The Buddha Machine from Chinese manufacturer FM3 looks like a cheap transistor radio. Turn the single dial, and it starts making crazy-ass, generative ambient music. Press the single button and a different kind of crazy-ass music emanates from the single small speaker. That's it -- one button, one dial, one speaker. There's also an LED to let you know it's on.

It is the single most interesting gadget I've held all month. It doesn't feel like something manufactured this decade. It feels like something from the first blush of Walkman knockoffs, the JiLs and the like. And the sounds are really soothing and kind of haunting. There's nothing on the box that tells you how the sound is generated -- maybe it's analog, but I'm guessing digital.

At $35, it's a little steep, given that it has the hand-feel of a Happy Meal toy. But I bought one and I don't regret it. It's going in my keeper pile -- it will be no less anachronistic, weird and interesting in an age of nanocomputers than it is today.

The Buddha Machine is a modified version of a device used in Buddhist temples throughout Asia, which feature repeating loops of chanting monks or nuns. This particular incarnation is the brainchild of the musical duo FM3. It contains nine preset loops which which play individually and run continuously. The sounds can be played from the built in speaker, or by connecting headphones to the built in jack.

If you are aware of ambient music such as the works of Brian Eno (Music for Airports, Discreet Music) then this is of a similar vein. Whereas music on a CD, Record or tape inherrently has to end before being restarted, the loops of the Buddha Machine will continue for as long as the AA batteries work (or forever if you connect a 4.5v supply).

Link

Update: Sonny sez, "GM3 is not a manufacturer but a group formed in 1999 consisting of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian. They have released full CDs under that band name and have also done some CDs for the excellent Sublime Frequencies record label which I suggest you check out. Also a album was released of remixes of all the loops by various artists called 'Jukebox Buddha.'"

See also: Musician releases songs in a $23 electronic gizmo

Update 2: FM3's Christiaan sez, "Here's the official English site. The Buddha machine is available in the USA for only $23 from our distributor Forced Exposure, and in the UK at Boomkat."

Update 3: Simon sez, "All nine Buddha Machine loops in uncompressed .WAV format are available for download."

Update 4: John sez, "Sonic musician Robert Henke, aka Monolake, has a great album of Buddha Machine remixes available." and Michael sez, "I live in Taiwan and have my own B-box that I bought at the NT$10 (33 cents) store down the road."

Update 5: Rob sez, "Your readers in toronto may want to head to a Buddha Machine gathering *today* in Toronto's Allen Gardens, also, Buddha Machine pool on Flickr."

Update 6: Mark sez, "I thought you might be interested in this (video) interview I conducted with FM3 for flasher.com at Montreal's MUTEK festival in 2005. We talked mostly about the conception and creation of the Buddha Machine and I think it's a pretty interesting look at their process. You can find it here."

Check out this lost remnant of the Disney archives -- an irreverant, unofficial employee send-up of the Haunted Mansion, done in MAD Magazine style.

Stephen Worth, Director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, very generously passed on scans of a wonderful vintage Disneyland document to post here at 2719 Hyperion. The Haunted Mansion Supplement appears to have been a supplemental publication to the internal newsletter Backstage Disneyland, and was produced to commemorate the 1969 opening of the Haunted Mansion. It is a tongue-in-cheek send-up of WED Enterprises, the company’s theme park design division that would ultimately evolve into Walt Disney Imagineering.

The highlight of the piece is a two-page Mad Magazine-inspired comic strip by William Barry.

Link (via The Disney Blog)

On the Soupy Sales show in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an ongoing gimmick where there'd be a knock at the door and Soupy would open it to reveal a surprise celebrity guest. The best part of the gag is that neither Soupy nor the audience knew who the celebrity would be. Once though, Soupy's crew played a great prank on him where a stripper was waiting behind the door. COOP found the video on YouTube. It's a real hoot. From Wikipedia:

One time during the Los Angeles years, as Sales was ending the show, when he opened the door he saw a topless dancer gyrating with a balloon. Viewers saw only the balloon, although a second, non-broadcasting camera captured the uncensored version, and Sales was forced to try to keep the show going without revealing the risque events backstage.

Link

UPDATE: YouTube yanked the video, but reader Matt Sanderson kindly points out that right now it's still viewable via Delutube. Link

Czech painter Jeremiah Palecek has created these Vista error message stickers ("Error: The Operation Completed Successfully") that are the right size to stick over the Vista screens in bus-shelter ads and the like. Link (via Wonderland)

See also: Oil paintings inspired by video-game scenes

The makers of China's popular MMO Cabal told banned players that they could get back into the game if they donated blood.

An online game operator has demanded that banned players donate blood to be allowed back into the game. Moliyo, which runs a 3D massively multiplayer online game in China, made the demand after banning 120,000 players who attempted to hack the game.

More than 100 players had already signed up to exchange half a litre (1 pint) of blood for game accounts. The company has also offered free accounts to ordinary players who give blood...

Chinese hospitals have had increasing difficulty attracting blood donors in recent years after scandals in which thousands of donors and blood recipients contracted HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. Blood donors in China are usually paid about 12 dollars per donation.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Singapore is building this crazy housing block with four towers kind of hanging off the sides of another, central tower.

The 153 meter tall tower will be located at the intersection of Scotts Road and Cairnhill Road, in close proximity to Orchard Road, Singapore’s famous shopping and lifestyle street. With 20,000m² of built floor area, the building will provide 68 high-end apartment units with panoramic views. The design strategically maneuvers within the highly regulated building environment to maximize the full potential of the site: Four individual apartment towers are vertically offset from one another and suspended from a central core.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

A Boing Boing reader writes, "Bruce Lehman, the architect of the DMCA and the WIPO Internet Treaties, appeared at a conference in Montreal today and made a series of admissions that are obvious to everyone but still remarkable given the source."

The most interesting - and surprising - presentation came from Bruce Lehman, who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute. Lehman explained the U.S. perspective in the early 1990s that led to the DMCA (ie. greater control though TPMs), yet when reflecting on the success of the DMCA acknowledged that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful" (presentation starts around 11:00). Moreover, Lehman says that we are entering the "post-copyright" era for music, suggesting that a new form of patronage will emerge with support coming from industries that require music (webcasters, satellite radio) and government funding. While he says that teens have lost respect for copyright, he lays much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s.

