This youngster toured the world with his Game Boy in hand. Here he is in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, touching the Game Boy to the Stone of Unction, allegedly where Jesus's body was prepared for burial. Visitors often rub things on the stone to pick up some of the, er, magic. Judging by the little fellow's devilish grin, I'd bet he's not a believer.
Link to Cybjorg's "Game Boy Around the World" set on Flickr (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Regarding last week's post on publishing's relationship to "okaysellers," Tor Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she’s absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are “driven by” our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don’t in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that “publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest” and says that “when a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant,” they’re grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that “bestsell,” but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it’s like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you’d better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don’t spend all of our time on them, and we don’t sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know." Link

My friend Kim Plowright created these amazing anatomically correct skins for avatars in the virtual world Second Life. Link

Lifelike is an online episodic comic series written by Iranian expat Dara Naraghi. Lifelike's stories are short, sweet slices-of-life, sometimes with twist endings, each drawn by a different but equally talented artist. There are so many different visual styles here, and Naraghi is such a versatile storyteller, that they barely seem to be part of the same series, but there's something that links them together, a great storyteller's sensibility. From hard-boiled noir crime to war memoirs to sweet, sentimental stories, Lifelike has the feel of a great comics anthology, like Drawn and Quarterly or World War III. Link (Thanks, Dara!)

Last Tuesday, Revver co-founder Steven Starr gave a great talk on copy-friendly business models at my USC speaker series. Mark Smith of MoveDigital came and shot the talk in high-def and edited it down and uploaded it as a Quicktime file or a phone-friendly 3gp stream. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

See also Audio from Revver founder's talk on copy-friendly business models

On the Disney Blog, John Frost writes:

Charles Phoenix, known for his retro-postcard slide show events, has started offering 'walking tours' of Los Angeles. If you've ever seen or heard Phoenix's talk, you know that alone would be worth the price of admission. But Phoenix tops it off by drawing a multitude of parallels between Walt Disney's crown jewel themepark of Disneyland, and the icons of Southern California that played such a major part in the development of Walt Disney the man.

Link (Thanks, John!)

Retrothing has a great article on Red Raven records, which came with the cells of an animation printed on the LP label. You put a mirrored circus tent-topper over the spindle and watched the animation in its surfaces. I had one of these when I was a kid and I absolutely loved it.

These were cardboard children's records with the animation printed right onto the disc itself (later versions like the one above had the animation on the label of regular colored vinyl). The Red Raven included a little mirrored device that you pop onto the turntable's spindle that reflected the animation in such a way that while the record plays you get to see a little cartoon.

The effect is rather hypnotic (the mirrored device is an ersatz praxinoscope for all of you optics junkies), and a neat addition to the typical children's fare on the record itself. Sixteen Magic Mirror Movie records were released by Red Raven (making for 32 animations of course).

Link (Thanks, Adzoum!)

Synthtravels is a tour operator that arranges for guided visits to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, providing "native guides" for people who want to get the lay of the land.

Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds.

The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers.

Link (via Futurismic)

This tacky monstrosity is the "Respecting Copyrights merit patch" that Los Angeles Boy Scouts can receive if they consent to being brainwashed by the MPAA's curriculum. Nice to see an organization in loco parentis shilling for a cartel of Fortune 100 companies. Link (Thanks Pawel!)

See also:
Boy Scouts shill for MPAA with copyright merit badge
Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright

Update: There's some dispute as to what this is called. Clark sez, "The MPAA monstrosity is an activity patch or temporary insignia- these denote that a scout has participated in a special event or activity; a couple of common examples of activity patches are those issued to scouts who have attended a weekend camporee or a week at summer camp. Activity patches are simple tokens of recognition that are not vetted or controlled on a national level. Unlike merit Badges activity patches do not apply to a scout's advancement in rank."

