Comcast, the parent company of both G4 and E! Networks, is consolidating shop and moving the gaming-themed channel into the entertainment TV network's camp. Snip from TVWeek article:

E! and Style chief Ted Harbert has been given the newly created title of CEO, Comcast Entertainment Group. He will continue to report to Comcast Programming Group President Jeff Shell. G4 President Neal Tiles, who joined the network in September 2005, will now report to Mr. Harbert. G4's executive staff will move into E!'s Los Angeles offices. Sources said layoffs among the G4 staff are likely, though Mr. Harbert said it's too soon to tell.

"When there is consolidation, if we find there's overlap in administrative and support positions, we'll have tough calls to make," he said. "But we haven't looked at that yet." Mr. Harbert said he has not yet decided whether G4's Santa Monica production facilities will move as well. "They're shooting shows in very expensive space, but we're already maxed out at this building," he said. "I don't know what the answer is, but nothing will happen for a while."

Link, and this Wikipedia article provides a timeline of G4's history (Hey, remember TechTV? Good times. Good times.) (thanks, David Ahrendts!)

Scarefactory's Haunted Furniture page is chock-a-bloc with amazing haunted props for your haunted house. Makes me want to redecorate.

Reposed possessed girl flails up to begin violently thrashing front to back side to side to swirl & contortatop the bed. Includes steel queen sized “mattress”frame, character, mech & pneumatic pkg.

Link (via Cribcandy)

* Viagra Spam Recipes: Link.

* Oh, others may see Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich, the Virgin de Guadalupe in a tortilla, or a vagina on a carrot. Frankly, who hasn't. But BoingBoing readers are a different bunch: you see aliens in naan. Link. Peter and Gaynor Flint tell us, "We bought some garlic & coriander naan bread from our local Tesco store and found two aliens in the packaging! The linked photos were shot just moments before the bread was consumed with a very nice curry."

* These lamps are made of salt: Link.

* The Ambien Cookbook: "Take Ambien, fall asleep. Sleep 3-4 hours. Roll out of bed, wake up on floor. See extension cord, think, What a big delicious licorice rope that is!. Chew on essentially flavorless cord until you get to the metallic center, where the surprise is."Link

* Rainbow carrots: purple, red, yellow, and white. Link.

* Rainbow roses. Not edible, but equally apropos for Pride day picnicking, or an afternoon tea party with Deadheads. Link

* Just because it's low-carb doesn't mean you wanna EAT it: Hot Dog Loaf. Link.

* Voice-activated microwave oven. "Cook me some food, bitch!" Link.

* "I'm going to eat everything there is to eat at McDonald's, and blog about it." Link.

* A happy meal that fits in the palm of your hand. Link.

* Lego ice cube tray: Link.

* Plan59.com, an online shop specializing in midcentury illos, has many wonderful vintage food ads. Here's a flickr set of some of their best, gathered and posted there by a fan. Buy gorgeous, high-quality repros here (as cheap as $9 for a 13"x19", all the way up to $250 for a 44"x45" humongoprint on archival paper.)

* Strange medicinal or edible plant-thing found in Chinatown: what is it? Link.

* The annual "What the Fluff? Festival" celebrates a sugary foodstuff called Marshmallow Fluff: Link.

* Pumpkin pie coffee beans: Link.

* A resume constructed from fortune cookies: the better to nail a Fortune 500 job with? Link.

* From BoingBoing's growing collection of Wonderful Wedding Cakes:

Guillaume says, "The cake at my wedding featured 400 Emperor Penguins standing in line around a bunch of icebergs. My uncle took 72 hours to create all the penguins out of cake, almond paste and chocolate, carving them by hand one after the other. Yup, I've been to Antarctica 5 times. And they were excellent too. Some people have kept theirs to this day instead of eating them." JPEG Link.

(Thanks, R. Stevens of dieselsweeties fame, kosmonaut, Marc, Wayne Correia, Andy Yang, Glenn, Mike, Michael, Jim Mookstein, Charlie B., and Austin Sipes.)