In a later afternoon discussion, Lehman went further, urging Canada to think outside the box on future copyright reform. While emphasizing the need to adhere to international copyright law (ie. Berne), he suggested that Canada was well placed to experiment with new approaches. He was not impressed with Bill C-60, seemingly because he does not believe that it went far enough in reshaping digital copyright issues. Given ongoing pressure from the U.S., I'm skeptical about Canada's ability to chart a new course on copyright, yet if the architect of the DMCA is willing to admit that change is needed, then surely our elected officials should take notice.

I think that Lehman is still out of it. Patronage? Has he missed the fact that there are tons of new, copy-friendly artists who are making a good living from touring (using free copies to bring people to gigs), from direct sales of MP3s, from merch, and so on? Sure, these people aren't supporting a label that takes $0.92 out from every buck they earn, but should the law concern itself with full, permanent employment for middlemen? If they add value, they'll survive. If the market doesn't support them, they'll go broke. The point of copyright is to support creativity, not Fortune 100 entertainment giants.

This Slashdot article also includes a link to some video of the event, with Lehman's talk at 11:00. In the video, Lehman reportedly blames the DMCA's failure on the record industry (McGill University's crazy media player won't play the video in my browser for some reason, and they don't have a direct download link -- someone rip/post this and send me the URL?)

Link, Link to video

Update: Here's the Windows stream -- still won't play for me, but maybe someone can transcode it to something less brain-damaged. -- Thanks, Whiteg!

Update 2: Thanks to Jason Turgeon for ripping this video to something easier to see. Here's the whole thing, and here's Bruce Lehman's bit.

Update 3: Carl Malamud has made the whole video available on the Internet Archive.

The Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index is a colorful entomologist's attempt to map out the relative ouchiness of different bug-stings. The definitions -- from a man who was stung many, many times -- are hilarious:

* 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
* 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
* 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
* 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
* 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
* 2.x Honey bee and European hornet.
* 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
* 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
* 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
* 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

Link (via Kottke)

My friend Rael Dornfest is the founder and CEO of values of n, the company that created Stikkit ("little yellow notes that think") and now, iwantsandy, an email assistant. Rael asked me to come up with a drawing of Sandy and here's what I gave him. Can't wait for the service to go live! Link

Patrick Rosenkranz, author of the highly recommended history of underground comics, Rebel Visions, says

Thanks for your advance listing for the Rand Holmes art show. I helped to organize it. It was a unique experience in a wild and wooly place. My son Crispin and I spent six days shooting a documentary of the event. He posted some pictures on Flickr.

Link

Holme's painting of a marijuana farming family reminds me of Will Elder's A Visit to Grandma's. (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Rand Holmes retrospective
• Account of Rand Holmes art show

Next Thursday, March 29 at 6:30, I'll be doing a drop-in signing and meet-and-greet at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego. They've got a stack of copies of Overclocked (my new short story collection) in stock. I hope to see you there!

When: Thursday, March 29: 6:30-7PM
Where: Mysterious Galaxy Books, 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302, San Diego, CA 92111, 858.268.4747

Link

On the Rich Text blog, a list of the most expensive items in each Amazon category. The write-ups are really funny, and the items are often surprising -- entire businesess, a spacesuit, and buildings!

Toys: A city-park-size playground system for $32,229.59. The most expensive toy for a single child is an electric monster truck for $13,800. For that I bet the kid would have more fun with a real, yet not monster, truck.

Automotive: A JIC EK2D1-TI res Spartan DE Type 1 TI Exhaust System for a 2dr 1996-2000 Honda Civic for… $891,480. I don’t understand either. #2 is an actual physical auto parts store for sale for $750,000.

Gourmet Food: 4 lbs Russian Beluga Caviar for $10,560. I was expecting something even more ridiculous, but ok.

Grocery: Skin cream for $340, but that’s boring. How about 25 lbs of Altoids for $337? 22 lbs of chocolate powder for $313? (Gourmet Food and Grocery? Classist!)

Furniture & Décor: “Goddard replica“, $9,999,999. I’m not sure what it’s a replica of, but I’m betting it’s not the entire space research complex. If that seems a bit too much, then there’s a $999,999 space rock paperweight. Incidentally Amazon themselves put the accent on the “e” in “Décor”.

Outdoor Living: 10×18 Log Wedding Chapel with Wooden Roof,  $20,319.97. Now this is the kind of ridiculous-but-not-impossible thing I wanted to find on a list of Amazon’s most expensive things. But a wedding chapel really ought to cost twenty grand, right? So there’s also a $14,662 barbecue grill that you could use beside your $13,997 tiki hut.

Apparel: Space suit, $999,999. I think they’re pulling my leg, though, so skipping over the jewelry that is in the wrong category, we have a $40,000 fur coat from WEBFURS. You know, if you’d asked me what WEBFURS was, I wouldn’t have guessed “fur coat company”.

Sporting Goods: Football arcade game, with real football-throwing, for $88,550. #2 is an extremely dorky golf cart for $77,988.

Link (via Consumerist)

I love the giant, luxuriant cakes printed on the upholstery of these Dutch kids' chairs. Link (via Cribcandy)

This Chinese phone comes built into a pack of cigarettes and sports a government health warning, an MP3 player, dual GSM radios, a VGA screen and a microSD slot, all for $175 (purchase price includes cigarettes). Link, Chinese Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Carol Shloss, a Stanford professor, has prevailed in her lawsuit over the litigious estate of James Joyce. Shloss, a Joyce scholar had been threatened by the Joyce estate (who also threatened to sue the Irish library for displaying Joyce's letters!) over her forthcoming book. Larry Lessig and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society represented her, and fought the Joyce state to surrender. Bravo!

Last June we sued the Estate of James Joyce to establish the right of Stanford Professor Carol Shloss to use copyrighted materials in connection with her scholarly biography of Lucia Joyce. Shloss suffered more than ten years of threats and intimidation by Stephen James Joyce, who purported to prohibit her from quoting from anything that James or Lucia Joyce ever wrote for any purpose. As a result of these threats, significant portions of source material were deleted from Shloss's book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake.

