filter the image as they shot it or to correctly adjust it in post-processing. I applied the equivilent of #82 cooling filter (the filter that a knowlegable photographer or motion picture creator would use to compensate for shooting with tungsten lights), and as you can see (image below and attached) the elephant (as well as the rest of the scene) are more true to what you see/experience live: Red elephant, gold designs, white light. There is also a slight drop in saturation that is characteristic of the extra yellow shift of the light on film.

Truth is, most americans find a slight shift to the yellow more pleasing in photos due to the extra color saturation and overall warm "feeling" of the image (europeans tend to prefer a cooler color shift). But in this case it is just the photog not adjusting/filtering properly for the light. Its not incorrect exposure nor is it likely on purpose.

Okay - I understand that this is pretty tech-geeky; but it is an obvious mistake to any pro or experienced shooter, and I wanted to point it out.

Update: The elephant is now naked. This is an atrocity. Someone call PETA, stat. Ashley says,

Here's a picture of the elephant at Banksy's Barely Legal show today; as you can see -- no longer pink (or red).

The Warren Magazine collection (warning, obnxious Flash audio ahoy!) features years of covers of classic horror magazines CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA -- gory horror-sploitation imagery gone wild! Link (via MeFi)

Update: Todd sez, "I've got those AND Famous Monsters AND Castle of Frankenstein and several of the classic monster mags (as well as the Aurora model boxes, movie posters, and other stuff) ."

Toronto copyfightin' band Barenaked Ladies have gone remix crazy, inviting fans to remix their music, make their own t-shirts, and generally be as creative as they want with BNL's stuff. They call this "shifting the focus to the fan and letting them decide how they want to consume the music," which is such a radically sensible idea. I loved these guys when they were performing at the Scarborough Town Centre, up the street from my parents' place -- I love them even more now.

The band will re-package five of the best remixes in one CD, with proceeds going to charity.

The band has a new 13-song CD out, but had too many tracks for it and didn't want to toss the ones that didn't make the CD.

The 16 songs that didn't make it will be sold online. Consumers can download the songs, buy a deluxe CD package or get a USB stick containing all 29 songs.

"People will not often even listen to a record anymore. They might download the songs and just listen to it on shuffle with all your other music or a bunch of other bands they like," said Robertson.

That's not the end of the fan interaction. The band is also asking fans to download the song Wind It Up from the MySpace website and to film themselves playing along. Top performances will be mixed together for the actual video.

Those with artistic aspirations can also enter a T-shirt design competition, with the winner receiving more than $1,000 in prizes.

Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Update: Alas, the t-shirt design contest has expired! Thanks, Gen.

A forthcoming, untitled book by historian Ed Kritzler argues that many of the "Spanish" pirates of the Caribbean were in fact Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who took to the seas to flee/avenge the Inquisition.

While some Jews, like Samuel Pallache, took up piracy in part to help make a better life for expelled Spanish Jews, Kritzler said others were motivated by revenge for the Inquisition.

One such pirate was Moses Cohen Henriques, who helped plan one of history's largest heists against Spain. In 1628, Henriques set sail with Dutch West India Co. Admiral Piet Hein, whose own hatred of Spain was fueled by four years spent as a galley slave aboard a Spanish ship. Henriques and Hein boarded Spanish ships off Cuba and seized shipments of New World gold and silver worth in today's dollars about the same as Disney's total box office for "Dead Man's Chest."

Henriques set up his own pirate island off the coast of Brazil afterward, and even though his role in the raid was disclosed during the Spanish Inquisition, he was never caught, Kritzler told The Journal.

Link (Thanks, Dennis!)

Fred sez,

Enter FreeCulture.org's Down with DRM video contest for a chance to win a Neuros OSD - a portable digital VCR!

FreeCulture.org wants you to make your own anti-drm video and upload it to any video-sharing site. Please tag your videos with "downwithdrm" and "dbdoct3" and send us a link. We'll then choose the 5 best videos and award the creators of each one a Neuros OSD (a $230 value). Preference will be given to videos licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, BY, PD, or the Free Art license.

DefectiveByDesign.org will then run select videos on their website during the week of October 3rd as part of their DRM protests.

Link

Awesom anti-DRM banners from Militant Geek

(Thanks, Fred and Laura!)

Microsoft has begun to send out odd takedown notices against people who host copies of FairUse4WM, a program that lets you get more use out of the music and video you buy by breaking off the DRM.

Microsoft is sending takedown notices to FairUse4WM hosters asserting that FairUse4WM violates Microsoft's copyright in Windows Media Player. This is an odd claim -- it may be that FairUse4WM is a DMCA violation because it circumvents Windows Media Player, but it's quite a stretch to say that it violates Microsoft's copyright.

The Microsoft FairUse4WM takedown notice doesn't actually purport to be a DMCA notice, but it follows the format and wording of a DMCA notice. DMCA notices shield ISPs from liability -- if you get a notice and abide by it, you aren't on the hook for any infringements committed by your customers.

This notice, though, does no such thing. It demands that you take down FairUse4WM, but doesn't offer any immunity from future prosecution in exchange (it may be that failure to abide by a notice like this could make things worse for you in court).