Previous Omakase Links on BoingBoing:

- I wanna tear you apart
- Sexy taco, space gun, deli flesh.
- Arabic smokes, Norway bimbo, Danish BB ringtone
- Post-holiday bluesnixer roundup

Reader comment: Andy Fischer says,

You might be interested to know that the salt lamps you show in this post also appear as pension gifts to retiring German salt mine workers in Shultze Gets The Blues, which is fantastic even apart from the salt lamp.

BB reader Steve Glista figured out what the weird Chinatown plant-thing was: a "horn nut."Link.

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Tom Parker, author of Rules of Thumb, created a washer out of a penny instead of spending a lot of pennies to buy a washer. (Thanks, Kevin!)

Some free speech advocates call the grant "blood money," and say the Stanford program should return the grant. Snip from a San Jose Mercury News article by K. Oanh Ha:

A prestigious journalism fellowship says it has no plans to return a $1 million grant from Yahoo, despite a spirited debate over the company's record on freedom of expression. But the director of the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University said the program is considering holding a forum to engage Yahoo and other media companies about operating in repressive countries.

Yahoo intended the donation to "demonstrate our support for freedom of expression," said a spokeswoman, but it has instead revived attention to the company's controversial practices in China, where it has turned over user information to Chinese authorities. The Sunnyvale company has supplied information to Chinese law enforcement that led to the arrests of two journalists and two other Chinese dissidents, according to Human Rights Watch.

Link, see also "Yahoo money sparks debate over journalism fellowship" at the San Francisco Chronicle: Link. (via Romenesko) Here's the John S. Knight Fellowship's press release about the grant: Link.

Here are pointers to some of the reasons why people are upset with Yahoo over these issues, and here are more: Link.

(1) The first case in which Yahoo is said to have helped Chinese authorities jail a journalist involved Shi Tao. He's still in prison, and is sentenced to stay there for another nine years.

(2) Yahoo was also implicated in the case of internet dissident Li Zhi. He was sentenced to 8 years.

(3) The third case involving reported data-sharing by Yahoo with PRC authorities is that of Jiang Lijun. He's incarcerated, too, serving a four-year sentence.

That's three lives, for a total of 21 years in prison. When I interviewed a Yahoo spokesperson earlier this year about this series of incidents, I asked whether the company (and specifically Yahoo! China, now controlled by China-based Alibaba, which Yahoo owns 40% of) may have been involved in more cases. I never received a definitive response.

Earlier this year, popular PRI radio show This American Life asked blog-fans to stop producing an "unofficial podcast" of episodes TAL only made available to paying subscribers (BB posts: link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The bloggers weren't copying and hosting the files elsewhere -- rather, they were rolling RSS script that pointed to the source files on the TAL website. Still, TAL asked them to stop.

But today, great news for fans of the show: they've announced that they will change their policy, and begin offering episodes via RSS for free! Link

Aust Gate, a killer UK indie science fiction bookstore, has done a Hallowe'en edition of its online catalog with a Ramsey Campbell interview and lots of great, weird small-press UK horror books. Link (Thanks, Iain!)

The Geowankers email list is where the action is online for locative media hackers, geoweb buffs, and cartogeeks. BB pal Annalee Newitz attended last week's San Francisco Geowankers F2F meeting and wrote up her experience for AlterNet. Rich Gibson, co-author of the excellent Mapping Hacks book, presented at the meeting as did my Institute for the Future colleague Mike Liebhold. From Annalee's article:

Gibson told us that he's currently thinking about how to use technology to deal with the "probability characteristics of space." In other words, how do you create an accurate high-tech map that reflects the fact that a given geographical location has a high probability of being referred to as "the Mission," but at least 10 percent of the time might be referred to as "Noe Valley"?