In the lawsuits we filed against the Estate and against Stephen Joyce individually, we asked the Court to remove the threat of liability by declaring Shloss's right to publish those deleted materials on a website designed to supplement the book. After the trying to have the case dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, the Estate gave up the fight. Joyce and the Estate have now entered into a settlement agreement enforceable by the Court that prohibits them from enforcing any of their copyrights against Shloss in connection with the publication of the supplement, whether in electronic or printed form. (The Settlement Agreement is posted here.)

Link (via Lessig)

See also:
Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce
James Joyce's descendants are copyright jerks
Molly Bloom talks copyright

The US News and World Report interviewed a bunch of tech people about making America more competitive and innovative, including me. Flatteringly, they published the article under the headline "America Needs More Boing Boing Economics."

1) I would repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that it would once again be legal to create technology that competes directly with incumbent technology–for example, to make a device that plays all the songs on your iPod. It's presently illegal to do so, because you have to break Apple's copy prevention to get the songs to play on non-Apple hardware.

2) I would then create a black-letter law that repealed the "inducement" standard set out in the Grokster Supreme Court decision. That's the standard that says that if you designed your technology with the idea that some users might use it unlawfully, then your technology is illegal. The problem is that it's often impossible to know which uses will and won't be lawful until a court rules on them. Under this standard, the videocassette recorder would be illegal, since Sony advertised it as a machine for time-shifting (which the Supremes found legal) and for making libraries of shows (which they didn't find legal). It's inducement that's at the heart of Viacom's ridiculous lawsuit against YouTube.

3) Finally, I would regulate telcos to enforce a neutral Internet. These companies are creatures of enormous regulatory largess–without government handouts, like rights of way into every basement in the country, they wouldn't exist–and if they don't want to play fair, let's get someone else to run the phone network. Government monopolies aren't a right; they're a privilege.

Link (Thanks, Jim!)

Alcohol and tobacco are more "harmful" than LSD and ecstasy, according to a new study published in scientific medical journal the Lancet. Researchers from Bristol University and the UK's Medical Research Council came up with "a systematic framework and process" to assess the harm of certain drugs. They developed a "matrix of harm" to classify 20 different drugs. From Bristol University:

Professor David Nutt from the University of Bristol, Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, and colleagues, identified three main factors that together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse:

1. the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug
2. the tendency of the drug to induce dependence
3. the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society...

Professor Colin Blakemore added: “Drug policy is primarily aimed at reducing the harm to individual users, their families and society. But at present there is no rational, evidence-based method for assessing the harm of drugs. We have tried to develop such a method. We hope that policy makers will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than many illegal substances.”

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

France's space agency has released more than 100,000 UFO-related documents. The material, documenting sightings as far back as 1937, is now being uploaded in batches to the space agency's Web site. From the International Herald Tribune:

The space agency, known by its French initials CNES, said it is making them public to draw the scientific community's attention to unexplained cases and because their secrecy generated suspicions that officials were hiding something.

"There's always this impression of plots, of secrets, of wanting to hide things," (said Jacques Patenet, head of the space agency's Group for Study and Information on Nonidentified Aerospace Phenomena.) "The great danger would be to leave the field open to sects and charlatans."

He said many cases were unexplained lights in the sky. "Only 20 to 30" could be classified as "Objet Volant Non Identifie" — UFOs that appeared to be physical objects, leaving "marks on the ground, radar images," he said...

Only 9 percent of France's strange phenomena have been fully explained, the agency said. Experts found likely reasons for another 33 percent, and 30 percent could not be identified for lack of information.

Link to IHT article, Link to the overloaded CNES site (Thanks, Chris Courtney!)

Glenn Fleishman sez,

The FCC approved the rules for in-band, on-channel (IBOC) digital AM and FM yesterday, and didn't include a broadcast flag requirement. Digital radio has been broadcasting in the US under interim rules, mostly on the FM band and initially largely on public radio, for over three years. One company, iBiquity, controls this particular form of digital audio broadcasting (DAB). About 1,200 stations broadcast digital signals, 300 of them multicasting, or providing one or more additional digital-only broadcasts.

Part of what has held back DAB in the US has been uncertainty about the FCC's ultimate statement on IBOC would be, especially in regards to AM, and about a broadcast flag. Because IBOC's FM flavor has the dynamic range of a CD (albeit with somewhat less fidelity than a good MP3 or AAC), the RIAA and others have raised the same bugbears for terrestrial DAB as they have for Sirius and XM.

IBOC's particular difference from European DAB, by the way, is that it allows existing broadcasters to use their current frequencies and nestle digital signals alongside the stronger analog signals. (IBOC requires 1 percent of the power to reach a similar geographic area: 100,000 watt stations broadcast 1,000 watts of IBOC.)

There is a fair amount of opposition to IBOC particularly in the AM band, because of the concern of how AM signals propagate between dusk and dawn, with buzz from digital signals allegedly affecting reception far distance. Hobbyists DXers also hate IBOC because it interferes with their hobby (pun intended). The FCC dismissed all the petitions against IBOC as part of yesterday's order, and allowed 24-hour-a-day AM broadcasting, which was previously restricted.

With the FCC approving IBOC without a broadcast flag requirement, Congress would have to impose a regulatory requirement. Which seems unlikely with the current composition.

Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

A couple of weeks ago I posted a couple of entries about people who refused to give up their homes to new development and ended up being surround by a parking lot, freeway, or airport. Many readers offered stories of other holdouts. Here they are.

Here's a long interview with 40-year-old Mrs Wuping, the owner of the "nail house" (called that because it sticks out of the pit around it like a nail).

Wuping: until present I haven’t received a single bit of monetary compensation or a resettlement. According to the pertinent regulations, at the minimum they have to give us temporary housing, and you’ve seen in the picture there aren’t any, we can’t even get up to the building. This absolutely is the government and businessmen working together; there is nothing we can do. Jiulong Hills is completely managed by the district party committee and government. At the hearing yesterday I cited several laws and regulations, all are explicit, the city cannot force people to leave their homes for demolition.