It's a strange strategy from Redmond: there's clearly no infringement of Microsoft's copyright here. Instead, the violation is of the notional "compatibility right" that the DMCA seems to create: a right to control whose software can interoperate with yours. Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

A German screenwriter has written a history of anti-Nazi humor in Germany during WWII -- "Heil Hitler, Das Schwein is Tot!" (Hail Hitler, the Pig is Dead!) tells the story of the grim humor told by Germans during the Third Reich, including the gallows humor of the Jews facing the concentration camps:

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort "through spiteful remarks" and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. "Why don't you just jump?" suggests Göring...

"Two Jews are about to be shot. Suddenly the order comes to hang them instead. One says to the other "You see, they're running out of bullets..."

Such jokes told by Jews were a form of mutual encouragement, an expression of the will to survive. "Even the blackest Jewish humor expresses a defiant will, as if the joke teller wanted to say: I'm laughing, so I'm still alive," says Herzog.

Link (via 3 Quarks Daily)

This 14-foot-tall inflatable pool-iceberg will set you back about $9,000 (not including the pool and the back-yard), but it looks like it just might be worth it. it doubles as a climbing-wall, with ascents from easy to pro. Link (via Wonderland)

Update: Linoma Beach, halfway between Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, sports one of these -- thanks, Willa!

The new Microsoft Zune player (their soi-disant "iPod Killer") applies DRM to all the files you move onto it, even the Creative Commons-licened music. The problem is that CC licenses prohibit this. What's more, CC licenses are machine-readable and could, theoretically, be detected by Microsoft, if they cared enough about copyright to ensure that they were adhering to the license policies set out by creators.

There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding.

Link (Thanks, Christian!)

Update: More on Medioloper

Mister Jalopy has a fine commentary about an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal concerning a man who paid a lot of money to commission an exquisite 144-piece porcelain service set with hippopotami on them.

WSJ: In 2003, he met a ceramics scholar for lunch and they wound up talking about Royal Copenhagen's 1880s dinner patterns, and how they often featured bears, ducks or birds. Mr. Cohen said, "You know, I think I'd like to see a hippo on one of those."

He scrounged for antique etchings of hippos but eventually decided to go all out and hire photographer Sarah Galbraith to document the names and faces of nearly every hippo in captivity -- she ultimately traveled to 101 zoos in 33 countries, including Vietnam, South Africa, Australia and Sri Lanka. (She has chronicled her trips in a blog, "Joined at the Hippo: The story of traveling the world, one hippo at a time.")

Back home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., Mr. Cohen sifted through 3,000 images and sent his favorites to Royal Copenhagen, which hadn't received a commission of this scale in at least a century. He asked for the hippos to be painted on the company's renowned Flora Danica pattern -- also found in the collection of Denmark's Queen Margrethe II -- with enough teacups and dinner plates to serve a five-course meal for 18. The 231-year-old porcelain company has about 25 artisans who can paint the pattern for regular, five-person place settings (cost: about $6,000). But because of the scale of this commission, the company called in semi-retired master Jørgen Nielsen to do the entire set. (Mr. Cohen says he doesn't plan to sell the collection, or eat off it.)

MISTER JALOPY: Naturally, an effort like this must suffer questions of whether $400,000 was worth it and the inevitable comparison to real estate soon follow. Of course it was fucking worth it. $400,000 is a rounding error when purchasing an impressionist painting that adds no value to the world; it merely transfers bragging rights. It wasn't $400k charged by a private equity fund for management costs incurred while splitting up a venerable family company, it was spent hiring a photographer, painters and one of the five remaining porcelain companies that can still execute such a noble effort. There are valid discussions about distribution of wealth, but this is not one of them.

Link

A roundup of fun little stuff at the end of a long work week:

# Discuss your smoking habits in Arabic: Link (Thanks, Hugo).

# Are you ready to have my thang in your mouth? Link to a short video clip from Dateline NBC. (via Defamer)

# Hot new flooring trend in Canada? Dead women at the bottom of a staircase, courtesy of the Red Cross Link (thanks, Seth).

# How They Found Pussy (totally work-safe): Link.

# Prosthetic fuzzy-mommy-hands for prematurely born babies, with the scent of a parent: Link.

# 1975 Star Trek promotional flyer from Toys R Us: Link (thanks Scott).

# Papercraft Polaroid camera: Link.

# Happy 10th birthday, Disinfo.com! (Thanks, Denis)

# Vintage tobacco ads: Link (thanks, IZ Reloaded).

# WTC in mid-'70s cigarette ad from Playboy Magazine: Link (Thanks, Dan)

# Baby's first Modernist Alphabet Flashcards: Link

# The Princess and the Processor: Norwegian reality show setup involving smart computer and dumb blonde. "I can't understand the computer language they are talking." Link (Thanks, Andrew)

# Guerilla wedding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: Link (thanks HeyTomK)

# And BoingBoing reader HornCologne says,

"Following the long and successful career of the Kraftwerk remix as the ring-tone on my cell, I present you ... Boing Boing Woop, remixed from that Danish rap song you posted yesterday. BTW, I love the part in the song where the guy sings blah-blah-blah-dont-understand-anything-in-Danish SEXY ASS blahblah.' It totally reminds me of Channel 9 from the BBC's Fast Show."

