Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko unloads on the Zune with both barrels, calling it a "complete, humiliating failure" and a "colossal blunder," because Microsoft has taken the user out of its design considerations and put the music industry (in the person of Universal's Doug Morris, "a big, clueless idiot") in their place.

Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity...

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba's Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune's limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

Link (via Joho the Blog)

Fred sez,

More evidence that the digital video future may look like a big downgrade compared to the analog present, thanks to viral DRM carried by the CableCard.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows MCE computers equipped with a CableCard will only be allowed to stream live video to Media Extender devices (like Xbox 360). No streaming to other PCs. Also, recorded CableCard content cannot be converted for playback on portable devices (Zune, iPod).

By contrast, analog, non-CableCard-infected TiVos support both these functions, as do PCs that use analog TV tuner-cards.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Gizmodo has a quick and easy hack for breaking the DRM on the Zune's WiFi. The Zune locks the music you wirelessly share with other Zunekers so that it only plays three times before evaporating. This is applied totally indiscriminately, even to Creative Commons music with a machine-readable license granting permission to distribute it. It would also apply this restriction to students who shared MP3s of their class-lectures.

First, you need to enable hard drive mode using the instructions we posted before. Then, rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension ".jpg" in order to fool the Zune into thinking its an image. This hack works because Zune doesn't apply DRM to images!

Then what?

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.

Link (via Wonderland)

See also: Microsoft Zune will violate Creative Commons licenses

Snip from Consumerist:

Inside, a man asks whether the no liquid rules apply to his pie... Not much fuss at the security pageant. We packed our liquids in our checked luggage, seeing no need to perform toilet mid-flight. A man waiting in line asked if it was okay to bring his pie on board. "That aint't a liquid," said the TSA employee. "Oh, good," said the man. We refrained from asking aloud whether cherry pie filling was considered a gel. "Unless it's sweet potato," she said. "It is," he said. "Then I'm gonna have to confiscate it!" said the TSA employee, to general laughter.

Link (Thanks, Ben Popken)

Filmmaker and writer Adario Strange interviewed me for New York Press, and called me an "anthropomorphic avatar," which is pretty darn funny. Link to article, cover scan (photo shot by Jacob Appelbaum).

The Copyright Office has created six new exemptions to the hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to break any digital lock, even if you're doing so for a legitimate purpose.

Every three years, the Copyright Office hears petitions for exemptions to this sweeping rule. This year, it created six exemptions, including one for film profs, another for gamers whose consoles have gone obsolete, blind people, and cell-phone recyclers.

However, the office refused to grant exemptions that would benefit the general public -- space- and format-shifting, backing up your DVDs -- and they took back an earlier exemption that let people reverse-engineer the blacklists maintained by censorware companies to bring some transparency to their process.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Link (Thanks, Andy, Andreas, and everyone else who suggested this story!)

I've been listening to Sophe Lux's CD Waking the Mystics nonstop for a week or so, and just loving it. The Portland, OR eclectic glam band is fronted by Wendy Haynes, who sounds a little like PJ Harvey by way of Freddy Mercury. The songwriting is often hilarious, sometimes profound, and the songs veer from faux-psychedelic 1960s clavier rock ("God Doesn't Take American Express") to luscious sci-fi rock opera ("Marie Antoinette Robot 2073") to bouncy numbers like "Little Soldiers of Time." It's singable, it's danceable and the concert DVD I've been perusing suggests that this is the kind of thing you want to see live, too. Link

Sticker Graphics is a series of gorgeous box-set mixed-media books devoted to sticker art (something I have a lot of passion for). I picked up issue two ("Do You Love Stickers?") at Reading Frenzy last week, taken by the gorgeous, Space-Odysseyesque curved white box, which has a transparent compartment on the top filled with handsome stickers and patches. There's a drawer set into the box that slides open to reveal a book of lush sticker-art photos, a "locker poster" of stickers, and a DVD of little sticker animations (these are the least interesting part of the package).

The stickers and book, though, are really terrific -- it makes me wish I had a new laptop to cover. There's a lot of Japanese-looking die-cuts, a lot of little stickers perfect for filling in the blank spaces on your canvas (or decorating smaller phones and cameras) and some nice retro and Euro-stickers. The book provides a fascinating tour of global sticker design and placement. Sticker Graphics: All you need is..., Sticker Graphics 2: Do you love stickers?

Livingstones, a French company, sells these cushions that look like rocks -- the idea is to pile them up in your living room to make soft, comfy cairns of cognitively dissonant rock-pillows. Link (via Cribcandy)

Xart, a hobbyist PSP game-maker, has created a DRM system for his games. Creators of unauthorized homebrew games for the PSP worry that others will strip their names off of their creations and appropriate credit for their work, so Xart has proposed that the splash-screens that appear before the game starts should be encrypted so that they can't be altered.

Of course, the homebrew PSP scene exists because this sort of thing just doesn't work. It's impossible to deliver a game to a user with an encrypted section and the keys to decrypt it and expect that the user won't be able to decrypt it.

On the one hand, it's pretty unlikely that a homebrew hobbyist will use the DMCA to attack people who break their crypto, and it's reasonable to want to keep the credit intact on your works. On the other hand, this stuff really doesn't work, and no one should know that better than a PSP hobbyist.

With some people trying to rip off the homebrew scene, pretending to be Dark_Alex or some of our other respected devs, Xart from our forums has come up with a great new idea to prevent people ripping off others work. Xart has developed a powerful, fast Data Array Scrambling (DAS) system to protect your homebrew games and applications from hex editing and others stealing credit from your hard work.

This is an example of an encryption technique and it not a yet full release. For this Xart has used his xLoader application. It's a proof of concept to show just how quick encryption can be done to protect your work.

Link (Thanks, Hamish!)

The NESPaul guitar was made by grafting the neck of a dead electric guitar onto the hollowed-out body of an old Nintendo console. I have no idea if the resulting contraption sounds any good, but it looks so! damned! metal! Link (Thanks, CB)

Mr Blobby (a fathead, blobfish or Psychrolutidae), pictured here, was "trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003." I had no idea that things like this existed outside of the cartoons. He gives me the crawlies. Link (via JWZ)

BoingBoing pal Danielle Spencer says, "Well, after last year's frighteningly realistic Jell-O® turkey (previous BB post), I conducted a Turkey Mold contest for this year's Thanksgiving party at the office. And here, now, the highly unheimlich results."