Kurt Randall says:

Hey, there is another guy like this in Hamilton Ontario, whose house is surrounded by a mall parking lot. I've admired the guy for years every time I drive by for not giving up. I've always wondered what is going to happen to these sorts of places once the homeowner finally moves or dies. Sadly, I can't imagine that most of these holdout houses will survive their owners.

Destin says:

All these stories about companies building around homeowners who wouldn't sell out in the face of "progress," and no link to arguably the most famous example? I refer, of course, to the case of one Mr. B. Bunny, who successfully defended the sanctity of his American home against an *extremely* aggressive developer. His brave struggle was documented in this 1950 film by historian Charles M. Jones.

Nathan says:

http:// In response to the article about the Chinese leaving a house standing in the midst of a construction site, I'd like to point out that this isn't the first time this has been done.

Around 100 years ago, in Seattle Washington, they undertook a project and washed away and entire large hill before this sort of thing would have been illegal for environmental reasons. Anyone who didn't sell their land and go along with the regrading was left on what is known as a "Spite Mound". There are various photos of these, including on the page linked.

Shad says:

I love the farmhouse at the end of the runway at the Glacier Park International Airport in Kalispell, Montana. There is a high barbwire security fence that runs along the highway, then cuts in and around the house, then back out along the highway. It's great.

Andrew Webb says:

Mark, I'm late to the party with my favorite homeowner holdout, but here she is.

The two houses on a quarter acre, surrounded by a parking lot, belong to the family of Adele Martinez, who, in the mid-1990s, fought efforts by the state to buy her property for $119k for its planned, $16.5 million National Hispanic Cultural Center. As you can see, she prevailed, and they built around her. Adele has since died, but her family still lives there, where they have a beautiful view of a parking lot.

Chris says:

Last May, the Washington Post profiled a man who refused to sell his hundred year old house to developers who had purchased the entire block. At the time of the article, the house jutted out into a 40 ft deep chasm buttressed by a rather precarious-looking system of boards constructed by the developers. Photo here.

Justin says:

Here is another holdout. (In Harrisburg, PA) Link

Maury says:

A similar case but with a twist. When my former company, Microsoft, was building their Redmond West campus, they purchased an old chicken farm a mile or so from the main campus. The owner didn't want to move his parents however, so part of the deal was that their house could stay intact at the same location until they died. It's circled in red in the attached pic. As far as I know, it's the only private residence on any MS property.

Steve says:

Here are two guys who won't sell to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Xon says:

This house not only borders a major artery in northern Delaware it actually sits on the entrance ramp besides a GM plant. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Stephen Worth, the director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, says:

Today at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, we digitized a collection of cartoons by the great Playboy cartoonist, Eldon Dedini. Dedini is best known for his watercolor paintings of satyrs and nymphs, but most people don't know that he got his start as a story artist on Disney's Donald Duck cartoons. Along with our gallery of images, we have posted a video clip of an interview with Dedini in his studio where he discusses how he got his start, and his years at Disney. It's an amazing insight into an important cartoonist.

Link

There are a lot of other great features on Playboy cartoons in the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive collection as well...

• Erich Sokol's Playboy Cartoons

• Kurtzman and Elder's Little Annie Fanny

• Doug Snyed and Phil Interlandi

Chris Thompson says:

Flickr user Troy Paiva of lostamerica.com found an interesting spot in the California desert. This is from the picture's description:

Joe and I woke late the next day and began exploring potential night-shooting locations near Helendale. We stumbled on an abandoned ranch just outside of town and immediately stopped to explore it. As soon as we opened the car door we were bowled over by the strong smell of organic decay. The place literally smelled like death.

Expecting to find a dead cow (or worse) we rounded a corner and came upon an unexpectedly appalling sight: Food, still in packages. By the case, and even pallet full. Just rotting in the hot desert sun. Tons of it. This forgotten corner of the desert appeared to be a dumping ground for expired donations for a SoCal foodbank. When we got close enough to take pictures the stench was overwhelming. We thought about shooting here at night, but after 15 minutes of walking around we were both nauseated beyond belief. Neither of us EVER want to go back.

I found it because I'm subscribed to a feed for the Infiltration pool. We can only wonder why someone thought this was a good idea. What a waste.

Link

Noah Shachtman blogs on Wired: Danger Room...

For years, the Pentagon has come under harsh criticism its brain-dead approach to handling the media, broadly defined.  From clamping down on bloggers to chucking out embedded reporters to  banning digital cameras to quaking in fear of web developments, the military's press operators seemed to miss no opportunity to shoot themselves in the collective foot, repeatedly. All this, while insurgents trained potential terrorists online, advertised their martial prowess on YouTube, even sold t-shirts over the 'net. 

But recently, things have begun to change.  The Defense Department's Pentagon Channel started posting YouTube-esque videos.   Bloggers have been called into more and more conference calls with senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Multi-National Force-Iraq set up its own YouTube channel.   

Now, the Army has set up shop on content-sharing sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube.  The material is pretty awful -- like the stilted, propaganda-like reports, straight from the Armed Forces Network.  It's a start, though. 

But the military is a huge organization.  And not everybody gets with the program, at an equal pace.  A general is threatening to boot Michael Yon, the special-forces-soldier- turned-milbogger-supreme, out of Iraq -- again.

Link to full text of post.

Link. (Thanks, Angstrom).

Previously on BoingBoing:

Viacom censors Colbert Report machinima off YouTube

EFF sues Viacom over YouTube takedown of Colbert parody

YouTube/Google sued by Viacom for a billion bucks

Viacom: privacy-hating hypocrites

Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices

Viacom announces deal with Joost

Why was Colbert press corps video removed from YouTube?

Fans protest Comedy Central's YouTube demands

YouTube removes Comedy Central clips over DMCA claims

Steven Colbert: Machinima fantasy with Karl Rove, Soledad O'Brien...

correct me if i'm wrong

grammar girl

cliche finder

palindromes

nova convention

poetry archive

pulp fiction (screengrab above)

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!).