Link to the BoingBoing Danish rap ringtone.

Previous installments of BoingBoing Omakase Links:
Post-holiday bluesnixer roundup

Warren Ellis writes,

[A] random person I spotted in Transylvania two minutes after the grid went back up earlier today. In her eyes, you can make out part of an error message, denoting that a graphic or script from her customised “avatar” or representative form in Second Life is missing. It means that the system, that’s been crashing and hiccuping constantly since an upgrade on Wednesday, is failing to find and/or process the entirety of her body. Elsewhere, I’ve seen people wearing that message over swathes of their skin, projected there by the system.

The girl with error-message eyes.

Link to full text of post.

Link to snapshots from "art terrorist" Banksy's LA show this weekend. (thanks yevgeniy)

Anonymous says,

Apparently the word "dishes" is a federal trademark, and the Brooklyn restaurant "Little Dishes" was sued, renaming themselves "Little D Eatery". Quote from the owner: "As a new small business, we did not have the resources to fight to keep the ‘Dishes’ part of our name..." Link. More (but not really): Link.

Reader comment: Grayson says,

I can't figure out how to direct link to TESS results, but the serial number for this registration is 75440805. Here's one link.

Although I agree that it was stupid to allow registration of a single generalized common word as a trademark in the first place, once that's done the trademark stands. If the mark was held by a company selling dinnerware it might be different, but the original mark for "Dishes" is also for a NY restaurant. Therefore there might be some reasonable basis for confusion. Bobby Flay would probably have a case against anyone opening a "Mesa 'anything'" restaurant, but not an art gallery for similar reasons.

Johnny Ryan has a show tonight in Silverlake at Cory's new favorite store, Secret Headquarters. I haven't been there yet, so this'll be a good excuse to visit.

Secret Headquarters is pleased to announce an art opening with the lovely and talented JOHNNY RYAN.

Johnny first developed his hilarious drawings in the self-published title Angry Youth Comix. Now published by Fantagraphics Books, Ryan's AYC has become the international bastion of lowbrow humor cartooning. Ryan's utterly unpretentious taboo-tackling is an infectious bombardment of political incorrectness.

JOHNNY RYAN CRASHES and BURNS
@ Secret Headquarters
Friday September 15th, 8pm-10pm
Secret Headquarters
3817 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
323-666-2228 (phone)

Link

Earlier this week, I posted an item about a weird experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory in which she-bees were trained to stick out their tongues when they smell explosives. BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton happens to be a bee expert, and he lives in Papamoa, New Zealand. He's so knowledgeable, he sounds like he has degrees in bees! He's going to school us on bees now:

It isn't very often that honey bees make an appearance on Boing Boing, but when they do it's great since they're something I more or less know something about. I've been a professional apiculturalist (advisor to beekeepers on bee disease control, pollination and honey production) for 30 years. Here's a book on a particularly nasty disease of honey bees I co-wrote, edited and produced: (Link).

A couple of points of nomenclature and clarification:

1. A well-trained honey bee scientist wouldn't spell the name "honeybee", even though you'll find it mistakenly spelled this way in a number of dictionaries (as well as on the MS spell checker), and even in Wikipedia. The biological convention is that the name of an insect is separated into two words when the insect is what the name implies. So "honey bee" is separated into two words, since its a bee that collects honey, whereas "butterfly" is one word since it isn't a fly that produces butter.

2. The scientific name for the western hive bee pictured [in the BoingBoing post about the Los Alamos experiment] is Apis mellifera. The genus (first name of the two) is always capitalised, whereas the species name (the second of the two) isn't. And I'd bet dollars to donuts that the bee in the picture is actually an Italian honey bee, aka Apis mellifera ligustica.

3. Worker honey bees live more than a couple of weeks, even during the height of the summer. They actually live about six weeks, but only forage actively outside the hive in the last two weeks of their life. They don't die of old age per se. They just don't come back to the hive one day when their wings wear out and they can no longer achieve lift off. During the winter, when honey bees cluster within the hive and don't forage, they can live for up to 5 months.

4. Worker honey bees aren't only female by genetic composition (i.e., diploids), they also have rudimentary ovaries. The comment in this post says they have "no functioning genital organs". I'm not sure what "genital organs" means in this case (both queens and workers have vaginal orifices), but suffice to say worker honey bees do have reproductive organs that are capable of laying eggs, and this often happens when a hive loses its queen. What they can't generally do, however, is produce fertilised (i.e., diploid) eggs, since they don't mate with drones, and also don't have a spermatheca (a sac present in queen bees that retains the sperm obtained during mating flights).

Once again, thanks to you and your mates for doing Boing Boing. I really appreciate all the work you put in.

Thanks, Cliff!

Image: A bee at the Del Mar fairgrounds, collecting pollen. Photographer: Jon Sullivan (via this Wikipedia entry).

Man, I tell you, I love bees!

Previously: Los Alamos Lab trains bees to stick out tongues at bombs

Update: Whoah, Steve Jurvetson shot more bee porn! Link to full-size.