Design shop Fitzsu has challenged several hot designers to create unique toy cars for a charity auction. The cars are all one-of-a-kind and they're really wonderful -- I'm totally loving this melted-wax car from Dalek. Link (Thanks, Mapletree7 and Justin!)

The talented folks at DaveFilms have produced a full-cast audiobook adaptation of my award-winning novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. They're transmitting it in ten parts, as a podcast -- part 1 just went live.

This is the second audio adaptation of Down and Out -- the podcaster Mark Forman read the book aloud on his podcast in August 2005.

I love the different adaptations of the book -- it's amazing to hear my words read by so many different people, with so many different choices about how to dramatize it. Often, the reading isn't how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it, which is cool -- it's wild to hear how your own words sound to someone else. Link to part 1 as MP3, Link to part 1 as streaming Quicktime, Podcast feed

Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.

"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."

The Los Angeles Council of the Boy Scouts of America will offer rewards to Scouts who absorb a brainwashing regime written by the MPAA. The merit badge patch in "respecting copyright" will almost certainly not include any training on fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I'm sure it won't mention the anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood "rating" system, or the way that the studio cartel's copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can't be brought back into circulation.

Bravo, Scouts -- letting an industry group brainwash the children in your charge is the only way you could sink lower than being mere religious bigots -- now you're religious bigots who shill for a cartel of Fortune 100 companies.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

"Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Link (Thanks, Kingkong, Cyrus, Jeffrey, Dolface, and Jdaisy!)

See also Boy Scout badge in Intellectual Property

Update: Liz sez, "Mel Horan of Garbage Island made up Photoshop versions of possible copyright merit badges several months ago, and I posted them on Sivacracy in connection with a story about the Hong Kong scouting program already policing piracy on the government's behalf. Check them out!"

Update 2: Ed sez, "The copyright merit badge is *not* sanctioned by the Boy Scouts of America. It's a local initiative by one group in LA. That's why they called it a "merit patch" instead of a "merit badge". The real list of BSA merit badges here here. The newest one is "Composite Materials"."

Update 3 Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.

"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."

Update 4 This tacky monstrosity is the "Respecting Copyrights merit patch." (Thanks Pawel!)

In his latest paintblogging experiment, Coop created a neat time-lapse video from the still photos he shot while creating his latest artwork. I love watching a master in action. It makes creative work look magically effortless.
Link

A reader writes, "HauntedHotSauce.com offers Zombie-themed hot sauce products sealed in handmade cedar coffins. In addition to the hot sauce, each coffin comes stuffed with Spanish moss, a bloody toe-tag prop and a few novelty maggots thrown in for effect! There's a creepy fold-out paper mask on top of some of the larger bottles that can also be downloaded free from the site."

I'm a total hot sauce junkie. Remember those Tabasco ads where they asked celebs what they put Tabasco on, and Dan Ackroyd said, "Anything humanly possible?" That's me, too. I'd brush my teeth with hot-sauce if I could.

Combine sweaty pepper juice with gruesome packaging and you've got an unbeatable combination. I just ordered some. Link

A new survey suggests that six percent of adults experience bouts of compulsive buying that may "leave them saddled with debt, anxiety, and depression." And while it was previously thought that compulsive buying is a predominantly female condition, the recent research shows that it may be just as common in men. To collect the data, Stanford University psychiatrist Lorrin M. Koran interviewed more than 2,500 people over the phone. From Science News:

Compulsive buying, as defined by a high score on a tally of the cardinal signs, occurred in 6 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men, regardless of racial or ethnic background, Koran's group says. Compulsive buyers averaged 40 years of age, compared with 49 years for the other participants. A majority of compulsive buyers reported annual incomes under $50,000, whereas only 39 percent of the others reported incomes in that category.

Compulsive buyers reported having the same number of credit cards as other participants did. However, compulsive buyers tended to stretch credit card limits thin, often to within $100 of the maximum. Compulsive buyers also preferred to make minimum payments on credit card balances, regardless of their annual incomes.

