5:06pm: Helicopters are circling overhead where I am right now, not too far from an ongoing 200+ acre fire in Griffith Park, a little bit east of the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles. Flames are still live, and there's talk of arson an arson suspect in custody.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Swingsha. Bear in mind that this was shot from a number of miles away, over the hill, in Burbank. You can see the fire/smoke plumes from just about anywhere in LA right now.

LATIMES blog has good updates.

It started as a small brush fire in the park, at about 120pm. I could see the smoke plume all the way from the NPR studios in Culver City a few hours ago. Driving from there towards this site, north on Western through Koreatown (a few miles away), I could see very large flames and clumps of black and brown smoke above the chaparral hills. It's huge. And it's crazy hot (100 F), gusty-windy, and dry out today, unseasonably so.

Humans have been evacuated from the LA Zoo and the Autry Museum (both inside the park), but I understand the more fragile critters inside the zoo (about 1,000 of 'em!) are instead staying put, under protection. No word on the ponies and the carousel, and the teeny tiny steam engine ride.

The guys at blogging.la have a number of related items up. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

BoingBoing pal Michael P. points to more photos on Flickr, and says,

We must go free the animals at the zoo NOW.

(Thanks also, Ape Lad and others)

UPDATE: Sean Bonner just called, out riding around the area on his bicycle -- he's roaming near the fire site, phonecamming what he encounters: Flickr stream, and one of the shots is below.

And eecue just uploaded this HDR shot...

UPDATE, 745pm: OK, there are a hell of a lot more helicopters, flying even lower and more frequently now. I guess some of these are news choppers, but some may be first responders, too? All I can hear are sirens and roaring helicopters overhead. I think we're about a quarter mile or less from the center of the burn area (though not in any immediate path of harm). They're saying it's 20-25% under control now. The numbers don't feel too comforting at the moment.

The power is out in much of our neighborhood now. Our DSL has been down for a while, and I'm using my EVDO card to blog this.

7:53: Someone just called me from a few blocks away via mobile, even closer to the burn site, and says the fire is coming closer to where we are, moving down the hill, towards houses, spreading out and covering an even larger area. The hills are glowing red, much ash in the air, heavy smoke smell. Lots of people in the streets looking up at the burn. Small planes circling. We're packing up a few essentials now, just in case the wind gets super hinky and we receive an evacuation order.

Local TV news is reporting the fire was started by a golfer who tossed a cigarette aside while playing golf in the course nearby.

8:30pm: Friend shot this photo a few blocks away, an hour ago. The air is extremely thick with smoke and ash. More homes now without power, increasingly. Officers going door to door instructing people of mandatory evacuation orders a few blocks way. All the newscasts I'm watching are covering the immediate area outside our house, which is weird. Windows and doors all closed here, neighbors doing the same. Sky overhead at night now is dark orange-red, hills look like lava flowing down. Hot Santa Ana winds, gusty, fast, from the northwest. I've lived here for years, through many fires, never seen anything this big.

8:50pm: Cops shutting down Los Feliz boulevard (big street here) now, to minimize incoming traffic from gawkers. Unclear if the shutdown order will make it more difficult to get out. Police on bullhorns giving mandatory evacuation orders about 5 blocks from here. They're closing more streets by the minute, and placing evacuees in a nearby high school shelter.

9:01pm: They're describing the fire's movement as having "exploded" over the past hour. No homes burned yet, but lots in imminent danger, and evacuations under way. 250 acres burned now. Landmark "Dante's View" destroyed, bird refuge in immediate danger. "Deer and coyotes here are running for their lives," a councilman at the burn site is saying on local news right now. Some animals who live in the park are running into the street now.

9:08pm: Cops going door to door evacuating people nearby now. Fire appears to be spreading via embers? New spots of burn now, burn area obviously growing, even from our distance. Guy on TV: "How did the firefighters not see this coming and plan for contingency? It's moved all over the place now."

9:19pm: 300 acres estimated burned now. Here's a cameraphone video shot a few blocks away, at 7:55pm, by M.D. Video Link.

9:45pm: Now, 600 acres burned -- several times what was estimated an hour ago. Winds close to the fire are very hot and very strong now, which may be Venturi effect.

Outside my window, it looks like a giant SRL show on the hill. Big flame tornado shapes reaching up into the sky.

