The break-room in Disney World's Cinderella's Castle has been converted to a "royal suite" that winners of Disney's Year of Dreams competition can sleep in. The first photos of the finished suite have surfaced. Disney World's most exclusive suite looks like a fantasy room in a really good Shinjuku love hotel. If you win a night in the suite, you're locked in until morning -- no sneaky running out into the Magic Kingdom and riding the Haunted Mansion in the nude! Link

Minifig sez, "It's been a while, but Xeni very kindly linked to me making Dick Cheney in Lego. In return, it would have been nice to make her out of Lego, but however hard I try, I can't get it right. Instead, I've made Cory, with a heap of his CC books next to him. Enjoy. There are a few other famous people recreated in Lego in my flickr photostream if you take a look around." Link (Thanks, Minifig!)

Steve from Scary Toy Clown submits his "post following the path of bright orange novelty lederhosen from the Bavarian Beer company which have now shown up as the main game piece in a Chinese board game with an amusingly violent commercial. Video and pictures follow."

Bavaria Beer, a Dutch brewer, doesn’t just make a hearty beer, they’ll also sell you bright orange pants with a lion’s tail attached. You can buy them here but they were originally given away if you bought enough beer. Bright orange is the color of Dutch pride and the Lion is the symbol of Dutch soccer so it would seem the perfect novelty garment. People who drink your beer get a free pair of lederhosen, the company gets some free adverstising as “Bavaria” is emblazoned across the chest. Chances are you’ll get a few people to wear them to the game. You want to see a sea of orange? Look around for Dutch soccer fans on flickr...

Scrappy Chinese manufacturer, Wang Ming, saw an opportunity where others saw a crisis and pressed the excess pants into service as props in a baffling looking board game named Smack The Lion. Wang Ming makes 3 products: Plastic trees, Industrial oven hand protection, and Family Game. While I’m sure they make a nice tree, Family Game has a weirder back story.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

And now, we pause for a Unicorn Moment. From the lovely and talented R. Stevens of dieselsweeties.

I decided to try out veganism a little over a week ago -- so far I feel great, and it's a lot easier than I thought. A number of things inspired me to give it a go, including Joi Ito's blog entries about his own vegan bodyhacking experiment, and this Rolling Stone article by Jeff Tietz. A friend had a copy sitting on the couch, open to this page, and I couldn't take my eyes off the story.

It's an investigative piece on how Smithfield Foods, America's largest hog slaughterer, circumvents law, pollutes like crazy, and creates antibiotic and vaccine-laden pork products that feed our country. I don't intend to become one of those annoying vegangelicals who tries to convert everyone to tempeh, but this was just a fascinating read:

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

Link to "Boss Hog," by Jeff Tietz. Photo by doveimaging.com. (thanks, Sputnik!)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Time-lapse video of decomposing piglets

Reader comments:

Cowicide says,

(Unintentional?) Smithfield Ham Pron?

Check out the screenshot in my post. It's from this part of the Smithfield website here: Link.

Damn, now that's some juicy ham pron if I've ever seen it.... I just want to stick my tongue right in the midd... (OK... I'll stop).

Cropped thumbnail of porkse.cx above, here's a JPEG link to full screenshot.

Daddymem says,

Here's an employee site regarding Smithfield Farms' labor practices: Link.

Kelly says,

B..b..but Smithfield can't possibly be a polluter. They have a web page that shows they got an Environmental President's Award award! Link.

numlok says,

I dig your post about Pig farms and Smithfield Foods in particular. I only want to ad that if you really want to turn people off to their products, I can think of no better way than their own (vintage drive-in) advertising. Enjoy! Video Link.

Manuel says,

Here's a link to the pig farm in google maps for the site referenced in the "Pork's Dirty Secret" article.

[Ed note: those big, pink "lakes" in that map detail above, next to what look like housing for the pigs? Filled with pigshit.]