Yesterday, the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online officially launched, bringing 50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images to the public for free. Presented by the University of Cambridge and other collaborators, the site currently contains only half of what will be available by 2009. Seen here, a diagram from the Origin of Species.

From the Origin of Species:

'It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working'

'When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.'

Link

Check out this incredible gallery of over 1500 Italian pulp science fiction magazine covers, spanning 1952 to the present day. Link (Thanks, Spencer!)

Andrew MacPherson has founded a monthly Copynight in Hollywood, California. Copynights are monthly gatherings of copyfighters, activists, artists and others interested in copyright reform. This month's inuagural belly-of-the-beast Copynight is being held next Tuesday night.

# Fourth Tuesday of every month, 8 PM
# Barney's Beanery, 8447 Santa Monica Blvd (map)
# Hosted by Andy McPherson, hollywood (at) copynight.org

Link (Thanks, Andy!)

Video game economist Ed Castronova (whose back-of-the-envelope math on the GDP of Everquest's Norrath made a huge stir) has received a $240,000 MacArthur grant to fund the creation of a virtual world built on the works of Shakespeare:

"It's a historical Shakespeare play, so that means it's really easy for us to take all the sort of fantasy stuff like knights in shining armor and peasants and woodworkers...and we can just really fit right into 'Richard III' right away."

But "Arden" has a more serious goal than just letting gamers cavort around in an Elizabethan playground.

Castronova likens "Arden" to a "petri dish" where he and other researchers can conduct ongoing social-science experiments. He said the idea is similar to a biologist running multiple versions of an experiment, each with slight variations in conditions, to see how those conditions affect the outcome.

"Now we have this technology for making little pocket societies and we can do different governments, different economies, different social norms in the different environments," he said, "and see how it affects the things we care about, like equality and justice and growth and efficiency."...

He said one of the more unique elements of "Arden" is that the game will be seeded with Shakespearean texts, many of which will be the most valuable treasure players can find.

"If you collect the 'To be or not be' speech and then take it to a lore master or to a skilled bard, he can then apply the magic to your broad sword or you (could) utilize the magic in a battle situation to give you this massive (advantage)," Castronova explained. "So there (will be) this intensive competition to get the best speeches of Shakespeare in your play book.

"You've got to know your Shakespeare, but...if you do, collect these texts and you can just playfully kick butt the way wizards do."

Link (via Wonderland)

iGlow is a chemo-luminescent hair gel that makes your head glow -- perfect for Hallowe'en.

Just like Voltage, iGlow does not rely on UV, neon or black lights to create glow. Instead, it produces its own light! Tiny, microscopic particles in the gel come together in the mixing process to produce a bright colorful glow that can be seen in partial light and in the dark for several hours.

While iGlow is classified as a "temporary hair color" it does not actually color the hair cuticle. It "coats" the hair with color. The gel is the delivery medium for the luminescence (glow). As such it is safe for color-treated or bleached hair when used as directed.

Link (via Popgadget)

Wired News has released the source code for a program written by its editor Kevin Poulsen to catch pedophiles on MySpace by comparing MySpace profiles to registries of sex-offenders. Poulsen is a notorious reformed hacker who wrote the code to produce empirical data on the use of MySpace by sexual predators, though he acknowledges that the code only catches predators who use their real names, and that some sex offenders use the site for innocent purposes, to stay in touch with friends and family. The code is released under a BSD free software license:

Finding sex offenders on MySpace is a three-step process. First, you need the list of offenders. I put together the first script, scraperps.pl, in late April. From a list of ZIP codes, the program simply fills out the query form on the DOJ's registry, maxing out the query by running five ZIPs at a time. Then it stores the results -- name, ZIP, city, county, state -- in a database, within a table called `perps`.

My first run quickly got me temporarily blocked from the site. It turns out the DOJ server doesn't like you running a lot of queries back-to-back. When the ban was lifted (never let it be said that the Justice Department is unforgiving), I incorporated a 30-second pause between queries, which seemed to satisfy the server. That raised the run time to over 71 hours.