Reader comment: Bryan William Jones of the University of Utah School of Medicine says, "

More bee porn can be seen here.

Bruce Derling says,

More bee porn from Northern Ireland.

Kate says,

Still more bee porn. I took this picture of a lovely little bee in one of my mom's sunflowers in El Mirage, AZ. Link.

Matt Goff says,

At the risk of overloading on bee porn, here is a shot I took in Mendocino County, CA: Link.

Mariana sends a comic about bee porn: Link.

Haunted Portraits will matte your photo into a ghostly lenticular portrait that changes as you move past it, making you appear and disappear. They feature a number of scenes inspired by Disney's Haunted Mansion. Link

talk like a pirate day
british hq
pirate executions
cannon game
draw the pirate
you are a pirate
pirate clubhouse
five things...
another cannon game
aargvark
aaarrr
yo ho ho! pirate zen 2005
yo ho ho! pirate zen 2004
yo ho ho! pirate zen 2003
plus for a limited time... David Byrne's "Pirates." (this will disappear on 09.20.06)

Image: The Jobby Roger, an excellent sticker for pirates who use Macs. If you attach one to yours, your computer will look like this, and you will look like this.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comment: Aija says,

Here is a pattern for pirate arrrrr!gyle handknit socks (pic link, pdf chart)

Paul Saunders says,

As you may know, International Talk like a Pirate Day is coming up on September 19. In honor of this important holiday, LoadingReadyRun has created a vintage classroom film reel to instruct the less nautically inclined among us in proper pirate speech. Video link.

Bill Newcomb says,

The movie that Paul Saunders linked to gets one thing dead wrong: 'avast' has a specific meaning, viz. to cease, stop, or stay. Thus, the phrase "Avast, ye scurvy dogs" means something a lot more like "Nobody move, nobody get hurt" than "What up, homes". Perhaps this will be the year that we can avast the misuse of 'avast'.

BoingBoing reader Sven de Marothy writes,

Thanks for pointing out that interesting exhibition on WWI facial reconstruction/prosthetics.

As a note, given the tech-savvy nature of BoingBoing, it might be worth mentioning what's probably the most well-known patient of such procedures (given the readership).

Namely Gaston Julia, the father of the famous Julia set fractal, who quite literally had his nose shot off in WWI.

Most of the work he is now so famous for was performed during the period while he was in hospital having his face put back together, as best they could. However, he ended up wearing a patch covering (what had been) his nose for the rest of his life. Bio (with pic): Link.

He refused a discharge for his injury. Luckily for mathematics and fractal-lovers, the war was over by the time he'd recovered. So he published the results and the rest is history, as they say.

(It seems his military courage didn't go unrewarded though - in the picture at the linked bio, it looks like he's wearing a Légion d'honneur - France's highest honor.)

Below, a Julia set fractal.

Previously: Project Facade: Post WWI surgical facial reconstruction

Earlier today, I posted that game researcher/prankster Jane McGonigal was included in Technology Review's prestigious 2006 TR35 list of "Young Innovators Under 35." Jane just emailed to tell me about the latest game she and collaborator Ian Bogost are premiering later this month. It's called Cruel 2 B Kind, a "game of benevolent assassination." Jane says:

Cruel 2 B Kind is designed to be played anywhere in public, by 10 to 200+ simultaneous players, anywhere in the world there's cell phone coverage.

I know what you're thinking: Why benevolent assassination? What's wrong with the good, old-fashioned violent kind? :) (like Street Wars, for example) Well, with the trend lately to move games of assassination to more public spaces and to include more diverse social networks, and as governments start to issue warnings to game organizers that their actions will be potentially construed as terrorist threats (this happened in London last month!) it seemed necessary to start rethinking what players are doing. As the magic circle of the game starts to encompass more people and places, we thought it would be a good idea to trade the water balloons and Nerf guns for interactions that create a more interesting social effect on both players and bystanders.

The really exciting thing about it, though, is that we also made it to be the world's first open/public pervasive game. As you probably realize alread, most big pervasive games are either commerical, or proprietary (only the makers can run it), or don't have sufficient technological infrastructure to make it easy for ordinary folks (i.e., non-programmers) to run it where they live. So we set out to make a pervasive game that was 1) easy for people who aren't hard-core gamers to understand and get excited about and 2) completely free and non-commerical 3) possible for anyone to run. You just sign up for a date and time and tell us where you're running it, and we set up a registration page for your players, and the game runs automatically on that time and date. All the organizers have to do is gather players, and all the players have to do is show up! Then, we're funneling back feedback from the local organizers to increase our database of game weapons (which are all random acts of kindness you perform on suspected targets).

We're world premiering in New York City Saturday September 23 at the Come Out and Play Festival, but we've already run two awesome playtests in San Francisco. And we've already got people signed up to run their own Cruel 2 B Kind games everywhere from Los Angeles to suburban Illinois, London to Dublin, and I'll hopefully be doing games in Delhi, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Link

Beautiful/Decay is an excellent and well-produced street/underground art and culture print magazine that I've been meaning to post about for months now. We're honored that the new issue features a write-up on the double-label Boing Boing/Imaginary Foundation t-shirt!