This kind of question might sound silly if you look at neighborhoods purely as the creation of real estate companies that have rigid ideas about where the Mission ends and Noe Valley begins. But geowanking is all about making maps democratic and creating representations of space that reflect ordinary people's lived experiences. The idea of letting a real estate agency call the shots on where your neighborhood's boundaries are is absurd to a geowanker. Why not just build a digital map in layers so that you can see the real-estate-defined neighborhoods, then click into another layer that shows what ordinary people on the street think are the boundaries, then move to another layer to see where all the rivers run underneath the city?

Liebhold pointed out that as more and more people start creating their own maps and putting them online, we're going to need to invent a system where we know which maps are "trusted" and which are just somebody rambling about how there are many paths to Blue Bottle Coffee from the Haight.

Link

"Regina Gloriae Naturae,” based on Mark Ryden’s painting 'The Creatrix,' is a limited edition, giclée print with gold foil stamping, letterpressed title and embossed chop on archival cotton rag paper." It's limited to 60 prints and costs $3,000. Link

Reader comment:

Kevin Kelly says: Whenever you see the claim "giclee print" just substitute the word "inkjet." Same thing, but without the $64 dollar fake french accent. A giclee is a nice inkjet print, but inkjet nonetheless. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclee

This amazing track jacket embroidered with Tim Biskup's Yeti illustration is part of his Gama-Go collection for Fall. It's $78 and I am so deeply saddened that it doesn't come in XXL to fit my sasquatch frame.
Link

Earlier this week, I joined host George Stroumboulopoulos (who is far more than just reasonably okay-looking) on the CBC television show "The Hour" for a segment about Google's $1.65B handshake with YouTube. Some of Hollywood's litigiously-minded have taken to calling the deal "SueTube."

Link to video, the whole show is a blast and also features a bit about some great new books from Disinformation (I'm right about halfway through the show). Speaking of Disinfo, one of those new books is by Graham Hancock, and they're doing a tour right now: Link.

After two police officers ate half of their hamburgers at a Burger King in Los Lunas, New Mexico, they noticed that the patties were peppered with pot. According to the Associated Press, three Burger King employees were busted for marijuana possession and the felony crime of aggravated battery on a cop. Link (Thanks, Mike Love!)

I don't understand a word of what this robot is saying to his young human assistant, but he's a good Rubik's cube solver. Link

Larry Smith wrote a great article for Slate on the most iconic technology from the history of the future--the jetpack! Actually, the "real" name for this kind of device is apparently "rocketbelt." Larry attended the world's first ever rocketbelt convention that took place last week at the Niagara Aerospace Museum. Bill Suitor (Sean Connery's rocketbelt-wearing stuntdouble in Thunderball) made the scene, as did 72-year-old rocketbelt pioneer Hal Graham, who in 1961 was the first person to get off the ground with one of the contraptions. Graham showed up sporting his vintage black-rubber flight suit and helmet along with a plastic mock-up rocketbelt. From Slate:

For insiders, the highlight of the conference was a new bit of rocketbelt lore. During a talk to 100 people—and just before debuting on the ukulele an original song he wrote—Graham for the first time told the story of his only crash. He recounted falling 22 feet and landing on his head during a secret demonstration at Cape Canaveral, a mishap that left him unconscious for half an hour. Graham retired from the rocketbelt biz shortly thereafter. "It's not a matter of if you get hurt, it's when," says Eric Scott, a 43-year-old former stuntman who flies for the sports-marketing company Go Fast in the rocketbelt you see in the video at the top of this article. All would-be rocketbelters practice on a tethered safety line for months before attempting a free flight. And most never make that flight: To date, only 11 men in history have free-flown a rocketbelt. More men have walked on the moon.

Link to Slate article, Link to a video of Graham's ukulele ballad about the rocketbelt, shot at the convention by John Carnett for SMITH magazine

UPDATE: Xeni kindly points out that one of her recent Omakase Links compendiums points to Bill "Beam Jockey" Higgins's report and photos from the rocketbelt convention. Link

Artist Ray Villafane carves incredible pumpkins and has posted a HOWTO on sculpting your own.