While that was under way, I went to work on screen-scraping MySpace. When you register for MySpace, you're prompted to provide your full name and your ZIP code. That information doesn't appear in your MySpace profile, which may help explain why so many offenders felt comfortable providing it. But MySpace's search engine lets you search by name, and restrict the results to within five miles of a particular ZIP code. That made it a natural match for the sex offender registry.

The MySpace scraper, myspacebot.pl, performs this search for every entry in `perps`, and loads the result into a table called `myspace`.

Link

See also: Wired News editor catches MySpace pedophile

Update: EPIC's Guilherme Roschke sez, "The code 'caught' lots of people, and it took human work to sort out who was a predator and who was not. "

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Star Wars mashups. I am just loving the Gollum/Yoda pictured here. Link

Stephen Reed Industrial Design installed these Scrabble-tile-holder benches (with Scrabble tile pillows) in the offices of Bloomberg London. Want. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Jeremy sez, "I saw your Scrabble Furniture, and wanted to show you the work of my friend Josh Cyr, who has created his own Scrabble Coffee Table."

I dig this kooky-creepy devil inkwell up for auction on eBay. Current bid is $202.01. From the auction listing:

19th Century devil inkwell of handcarved wooden construction by a master craftsman. I believe this to be of European origin - Black Forest or Swiss. Quality of carving and fit of the lid are exceptional. Not a nick or chip or scratch. Original paint. Original well looks to be porcelain. Ink still on inner rim around well and lid shows honest wear. Total height is 4". Satisfaction guaranteed.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Union Products, manufacturer of the plastic pink flamingo, has ceased production of the quintessential kitsch icon. Apparently, the Leominster, Mass-based company was hit with financial woes, in part due to the increasing cost of plastic resin. Don Featherstone, who created the classic lawn ornament in 1957 during a countrywide epidemic of Florida fever, is still very much alive though and hoping some other company will crank out his creation. According to Wikipedia, every authentic flamingo is emblazoned with Featherstone's signature under its tail. From the South Florida Sun Sentinel (photo from Union Products):

"They think the pink flamingos could be extinct, and they think I will be extinct soon, too," (Featherstone) said. "It is sad that it is happening, but it may not be dead yet."

Featherstone and (Union Products president Dennis) Plante are hoping for a resurrection. Plante has been seeking another company to buy the molds. So far, two companies in the U.S. and one in Canada have expressed interest.

"I am hoping that someone will come forward and save the plastic pink flamingo from extinction," Plante said.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Glyph Jockey has kindly posted scans of an entire "Nancy and Sluggo" comic book from 1953, including the fun ads for fireworks, magic tricks, and BB rifles. This makes me very happy.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

This week, three BB pals invade RU Sirius's MondoGlobo network podcasts. Violet Blue is the guest on the RU Sirius Show while Eddie Codel (GETV) and video artist Ryan Junell, organizer of the Webzine conference, chat up RU on the NeoFiles.
Link

The audio from Tuesday night's talk by Revver co-founder Steven Starr is online. Steve spoke as part of my USC speaker-series on copyright, freedom and technology and his talk was about Revver, a system that puts ads at the end of viral videos, which means that every time the videos are copied, their creators make more money. Steve's talk was great, and there was a rollicking, wide-ranging Q&A session afterwards.

Next Tuesday's speaker was to have been Jamie Love from the Consumer Project on Technology, but he's had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict with a diplomatic event. I will give his talk in his stead, about international development, copyright, and the Access to Knowledge movement. Link, Podcast feed

Democracy Player, the amazing, free, open Internet video player, has just released an important update, bringing tons of new features to the platform. Democracy lets you subscribe to channels of video that are downloaded quickly using Bittorrent. Getting video in channels means you don't have to remember to keep checking for new files, and Bittorrent means the files come down quickly and without costing the creator a fortune in bandwidth. There's a complementary tool, "Broadcast Machine," that makes it easy to publish your own video channel for Democracy and other players.