Snip from a description of one of the winning fowl:

Chopped Liver Turkey
Lianne and Karis's stark and startling chopped liver turkey executes an interrogation reminiscent of Greenbergian formalism — what qualitites are intrinsic and indispensible to turkey qua turkey, to the quiddity of the bird? — they ask us. Simultaneously, the sculptural form references the geometry of minimalism and the somatic impulse of gender and identity-based work. A dazzling recapituation of late twentiety century artistic movements.

Link

Tim sez, "EMI have rescinded their copyright warning about the parody cricket songbook, according to its distributor."

Unless you've been living on another planet you would have surely been hearing about the Fanatics songbook over the last couple of weeks.

Just 5 days prior to the commencement of play at the Gabba it looked like we were going to have to shred the recently printed 100,000 copies.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we've been reliably informed that the songbook isn't in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

Fantastic news for Aussie cricket fans the nation wide!!"

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

I was lucky enough to recently tour Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center -- a zine-maker's co-op that provides a lab for self-publishing zinesters who can come in and use the center's computers, printers, copiers, and fantastic letter-press workshop. They offer courses in zine-making (especially in the use of the letter-press, which produces really handsome materials). Membership is a sliding scale of $45-$100 year, and the Center also sports a multi-thousand-volume library of zines that you can use for inspiration. It's just upstairs from Reading Frenzy, the stunning zine store. Link

I read Greg Ruth's graphic novel Sudden Gravity this week on a plane and I'm still reeling from it. It's a deeply surreal story about the apocalypse coming to a giant, grim hospital modelled on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The storyline is un-summarizable in the way that, say, Twin Peaks was. And as with Twin Peaks, the thing that makes this book work is the spooky, overarching feel, something that comes from the writing and especially from the stupendous, stark, haunting black-and-white artwork. I was given this book by Shawna Gore, an editor at Dark Horse, who declared Greg Ruth to be her favorite artist working in the field, and I'm inclined to agree. There is so much to set your skin a-crawl and keep you turning the pages in Ruth's illustration. It's a fast read -- I put it away in less than an hour -- but it's a slow burn. I keep returning to those illustrations in my mind. Link

An executive at IFPI -- the international recording industry association -- has declared DRM to be "dead" -- though he warns of "Son of DRM," whatever that means. He promises that the major labels will always be at the center of the music industry, too (he runs an indie label). New Music Strategies speculates that the labels will shift to even more online surveillance, more lawsuits against fans, and worse End User License Agreements (I don't see how you accomplish this last one without DRM, though).

DRM as we know it is over. There may be Son of DRM but that’s another matter. Right now its dead, the majors are moving towards the new model. The one thing you can be sure of is they will still be at the centre of the world music industry whatever happens. The independents are another matter. As our sector’s share has fallen by almost half in just over twelve months, the new model for us is partnership. It always was, I’m just not sure we got it.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Jeremy sez, "Penguin has released six classic titles with pure white, art-quality covers for people to design their own book jackets. Titles include The Picture of Dorian Gray,Magic Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Emma."

In essence, we've started a new series because if the first six work we'll publish more. The series was named My Penguin by our rather marvellous Creative Director, who came up with the name after about two minutes. The tag line is 'Books by the Greats, Covers by You', and throughout the rush to design the (back) covers, get the right paper, and tell people about them, we've had a really great time. The covers are art-quality paper, and from internal Penguin efforts we know that they hold ink, paint, pencil and glue (see the first efforts here). Each one comes shrink-wrapped so the paper doesn't get dirty, and I hope people might give them as gifts. They're went round Penguin earlier in the week and we've starting an online gallery that will launch with staff efforts at the end of November (no doubt we'll talk about this here). All of the books talk about the gallery on the back cover, because we want anyone and everyone to send in pictures of their own covers so we can put them up too.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Gilles Barbier's genius photo "L'Hospice" depicts the final days of funnybook underwear-perverts -- a saggy Wonder Woman wheels Captain America along on his gurney, Superman leans on his walker... Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: Andy sez, "Mr. Barbier's works are actually life-size sculptures, not photos. They were shown at the Whitney Museum in NYC in 2003 as part of an exhibition on how American culture influenced artists worldwide."

BLDGBLOG has posted a fascinating interview with Simon Sellars, co-author of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations. Micronations are those "countries" founded by lovable crackpots who declare some chunk of dirt to be sovereign territory and create a flag, currency, royal line of succession, and all the pompous trappings of nationhood. The book is a traveller's guide to these kingdoms, with all the best things to do and see as you visit them.

BLDGBLOG: Have you ever declared your own micronation?

Sellars: Yes. I grew up in the suburb of Bentleigh, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an exceedingly boring place, like a retirement village – it seemed like I was the only teenager around at times. So I founded the Independent Republic of Bentleigh, declared myself President, and claimed the whole of Bentleigh as territory. Our national anthem was "We Can't Be Beaten," a song by the toughest band in the land, Rose Tattoo.

BLDGBLOG: What happened to it?

Sellars: We were beaten – the IRB was invaded by Poland. The Polish kid next door already hated me, but when he saw me poncing up and down the back yard draped in my IRB flag, he was enraged even more than usual. He jumped over the fence, punched me in the mouth and stole my lunch money – and that was all the IRB's assets gone, just like that. He also stepped on my toy tanks and melted my plastic soldiers with a cigarette lighter, which meant the IRB had no defence force, and that was the end of it, really. My mother banned me from starting up a micronation ever again, unless I could back it up with sufficient armoury and investment capital, which of course I never could, being a very lazy kid.

Link

Love this fried-egg toy -- a metal egg-shell that opens up to reveal a felt fried egg. Link (via Cribcandy)

Steven Spielberg decried the iPod's 3-inch screen and promised that he would not shoot for the medium. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that a 3-inch screen wants different kinds of material than a 300' one -- and that old timers like Spielberg may not have what it takes to shoot for 3".

He also says that people are social and will always go to the cinema -- another statement I largely agree with. But there are two factors working against this:

1. The arms-race for feature-film budgets means that no one takes big chances with wide-release movies. No one is going to take a flier on a $300 million movie, trying something totally unproven and radical.

2. Because the movies cost so much to make, the studios are obsessed with them as crown jewels, and they've taken to treating cinemagoers like suspected criminals, bombarding them with "anti-piracy" warnings (um, I just paid $13 to get into this turkey, I'm not a pirate), searching them and taking away their phones (that thing has my calendar, personal photos, and private rolodex in it -- plus you can use it as digital cash!), and spying on them during the show (now *that's* a way to make a customer feel welcome).