We're packing stuff up now. Homes close to us are being given evacuation orders and we might need to get out if things change once again for the worse. Ash and live embers are floating in the air, eyes burn, throat itchy when you step outside.

Policeman on TV saying lots of homeless people who live inside the park, up in the chaparral hills, are evacuating onto the street.

Electricity outages and mobile phone problems are resulting from the destruction of (or damage to) towers inside the park.

Lots more videos now at Blogging.la, and more updates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Reader comment: David says,

Hey, I live a mile under the fire. We've been watching the new flare up for the past few hours. Thought I'd share photos from it: Link. This is also where the Greek Theatre is as well -- and we think its gone!

sara says,

A friend of mine works in the zoo as security most days. After I read the article here I called him to find out what was up, and he said he was posted on one of the ridges above the zoo keeping watch. He sent me several videos of the helicopters flying back and forth, and you can see the bright flames coming over the crest of the next hill over. They're not very good (exceptionally small) but you can definitely see the flames. He's off work now, and the zoo is out of danger (when the wind changed, I think that is when it headed towards the homes) but he noted when driving out that the homes that had already been evacuated? Had also already been *looted*! Where the heck was LAPD? I'm hoping he'll be able to get the videos up, but he's had a pretty long day and the zoo will apparently be trying to open tomorrow as scheduled.

Mack Reed says,

Here's a Flickr set shot this morning in the wasteland that the fire made of the hills above Commonwealth Canyon. What's creepy is the huge number of suddenly-exposed beer empties that people hucked into the brush figuring, "Nobody will ever spot these." Link to Flickr set, and related blogging.la post is here: Link.

A gay friend of mine received this accusatory letter from the Christian Science Monitor today. The photo shows exactly what he saw when he pulled the paper from the envelope. Then he realized that it was the bottom half of a folded sheet of paper. Whew--for a moment he thought he'd been outed. (Click the photo to see the whole piece of paper.)
Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

A group of Toronto high school students on a field trip captured footage of an auto driver attacking a bicyclist who reportedly stopped in front of him at a yellow light. The interesting thing is that the students were out with videocameras investigating the notion of "public and private space" in their city. Toronto CityNews has the video online.
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

UPDATE: Unrelated to the reasons I found the story interesting, but worth an update anyway, is the news that the driver who "allegedly" assaulted the bike rider is a cop. He turned himself in. Link (Thanks, Golan Klinger!)

Galleries in Washington DC are honoring pioneering Color Field abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s who are perhaps best known for covering large areas of canvas with single solid colors. BB pal Alberto Gaitán participated by creating an art installation where Web-connected robots paint their own color fields and generate a musical soundtrack. The piece, titled Remembrancer, is on display at the Curator's Office gallery. Gareth Branwyn has more about the piece over at Street Tech. From his post:

For the geek artists (and engineers) in the audience, the mechanisms that render the art might be as interesting, and maybe as poignant, as the art itself. Alberto used the Make Controller, an iconic object of the current anyone-can-play high-tech/DIY craze, "canvases" gridded off like geeky graph paper, beautifully printed on Komatex/Sintra, an expanded PVC material popular in robotics, peristaltic pumps that look like they were lifted from an OR, and paint-laden "carboys" suspended from the ceiling, that look like they might be from the recovery room. Gorgeous little robot carts complete the tech, with precision-machined gears and rack and pinion drive mechanics, stepper motors, and segmented cable guides that look both serpentine and like something from a LEGO Mindstorms set. As the gallery's curator, Andrea Pollan, so perfectly put it: It's "Frankenstein lab meets Walter Reed hospital room."

Link to Street Tech article, Link to Curator's Office gallery

The latest edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools (guest edited this time by Steven Leckart) features a recommendation for this $8 hand-crank peanut butter mixer. Great idea!

We like natural peanut butter, but hate the initial stirring mess. The minute you put a spatula in, the oil overflows and is everywhere. This stirrer seals the jar, and with a few quick turns the peanut butter is completely mixed and there is zero mess. Easy to use: you put the lid on, insert the stirrer and turn the knob. The gasket on the hole where you put the stirrer even cleans it off when you are done! My husband actually sneaks in a new jar of peanut butter so that he can mix it up before I get to. -- Sessalee Hensley

Link

Rick Prelinger says:

Stockholm professor David Katz assembled his Psychological Atlas in 1948, pulling together classic and curious images from the history of myth and psychology. This is an amazing, bizarre collection that blurs the distinction between what we consider science and pseudo-science. Among the images are classic visual and perceptual illusions; comparisons of the facial expressions of meat-eaters and vegetarians; artworks by blind people; visualizations of personality "types"; chiromancy; and conditioned reflexes in action. Art students visiting our library home in on this book.