Mark says,

If you go through the Smithfield site, they link to worldwatermonitoringday.org. They said they were involved with this for the last three years. However if this is going on for the last several years, where are the result from before? There is no link to previous years result. Also will the actual data be made public or will it get filtered?

Paul Jones says,

Just saw your pig postings about the trouble Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, NC as I got back from the Science Bloggers Conference where folks from OnlineNewsHour began their talk with a bit from their 2004 show called "Pigs and Politics": A snip from the transcript:

"North Carolina's ten million hogs produce twice as much feces and urine as the populations of the cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago combined. Industrial farms, most with thousands of hogs each, store the waste in open-air pits, called lagoons. They spray the waste, untreated, as manure on adjacent fields."

Tasty.

John Alderman says,

Look at these crazy pictures of a festival in Taiwan where it appears they sacrifice 2,000 pigs: Link.

Ian Hogben says,

I was reading about the (horrific) pig farm article and couldn't believe there was no mention of the unintentional goatse of the farm's aerial map. From the user comment "Here's a link to the pig farm in google maps for the site referenced in the "Pork's Dirty Secret" article.", the photo is SO TOTALLY goatse it's hilarious.

Nate says,

*sigh* I've never been so conflicted about eating meat after reading that post. So I hope Choppy the two faced pig either brings a smile or a WTF. Reminds me a bit of Cy the kitten. Link.

Andrea James says,

Speaking of the poor pigs, ever seen a state of the art Jarvis bung dropper? Link. Be sure to watch the vid at upper right: Link. Not to be confused with a bung cleaner: Link. Or bung ring expander: Link. Or lung gun: Link. Or spinal cord remover: Link. Other fun links for kill floors and carcass prep: Link.

Go veggie! I attached a pic of the best way to taste a pig.

UPDATE: Many more of you wrote in with strong opinions on pigshit, economic activism, and braised tofurkey. Your comments after the jump.

sheep ringtone
squow
sinister ducks
kungfu bunnies
cows with guns
these little pigs
chicken a day
cowscapes
cluck of july

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!) Image: From the Cowscapes series by photographer Rachael Sudlow. To purchase a print, email rachael.sudlow at gmail.com. Below, kung fu bunnies, which is insane.

Update: some of you have complained of an auto-loading Flash embed with sound for the "kung fu bunnies" in this post -- there was never a flash embed in this post, just a jpeg that links to the Flash content. But we did a little digging and learned that BoingBoing's feed was configured to pre-load linked-to Flash items under certain circumstances, so we've turned that off. Sorry for the annoyance!

My NPR "Day to Day" colleague Luke Burbank did an amazing piece this week about the huge, passionate, came-from-nowhere online community of Barbaro fandom. You gotta see the fanmade videos, chock full of race footage and love, and set to the music from the likes of Enya, Michael Bolton, or Andrea Boccelli. "Believe in Barbaro," reads the metadata. From Luke's introduction:

The racehorse Barbaro is recovering this week from his latest setback, a diseased hoof. As he convalesces, an online community of thousands is following his progress breathlessly. Last spring, Barbaro was a contender for the Triple Crown. He had won the Kentucky Derby and was a favorite to win the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore.

Then fate struck. Not far out of the gate at the start of the Preakness, Barbaro shattered his right hind leg. It was a heartbreaking development, accented by images of his visibly distraught jockey, Edgar Prado. Barbaro's career was effectively over.

But his life as a cause celebre was just beginning. YouTube is full of Barbaro tribute videos and photo montages such as this one, all set to tearjerking music. At another site, 14,000 candles have been "lit" in his honor. On various message boards, people post fervent messages expressing hope and admiration for the struggling racehorse. One couple even invited Barbaro to their wedding.

Link to audio, text, and photos for "Loving Barbaro: A Racehorse and His Fans." Here's a bunch more Barbaro fan videos.

Reader comment: Dave Warner says,

Barbaro was recently voted "Sports Human of the Year" at Gawker sports blog Deadspin.com, in no small part because of the fervent fan base he's developed -- a fan base that has declared Deadspin to be "garbage." In particular, Dee Mirich of Merrillville, IN, has become a cult figure at Deadspin for her "Affirmed" messages. Check the link for all of Deadspin's posts about Barbaro and his fans.