In a free-ranging hour of interview with former NBC News correspondent Garrick Utley and questions from the audience, Spielberg said iPod video may be all the rage but count his films out from tailoring his films to fit the small screen.

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line," he said. "We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

"I don't think movie theaters will ever go away," Spielberg said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

I like these baseball cuffs -- velvet lined, brass-reinforced, and ready to be autographed by your buddies. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Today on a very topical Worth 1000 photoshopping contest: gross-out banquets for Thanksgiving. Link

Bibliodyssey has an excellent gallery of 18th century engravings from 'Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen' at Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon (named as 'Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes'.

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.

Link

What is this squid doing with a bottle of tea in a parking space? Brought to you by Squid, a blog of all things squidish. Link

Coop is back from his Mexico adventure as a co-racer in the La Carrera Panamericana. He's just posted the photos and stories from day 5.

If you ever need to buy something in a locale where your grasp of the native tongue leaves something to be desired, it helps to be able to draw a picture. We found some valve springs that we hoped would work, and we were on our way again.

I wonder if the Mexican mechanic realizes he in possession of a piece of Coop original artwork. Link

The 4th issue of my favorite art magazine, Hi-Fructose, is hitting stands in December.

The fourth volume of Hi Fructose Magazine returns this winter with more under the counter culture and toysploitation to sink your rotten teeth into

This issue features an extensive interview with Ray Ceasar, the tiled street abduction of Space Invader, the doe-eyed-sweet art of Fawn Gehweiler, Ragnar’s hobos and vixens, and an interview with Gary Taxali! Plus multipage exposes on Kozik’s Mickey Maos, The Gorillaz as shot by Brian McCarty, Leslie Repetaux (aka Black Olive), Sauer Kids, Sam Buxton,Wilfred Wood, a journey into Longo Land, Designer toys and much, much more.

Edited and published by Annie Owens and Attaboy.

Laughing Squid has links to preview pages. Link

Last month, I posted a video of Brian Atene, the young arrogant kid who made an audition tape for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket casting call in 1984. I followed up the posting with a link to a YouTube video from 2006 of a guy claiming to be Brian Atene. It turns out this was a fake. Here's the REAL Brian Atene.

Well, Brian Atene himself has posted a video response to his 1984 tape, and he more or less admits that the video wasn't a joke. This isn't one of the lame fake Atene videos that popped up on YouTube in the wake of the original video—it really is Atene this time. If you skip the first two (very weird) minutes, this new video is pretty entertaining. Atene seems off his rocker, but he's also weirdly charismatic. Among other things, he says he didn't actually send the famous tape to Kubrick; he made two tapes and ended up submitting the other one.

I actually like the first two minutes. He's funny! Link

The Daily Mail features a gallery of images of animals in the womb from the National Geographic documentary In The Womb: Animals that airs December 10. I'm not sure how much these images have been enhanced and altered with CG but they're still quite stunning.

From the Daily Mail:

Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the team were able to show the entire process from conception to birth.

"These kind of images from inside animals have never been seen before," said Jeremy Dear of Pioneer Productions, who made the film.

"We worked with dozens of zoos and animal sanctuaries across the world. There were a lot of different challenges - recording a dolphin (image right) is very different from an elephant (image left), for instance.

"Animals were trained to sit still near the scanners and we also inserted cameras into the womb via the elephant's rectum-But it has been worth it. It one sequence we follow an elephant developing. When it is finally born, there is not a dry eye in the house.

Link to Daily Mail article, Link to National Geographic's In the Womb: Animals (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

This weekend nearly 200 Fords in Cardiff, UK were robbed of their stereos, more than four times the norm. According to police, the boosts in boosts was probably due to the spread of an urban legend that chips inside the stereos can be used to decode scrambled digital TV signals. Yesterday, police recovered 37 of the stereos, 21 radio face plates, and a laptop from a single car. From the BBC News:

Police confirmed the rumour but officers have spoken to Ford and the digibox manufacturers who said there was no link.

Ford told BBC News that components cannot be used in this way.

A spokesman said it was "pure myth" sparked by an off-the-cuff comment from someone within the motor industry.

Link

In the latest MAKE: Weekend Project video, Bre Pettis and special guest Allison Kudla teach you how to make the ultimate vegetarian turkey... out of paper. From the project page:

(We'll explain) how to use Blender to decimate a turkey and output it to Pepakura which will flatten it and add tabs and get it ready for papercrafting... Watch the video to learn how to build one from scratch, print out the instructions if you want to learn how to make your own model out of paper, or you can just print out the plans and fold them on up! This could make a great activity for the family while the meat-based bird is cooking!

Link

My art show at Roq La Rue gallery earlier this month was a blast. I showed nine of my paintings and have sold six all of them. My worked was shown with four other artists: Chris Reccardi, Lynne Naylor, Johnny Yanok, and Wednesday Kirwan. Wednesday was at the show, too, and it was really fun meeting her. You can see everyone's art here.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

"Candy Thief"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Fallen Leaf"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Gumdrop Princess"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Pet Walk"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Star Hitcher"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Stump Dance"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"The Poke"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Torn Leaf"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Zero"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD

Link

Robert Pirsig, author of the best selling philosophical autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, gave what he claims is his last interview with the Guardian, to promote the republication of his second book, Lila, originally published in 1992.

When [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father's mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. "I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still," he says now. "He wasn't a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son ..."

I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig's face strains a little.

"He didn't like it. He said, 'Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.'"

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will give a free talk next Tuesday at USC in Los Angeles. Seth is the final speaker in my Fulbright Chair lecture series this year, and he's a fascinating technologist who does an admirable job of explaining the subtle ways in which technology design can affect liberty for better or for worse.

Seth's the creator of the conceptual Trusted Computing mod, Owner Override, an implementation of Trusted Computing that preserves all the privacy benefits and eliminates the danger to users.

He's also the maintainer of the Bootable Business Card Linux distribution, the author of the DeCSS Haiku, and one of the investigators who cracked the secret behind the hidden codes in color laser printer outputs.

Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207 (Los Angeles)

When: Tuesday, November 28, 7PM-9PM

Hope to see you there! Link

The audio from Andrew "bunnie" Huang's free talk at USC last night is online, thanks to students Mike Jones and Andy Sternberg. Bunnie came to fame for breaking the crypto on the Xbox, enabling the creation of Xbox Linux, and is now working with the startup he founded, Chumby, which makes an open media-player/device.

Bunnie's talk was a fantastic exegesis on the mind of a reverse-engineer, the perils and promise of hardware hacking, and the pursuit of business models that encourage smart customers to get the most out of their devices.