It's free for download from Prelinger Library at the Internet Archive. HINT: Click the "FTP" link to access the original scanned-page .jpgs in highest res.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Many more Rick Prelinger treasures
• Crap Hound -- seminal clipart zine -- is back!
• Crap Hound No. 6 - clip art magnificence

How to make your own Ed “Big Daddy” Roth-inspired case mod. Link

Derek Bridges says:

Your post today about the history of tiny handwriting reminded me of the German writer Robert Walser who (somewhat) famously wrote in a "microscript." The link I've sent y'all is a flickr image of Walser's microscript of his. Tough going for Walser's translators, but well worth the effort ...

Link

Susie Felber says:

Re: your post yesterday titled McRaw McChicken McServed at McMcDonalds. I am the gal who got the raw deal and took the pictures.

But while I truly appreciate spreading my story, the “original story” was actually on my blog which has been going since 2002.

On the fast food blog you linked to, now there are many who are calling the whole thing a hoax – even people claiming to be former McDonald’s employees. The person calling me “worse than Hitler” is my personal fave. Feeling like Buzz Aldrin finding a videotape, I uploaded my original receipt to flickr last night.

My original post is here

Today I gave my thoughts on the whole thing/response to the conspiracy theories here.

I love Boing Boing.

Yours sincerely,

Susie Felber

Link

In an apparent effort to sell more meth to children, drug dealers in various parts of the United States are marketing a mixture of methamphetamine and fruit-flavored drink powder as "Strawberry Quik." It looks like Pop Rocks. Link, Link 2. Not an urban legend.

Reader comment: William Gunn says,

There's no evidence meth is flavored to appeal to children, and there's no masking the taste.

On the contrary, there's an established tradition of drug dealers coloring and styling their wares, as a brief look at http://www.ecstasydata.org/ will make evident. The purpose of this is to create a reputation for a certain "brand" of drug, allowing a dealer to promote his product over the other guys.

"Pink champagne" meth(with residual red dye from sudafed tablets) is one such brand and has been around forever. The rumor that "the pink stuff is the good stuff" is almost certainly the inspiration for this. Also, amphetamines are about the most vile thing you could ever taste, and a pinch of Kool-Aid isn't going to change this.

Cory Stroik says,

I found the article on pop rocks combined with meth-amphetamine very interesting (what an odd combination?) I must say though, I felt a slight cringe when reading the first sentence "In an effort to sell more meth to children"

And I mean no offense by this, it would be a lot easier to sell candy to children then clandestinely produced powder, but really I cant see anything else that this implies that it was an effort to sell "to children"

There are several things that seem logical to me, for one wouldn't pop rocks look a lot less inconspicuous then a white powder? Drug dealers and smugglers have been using techniques like this for years to smuggle drugs. We've all heard of heroin lolipops, but of course those were not intended to actually be eaten as lolipops, just for smuggling.

Jonathan sez, "The Free Me DVD, a really cool project to help promote free culture, has just made the iso image to download. The DVD features movies which will play in a DVD player, music and literature which you can enjoy on your computer, and an Ubuntu live cd with all of this amazing content on the desktop for you to enjoy! It is planned for distribution to MPs and journalists but the iso has been made available so everyone can download it and share with their friends and family." Link (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Internet folk-hero and librarian Jessamyn got some donated PCs without any operating system on them at her library, so she installed Ubuntu Linux. It took less than an hour to get all three machines up and running (and she even had time to make a video about her experience). I use Ubuntu, too -- it's been my main operating system since last October and I've been completely delighted with it (and yes, I will shortly be writing an article about my experience).

I installed Ubuntu on two of the donated PCs at my library yesterday. It took less than an hour. In fact, if I hadn’t been making the little movie at the same time [with my laptop and my little Canon digital Elph; I don’t have a video camera] it would have taken me even less time. Ubuntu comes bundled with a lot of the popular Open Source software titles like OpenOffice, Gimp and Firefox. The Calef Library has two Windows PCs already so if people need specific software that doesn’t run on Ubuntu, they can use those. I’d like to get them a Mac as well and then they can be the only library (to my knowledge) that is triple platform in the entire state of Vermont.