Link to article archived on the IF site, Link to Beautiful/Decay, Link to buy shirt

I'm not an angler, but my friend Blind Lightnin' Pete sent me a copy of The Curtis Creek Manifesto because he knew I'd appreciate the excellence of this 1978 hand-illustrated 48-page primer about fly fishing. It was written by Sheridan Anderson (angler, artist, wanderer, eternal foe of the work ethic), and I don't think I've ever come across a more impressive primer on any subject.

Anderson presents the material in beautifully composed comic-book style pages, using a variety of hand-lettering styles to organize the material on each page. It's clear that Anderson spent ages planning, writing, and illustrating The Curtis Creek Manifesto, because I can't imagine it being any better. All 17 reviewers on Amazon seem to agree, because every one of them give it 5-stars.

After reading the book, I was excited to track down Sheridan Anderson to see if he might be able to contribute something the magazine I edit, Make. There's precious little about him online, but I finally found a 2004 article from the LA Times about him. He died in 1984 at the ago of 47.

He claimed four names. He favored black hats and a flowing cape and considered himself "one of the last Edwardians." He died 20 years ago at age 47, leaving only the most cryptic biographical clues in his work.

Looking like a Renaissance Faire bouncer, the author stares out at readers from an opening page, mustache bristling, hair tousled, perhaps from jousting. His chin rests on a hand and the eyes blaze in ferocious thought.

As for the man behind the pen, "he was big. Probably close to 300 pounds…. Always dressed in black, and had that black hat and big black cape," recalls Amato's sister, Lorraine Guelker.

"He came to our home once," says Amato. "My wife was cooking two roasts, with the idea that we would have one the next day. I brought out a bottle of Scotch. He pretty much put away the whole bottle before dinner. And then he polished off one of the pork roasts. Voracious appetites."

MidCurrent has another good article about him. Link

Update:

Kevin Kelly reviewed this book a while ago, and included a few sample pages. Link

Reader comment:

Phred182 says: I recommended the late William Nealy on Metafilter a while back.

His books on mountain biking, kayaking, and the outdoors are superb: like riding/rafting with a more experienced buddy. The format is very similar to Anderson's work, with detailed instruction on repair, riding, and maintenance techniques--suffused throughout with a self-deprectaing wit that is clearly the product of experience and thought.

A great place to start is Mountain Bike! A Manual of Beginning to Advanced Technique.

Full catalog available on Amazon here or directly from the publusher, Menasha Ridge Press.

A Crafster community member made a pair of Converse shoes and sewed them onto a set of Converse soles whose uppers had worn away. After sewing on the Chuck Taylor All-Star ankle patches, the outcome was a dementedly fabulous pair of frankentennies.

I knit a pair of converse shoes. I'd had this idea for aaages, but just recently conned someone into giving me an old pair. I cut off all the fabric, save for about a 1/4 inch along all the edges, and knit pieces to sew in place. They didn't take a very long time to make- the hardest part was sewing everything together. Ugh! I think the effort was worth it, and they're actually really strong. I played a game of baseball in them the other day, and they've held up just fine!

Link (Thanks, Aija!)

Microsoft's "iPod-killing" Zune player won't play music that's locked up with Microsoft's own anti-copying software. Music and movies sold through Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink and Cinemanow won't play on the Zune, even though these services are marketed in conjunction with Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" (AKA Plays for Shit) program.

This is a stark example of DRM under the DMCA giving customers a raw deal. Buying DRMed media means you're locked into the limited array of devices that vendors say you can use. You have to rebuy your preexisting DRMed media collection if you want to use it on the Zune. And you'll have to do that over and over again whenever a new, incompatible device with innovative features blows existing players out of the water. Access to MP3s and non-DRMed formats creates the only bridge between these isolated islands of limited devices...

In an interview with Engadget, Microsoft Zune architect J Allard pointed out that Zune has sufficient video format support, in part because there's "Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats, so the most popular formats out there, whether it's MPEG-4 or H.264, we'll support those." Gee, he isn't suggesting that his business model benefits from customers using tools like DeCSS or Handbrake to evade the DRM on DVDs, right? Especially since Microsoft is furiously trying to squash the FairUse4WM tool, that would seem rather hypocritical.

Link

The dwarf planet UB313, a distant object that fueled the fire of what the definition of a planet should be, has now been officially named Eris by its discoverer, Caltech astronomer Michael Brown. It's an appropriate name because Eris, according to Greek mythology, was the goddess of discord. (As Robert Anton Wilson fans and fringe culture explorers know, the worship of Eris is the chaotic cornerstone of Discordianism, "a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion.") From the Los Angeles Times (artist's concept from NASA/JPL-Caltech):

Not everyone is happy with the choice. Robert Mitchell, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said it seemed "a little silly" to give a permanent name based on a controversy that will blow over in time.

Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, said you can't please everyone.

If "the IAU named Mars today, there would be all kinds of politically correct arguments" over naming a planet after the god of war, Friedman said.

The IAU also took Brown's suggestion for the name of Eris' tiny moon, Dysnomia. In Greek mythology, Dysnomia is Eris' daughter, the goddess of lawlessness.