Next week's speaker is EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, whose many claims to fame include authoring the DeCSS Haiku, his sharp critiques of trusted computing, his role in uncovering the color printer secret codes, and many other seminal technical achievements. He also maintains the Bootable Business Card distribution of Linux. Seth speaks at 7PM on Tuesday, Nov 28, at the USC Annenberg School, room 207. Link, MP3 Link

Chloe from Reading Frenzy (Portland's astounding zine store) just handed me a copy of Crap Hound No. 6, the latest installment in her press's steady reissuance of the seminal clip-art zine. Created by Sean Tejaratchi, Crap Hound issues each featured a grand, disjointed theme -- issue six's is Death, Telephone and Scissors. Each page is a kind of collage of stark, black-and-white imagery of these things, laid out with a lot of wit and yet with a solemn appreciation for the subject.

I'm very excited to hear that a new issue of Crap Hound is coming shortly -- this one to feature "Church and State."

Crap Hound inspired me and countless others in its initial printing (the name of the zine was part of my impetus for titling my first major story-sale "Craphound" and subsequently registering the domain -- I was also inspired in this by the insults fielded in the great film Local Hero). Holding an issue again after all these years takes me whirling back. I could look at this thing for hours. Link

See also Crap Hound -- seminal clipart zine -- is back!

I just finished reading Joe Sayers's mini-comic, "I'm Gonna Rip Your Face Off" (discovered on the shelves of Portland's amazing, one-of-a-kind zine emporium Reading Frenzy) and man, that's some kind of bitter, angry funny! Three bucks is cheap for the kind of sardonic barks of laughter this little book wrung from my chest. Link

In this article, entitled "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf," a sharp analyst tackles what the loss of Net Neutrality could mean for online gamers. Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP sends you the packets you ask for as well as it can. A non-neutral net is one where ISPs take bribes to make some services better and degrade the rest.

With the permanent barriers that the removal of net neutrality will erect for these uses, the worst-case scenario includes three waves of change:

* One or more mainstream ISPs will introduce excessive lag that will effectively prohibit their users from participating in online games. The move will not be aimed at restricting usage per se, but rather to extract a fee from the game operator. However, as the Cablevision and YES dispute of 2002 showed us4, a fee disagreement between a cable company and content provider can effectively lock out the use of a popular service for over a year;

* As online gaming guilds, clans, and partners disappear into the rifts created in the Internet fabric, players that derive value from the community of the game rather than the playing experience per se will drop off. This vicious cycle of scarcity of users will lead to diminished enjoyment for existing users which will lead to still fewer users, until more games follow Asheron’s Call to oblivion5;

* Hardcore users will write strongly worded messages to their ISPs, who will classify them as unreasonable malcontents using more than their share of bandwidth.

Link (via Wonderland)

Barney's New York department store is selling limited edition "Andy Warhol" cans of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. The cans are available in four colorways based on Warhol's famous screenprints and cost $12/each. According to the Barney's catalog, the imagery is "Printed on special quality paper and with Andy's signature (reproduced)." (In 2004, Campbell sold a similar limited edition four pack of soup cans wrapped in Warhol labels.)
Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Pirate sez, "Australian recording label EMI has threatened to sue Australian cricket fans for publishing parody songs based on popular pop songs at cricket matches."

EMI says The Fanatics' Ashes songbook breached copyright because it included altered lyrics to songs such as Go West by the Village People and Daydream Believer by The Monkees.

The Daydream Believer parody included the lines: "Cheer up Michael Vaughan, How bad must it be, To a be a poor pommie whinger, And you're watching on TV?"

Link (Thanks, Pirate!)

Update: Tim sez, "EMI have rescinded their copyright warning about the parody cricket songbook, according to its distributor."

Unless you've been living on another planet you would have surely been hearing about the Fanatics songbook over the last couple of weeks.

Just 5 days prior to the commencement of play at the Gabba it looked like we were going to have to shred the recently printed 100,000 copies.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we've been reliably informed that the songbook isn't in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

Fantastic news for Aussie cricket fans the nation wide!!"

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

David sez, "The Italian Post Office was privatized recently, and they pulled the freely downloadable database of Italian postcodes, right before introducing a new series of postcodes, extensive changes to existing ones, and a new rule by which they would refuse the delivery of any letter with an imprecise postcode on it. Simultaneously they started selling a CD version of the database for several thousand Euros. The Italian public was understandably upset, and it took only about a month for a project from Free Software Foundation Europe to recreate, and liberate the database which is now accessible again to users, and software developers, independently from Poste Italiane's." Link (Thanks, David)

See also Help build a public UK postcode database

Here are a couple of Flickr pools with photos of signs that have words in quotations for no reason, and non-possessive plurals with apostrophes (also known as the "grocer's apostrophe.")
Apostrophe link | Quote marks link (Via Give, Get, Take and Have)

Flickr is publishing an amazing concordance of stats about the cameras used by its members: which cameras are popular, which are gaining, and so on. You can also browse photos by camera to see which ones please you most: this is the world's best consumer-guide for cameras. Link (via Waxy)

Ward Jenkins scanned a few pages from his copy of the Fallout Shelter Handbook from 1962

From 1962, deep in the midst of the Cold War. I found this amongst piles of musty smelling magazines and articles at a booth at the Inman Park Arts Festival several years back. The cover is classic: your average white American family enjoying life as best as they can after an atomic attack. What I love the most about it is that Mom is in her day dress, apron and all, preparing dinner, and Dad is relaxing in his jacket, smoking a pipe, having just finished reading the liner notes to something by the Ray Coniff Singers, probably.

The rest of the handbook is some interesting stuff if you dig construction how-to's -- this could've been sold at a Home Depot if they had them at the time. There are some very interesting ads in the handbook, too. Check out the rest of the images I've scanned to see more.

Link

My favorite part of any James Bond film is the title sequence. You can watch them all here. Link

Swapatorium bought this cool-looking old metal bulldog statuette and discovered that it contains some kind of electromechanical component. What is it?!

This metal bulldog was in a box of objects from an estate sale. It no longer works. I have no idea what its function was when it did operate. It's 3 inches tall and made in Japan.

The bottom has a piece of cardboard and felt. I pulled it up to see what was inside and found the metal coil and string. Was this thing a noisemaker? The dog is solid metal except for the tiny hole on the side which probably once held the pull string. Anyone ever seen one of these? I'm just curious as to its purpose.