Democracy runs on Linux, Windows and the Mac, and is overseen by the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation. PCF director Nicholas Reville sez,

This version (0.9.1) has lots and lots of new features. The 3 biggest:

1. The interface is faster and more responsive.

2. You can make 'Search Channels' that automatically search a channel (rss feed) or a website like YouTube and download videos that match the search.

3. The Mac and Windows versions can now both search, save, and play flash video (such as YouTube or Google Video).

Link, Link to new feature list

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation)

Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralized distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station --this is a public-transit version of the "Traffic Napster" that appears in my novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.

undersound will be spatially distributed at individual stations and throughout the wider tube network. I can add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls , and I can download tracks on the platforms. Architectural configuration of the stations affects my experience of contributing and downloading music as the proximal nature of the interaction with these situated points require s myself and other undersound users to congregate at certain locations within the station for the purpose of interacting with the system.

Each track in the undersound system will be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information is visible as the track is being played. This may trigger memories and musings around my personal relationship to that place. Is there also a correlation between the flow of people around the tube network and the flow of music tracks around the undersound network? What might a sense of place for these digital artefacts be? Do they care about geographical location too or might their sense of place revolve around the quality and type of network and the technological devices they pass through?

Link (Thanks, Akshat and Dillo!)

The respected journal Far Eastern Economic Review has been banned in Singapore for publishing an article critical of Singapore's prime minister. The Review has published a stinging analysis of the legality of this action under Singaporean law, suggesting that the government is willing to invent laws for itself when it wants to suppress dissent:

The July article that started this most recent dispute with Singapore, “Singapore’s ‘Martyr,’ Chee Soon Juan,” sought to raise a similar question, only it focused on the methods used to silence the leader of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. We put it to Mr. Chee himself, and he laid the blame squarely on the country’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who now holds the title of “minister mentor.”

The ruthless suppression of dissent must be kept up, he said, because as long as Mr. Lee is alive, a new generation of leaders is unable to emerge and distance themselves from his record. Mr. Lee’s past actions, which have led to human rights abuses and statist management of the economy, haunt the government. Mr. Chee believes that is the true reason dissidents like himself are hounded: “If we had parliamentary debates where the opposition could pry and ask questions, I think he is actually afraid of something like that.”

After the article was published, we received letters from Davinder Singh, a lawyer for Mr. Lee and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, claiming that these sentiments and several other sections of the essay defamed the two men. Mr. Singh demanded apologies, removal of the article from our Web site, and an undertaking to pay damages and legal costs.

Link (Thanks, HY!)

Mike sez, "The National Trust, a British charity, held a competition to garden-growers across the country to grow the ugliest vegetable possible. This year's winner was Mrs. Hilary Nellist from Bedford with her parsnip from the deep. The contest seeks to promote organically grown fruit and vegetables. Some may not look good enough to end up on supermarket shelves, but they quite possibly taste better and are better for you. Look at the picture of the parsnip and tell me Cthulhu didn't have his hand in this one." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

(Photo thumbnail above taken from a larger picture credited to Hilary Nellist)

Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- an expert on fiction publishing -- has written a great response to a Wall Street Journal article where the Journal asserts that publishing is a hit-driven, winner-take-all industry. She points out that this is far from the truth -- that publishing isn't driven by bestsellers, but by "okaysellers," and that bookstores are filled with these okaysellers.

What irritated me about the story was having the Wall Street Journal trot out the completely bogus standard paragraph about the state of publishing:

Much like Hollywood, book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest. A publisher has to find a title with huge potential and single it out for special attention. If the book gets traction, the upside is limitless. If it fails, there’s a long way to fall. When a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant. With 172,000 books published last year, shelf space is limited.

I think they’ve got that paragraph set up as a macro—and they’re not the only publication that uses it.