This tool-cutlery (knives, spoons and forks with wrenches on the other end) is just fantastic -- though at $24 per place setting, it's the kind of thing you might want to reserve for good company and special occasions. Link (via Make)

"Just Do It" by Heather Lindsley is the story this week on Escape Pod, the wonderful, free science fiction podcast, and it's a doozy, really one of the best stories they've featured so far. It's a darkly comic corporate dystopia where "chemical marketing" (shooting people with darts that make them crave french fries) rules the day. The reader, "Word Whore," does a terrific job of bringing the story to life, and Sal Fadhley does a nice intro on the role of special audio effects in sf. All in all, the best listen I've had all week -- all month, even. Link

See also:
Escape Pod -- great sf story podcast
Cory's Printcrime audio on Escape Pod
Paul Di Filippo's "Shadowboxer" - Twilight Zonesque story podcast
Di Filippo's story "Little Worker" as a podcast
Podcast of Cory's story, "Craphound"
Science fiction podcast: a modern Paul Bunyan story (funny!)

I picked up Gene Luen Yang's "American Born Chinese" yesterday at Secret Headquarters, LA's best comic shop, and read it all before bed last night. American Born Chinese is a wonderful, funny, heart-breaking and inspiring graphic novel that tells the story of Jin Wang, a Chinese boy who is one of two Asian kids in his class at an American school. The story is told through three interleaving narratives -- the story of Jin's school life, and two others: one is a recounting of a Chinese legend about The Monkey King, who wants to be something he is not, and the other is a notional sitcom about an American kid named Danny whose racist stereotyped Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee, is ruining his social life.

These three stories interact in truly unexpected ways, creating a wonderful effect by the story's end. This isn't just a story about kids coping with racism and young love. This is really a story about identity, and coming to grips with who you are. According to the cover, the book has already won a couple of prestigious awards for kid's lit, and they're well-deserved. There's a lot of subtlety and smarts in this story. Link

The Elephant Poo Poo Paper company makes stationery and related goods out of dried, odorless elephant shit:

We can make about 25 large sheets of paper from a single piece (or turd) of elephant poo poo!!! That translates into about 10 standard sized journals including the front and back covers! Neat, huh!?!?!?

Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Henrik sez, "Swedish entrepreneur (and some other folks, too) Lars Cronquist makes paper out of moose shit. And old denim jeans... and different vegetables and stuff...."

Update 2: Ilja sez, "These people make paper from sheep droppings."

Update 3: Lorraine points us to this panda shit paper, too.

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about "Clockpunk," a sub-genre of science fiction about anachronistic use of Renaissance technology -- Da Vince automata in the stone age, etc.

Now, the Da Vinci Automata blog -- a Clockpunk blog -- is putting together its own Clockpunk anthology, using stories solicited from readers, and voted on by readers. They've just gotten their first submission, “On Deep History” by Jim Rossignol. I haven't read it, but this is a pretty cool project -- I wish I had time to write something for it!

The disease collectors were famed for their lethargy. Belatedly, Stry realised he had not left himself enough time to deliver the bundles of infected wax, to claim a receipt from the collectors, and then still make it to the Lehmkuhl lectures on time. He could not afford to be late, since the tickets were issued only once a year, and then only through a lottery system controlled by the college.

Stry paced outside the clerk’s office in the Hall Of Ailment. The dark and lonely building was far from the central campus of the University. Deliberately isolated, as one might expect. Stry delivered garlic and disease samples for his wage, and was more familiar with the building than most other students. It troubled him less and less. The disease collectors were mostly ageing men of a certain disposition, and Stry gave them a wide birth as they shambled by, although he did not fear them. A few younger students had passed Stry in the hallway, but they too were pallid and exhausted, reeking of decomposition, weakness.

Link

SF writer and design prof Bruce Sterling has produced a wonderful 8-minute short film about the future of cities, in which he wanders around Belgrade, the city he's made his home, and talks about the way that his city is interacting with the present, past and future. This is fascinating stuff. Link (Thanks, Al!)

I get a namecheck in today's installment of xkcd, my favorite geeky comic-strip! Link (Thanks, Cowboy_K!)

See also:
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
Pi joke

Next Tuesday, Mar 27, the EFF's throwing a fundraiser at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. The event is the presentation of the Pioneer Awards, an award that "recognizes individuals who have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications or to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet." I'm a winner this year, as are security expert Bruce Schneier and Yochai "Wealth of Networks" Benkler.

The event features a debate between Mark Cuban, the owner of HDNet, and Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior IP attorney, about "Copyright, YouTube, and the future of Web 2.0." Cuban has taken a vocal stand against copyright infringement on YouTube, while Fred argued the Grokster case to a victory in the Ninth Circuit on the grounds that hosting companies shouldn't have to assume the burden of policing their users' behavior.

Tickets are $35, with proceeds going to EFF -- the organization that legalized crypto, is fighting the NSA's secret wiretapping, and that is suing Viacom for censoring a political video off YouTube. Admission includes food, beer and wine.

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 7:30 - 10:00PM

Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego, Douglas Room, 1 Market Place, San Diego, California

Honoring this year's winners: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier

and featuring a lively debate between HDNet Chairman and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban & Senior EFF Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann on Copyright, YouTube, and the future of Web 2.0 Libations and hors d'oeuvres provided

Link, Ticket sales

Artist Rob Sato and Ako Castuera have a new show going up at The Secret Headquarters (LA's best comic shop) next Friday:

Rob and Ako live up the street from Secret Headquarters in what some would call a shack. They like to refer to the place as a log or The Log. The sad part of this story is not the living conditions, but the possible non-living conditions as The Log has been sold. Or is going to be sold. Either way, Sato started to pack. All books are boxed you'll be happy to know. It might be safe to say that his Xeric award is tucked away in there as well. He won that prestigious grant a few years ago for his BURYING SANDWICHES graphic novel. Know this; he's been compared to Winsor McCay - Wha'! (Though that review was from his cousin.)

What can we say about Sato's partner in crime Ako Castuera? Actually, not much. We don't know a goddamn thing about her. Except that she lives in The Log with a bunch of boxes. We are really on top of our game here at SHQ.