If you think you know what it is, post a comment. Link

The always-surprising Harper's Weekly email starts off with bad news about Iraq:

In Hillah, Iraq, a man promising work lured day-laborers into a minivan, then blew it up, killing 22 people. "The ground was covered with the remains of people and blood," said a laborer, "and survivors ran in all directions." Thirty people were killed in attacks in Mosul, Baquba, and Baghdad, four American security contractors and an Austrian were kidnapped in Basra, and a deputy health minister was kidnapped in Baghdad. "Where is the government?" yelled a woman in Mashtal, after multiple bombs killed 11 civilians. "Women and children were killed. God is great, God is great." Senator John McCain said that American troops in Iraq were "fighting and dying for a failed policy"; Henry Kissinger said that he didn't believe a military victory in Iraq is possible; and Army Specialist James Barker admitted that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and helped murder her family in March 2006. Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been "pretty much of a disaster."

Link

There are many times I could have used this harness, meant to keep your kid out of trouble while you use a public toilet.

It reminds me of a story a friend told me. His wife is a social worker who goes into crack houses to rescue kids. One time, she walked into a decrepit crack house and found a baby duct taped to the wall.
Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Reader comment:

Scott says:

This link is to a photoshopped image I created of the infant bathroom restraint device with an included gas mask.

I think that the manufacturers of the bathroom infant restraint device should throw in a blindfold or at least a gas mask for the poor kid. Strapping a helpless person to a wall and forcing them to watch someone go the bathroom is considered torture in some countries.

Mitsuoka Motors in Japan sells neat car kits.

To support your dream to make up your original car by yourself. Not only people who love cars but also like mechanical things must have dreamed at least once. This model makes your dream come true.

[The K4] is composed of more than 500 parts and takes approximately 40 hours to assemble. The Kit-Car measures just under 2.5 meters (eight feet) long and can run at up to 50 kilometers (31 miles) an hour. The expected cost of each of this vehicle is US $6,460. (Spluch)

Link

Reader comment:

citizenj says:

I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but Google's translation from Japanese to English of the Little Car Kits site comes up with some serious Engrish going on:

"Electlic? It delivers the feeling of being stoked to you as the Santa Claus does?"

Wow.

New York artist Takeshi Yamada creates spectacular taxidermy gaffs--frauds and fakes that are right at home in a Victorian cabinet of curiosity or PT Barnum's American Museum of the 19th century. (Seen here, Yamada's Human-faced fly with penny.) Culture chronicler Silke Tudor wrote a wonderful profile of Yamada in last week's Village Voice after meeting him at a recent bizarre taxidermy confab orchestrated by BB pal Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy.

From the Village Voice profile:

Born out of the mythos of Coney Island, Yamada's present-day cosmos includes several six-foot-long Mongolian death worms; a pair of Fiji mermaids; a two-headed baby; a hairy trout; a seven-fingered hand; fossilized fairies; jackalope stew; a five-foot-long bloodsucking chupacabra; a 16th-century homunculus; a legion of samurai warriors trapped in the bodies of horseshoe crabs; a tiny marsh dragon; a coven of freakishly large, nuclear-radiated stag beetles from Bikini Atoll; and a furry mer-bunny, all of which are brought to life using old bones, shells, resin, origami, and bits and pieces of refuse, both inorganic and fleshy.

"In the East, abnormalities are not seen as shocking," explains Yamada as he slogs through a deep, soggy thicket behind a baseball field. "The freakish is not a bad thing. It can represent the mystery of the universe. An expression of divinity. A blessing."

He felt a bit differently when a tiny, horn-like tumor began to grow out of his finger after he moved to Coney Island.

"Shazam!" exclaims Yamada, as he often does. "I was like jackalope!"

Link to Village Voice article, Link to Yamada's page at Sideshow World

Researchers have invented a new plastic material that can change into three different shapes based on heat. The chemical engineers from MIT and the Helmhotz Association of German Research Centers demonstrated a plastic tube with three "programmed" diameters (4.5 mm, 6.9 mm, 5.8 mm) that are selected by altering the temperature. From the MIT News Office:

An "intelligent stent" made of the new class of plastics could assume three different shapes to facilitate medical procedures: It would assume a handy oval shape for insertion, then a fully inflated round shape for temporary use inside a blood vessel, duct or other cylindrical organ, and lastly, a compressed cylindrical shape for easy removal.

The triple-shape-shift from shape A to B to C could also have applications in industry. In factories, changeable plastic fasteners could be implanted in, or attached to, one part, then heated to extend an arm to another part. With further heating, the fastener would change shape yet again to lock itself in place. In effect, it would be an automated form of self-assembly.

Link

In this YouTube video, "The Disney Trap: How Copyright Steals our Stories," James Joyce's Molly Bloom and an Italian net-user have a video-chat about copyright and how the protracted term of copyright makes it hard for characters to defend themselves. It's a nice way of putting it -- by prohibiting new writers from retelling others' characters stories, the characters are limited to the perspective their writers imbued them with. Link (Thanks, Mr Bijou!)

One of the UCLA cops who was caught on video torturing a student in shackles with a tazer has a record of sadistic, violent attacks on the job.

Brendon sez, "LAist has a great rundown of the history of Terrence Duren, an 18-year veteran of the UCPD and the 'taser-happy' officer in last week's incident. Among his greatest hits, it seems that he's been fired from a 'real' police force, recommended by the University for dismissal after choking a frat boy with a night stick (UCPD just suspended him), and tried after *shooting a homeless man* (who survived)."

Duren hasn't had the smoothest career in law enforcement. He came to Westwood after being fired from the infamous Long Beach PD. A few years after being hired by UCLA he was accused of using his nightstick to choke a fratboy and the university asked the UCPD to fire Duren, but he was only given a three month suspension.

In late 2003 Duren shot a homeless man, Willie Davis Frazier, Jr., in a Kerckhoff Hall bathroom. Frazier, who attempted at first to shun lawyers and represent himself, was imbalanced enough to spend time in mental institution as the court tried to figure out if he was fit to stand trial.

During a 2004 preliminary hearing in which Duren testified against Frazier, the officer carried a Machiavelli book into court, "The Prince", which argues that the ends justifies the means. "Did you know that this was Tupac's favorite book?" he asked.

Link (Thanks, Brendon!)

Update: Blogging.la investigated the story further and the LA Times got it wrong -- Terrence Duren never worked with the Long Beach PD.