Link to LA Times, Link to NASA coverage

YouTube has a nice collection of LSD related videos, including a "Hot Girl on LSD" ("I can do everything"), and a nine-year-old explaining why acid is more enlightening than "reading the bible six times." Link (Via Beware of the Blog)

Technology Review magazine has announced its annual TR35 list of "Young Innovators Under 35." Joshuas Schachter of Del.icio.us was awarded "Innovator of the Year" and BB pal Jane McGonigal made the list for her supersmart (and fun!) research on game design. (Previous posts about Jane here, here, and here.) Congratulations to all of the TR35 honorees! From the profile of Jane:

McGonigal argues that alternate-reality games use network technologies--e-mail, websites, Internet chat rooms, text messages, and phone calls--to construct new types of communities whose "collective intelligence" lets them solve problems no member could solve alone. In 2005, she and the I Love Bees team won the Game Developers Choice Awards' Innovation Award and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Webby Award.

McGonigal has continued working with 42 Entertainment. In 2005 she developed Tombstone Hold 'Em, part of a 2005 promotion for Activision's game Gun; crowds congregated in historic cemeteries to play poker using tombstones instead of cards. Such novel uses of public spaces are another way she engages players. Her own work as a game designer is fed by watching players interpret the missions she designs: "They always think of far more interesting things than anything I could imagine."

Link

The work of British "art terrorist" Banksy, whose Gitmo prisoner in Disneyland prankstallation is shown here, will be shown in a Los Angeles warehouse this weekend.

Until now, the location was a closely-held secret, but Sean Bonner has the scoop:

"As promised, on the day of the opening (tonight) Banksy revealed the location of his 'Barely Legal' exhibition which will be showing all weekend in Los Angeles. The location is a warehouse downtown on Hunter Street, which is aparently off Santa Fe and near the freeway."

Link to details at blogging.la. Previous BoingBoing posts about Banksy: Link.

Amazon's new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the "agreement" you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I've ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1. As Ben Franklin might have said: They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy.

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. A lot. I won't ever be buying one of these movies. Amazon has a great and well-deserved reputation for amazing customer service. The rare occasions where I've gotten a lemon or ordered the wrong product from Amazon, I've been treated like royalty, with Amazon making every possible accommodation to help me out. Their Look Inside feature and the used goods marketplaces are a tremendous boon to me.

The difference between Amazon and Amazon Unbox is like night and day. When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don't belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.

Amazon Unbox's user agreement isn't just galling for its evilness -- it's also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this. Amazon Unbox user agreement is only a couple femtometers more dignified than being traded to another inmate for a couple packs of cigarettes.

Click below for a blow-by-blow analysis of the crummy deal you get from Amazon Unbox:

France's racially diverse football team has come under fire for inviting a group of recently-evicted squatters to a European championship game; far-right politicians, who criticize the team for not being "French" enough, dismissed the squatters as "illegal immigrants."

Far-right politicians criticized France soccer players Lilian Thuram and Patrick Vieira for inviting evicted squatters to watch Wednesday's European Championship qualifying game against Italy.

About 200 squatters — mostly illegal immigrants — have lived in a gymnasium south of Paris after being evicted from an abandoned university dormitory on Aug. 17.

Link (via Squattercity)

Computer scientist/activist Ian Brown spoke at an event on copyright in London last night, where anti-Internet enforcers from the entertainment industry spoke on DRM. The entertainment industry types proposed that ISPs should be forced by law to monitor all customers' communications for copyright infringement, charging for anything that might be a copyrighted work. When Ian asked about encrypted communications, they dismissed him, saying "only paedophiles use that technology and we would all be better off if it was banned."

The current favourite seems to be that ISPs should be forced to monitor all exchanges of data and charge customers when a copyright work is spotted. When I asked how the spread of encryption could possibly be compatible with this scheme, they airily replied that only paedophiles use that technology and we would all be better off if it was banned. They obviously don't know that the US government already tried extremely hard to do this over about 25 years, and failed.

Link

Wikipedia's entry "List of exclamations used by Captain Haddock" covers the incredible expletives employed in Herge's beloved Tintin comics:

A
Aardvark! Abecedarians! Aborigine! Addle-pated lumps of anthracite! Anachronisms! Anacoluthons! Anthracite! Anthropithecus! Anthropophagus! Arabian Nightmare! Artichokes! Autocrats! Aztecs! [13]

B
Baboons! Baby-snatchers! Bagpipers! Bald-headed budgerigar! Bandits! Bashi-bazouks! Bath-tub Admiral! Beast! Belemnite! Billions of billious barbecued blue blistering barnacles! Billions of Bilious Blue Blistering Barnacles! Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles! Black beetles! Black Marketers! Blackamoor! Blackbird! Blackguards! Blistering Barnacles! Blistereing blundering birdbrain! Bloodsuckers! Blue blistering barnacles! Blue Blistering Bell-Bottomed Balderdash! Blunderbuss! Bodysnatcher! Bootlegger! Borgia! Bougainvillea! Brat! Breathalyser! Brigands! Brutes! Bucaneers! Bully! Butcher! [33]

C
Cachinnating cockatoo! Cannibals! Carpetsellers! Caterpillars! Centipede! Cercopithecus! Coelcanth! Colocynths! Corsair! Cowards! Crabapples! Crooks! Cushion footed quadrupeds! Cyclotron! [14]

Link Updated Link (via Neatorama)

(Image thumbnail from a larger picture on "Tim und Struppi zum 75. Geburtstag")

Zippo has released a camera hidden inside a standard-sized Zippo lighter housing. The merchant bills this as a stealthy camera for taking quiet photos, but I think that's crazy -- between anti-smoking campaigns and in-flight lighter-bans, a lighter is a terrible disguise for a camera. You might as well hide it inside a realistic replica hand-grenade.