Rob and Ako will attend the opening from 8pm to 10pm. Have a beer while discussing the finer points of packing.

Link

I mentioned the 60s German band Les 5 gentlemen earlier today, then came across this awesome video of them performing Cara-Lin. Members of the audience appear to be in the throes of Stendhal Syndrome. Link

Craig Yoe interviews the excellent illustrator Mitch O'Connell on the Arf Lovers blog. Mitch has a new book out called Mitch O'Connell: Tattoos.

Mitch, what is you first comic book experience?

My first experience professionally (kinda) drawing comics was around 1980. Charlton comics was accepting/looking for folks to do covers and stories. The only catch was- they weren’t paying anything. Of course the thrill of seeing my stuff published greatly outweighed the lack of financial rewards! I think I ended up doing about 5 covers and a couple one or two page stories.

Link

Here, in no particular order, are five of my favorite podcasts.

Radio Oh La La This is the only music podcast I subscribe to. It's dedicated to French pop music from the '50s and '60s and is hosted by a Dutch woman named Natasha who presents the show in English. I thank her for introducing me to the music of the German band, "Les 5 Gentlemen," who sing in French. Subscribe to podcast (Update: Natasha says: "By the way, I'm not Dutch, I'm French Canadian, although I live in Amsterdam" and Mark Bellis says Les 5 Gentlemen hail from Marseilles, France.)

MacBreak Weekly Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay team up with guests to jawbone about all things Mac related. My favorite part is the hosts weekly software picks. One recent program that I found out about on this podcast is CoverScout, a $20 utility that grabs music cover art for your digital music. Subscribe to podcast

Kasper Hauser Comedy Podcast The first thing I ever heard from this comedy sketch group was a parody of Star Trek, in which Captain Kirk has ingested a psychedelic plant and is freaking out. I immediately subscribed to the podcast and caught up with all the previous episodes. Their New York Times wedding announcements are awesome, as is their take on This American Life. They are also the creators of one of the funniest books I've read in years, SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy From a Plane. Subscribe to podcast

The Sound of Young America This "Public Radio Show About Things That Are Awesome" features interviews with authors, film makers, comedians, and artists. Host and producer Jesse Thorn is a wonderful interviewer who keeps things moving without getting in the way. I especially enjoyed Jesse's interview with magician Ricky Jay Subscribe to podcast

Moldawer in the Morning David Moldawer picks three topics in the news and discusses them with a special guest. As David explains at the beginning of each episode, "Expect a medium amount of bullshit." Subscribe to podcast

Researchers have taught this robot how to dance. Programmed by Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University and Hideki Kozima of Japan's National Institute of Communications Technology, the robot, named "Keepon," extracts extract the pulse of rhythm from music and move its silicone body in time. According to Michalowski, giving machines sense of rhythm could aid in human-robot interaction. Of course, Keepon is damn entertaining too. From New Scientist:

"Rhythm and synchrony are the foundations of social interactions," he told New Scientist. "So I think that for us to comfortably interact with a robot, it needs to be capable of that....

To get the robot to dance, the team then wrote software that converts the beat detected by Max/MSP into a motion. It varies Keepon's movements and changes the number of movements per beat to keep things interesting. The researchers also attached external cameras to Keepon and wrote software that picks out regular visual movements.

Michalowski's team displayed the Keepon at the annual open house of NICT in Japan, where over 200 children aged from 2 years old to their mid-teens were encouraged to dance with it while songs were played. Many children choose not to dance, perhaps because they were embarrassed, Michalowski says. However, the team noticed that children were more likely to dance if the robot was itself moving in time to music, rather than if it was moving randomly.

"This tells us there is something happening here," says Michalowski. "The robot's rhythmic ability is having some effect on the interaction."

Link to New Scientist article (with videos!), Link to Michalowski's home page (Thanks, Matt Sparkes!)

For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on Kareem Amer, the Egyptian blogger recently sentenced to four years in prison -- and the changing role of bloggers in Egypt. Voices you'll hear in this report:

Egypt's ambassador to the US, Nabil Fahmy

Cairo-based blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah

Lawrence Wright, author of "The Looming Tower"

Freekareem.org coordinator Constantino Diaz-Duran.

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LISTEN:
(warning: contains brief audio of graphic violence) Link to archived audio (Real/Win). Or, listen to this report as an MP3 in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). Here's an updated direct MP3 Link for today's episode. NPR "Xeni Tech" archives here.

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Synopsis follows. Elsewhere around the web: Global Voices has been doing some great, ongoing coverage of free speech issues on Egypt, here: Link. And Egypt is the #2 top recipient of US foreign aid, with $1.8 billion promised in 2007: Link.

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U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaves for Egypt tomorrow. Free speech activists are hoping she'll speak to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about a jailed Egyptian blogger named Kareem Amer. Exactly one month ago, the 22 year old law student was sentenced to four years in prison for what he wrote on his personal website.

The case of Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, or “Kareem Amer,” as he’s known in the blogosphere, has shed a spotlight on a growing community of bloggers in Egypt, and on the country’s laws concerning online speech.

To give you an idea of what he did to get arrested, here is a translation from his final blog post last October:

The mere existence of legal provisions that criminalize freedom of thought, and threaten with imprisonment anyone who criticizes religion in any way, is a grave defect in the law.

Two days after he posted those words, he was interrogated by Egyptian police. Eventually, he was convicted of violating the same legal provisions he criticized on his personal blog.

A court convicted him of contempt of religion, specifically Islam, and defaming President Mubarak. Though this is the first time a blogger in Egypt has been convicted by a court for blogging, Egyptian bloggers say free speech and political activists are often arrested and detained.

Cairo-based Alaa Abdel Fattah spent a month and a half in jail last year for protesting injustice in Egypt's legal system. And just last week, Egyptian authorities targeted him again. Authorities produced a list of opposition activists that included him and other bloggers. At a protest days later, police arrested and jailed 20 people for two days, including some of the bloggers on that list.

One of the other bloggers targeted for spreading what the government called "false news" posted a video of alleged torture and rape in an Egyptian prison (Video Link, warning: contains extremely graphic violence).