Newsweek takes notice of the burgeoning global anti-DRM movement:

Now, an increasingly vocal grassroots resistance to DRM is cropping up. An anti-DRM campaign called “Defective by Design,” which is organized by the Free Software Foundation, has 15,000 registered members; the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that DRM places limits on “your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.” Web sites like stopdrmnow.org and digitalfreedom.org have been launched “to protect individuals’ right to use new digital technologies” and urge boycotts on DRM-tagged content. David Berlind, executive editor of tech trade journal ZDNet, coined his own term for DRM: “Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection.” (Figure out the acronym).

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Andy sez, "Our local Fox affiliate in DC has been plugging their new blogging tool on air lately, inviting the public to use it. It's one of the first cases I've heard of in which a TV news station is doing this, but of course, there had to be a catch in the fine print."

You agree that any content you post becomes the property of FIM [Fox Interactive Media]. You understand and agree that FIM and its parent and affiliated companies may use, publish, copy, sublicense, adapt, edit, distribute, publicly perform, display and delete the content you post as they see fit. This right will terminate at the time you remove such content from the Site. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the content posted by you to the Site may remain on the FIM servers after you have removed such content from the Site, and FIM retains the rights to those copies.

If at any time you are not happy with the Forums or object to any material within the Forums, your sole remedy is to stop using them.

Now, it's clear to me that Fox -- or anyone who hosts others' words -- needs to know that the people who post the material on its site won't turn around and sue because the site is hosting their words. But as with all non-negotiated, crammed-down-your-throats "agreements," Fox goes so far beyond this as to make it clear that the lawsuits they want to guard against aren't the frivolous ones, but rather the ones that might arise from them actually ripping you off. Link (Thanks, Andy!)

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is on trial for laundering money by purchasing copyright licenses from MPAA members. Accused of co-conspiring with him is David Mills, the "estranged husband" of Tessa Jowell, the British copyright minister who has taken many extremist stances in support of the handful of US-led Fortune 100 companies that dominate global entertainment.

Next time you hear an entertainment exec spouting evidence-free garbage about P2P being used to fund terrorism, ask him about Berlusconi and his company's complicity with high official corruption and money-laundering.

Prosecutors say offshore companies set up in the early 1990s were used to buy American film rights which were sold at hugely inflated prices to Mr Berlusconi's television company, Mediaset.

It was an intricate system designed, they allege, to ensure the former prime minister avoided paying tax.

Link (Thanks, Becky!)

Galactus is Coming! is a freakin' high-larious mash-up of the classic Jack Chick religious comic tract and the Marvel Comics Galactus Devourer of Worlds mythos. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

My latest Locus Magazine column is up: "The March of the Polygons: How High-Definition Is Bad News for SF Flicks" is about the way that the move to high-def screens in the home shortens the commercial life of blockbuster sf movies.

Every year, the effects are more impressive, the impossible more daring. That's because today's special effects are almost universally generated on computers, and computers get better every year. Moore's Law describes the trend in processor performance, doubling every two years and getting faster every year. Other laws describe even steeper curves for storage, bandwidth, and bus-speeds. If Moore's Law applied to cars, you could replace your $12,500, 10-year-old, 39 miles/gallon Toyota with a $50 car that weighs 200 pounds and gets 500 miles to the gallon today.

It's a good reason to go to the box-office, but it's also the source of an awful paradox: yesterday's jaw-dropping movies are today's kitschy crap. By next year, the custom tools that filmmakers develop for this year's blockbuster will be available to every hack commercial director making a Coke ad. What's more, the Coke ads and crummy sitcoms will run on faster, cheaper hardware and be available to a huge pool of creators, who will actually push the technology further, producing work that is in many cases visually superior to the big studio product from last summer.

It's one thing for a black-and-white movie at a Hitchcock revival to look a little dated, but it's galling — and financially perilous — for last year's movie to date in a period of months. You can see what I mean by going to a Lord of the Rings festival at your local rep-house and comparing the generation-one creatures in Fellowship of the Ring to the gen-three beasts in Return of the King.

Link

This 10-legged rocking chair stutters from leg to leg as you rock it. Hard on the floors, easy on the eyes. Link (via Make)

Check out these amazing, Katamari Damacy-inspired earmuffs that you can buy or knit yourself from a pattern in Shojo Beat magazine. Link (via Craft)

Four individuals were busted off Costa Rica's Pacific coast smuggling 3 tons of cocaine in a DIY submarine. According to the Associated Press, the vessel floated along at 7 miles per hour at a depth of six feet. The giveaway were three pipes, apparently used to provide oxygen to the passengers, moving along the surface of the water. (Link) Earlier this year, the Colombian navy captured a 60-foot sub they suspected was used to smuggle blow. (Link) And in 2000, a 100-foot drug smuggling sub was found under construction in Colombia. (Link) (Thanks to all who sent this in!)

These vintage wooden signs depicting the Zipper People are up for auction on eBay with a starting bid of $99. The rendering's resemblance to the real Zipper People is uncanny. From the auction listing:

The "Zipper People" are believed to be the folk art signs that marked the entrance to the Zipper Ride, a famous roller coaster, one of which was on the Daytona Beach Boardwalk for many years. They are believed to be from the 40's, though the 1950's is possible. Both are painted on wood board and have a hard shell finish. There are a few nicks here and there, but the condition is remarkable for the age. Both have mounting brackets which are visible in the pictures. Great americana for your collection. Each is over 6 feet tall.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Manybooks is offering a free book from 1898 called Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher After 25 Years' Experience, by Ike Matthews. This short tome is sure to make wonderful fireplace reading for the whole family.

The damage Rats can do to property, commodities, etc., is almost incredible. I have had so many examples of this that I scarcely know which to submit as illustration. I think the worst case I have seen was where they gnawed a hole half way through a 2−1/4 inch lead pipe, and often I have known them to bite through a one−inch lead pipe. The worst damage is done when they get under the flag floors of cottage houses out of the drains. They scratch the soil from beneath the flags, which then sink, and the consequent stench from the drains is abominable, jeopardising the health of the tenants. I have seen a great many of these cases in the poorer parts of Manchester. The damage the Rats will do in the silk and similar trades, to the goods of merchants, or in the grocery business, is enormous, and not so much by reason of what they actually eat as by what they carry away, which is often ten times as much as they eat. I have often proved this when ferreting at a wholesale grocery warehouse. When we have taken up the boards between the laths and plaster we have found the ceiling almost full of lump sugar, nuts, candles, etc., which have been there for years, hoarded by the Rats. Now, this all means heavy loss, and that is why I say that any business man so suffering ought to engage the services of a professional Rat−catcher once a year in order to keep the Rats down, and catch as many as possible before they begin breeding.