There's probably a great Linux joke in here, but I'm not funny enough to come up with it. Technologist and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold visited the Falklands[ / Islas Malvinas], and took some amazing photographs of penguins and other creatures there. Dr. Myhrvold is CEO and managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a private entrepreneurial firm he founded with his former Microsoft colleague, Dr. Edward Jung. Snip from an essay about what he observed on the islands:

It turns out that there are some reasonably well developed scientific theories of cuteness.

Penguins look like little people – their bipedal stance, walking gait and proportions look like a tiny toy person. Self-love is something humans are good at, so it is natural to find these animals compelling. Their behaviors also happen to map well to human behavior – or at least one can naively imagine so because they are stereotypically similar to some of our own actions.

That covers penguins, but there are some more universal aspects of cuteness. I once studied to be a cartoonist (alas, I wasn’t funny enough) and in that field they have this very well figured out. The rule of thumb is that if you want a cartoon character to be cute, you draw it so that the total body height is between 2.5 and 3 times the height of the head. This gives you a Mickey Mouse, or Tweety Bird sort of character. You then make the eyes a large fraction of head height – little beady eyes are not cute. To make a heroic character – say Superman, Spiderman or Captain America you want 7.5 to 8 heads high. It always has amused me that being a pinhead looks heroic.

Link. Image: (c) 2007, Nathan Myhrvold. (Thanks, John Brockman)

Reader comment: Jeff says,

You should link to Mhyrvold's article on the future of digital photography, it's a must read. Direct link here. Excerpt:

I'm eagerly awaiting Canon's next move, probably to 25-plus megapixels. I'm what marketing people call an early adopter, but mark my words - you'll own a 16- or even a 25-megapixel point-and-shoot in a few years, and it will not stop there. By some estimates, your eyes have an effective resolution of more than 500 megapixels. If you can see it, why shouldn't a camera record it? The reason many pictures don't turn out is that in daytime the human eye can easily perceive a dynamic range of 10,000:1, while at night it is more like 1,000,000:1. Meanwhile, color slide film can record only about 32:1, and digital cameras, about 64:1.

In many situations, this forces a choice - do you expose for the light parts of the scene and let the dark parts go dead black, or save the shadows and turn the bright parts pure white? Future digital sensors will fix this, with ever broader dynamic range and greater light sensitivity (the ISO rating).

Focus is another problem. How many of your pictures wind up fuzzy? Autofocus technology can help, but cameras today still have a limitation on how much of a scene can be in focus at one time, known as depth of field. If you focus on the flower in front of you, the mountain in the background is apt to be fuzzy. Yet technically there is no reason we can't get essentially infinite depth of field, again by using more digital processing.

Javier Rodruiguez says,

My impression concerning your post would have been much better if you just said "Islas Malvinas" instead of Falklands (...) they always belonged to Argentina, not just a matter of sovereignty but simply geology (it's physically undeniable that they are inside South America's continental platform). I guess you regard colonialism as evil, as much as many of us do.

Above: "Pac Man's secret," by Ape Lad.

Here are a bunch of BoingBoing posts from the past week that (a) people talked about or linked to a lot (b) we were particularly obsessed with.

BoingBoingBoing podcast 9: Matt Haughey of MeFi

Some Zune tracks are crippled with no-sharing flags

Feral woman found in Cambodia

Grand Canyon employees not "silenced" as PEER claimed

Mudflation: inflation in virtual worlds

Unicycle tank from 1933

Self-tuning portable RF jammer disguised as menthol cigs

A town called Fucking / A town called Feces

Government guide to destroying old Woodsy Owl costumes

Campaign to saved "world's weirdest creatures"

Two-person teledildonic rig

Xeni NYT op-ed from CES: Gadgets as Tyrants

Cory's new short story collection: OVERCLOCKED