Wael Abbas, the blogger who posted a copy of that torture video, reportedly also has a warrant out for his arrest.

Blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah says he wasn't tortured during his 47 days in jail last year, but knows others who have been.

Egyptian activist and blogger Mohammed el-Sharqawi, 24, was tortured and sodomized “using a rolled up piece of cardboard for nearly 15 minutes” according to his lawyer Gamal Eid. Human rights groups say Egyptian authorities have yet to investigate or prosecute the police officers accused.

Kareem Amer’s supporters are worried that similar abuses may await Kareem Amer, the blogger now just beginning his four year sentence.

Lawrence Wright documented the genesis of Al-Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower, and he says torture is rampant in Egypt's jails.

"We need to be much more universal in our condemnation of torture in Egypt," says Wright.

He argues that the US should also support due process and humane treatment for Islamist prisoners, not just reformist bloggers like Kareem.

"There's a greater risk in not advocating for those values for both sides. The Islamists in prison in Egypt pose a real threat when they get out," Wright says. "If we advocate for their rights, if not for their cause, we stand a better chance of having some kind of understanding."

Nabil Fahmy is the Egyptian Ambassador to the United States, and he believes much progress is being made on social and political reforms. But he admits that how Egypt’s government and society go forward in dealing with bloggers still remains a question mark.

Meanwhile, a coalition of Kareem’s supporters are campaigning for his release, including organizing protests at Egyptian embassies around the world. Coordinator Constantino Diaz-Duran in New York says because Kareem’s own family have disowned their son, the freekareem.org group plans to provide some of the necessities prisoners in Egypt generally depend on families to provide: medicine, clothing, food.

Kareem's father has said that he would like to see Islamic Sharia law applied. This would give Kareem three days to repent, or face execution. As dire that sounds, this may be one of his last remaining options. On Monday, an Egyptian court rejected an appeal for Kareem's release, a move the US State Department has condemned.

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Image: supporters from RSF.org demonstrate for Kareem's freedom at the Egyptian government's booth at the world tourism trade fair in Paris (Courtesy Reporters Without Borders).

(Special thanks to Ethan Zuckerman, and NPR News producer Nihar Patel!)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Egypt: blogger Kareem Amer gets 4 years for insulting Islam

WaPo editorial on jailed Egyptian blogger, and US responsibility

Egyptian blogger Alaa to be released from prison

Tan Boon Hock of Singapore died after getting cut by a live crab he was about to cook up for dinner. Apparently, he was infected by a flesh-eating bacteria that the crab was carrying. The bacteria, Vibrio, can also turn up on fish and prawns. From the German Press Agency:

Cooking destroys the bacteria, making the seafood safe for consumption. Doctors advised people preparing meals to use tongs or gloves when handling the live crabs. The claws should be brushed and washed with water before cooking, they added.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

San Francisco activist and videoblogger Josh Wolf has been in jail for almost nine months for refusing to hand over tapes of an anti-war demonstration. His father, Len Harrison, talks with NPR's John Ydstie at the start of a vigil to get his son released. Link to archived audio on the NPR program "Day to Day" (disclaimer: I'm a contributor to the show).

Previously:

Vlogger Josh Wolf breaks jail time record for subpoena refusal

Court rejects Josh Wolf's appeal, return to prison to follow

Videoblogger Josh Wolf returns to prison today

Josh Wolf released on bail from SF Bay Area jail

Blogger jailed for refusing to hand over video

Videoblogger's protest footage demanded by FBI

More archived posts on Wolf's case

Geisha Asobi posted a bunch of photos of sugar that looks like ants to her Flickr account. Link

The University of Nebraska is so pissed off with the RIAA's outrageous requests to help rat out students who file-share that it has sent the RIAA a bill for the time the University has wasted dealing with the RIAA's demands. Go Corn Huskers!

Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska has told the RIAA that it can't help them identify many of the students accused of file trading. The school's system changes a computer's IP address each time its turned on, and it only keeps this information for month. After that month, the school has no way of associating an IP address with a computer or its user. The RIAA is angry about this, and a spokesman for the group criticized the university for not understanding "the need to retain these records". This is a ridiculous complaint. The university doesn't have a need to retain these records, and there's no reason it should do so out of some obligation to the RIAA. If there were any doubt that the university is really irritated by the RIAA's requests, it has requested that the RIAA pay the university to reimburse its expenses from dealing with this (good luck with that).

Link (via /.)

BB reader Rizzo says,

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was shot down by a federal judge today, deeming it more harmful to children in regards to freedom of speech than the porn sites it sought from which it protected the children.

Link.

Update: Declan McCullagh has a related item here.

Ed Arnold says:

For years here in Memphis, there is a man who has cut people's hair with a butane torch. A friend of mine got a few pictures of him doing his work.

Link

Link to t-shirt site. They're 18 bucks, only available through April 6. (Thanks, R. Stevens of Dieselsweeties)

Reader comment: anonymouscoworker says,

The number on the shirt (1 888 STFU LOL) is owned by a company called United Carriers Network and is available for sale, though their pricing information was locked behind an online submission form and subsequent "sales" email.

Here's parts 3-5 of a fascinating first-hand account of being jailed in Japan, by "George," a 36-year-old American living in Japan with his wife and two young children. George wrote the journal while spending a few weeks in a Japanese Ryuchijyo ("Prison for people that haven’t yet been convicted of any crime"). In Part 1, George explained what he did to land in prison (basically, he behaved like a drunk, violent jerk and hurt a cab driver). In Part 2, he describes going to the police station the day after the incident to apologize and pay restitution. But after he is grilled for hours on end, it dawns on him that he's not going to get off as easily as he thought.

In Part 3, George describes the experience of the "classic good-cop, bad-cop routine," as two detectives work on him to confess. Part 4 covers George's day at the prosecutor's office in the Tokyo Metropolitan Courts. George describes the daily routine in Part 5.