I’ve been hearing the “publishing is becoming a winner-take-all sweepstakes” riff since I started working in the industry. It’s not true, and it’s not becoming true. I suspect it’s generated by lazy news departments that can’t be bothered to take notice of books that aren’t blockbusters, and from this conclude that blockbusters are all that matters in publishing.

Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.

Link

Update: Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she’s absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are “driven by” our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don’t in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that “publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest” and says that “when a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant,” they’re grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that “bestsell,” but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it’s like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you’d better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don’t spend all of our time on them, and we don’t sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know."

At "the f blog," former BB guestblogger Jenn Shreve has posted a an oddly engaging collection of "sorry I haven't posted in a while" excuses found on a wide assortment of blogs. Here are a few:

"I got promoted to an officer in my World of Warcraft guild "Trick Model" on Illidan."

"I've been honestly overwhelmed by trying to keep up with my two language courses"

"I forgot my password..."

"I've been busy shooting soccer teams."

"I've been very depressed since Ginger died."

"I was planning on working more on my chibi characters. "

Link

Ugly Overload (via Spluch) posted this beautiful portrait of a cute proboscis monkey. Text on the proboscis monkey from Blue Planet Biomes:

The proboscis monkey gets its name from its large, fleshy nose. Both males and females have the large noses. Female noses are not as large, although larger than most monkeys, and juveniles have small upturned noses. The male's are so large that they hang down over their mouths, reminding one of the old comic, Jimmy Durante. Sometimes they have to push it out of the way before putting something in their mouth. Their noses swell and turn red when they become excited or angry. They also make loud honking sounds as a warning when they sense danger, which make their noses stand out straight. The nose acts as a resonator when the monkey vocalizes.

Link to Ugly Overload, Link to Blue Planet Biomes page (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Computer scientists at New Zealand's Massey University are studying the mysterious low-frequency hums that have been reported in various places around the world. (It's sometimes referred to as the Taos Hum because many people in Taos, New Mexico claim to hear it.) Massey University professors Tom Moir and Fakhrul Alam began their research on "Unidentified Acoustic Phenomena" with a visit to the home of a Brown's Bay woman who said a hum she heard at home was sickening her. Moir and Alam couldn't detect the noise but are now expanding their efforts by talking with others who hear a hum. From a Massey University press release:

"The fact of the matter is that we do not yet have an answer even though there has been keen interest and plenty of speculation world wide on this phenomenon,” says Dr Moir.

“At this stage we believe there are two possible explanations. The hum could be a very low frequency sound that only some people can hear. Or, it could be that microwaves in the atmosphere trigger a hum like sound in the heads of some people that would not necessarily be heard by others or picked up by recording equipment.”

Link to Massey News Article, Link to Television New Zealand article

UPDATE: BB reader Gerard Hughes comments that it might be a little premature to speculate on a cause:

They left out the most important possibility--that there is no hum. Before speculating on what causes a phenomenon one should prove that it exists in the first place. There are a number of famous scientific self-deceptions when people thought they could see or hear things even though their instruments detected nothing. René Prosper Blondlot's "discovery" of N-Rays is one such example. He thought the rays made a calcium sulfide thread glow very faintly but it turned out that the researchers were just fooling themselves. Link

Last month, I posted about artist Annamarie Ho's art installation/performance piece, "Binlang Shi Shr," about Betel nut girls, the scantily-clad young girls who sell the stimulant from streetside booths in some Asian cities. (Background here.) The closing performance takes place this Saturday, October 21, from 2-5pm at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY College of Old Westbury in New York.

From the show program:

Ho simulates a vending stand of the sort that becomes, in effect, a free-standing display case, where the "betelnut beauties" function as commodified mannequins. She includes an example of the accompanying neon business signs often phrased to sound like the names of love hotels in East Asia. In Binlang Shi Shr (Betelnut Girls), Ho not only expresses a concern over the "entrapment"