Link (Thanks, Cathy!)

The BBC has hired a former Microsoft executive who was responsible for the Windows Media technology, to its "iPlayer" division. That's the division which it will be making crippled versions of some of the BBC's programming available online.

Windows Media Player is a kind of lockware that takes over your computer and prevents you from seeing and using some of the files on your hard drive. It's against the law to make a Windows Media Player device or program without Microsoft's permission, and Microsoft won't let you use its technology in open source players.

The BBC has announced that it will make its programming available through a short-term window using Windows Media technology, which means that British people will have to license American software to watch British TV. British open source programmers can't make their own players for BBC programming and share them with their neighbours.

This will have no impact on the unauthorized copying of British TV. The BBC broadcasts all of its shows "in the clear," so that any video-tuner can record them and share them, copy them, and so on. All this means is that Internet TV won't be as good as broadcast TV -- and that Brits who watch it anyway will get locked into Microsoft's proprietary software (and Brits who download from P2P services will go on being exposed to legal liability for watching telly).

A public call for comments found that more than 80 percent of respondents objected to the use of DRM and particularly Microsoft's DRM in BBC programming. The BBC's Trustees ignored this and gave the BBC permission to sell out the license-payers to Microsoft.

The hiring of a Microsoft exec whose remit has been to promote Microsoft's proprietary anti-user technology to work on the BBC's Internet player strategy is just another nail in the BBC's coffin. The 21st century doesn't need a "public service broadcaster" whose idea of public service is forcing you to buy your technology from a monopolist and preventing you from exercising your legal rights under copyright.

The appointment of a Microsoft executive to a key position at the BBC is significant. The newly created post of controller of the Future Media and Technology Group positions him as a potential successor to Ashley Highfield, who has done so much to promote new media within the corporation over the last six years. He has placed the iPlayer project at the centre of its online strategy. It is also likely to play a significant role in the commercial plans of BBC Worldwide.

Link

See also:
BBC Trustees agree to let BBC infect Britain with DRM
BBC techies talk DRM
BBC tries DRM-free distribution
BBC Creative Archive launches, without DRM

A new law in Florida requires stores to hold used CDs for 30 days before reselling them, and other states are considering similar laws:

"No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don't want to pay a $10,000 bond for the 'right' to treat their customers like criminals."

Link | Link to Slashdot comments

A Boing Boing reader says: "For your consideration, from the new issue of Cabinet Magazine, the history of micrography, or man's attempt to write ever more words in ever smaller amounts of space."

1894 C.E.: Miniature book collector George Salomon of Paris disperses his seven-hundred-title collection, a library that reportedly ìcould be carried in a moderate-sized portmanteau. His spirit lives on today in the Miniature Book Society, an organization whose interests extend only to printed works three inches or smaller. (Pocket Library of Lilliputian Folio Books, London, 1801. Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

Link

Here's one of my favorite snippets from the latest edition of the "Harper's Weekly" email newsletter:

Scottish scientists were developing a pill that will simultaneously boost women's sex drive and decrease their weight. When the pill was given to monkeys, said the scientists, females displayed their feelings via "rump presentation and tail wagging" and males through tongue-flicking and eyebrow-raising. A 68-year-old grandmother in England was the runner-up for "txt laureate" for writing a love poem to her husband. "O hart tht sorz," she wrote, "My luv adorz, He mAks me liv, He mAks me giv, Myslf 2 him, As my luv porz." Guests at a wedding in Patna, India, decided that the groom had arrived too drunk and had the bride marry his brother instead, and a farmer in eastern India beheaded one of his workers with a sword for failing to milk his cows. Four thousand Filipina mothers in Manila tried to break the world record for simultaneous breastfeeding.

Link

Western governments are granting patents, trademarks, and copyrights over yoga to con-artists who claim to have invented the millennia-old practice. The Indian government is retaliating by publishing a giant, multi-lingual database of yoga-stuff so that patent examiners can see that "yoga didn't originate in a San Francisco commune."

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories, and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There's big money in those pretzel twists and contortions - $3 billion a year in America alone. It's a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages.