Entertainment was one of only a few options for me. I was not allowed communication or any materials from the outside world, so I was able to spend my time by sleeping, reading, writing or talking. Once, while the Chinaman was there in the early days, he was struggling his way through a Su-Doku puzzle that came with the newspaper. I helped him through it, as it was a fairly low grade puzzle and he was mighty pleased with the help. He then in turn took the time to help me with some kanji, though his Japanese was not so good. Wajima would help me out also. Once I got my notebook and pen (pens were only allowed 1 per cell during the hours of 9am to 7pm), I was able to create a draughts/checkers board and we made some checkers out of tissue. We called them “tamagos” and “tadpoles," as when the checker made it to the opposite side and became able to jump forward and backward, we would twist out a tail from the rolled up tissue ball. We had to keep this game hidden from the guards as any such interaction was strictly forbidden. One of us would read his book near the caged wall and watch out for the guards who would occasionally patrol. A quick kick to one of the other two who would be engrossed in the battle of wits, and the guard would only see three chumps in a cell reading books. The game was hidden under my notepad.

Be sure to read the comments at the bottom of each segment. Link

NBC Universal and News Corp today announced plans to launch a video-sharing site with thousands of hours of content from about a dozen television networks and two film studios. The site will launch this summer. Here's the press release: Link, here's The Hollywood Reporter story: Link, here's the AP report: Link.

Update: Dylan Tweney has an analysis piece for Wired News. Snip:

My take: News Corp. and NBC are going to have a tough time posing a credible challenge. They've got to build a new site, develop an easily brandable embedded video player (one which accomodates the copy protection and advertising requirements of every distributor, by the way), fill it with content, and launch it -- all within a few months. Does anyone think that a rushed, top-down, corporate-driven project like this will pose a serious threat to YouTube? (...)

A phone press conference with Jeff Zucker, President & CEO of NBC Universal, and Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp., provides some additional information. Video will be copy protected, no question about that: "IP protection … is critically important to both companies," Chernin says.

However, users will be able to share video and even mash up videos, Chernin says. When I post videos (mashed up or not) on my own site, they'll appear with the new company's player, and with advertising from the joint ad network.

The new joint venture, which has yet to be given a name, aims to distribute its video content as widely as possible, subject to copy protections. In fact, Chernin says they had discussions with Google CEO Eric Schmidt this morning about the possibility of syndicating video content to YouTube.

Link. During that press call, Chernin blurbed: "This will be the largest advertising platform on earth."

Update 2: NYT coverage here.

There's a pretty intense slideshow on Yahoo News with photographs of the feet of women with bound feet (you see naked, morphed feet, outside of the tiny shoes).

Description for the image at left: "Chinese author Yang Yang shows one of the smallest shoes worn by women with traditionally bound feet, in Liuyi village in China's southern Yunnan Province, February 2007. Villages in China where women with bound feet survive are increasingly rare but the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911.(AFP/File/Mark Ralston)."

Link.

Reader comments: monkey (small, terry cloth, has a nice personality) says:

thanks for the link on boingboing about foot binding in china today. it sparked my memory to go back and search for the feature i caught the end of on the world this past monday. very interesting feature by louisa lim about foot binding and interview with a survivor of this eastern form of body modification. Link.

Anonymous says:

Readers should be aware of Emily Praeger's poignant short story, "A Visit from the Footbinder", with its cover's shocking Western-equiv. illustration: (Amazon link)

Doyle Stevick, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policies at the University of South Carolina, says:

Thanks for this article--since I taught human rights, I need to note one aspect of it.

The remark that "the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911" gives the impression that this took a long time. In fact, it is one of the great accomplishments in the history of human rights to transform this practice so quickly. People working on female genital cutting, for example, aspire to this success story as a model.

Further, while it was 40 years after the law passed, the actual transformation happened in only about a decade, an astonishingly brief time for an ingrained and widespread cultural practice. Laws alone don't generate transformations like this, social movements do.

Marie Vento posted One Thousand Years of Chinese Footbinding: Its Origins, Popularity and Demise, a paper which explains it in more detail:

"The work of the anti-footbinding reformers had three aspects. First, they carried out a modern education campaign, which explained that the rest of the world did not bind women's feet and that China was losing face in the world, making it subject to international ridicule. Second, their education campaign explained the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet. Third, they formed natural-foot societies, whose members pledged not to bind their daughter's feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet.[34] These three tactics effectively succeeded in bringing footbinding to a quick end, eradicating in a single generation a practice which had survived for a thousand years. Young girls were thereafter spared the tortures of footbinding, although older women with bound feet may still be seen in China and Taiwan."

Punk matriarch Patti Smith was recently inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. She wrote about the contradiction inherent in that award in this New York Times piece. She urges people to quit whining about the death of CBGBs and other punk institutions -- revolution is written, sung, and expressed in video every day, online:

Should an artist working within the revolutionary landscape of rock accept laurels from an institution? Should laurels be offered? Am I a worthy recipient?

I have wrestled with these questions and my conscience leads me back to Fred and those like him — the maverick souls who may never be afforded such honors. Thus in his name I will accept with gratitude. Fred Sonic Smith was of the people, and I am none but him: one who has loved rock ’n’ roll and crawled from the ranks to the stage, to salute history and plant seeds for the erratic magic landscape of the new guard.

Because its members will be the guardians of our cultural voice. The Internet is their CBGB. Their territory is global. They will dictate how they want to create and disseminate their work. They will, in time, make breathless changes in our political process. They have the technology to unite and create a new party, to be vigilant in their choice of candidates, unfettered by corporate pressure. Their potential power to form and reform is unprecedented.

Human history abounds with idealistic movements that rise, then fall in disarray. The children of light. The journey to the East. The summer of love. The season of grunge. But just as we seem to repeat our follies, we also abide.

Link (via WorldChanging). Disclaimer: I am the biggest Patti Smith fan ever, and I'm posting the image above for the sole reason that Horses is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Q&A with Patti Smith

CBGB closing for good

Reader comment: Chris Spurgeon says:

I'm right there with you when it comes to love and admiration for Patti Smith. I was very moved by her portion of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's induction ceremony... the firey introduction by Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, Patti's at-times tearful acceptance speech, and her (STILL!!!, AFTER ALL OF THESE YEARS!!!) blistering live performance. Link