Link

Science fiction writer Bradley Denton says a large cell tower near his home has been taken over by hundreds of buzzards.

You see, our cell-phone tower is now the permanent nighttime home of over a hundred black-headed buzzards. Big, ugly buzzards. The kind you see playing tug-of-war with whole deer carcasses.

Every morning when Barb and I begin our walk, there they are . . . just waking up, clacking their talons on the reverberant steel and stretching their great dark wings as they prepare to leap away and soar in search of the dead.

Once, I counted a hundred and twenty of them before I decided I didn’t want to know how many there were. Sometimes the tower is black-feathered from top to bottom. Other days, there aren’t so many. But I can’t recall a morning when there were none. And those who are there always watch us as we walk by.

Link

Reader comment:

Joel says:

The fellow who writes about the buzzards near his house should take a second to appreciate such a beautiful and interesting creature. Why, the vulture holds a distinction afforded few beings on this green earth. By consuming carrion, vultures step neatly out of the predator prey relationship. I think that's admirable, not spooky or unsettling.

Nature is a beautiful thing. A post like the buzzard one you hosted on boing boing I feel sad about. I wish more people felt differently about our fellow tenants.

Tony "Buzzard" Bussert says:

I'm a bit perplexed by why you included the comments from reader "Joel". He obviously didn't read the entire post from Bradley Denton, and by your posting the reader comment I'm inclined to think that you didn't either. In no way does it seem to me that Mr. Denton is taking offense to the buzzards. He says the following, "Yet it serves a purpose, and I know it has to be somewhere. We postmodern humans, we gots to have us our cell phones." This implies that he doesn't like the cell phone tower more than anything. He also says about the buzzards, "They're beautiful when they fly.". Your post of the comments of "Joel" detract from your usual thoughtful posts. Just thought I should point it out in the defense of Mr. Denton.

Kirsten Sanford (host and producer of TWIS - This Week in Science)says:

My thesis advisor at one point had a turkey vulture named Balzac. It was amazing to be able to get close to such a magnificent bird. They really are beautiful. Yes, some would probably find his red, wrinkled head slightly disturbing, but I thought he was quite regal looking. He had a thing for the chicks, too. Any man coming too close to his cage would get a screeching, but the ladies... he would sidle up to the wire mesh, tilt his head at us, and wink ever so suavely. All the while, he would make little whispering noises as if he were trying to tell us sweet nothings that would tempt us closer to him. I wonder if the cell phone tower in the post by Mr. Denton is being used as a rookery of sorts, or if it just happens to be in the right place to give the birds good lift when they take to flight.

Stephen Dubner took his family to Benihana in NYC and spotted a celebrity, but he's not telling. He's making readers guess.

One table over was a large party including someone that all of us recognized, whom we’ll call Celebrity X. A year ago, I don’t think many of us, if any, would have recognized Celebrity X -- even though he/she was pretty well known some 20 years ago. You could even say notorious. But that celebrity dimmed quite drastically. If in recent years you thought of this person at all, you probably would of thought of her/him as somewhere between a has-been and a clown.

Thanks to a couple of recent television shows, however, Celebrity X is back on top. This would seem to be due in considerable measure to an impeccable sense of timing.

There are some good guesses so far: Mr. T, Flavor Flav, Hulk Hogan, David Hasselhoff. I'll bet it is Flavor Flav. The first person to guess correctly wins an autographed copy of Freakonomics.

Chris Ware drew four different covers for the Thanksgiving issue of the New Yorker, and they all look terrific.

At the New Yorker site you an read his comic strip (a nice 1650x2250 scan -- thanks New Yorker!) and a five-minute interview with Ware (In MP3 format, not RealAudio -- thanks again, New Yorker!)

Link (Via Drawn!)

Reader comment:

Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review says:

Chris Ware also did the cover for the "Writers on Writers" special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. We gave him the whole shebang -- front, back, spine -- and told him to go crazy. (And, lo, he did. And it was good.) We've got a 2000x1442 GIF of it for our fellow Ware fanboys.

Steve Allen noodles on the piano while begging Kerouac to pardon him for asking some "square questions" in this video of a 1959 interview.

The brief interview is followed by Kerouac reading an excerpt of On The Road. ("I wrote the book because we're all gonna die.")

The end of the video shows Allen, many years later, reminiscing about the interview. Link

Reader comment:

Phil says:

The film What Happened to Kerouac? also features the interview footage you posted, along with a ton of other great archival footage and interviews with fellow beats - Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, etc. Well worth checking out if you liked the clip linked in that post.

Kyle says:

Jack's actually reading from the introduction to Visions of Cody. Gotta dig Jack, cat. :-)

The beloved Ape Lad has created a template for making your own Nano protector out of paper. Link

Last week I posted the story about Bank of America's callous disregard for a fraud victim who was arrested after the branch manager reported him to the police. As a bonus in that post, I added a video clip of a Bank of America employee singing a cover of a U2 song at a business meeting.

It turns out Universal Music thinks Bank of America violated Universal’s copyright of the song, because a lawyer for Universal posted a cease-and-desist letter on a site hosting the video. (NYT story here)

WFMU's Blog has a good entry about the story, along with information about the singer, whose name is Ethan Chandler. The best part is the way WFMU runs the lyrics to the U2 song side-by-side with the the Bank of America version.

For a darker reading of the BoA song, I recommend reading the lyrics side-by-side with U2's, which helps bring out some of the subtext.

It is even better ... Is it getting better?
Now that we’re the same ... Or do you feel the same?
Two great companies come together ... Will it make it easier on you now?
Now, MBNA is B of A ... You got someone to blame

Link

Update:

PhoneCam video of Johhny Marr and David Cross covering Ethan Chandlers rendition of "One." The video is interrupted after a few minutes by security goons, because... well, because that's what security goons do. Link

Jinx is sellng $6 rolls of RIAA bumwad -- though it seems redundant. Those four letters are already inextricably associated with dirty assholes. Link (Thanks, Olivia!)