The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally, and available in five international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can see that yoga didn't originate in a San Francisco commune.

It is worth noting that the people in the forefront of the patenting of traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas. We know a business opportunity when we see one and have exported generations of gurus skilled in peddling enlightenment for a buck. But as Indians, they ought to know that the very idea of patenting knowledge is a gross violation of the tradition of yoga.

Link (Thanks, Joseph!)

See also:
New twist in Bikram Yoga copyright feuds
Hot, sweaty, scandalous: Bikram yoga copyright clash
Open Source Yoga advocates fight "Atom Bomb Balls" Bikram
LA says "Atom Bomb Balls" Choudry's yoga studio violates safety laws

The long-awaited episode #12 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast is out! Sorry about the long delay since episode #11, but these homemade audio krafts take many fortnights for our tree-dwelling legion of squirrel-helpers to fashion from acorn husks and pine needles! Please direct complaints to our customer service manager!

In podcast episode #12, we talk with DJ and independent music producer/publisher Michael Donaldson, also known as Q-Burns Abstract Message (Website | MySpace | Amazon link to buy CDs).

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LISTEN TO BOINGBOINGBOING #12:
Podcast Feed, Subscribe via iTunes, Archive.org, Listen at Odeo, Direct MP3 url, iTunes link to this episode.

- - - - - - - - - -

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

In the realm of dance music, there are few producers that thrive on blurring the boundary between eclectic experimenter and populist ass-shaker as much as Q-Burns Abstract Message. Equally comfortable covering Krautrock legends Faust or dropping his favorite chunky house grooves into the mix, Q-BAM—known to his parents as Michael Donaldson—is indeed the rare auteur. Whether globetrotting as a DJ, co-running the Eighth Dimension Records label, remixing artists like Rabbit in the Moon, Fila Brazillia and Mazi & Collete, or recording his own original productions, Donaldson is all about the coaxing the maximum soul out of the machine.

Based in Orlando since the early-’90s, the former record shop owner and college radio DJ has spent the past two decades developing a sound that is obsessively devoted to the funk. His animated, vodka-soaked DJ sets have won audiences for the well-traveled Donaldson from 
San Francisco to (literally) Siberia, and landed him primo opening slots for GusGus, Chemical Brothers and Meat Beat Manifesto.

In addition to his ongoing nonstop (no, seriously) worldwide tour schedule, he has a new mixed CD out (Agave Nectar Vol. 1, on Agave Records), and a new record label that produces nothing but 12" vinyl releases. That label is known as EIGHT-TRACKS.

EARTH-SHATTERING QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE
(total duration -- 38:20)

How did Michael Donaldson end up going from major label artist to DRM-free DIY? Hint: it's all about chance, and it had to do with an ill-advised album title, and 9/11. (section begins at 17:41)

What is up with the internet fracas over "swiping" allegations surrounding artist Todd Goldman (previous BoingBoing posts). When exactly does inspiration, remixing, or borrowing become creative theft? (section begins at 00:27)

What is the dealio with Arnold Schwarzenegger and that curious photo EULA? (BB post) (section begins at 08:20)

Why did the mayor of Boston ban BoingBoing over boobies? (BB post) (section begins at 13:00).

What cool things might we experience at the Maker's Faire on May 19-20 in San Mateo, CA? (BB post). (section begins at 11:09)

What do cutups have to do with creativity, and why is a copy of the epic William Burroughs/Brion Gysin tome, The Third Mind, worth paying $200 for if you can find it? (section begins at 27:47)

Where did Q-Burns get his stage name? (section begins at 34:27)

What was New Wave Theater, and is it true that the show's murdered host Peter Ivers wrote and performed "In Heaven Everything Is Fine," in David Lynch's classic nightmare film, Eraserhead? Oh, the hell with it, yes. (section begins at 36:25)

MUSIC:
The tune you hear in this podcast is by Q-Burns Abstract Message -- his remix of "Angel Soup" by Cold Hands, recently released on vinyl and digital via Blunted Funk Records. Listen to the whole thing here.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IMPERSONATOR:
In this podcast episode, you'll hear the voice of Matt Plumb, who won Mark's BoingBoing Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation voicemail contest.

TECH NOTES:
We recorded this podcast as a Skype conference call, and captured it with AudioHijack. The audio was later edited in Apple's Garage Band, after some help from Levelator.