At a glance it looks like an ordinary silver Zippo lighter, but it is really a camera. Just flip up the cover and press a button...that’s it. Yah, it sounds kind of creepy but it is really cool.

Link (via Digg)

Update: See also TSA doesn't allow Zippo camera case past security

This youtube mashes up the classic Monty Python sketch "No. 42 How not to be seen" with machinima from the game Halo (as seen in Red vs Blue) -- the results are surprisingly funny! Link (via Wonderland)

LA's Institute For Figuring created this beautiful crocheted cactus garden, as well as a matching crocheted kelp-bed. Link (via Wonderland)

This Photoshop tutorial explains a simple and powerful method for creating artificial beards, hair and fur. Link (via Kottke)

Update: Here's a Flickr set of Mike's Photoshop beard efforts.

JK Rowling had to fight airport security in NYC for the right to fly with the only copy of the manuscript for Harry Potter 7:

"The heightened security restrictions on the airlines made the journey back from New York interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript of book seven," Rowling wrote. "A large part of it is handwritten, and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the U.S." Eventually, she added, "They let me take it on, thankfully, bound up in elastic bands."

Rowling said she was still considering two possible titles for the last of the boy wizard's adventures.

I like "Harry Potter and the Sequel of Profitablity." Link

Sean Bonner says,

OMG! Water Bombs!! There are liquid bombs and you can already buy them the internets.

Some terrorist front called Larrys is selling Water Grenades AND Water Bombs! And the water bombs even come in a pack of 200!

Do you have any idea how much terror you could spread with that? They even sell launchers for taking out freedom lovers at a distance.

Link

Only 23,500 of 'em were sold, but Segway will recall each and every one due to a "software glitch that can make its wheels unexpectedly reverse direction, throwing off the rider -- and in at least one incident, break some teeth." Link

Bruno sez, "SHiFT is an event happening in Lisbon, Portugal in September 28 to 29. It will discuss how technology is influencing our everyday lives. We will discuss Civil Rights and Liberties in Technology, how to improve technology for the disabled and the rest of us, how technology is changing the media and other related issues. We will have speakers from Yahoo, Google, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group, amongst others." Link (Thanks, Bruno!)

Here's an excellent and fascinating list of the psychological tricks employed in shop architecture to make us spend more money:

Hopscotch – One American supermarket chain hit upon the idea of drawing a hopscotch in the aisle next to the children’s cereal in order to make the children play and thus pin Mum & Dad to a point where the children could hassle them for treats....

Order Of Price- Shops will often be laid out in order of price with the most expensive items being encountered at the beginning of your visit and the cheapest at the end. This is done to play on our sense of comparison, we are much more likely to spend money on accessories etc if we have just agreed to buy an expensive item, as in comparison they will seem cheaper than had we encountered them first...

Tiles – Supermarkets used to have a trick placing slightly smaller tiles on the floor in the more expensive aisles of the shop. When a customer entered on of these aisles their trolley would click faster making them think they were travelling faster and thereby subconsciously slow down and spend more time in that aisle.

Link (via Consumerist)

The FBI and Joint Terrorism Task force are hosting a conference in Kansas City, Missouri, with an unusual theme: "Agroterrorism." Not "aggro" as in, "Osama totally aggro'd out on that infidel," but agro, like crops.

Oh, there's some tiny-font mumbo jumbo on the website about "devoting increased time and attention to specific topics related to the prevention, detection and mitigation of an intentional attack against the food supply," but I know what this is really about: Genetically modified foods rising up to eat their masters.

Hybrid cornstalks will fly through the sky in the form of spears, like something Carl Sandberg might write on a bad acid trip. Zucchinis will become zukillers, squash will squash us, and frankenshrooms will shroud entire cities in clouds of toxic spores.

Speakers include Republican senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and sits on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Director John Pistole; USDA secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns; and DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

The truth and the arugula are out there. Link, and here's the conference agenda.

Noah Shachtman wrote a related piece a while back for Wired News: Keeping Cows Safe From Terrorism.

Reader comment: Sean Bonner says, "This doesn't surprise me at all, you know tomatoes are water based!"

Chris S. Davis says,

I was wondering if you'd seen last month that the FDA had given the go-ahead for a Baltimore, MD company named Intralytix, Inc., approval to have six different strains of live viruses sprayed on foods, such as deli meats, hot dogs (anything cooked in processing, but not cooked after purchase) to combat Listeria monocytogenes, a rare bacteria affecting only 2500 people a year. Those 2500 people consists of pregnant women, small children and elderly people with supressed immune systems.