From his site:

If you have yet to try and carve a pumpkin in a 3-D manner you need to. Its fun and everybody enjoys a cool pumpkin. Unfortunately they begin to rot less than a week after carving so be sure to take plenty of pictures. You can experiment with ways of preserving them but I find nothing works better than a nice photo. Some chefs that I have carved for put lemon juice on the faces to help slow down the natural molding process that will occur.

Picking out the right pumpkin is very important. You need a pumpkin with a thick wall. To get this kind you will have to choose one that is very heavy for its size. Also avoid perfectly round pumpkins and opt for ones that have a protruding ridge that sticks out on one side. These shapes make nice faces as you could imagine how difficult it would be to carve a 3-D face onto a shallow flat surface.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

A Hungarian airport has been bilked into trying an insane scheme to RFID-track every passenger. This panopticon was invented by snake-oil salesmen from University College London. It will track every passenger to within one meter, and it will contain countermeasures to prevent passengers from removing or trading their snitch-tags. The idea is that "safety" is something abstract that can be enhanced by treating air travelers like rapists on day-release -- as opposed to each traveller's personal security of being free, and un-spied-upon.

Imagine the things a terrorist could do with perfect knowledge of the location of every passenger in the airport: "I think we'll put the bomb there."

But potentially, said Dr Brennan, the tags could aid security by allowing airports to track the movement patterns of passengers deemed to be suspicious and prevent them from entering restricted areas.

Link (via William Gibson)

A common cat parasite that can easily infect humans causes women to give birth to more boys than girls. Researchers at Prague's Charles University correlated data on nearly 2,000 babies with their mothers' levels of antibodies to toxoplasma, the parasite that infects humans through contact with cat shit and also some uncooked pork and beef. From The Guardian:

They discovered that women whose antibody count was high - suggesting a substantial infection - had a much higher chance of having baby boys. In most populations the birth rate is around 51% boys, but women infected with toxoplasma had up to a 72% chance of a boy. Toxoplasma causes congenital defects in newborns and can trigger miscarriages, but a link with the gender of newborns has never been identified before...

In most cases the parasite is harmless in humans but it is still unclear what the infection does to people in the long term. Researchers at Oxford University have proposed that the parasite could explain altered personality and changes in IQ levels after their research on rats showed that infection can persuade rats into a suicidal attraction to cats.

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Simon Kornblith writes:

Carl Zimmer over at The Loom has an excellent article on another recent study involving the toxoplasma parasite that links it to cultural differences between nations, and provides further details on the personality changes it can induce. Link

An award-winning junk-food inventor debuted deep-fried Coke syrup at September's Texas State Fair:

Gonzales deep-fries Coca-Cola-flavored batter. He then drizzles Coke fountain syrup on it. The fried Coke is topped with whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Gonzales said the fried Coke came about just from thinking aloud.

Gonzales' diet-buster wins the creativity honor at the second-annual Big Tex Choice Awards Contest...

Gonzales achieved notoriety in 2005 with the fried peanut butter, banana, and jelly sandwich -- selling an estimated 25,000 of the treats, according to the fair's Web site. The site said London got media attention in 2004 with her fried marshmallows on-a-stick.

Link (via Dethroner) (Photo from this Dethroner post)

Update: Da Mystic Homeboy sez, "Ammonia Coke is a delicacy/tonic I have yet to try. Mix in several drops of ammonia with your Coke, and apparently you get relief from a variety of hypertensive related disorders."

This crazy sculpture of a steampunk Japanese laptop includes a Morse key over the trackball and a manual typewriter keyboard straight out of Naked Lunch. If this was a working laptop, I'd carry it everywhere. Link (via JWZ)

Update: Adam sez, "It's not a 'sculpture' -- it's a working computer. In his notes, the creator resists comparisons to Gilliam and Cronenberg, saying "if you look carefully, you'll see it's totally different."