PREVIOUS EPISODES OF BOINGBOINGBOING:
1 (Mr. Jalopy, master craphound), 3 (Gareth Branwyn, cyberculture writer), 4 (Chris Anderson, WIRED editor-in-chief), 5 (George Dyson, tech historian), 6 (Steven Johnson, author), 7 (John Hodgman, humorist and PC), 8 (Merlin Mann, productivity guru), 9 (Matt Haughey, MeFi), 10 (Bonnie Burton, Lucasfilm), 11 (Noah Shachtman, defense tech reporter).

[Link to larger image.]

This is a tasty little hack: you can mount Wikipedia on your GNU/Linux machine as a filesystem, so that you can browse the articles with your text-editor. I just tried it here and it worked a treat! Link (via Digg)

Snip from an account by Tim Johnson, at McClatchy:

In a massive campaign that recalls the socialist engineering of an earlier era, the Chinese government has relocated some 250,000 Tibetans - nearly one-tenth of the population - from scattered rural hamlets to new "socialist villages," ordering them to build new housing largely at their own expense and without their consent.

The government calls the year-old project the "comfortable housing program," and its stated aim is to present a more modern face for this ancient region, which China has controlled since 1950.

It claims that the new housing on main roads, sometimes only a mile from previous homes, will enable small farmers and herders to have access to schools and jobs, as well as better health care and hygiene.

But the broader aim seems to be remaking Tibet - a region with its own culture, language and religious traditions - in order to have firmer political control over its population. It comes as China prepares for an influx of millions of tourists in the run-up to next year's Summer Olympic Games.

Link. Image: monk at Sera monastery, near Lhasa. Bernardo De Niz/MCT. (thanks, Mike Outmesguine, Laird, and many others)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Google, China, and genocide: web censorship and Tibet

"Hacking the Himalayas": Xeni's 5-part radio series on Tibet for NPR.

Reader comment: DK says,

I've known Professor Goldstein since the mid-90's when I first met him in Lhasa. He was misquoted in that article about Tibetan resettlement, and his rebuttal appeared today in World Tibet News. He's been one of the foremost scholars on modern Tibet, and it's painful to see his words so misrepresented. Here is his reply:

iCommons, the international arm of the Creative Commons movement, is raising money to provide scholarships to attendees at this year's iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The iCommons movement has projects in more than 80 countries, projects that work to convert the license to local language and law, and to promote their use. They've been incredibly successful -- for example, the Bulgarian foreign ministry is licensing all its materials under Creative Commons.

Copyright is a global problem -- the US has exported its worst laws to countries all over the world. In Russia, they've just agreed to implement the DMCA and then some; they're going to license and police-inspect their CD and DVD presses (so much for freedom of the press, guess Glasnost had to end sometime). The iCommons movement is global in scope -- in fact, it's the most widespread, credible and effective global organization working for copyright reform.

The iSummits are incredibly useful to the movement. Last year in Rio, the group adopted two resolutions, one condemning the WIPO Broadcast Treaty (which is now on life-support and is widely expected to kick the bucket), the other condemning the use of DRM for Creative Commons licensed works. These two powerful messages have reverberated all year long, and all around the planet.

But these things are expensive. I'm going to Dubrovnik, and I hope to see many of the activists I met last year. I've just donated $250 to the scholarship fund to make that happen. It's tax-deductible, and it's good value for money: these summits are crucial to the long-term health of free culture around the world. Link

The Search author John Battelle (disclaimer: BoingBoing's business manager, among other things) writes:

Good lord, has it come to this? That was my first thought upon getting off the plane here in Seattle, and seeing CNN - f*cking CNN! - running clips of David Hasselhoff reverse puking a Wendy's Steakhouse Double Melt in a crowded airport during high rush hour (6 pm).

Yes, it has come to this. Why am I, defender of all things Internet (see my views on NBC making the Va Tech material available), offended by seeing on CNN what I can freely see on the Internet? This may not be in any way insightful, and I'm sure someone has put it far more elegantly, but it comes down to this one simple insight: What I see on the Internet, I *choose* to see, and in particular, I choose to see it *privately* - in other words, I see it by choice. But when I'm walking with 1000 other souls through a public thoroughfare, and a poor, sick, f*cked up man is losing his dignity on CNN, well, it strikes me the standards are different.