The viruses are supposed to invade the bacterial cell, replicate until the cell bursts killing the bacteria. In the process, it'll create endotoxins, which could cause numerous possible allergic reactions, like asthma, autoimmune deficiencies, etc. The "testing" trials were based off one type of animal testing and four types of human testing. But those tests were not relevant to this type of application that was given approval.

Of course, the consumer will be "notified" by the requirement of packaging having the term "bacteriophage preparation" on it. Now how many consumers would even think twice on that term, let alone know what it means.

No one, not even the FDA, can guarantee the safety of this process and certainly there's no way of telling the long term and short term effects, this could have on our bodies. We all know viruses and bacteria can mutate. So what if, the virus mutates into something "less friendly" or starts attacking the friendly bacteria in our bodies that aid in our digestion?

In learning about Intralytix, the CEO, said they already have a deal with a multi-national company and would NOT disclose the name of said company. Not to mention that Joe Verrazano, seeded money to SteelCloud, a company who just received a 3.4 billlion dollar contract with the DOD.

Intralytix also has two other applications waiting approval of the FDA to spray for E.Coli and Salmonella. Oh boy, can you imagine the cocktail we'll be eating? And if people start getting sick, the lovely pharmaceutical companies will gladly sell some miracle drug to treat it.

But, hey, who needs terrorists in Iraq, when we have bureaucratic government organizations like the FDA, to do the work for them?

The Economist has an article that's the hypothetical pre-flight announcement for Veritas Airlines, the airline where they tell you the truth about the in-flight procedures:

he flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft. Also, please keep your seat belt fastened when seated, even if the seat-belt light is not illuminated. This is to protect you from the risk of clear-air turbulence, a rare but extremely nasty form of disturbance that can cause severe injury. Imagine the heavy food trolleys jumping into the air and bashing into the overhead lockers, and you will have some idea of how nasty it can be. We don't want to scare you. Still, keep that seat belt fastened all the same.

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.

Link (via Making Light)

Update: Joe sez, "The Economist magazine claims that no one has survived a water landing. The good folks at Wikipedia have extensive documentation to prove that the Economist is wrong."

IDEO's Andy Switky brought my colleague Lyn "Virtual China" Jeffery this excellent bootleg package of "V for Vendetta" he picked up in China. Check out the blurb on the front cover:

"V for Vendetta is a poorly paced and spectacularly disjointed rehash of Orwellian themes."

Related posts about bad DVD subtitle translations (no, not poorly chosen blurbs like the one above) here and here.

UPDATE: Chris Null reminds me of an excellent negative blurb he found on a Malaysian DVD bootleg of "SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2!" Link

Here's a neat way to make a buck at a hotel. Bring along your EVDO wireless broadband card, use a router to turn it into a local WiFi network, and set the SSID of the network to: "8bucks-a-day-wifi-$YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER_HERE." Other guests call you up and offer to drop off money at your room to get online.

Yes, that's right. Your hotelling neighbors HATE typing in their credit card numbers into an auth screen that messes up their DHCP. So offer them an alternative. When they call you, tell them you only accept cash and give them a unique Login and PW.

You can create up to 10 unique user accounts with an enterprise grade router called the TGMB8000. Armed with an EVDO Verizon Wireless or Sprint Card, and a 3g Router, you are a mobile wifi hotspot purveyor.

Yes, this violates your term of service. Yes, If Verizon caught you, they'd cancel your account. BUT nice part is that if they cancel YOUR account, no $175 termination fee! In anycase, it's all natted so your evdo 3g internet access provider would know what you were up to. So you can just ignore the sentence above in blue.

Link (Thanks, Bob!)

Ernie Fosselius is perhaps best known as the creator of the brilliant DIY Star Wars spoof Hardware Wars. We were delighted to find out that Ernie happens to live a stone's throw from the MAKE: compound in Sebastopol, CA. These days, he whittles incredible hand-cranked automata out of wood. He used to exhibit them in a big V8 trailer but now the Mechalodeon is traveling lighter and greener in a home-built pedal powered vehicle complete with a crank organ on the front. We visited his workshop recently and MAKE: media maker Bre Pettis put together a wonderful short video of Ernie talking about his magical creations. (Photo from Mark F.'s Ernie Fosselius set on Flickr.)
Link

UPDATE: Thanks to Kim Scarborough for reminding me that Ernie also created the pinball/counting cartoons from Sesame Street! Link to Ernie's Wikipedia bio, Link to YouTube video of "The Number 6"

Penguin Classics have revamped their iconic covers by commissioning original illustrations from comic book and hipster artists like Chris Ware (see his Candide, left), Chester Brown, Tomer Hanuka, Art Spiegelman, Seth, Charles Burns, Jason, Anders Nilsen, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I love these> I think they really make this old lit seem like something that doesn't belong on a pedestal, bur rather the kind of think you can read on the subway (though Alicatte, who suggested the link, thinks they're awful).

The link below goes to a long interview with Paul Buckley, the Penguin art director who set this up. Link to part one of interview, Link to part two of interview (Thanks, Alicatte!)