My friend Rick Lieder is a science fiction illustrator with a sideline in macrofocus insect photography. He's just launched Bee Dreams, a new site of photos of bees from around his neighborhood in Michigan. Link

See also Macrofocus bug photos for sale

A reminder that I'll be hosting a free public talk by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the legendary reverse engineer who broke the Xbox. Bunnie will speak at my Canada-US Fulbright Chair speaker series at the University of Southern California in LA. In addition to his talents as a reverse engineer (documented in his excellent book Hacking the Xbox), Bunnie is an evangelist for hardware hacking, working to help software people understand how to get their hands dirty with hardware. He is presently working at Chumby, a company he co-founded -- Chumby makes an open bean-bag WiFi computer that has small touchscreen.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a nocturnal hacker and the hardware lead; his responsibilities include the architecture, design and production of chumby's electronics, as well as writing drivers for and maintaining the Linux kernel on the chumby. With a PhD in EE garnered from MIT in 2002, he has completed several major projects, ranging from hacking the Xbox (and writing the eponymous book), to designing the world's first fully-integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbps with Luxtera, Inc., to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech. bunnie has also participated in the design of 802.11b/Bluetooth transceivers (with Mobilian), graphics chips (with SGI), digital cinema CODECs (with Qualcomm), and autonomous robotic submarines (with MIT ORCA/AUVSI). He is also responsible for the un-design of many security systems, with an appetite for the challenge of digesting silicon-based hardware security. bunnie is also a contributing writer for MAKE magazine and a member of their technical advisory board.

When: Tuesday, November 21, 7PM

Where: University of Southern California Main Campus, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207

As always, we'll have audio from the talk up a day or two later.

Link

Carl sez, "Hordes of Smithsonian lobbyists have descended on Capitol Hill to reverse recent congressional actions meant to mitigate at least a little bit of the damage from the Smithsonian's exclusive 30-year selloutcontract to Showtime. Lobbyists are moving moving on several fronts, including trying to keep a GAO analysis of the contract secret and rescinding House language that would cut the Secretary's salary in half so he would only earn what the President earns. This situation is begging for some sunshine in the attic. If you're interested, there is a letter open for signature that asks Congress to stand firm. More info in this post on Interesting-People. Link

See also Smithsonian's Showtime deal: critical attorneys shred it

Geekcorps sez, "In the village of Bourem Inaly, Mali there are over 120 television sets powered by 12-volt car batteries, but there is almost nothing to watch. With its CanTV project, Geekcorps has helped the local radio station stream video content to the local community over WiFi. The radio station, which rents these units out, benefits from a new monthly revenue stream while the villagers benefit with an improved source of news and entertainment. One goal of the CanTV project is to make it possible to build the CanTV receivers or TV cantennas (antennas built with cans) using locally using locally available parts, with the exception of the $25 audio/video receiver currently imported from Canada. Also, the TV cantennas have been designed so that a local technician can quickly learn how to install them without special tools. The radio station already has access to television broadcasts via satellite, and a TV over WiFi transmitter installed in August 2005 by Moussa Keita of Geekcorps." Link (Thanks, GeekCorps!)

Ryan sez, "I work at the CN Tower and have seen all kinds of days, when its all fogged up and you can't see anything - to when you can see all the way down to Niagara. But... I had never quite seen a day like this, the clouds were hanging pretty low so one you got to the observation deck, you were actually sitting above the clouds. I think this picture turned out the most incredible of all of them." Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

Update: Brad sez, "I used to work at the CN Tower too (in 1976!) but much later I took this unusual picture from it. that's unusual is that the 360 degree view doesn't exist from any one spot, it is taken from around the edges of the observation deck unsing techniques I have worked out to avoid the paralax problems that will occur in such situations. (I've done Boston, Tokyo and Ottawa the same way)"

Creative has restored the ability to record FM radio on some of its MP3 players. Last month, Creative shipped an "update" to its FM-recording players that disabled the record-from-radio feature (they hid this information in the fine-print on the update, focusing instead on the fact that they'd added new languages to the interface). Now, about a month later, they've restored the feature, after great outcry from their customers.

The newest firmware for the Vision:M is now up and we have FM recording again. This is a great move by Creative as many people here were really losing faith in them, and the MP3 player industry as a whole because of this removal. Creative weren't even adding the FM recording feature to their newest players (Zen Vision W, Zen V Plus, etc..) so hopefully that will also change. I congratulate Creative in making their wrong a right.

Link (Thanks, Futwick!)

See also Creative Labs shafts MP3 player owners with feature revocation

Ms Darcy knits delicious-looking wooly cupcakes and photo-documents them on Flickr. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

FreeGeek, a Portland, OR nonprofit that fixes up old PCs, turns them into Linux boxen, and gives them away, was robbed this weekend. The thieves took the machines that the FreeGeeks use to organize, test and upgrade the donated PCs, cutting the org off at the knees. They're calling on people to report suspicious sales of used Ubuntu laptops.

Hello, fine people. I'm writing with sad news. Last night, Free Geek, Portland's groovy technology non-profit, sustained its most major break in to date. The majority of the items stolen were laptops, a few hard drives, and LCD screens. Many doors were smashed in forcibly in the process. While our laptop program is becoming a major source of income for us, it also is a great source of needed hardware for local non-profits. This income is now gone, and local do-gooders will have to go without our free source of laptops for a few months.

So we're making a call out to the community to help us stop these thieves and prevent this from happening again. If you're offered a laptop with Ubuntu Linux installed on it in the next couple of months, give us a call at 503-232-9350. Used LCD screens, while harder to pin down as originating at Free Geek, might raise an eyebrow as well.

Thanks for your help!

Link

Update: Steve sez, "We (the Golden Greats) arrived with our gear to be greeted with the bad news, and more bad news: the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) was hit the previous night! The IPRC supports Portland's zine community, and I fear that they will have a tough time replacing those Macs. I haven't seen any postings or news about the break-in, but given the openness of both organizations, I would suspect the crimes are related."

I toured the IRPC just after the break-in. Spirits were high, but the sight of those empty work-tables was really depressing.

The US Mint is issuing a new one-dollar coin that will feature a new president every year. 2016's president will be Richard "Lying Scumbag" Nixon. I predict the "Nixie" will be hoarded and used to pelt George W Bush at his kid's birthday party appearances, as he attempts to eke out a living by supplementing the meager nest-egg left to him by his handlers after they are through looting the US public coffers. Link

The GR8 TaT2 Maker is a toy tattoo gun for your little budding skin-artist: "Open up your very own pretend play tattoo parlor. This easy-to-use tattoo maker kit includes an electronic tattoo pen and funky stencils. Using soft, safe pulsating action, the tattoo pen creates realistic, washable designs with dramatic effects." Link (via Neatorama)

Check out these gorgeous "beer goggles" -- working glasses-frames made from old beer bottles. They're from Urban Spectacles, the mad glasses-frame makers responsible for the previously-seen hand-carved frames and frames from old vinyl records, and they come with a ring made from the top of the bottle and a necktie made from the label. Link

See also:
Handmade wooden specs-frames
Hand-made glasses from vinyl records