Link

Reader comment: Brett Burton says,

Just read your post about the Hasselhoff puking clip. ...Am I the only one sees what's really going on here?!! This is an obvious frameup perpetrated by Michael Knight's old enemy, the evil doppelganger Garthe Knight!

Someone needs to get K.I.T.T. out of storage and back on the street so we can find where Michael is being held prisoner!

Eddie Codel from Geek Entertainment TV says,

Just saw your post on The Hoff's spectacle being broadcast wide on CNN. I am following up on the reader comment from Brett Burton who says 'Someone needs to get K.I.T.T. out of storage and back on the street so we can find where Michael is being held prisoner!'

We found KITT. He's no longer in storage, he does miss Michael and apparently still has very strong feelings for him. Irina gets the scoop.

Link

Visa and Hasbro have teamed up to make a branded version of the Game of Life intended to train children to go into credit card debt:

Hasbro is launching a new edition of The Game of Life called Twists and Turns that will replace play money with a Visa-branded card. Matt Collins, Hasbro's vice president of marketing, said of the switch, "When we started to design a completely new edition of the popular game, we knew it was also time to reflect the way people choose to pay and be paid - and replacing cash with Visa was an obvious choice."

They also changed the goal of the game from accumulating the most money to earning the most "life points." Supposedly this a combination of wealth and life experiences, but it's not hard to see parallels between "life points" and the reward points and airlines miles offered by certain credit cards.

Link

I love this little story from the August 1939 ish of Popular Science featuring a handyman who built a 17-in-1 lounger with every luxury he needed built right in.

COMFORT-LOVING Bill Porter, East St. Louis, 111., handy man, takes no chances on having to get up for anything once he’s settled in his easy chair. For the chair, which Porter designed and built, is equipped with seventeen convenient accessories, including a radio, bookcase, electric fan, shoe-shining and pipe-smoking equipment, and compartments for food and beverages. A pull on a “gearshift” lever lowers the back, converting the chair into a bed.

Link

Today's Wired News has a chilling multi-part story on organlegging in India, especially among tsunami refugees for whom selling a kidney is a ticket to wealth.

These days, Aadil openly advertises two packages for transplant patients at steep discounts to the brokered rate: $14,000 for the first transplant, $16,000 for people who need a second organ after the first has failed.

"You do not have to worry about the donor. We shall provide a live donor arranged through a humanitarian organization, which has hundreds," said Abdul Waheed Sheikh, CEO of Aadil Hospital in an e-mail interview with Wired News.

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Diacetyl, the buttery-flavored chemical used in microwave popcorn, may be banned in California by 2010. The fumes from it cause terrible lung-disease in people who work around it.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D) has introduced a bill to ban diacetyl use by 2010. The chemical is an artificial butter flavoring most commonly used in microwave popcorn. Numerous study have found links between the chemical used by flavor workers and a rare disease called bronchiolitis obliterans. For those of you who aren’t 2000 yr old Romans, that means that the bronchioles and some of the smaller bronchi are obliterated by masses made up of fiberous tissue. It’s like sticking marbles into the networks of tubes in your lung that connect fresh air to the alveoli, the little sacs where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged with the blood. As you Romans can imagine, that’s haud sanus. According to the WaPo, flavoring manufacturers have paid out more than $100 million due to health lawsuits. An excellent case study and background to this whole mess can be found at Defending Science.

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Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project collected photos of gamers and paired them with their in-game avatars. It's just been collected in a handsome hardcover edition with a nifty lenticular cover that shows a nice Korean couple morphing into chaotic evil game-characters.

I read this last night -- what I loved about it was the broadly construed notion of "player." Cooper doesn't just get people who play games for the fun of it, but also an old-school MUD developer (his "avatar" is a block of text from his game), several gold-farmers and miscellaneous other cheats; game developers and models for in-game avatars, and so on. The breadth of gamers interviewed by Cooper is really awe-inspiring: rich and poor, western and Asian, able-bodied and disabled, young and old. It's not all terminally shy, heavyset guys playing skinny little women (though there are some of those) -- Cooper has plenty of people who defy the stereotypes, too. The net effect is to demonstrate the common cause between all the players, no matter what their background: they are all living virtual lives.

Also: it doesn't hurt that these are beautifully shot portrait photos. Link, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 1, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 2