( posted from Guatemala / Xeni ) And if you've ever wanted a website full of bad Bob Dylan impersonations, have I got a link for you. Thursday also happens to be Bob Dylan's birthday, and there plenty days left in the year for talking like a pirate or Yoda. (thanks, J. Hazelip)
What do you do with an old Transformer tattoo?
Two options:
(1) Saw off your leg and sell it to a Dreamworks publicist before July 4.
(2) Transform it (heh) into an even bigger tattoo.
Max, whose before and after leg is shown above (still undetached, still unsold to Dreamworks) explains:
"When I was 19 three friends and I got Transformer tattoos on ourselves. Within a few years we were no longer friends and after a few more years I could no longer recall why I wanted a Decepticon on my body. I could make up some stuff but when it came right down to it I made an impulsive decision."
Read, and see, the rest of his tattoo tale here: Link. (Thanks, Craig) ( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )
Medical records of Colorado residents compromised
Jon Gordon from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) says,
On MPR's wavLength blog and American Public Media's Future Tense program, there's a story about how we came across personally identifiable medical records for thousands of residents of Colorado (and some from Illinois) on an FTP server that required no username/password to view the data. Data was sensitive, and some records included SSNs.Link. ( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )
Smorgasbord of vintage African TV ads
I recently spent about a month in several West African countries (I'm typing this now from Central America). During my short stay on the continent, I became obsessed with local TV commercials. I believe you can learn a lot about any culture through its ads. I taped a bunch of stuff in hotel rooms, and will blog clips sometime soon -- but for now, I wanted to point to some super cool vintage African TV ads I found online, from the '60s and '70s.
You can find some great classic 1960s TV commercials from Africa on sites like YouTube and Africahit.com, but all of that stuff appears to originate from one source: the amazing Africa archives at Adeater.com. About a dozen MPEG files there, and products include everything from perfume to cool old cars to booze to cigarettes (add it up, you got a recipe for the good life). You can't link directly to the index of Africa commercials, or to any individual videos therein -- the site navigation kind of stinks. But if you search for "Africa" you'll find the stuff.
Here are a few favorites that originated in Adeater's archive: a retro hair product commercial (Petrole Hahn, screengrab above), Omo washing powder (I wonder if the boxer was a famous fighter at the time?), Ploum Ploum men's cologne (avec heavily sedated dancing), An Ivory Coast bank ad from 1967 (my how the economic promise has changed in this country).
And here's a wild 1976 spot for Gauloises cigarettes (screengrab below), presumably for French-speaking West African audiences. Dig the sweet cha-cha-cha score. Includes kung fu fight scene with vigorous chair-tossing and bottle-breakage over heads. "Gauloises, the cigarette of a strong man."
Update: here's another vintage African ad for Omo laundry soap, this one from Algeria: Link.
( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )
Design Made in Africa: traveling exhibit
"Design Made in Africa" is described as the world's first major traveling exhibit of contemporary African design. The show opened in New York a few weeks ago at 4 World Financial Center, and includes the work of 30 designers from 14 African countries. Works on display range from useful to ornamental: chairs, wall hangings, graphic design, jewelry, lighting, and more. If you happen to be reading this blog post from Morocco, you can check out a companion exhibit at the Batha Museum in Fes.
Either way, hurry: both the New York and the Morocco exhibitions close this weekend, on May 27.
There's a website with more amazing images from Design Made in Africa, but I'm afraid the site was Made In Hell. First Flash, then a popup window, then a video that won't play unless you have DivX installed. Argh. (via Urban Congo, thanks Emeka Okafor!) ( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )
Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: fine art as advertisements.
Punching bag filled with underwear
Joe Heckel of Cincinnati, Ohio peeked inside a TKO brand heavy punching bag he had purchased and was surprised to find it stuffed with underwear, some of it "used." From WLWT Cincinnati:
"(There were) bras, thongs and bathing suits. We could not believe there were clothes inside instead of sand," he said.Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)
Heckel said the smell was "bad, real bad..."
Heckel said Thursday that the representative (from TKO) told him that the underwear in the bag was a "quality problem" that they were dealing with, and that the people who had made the decision to put underwear in the bags had been fired.
Mark Pescovitz photo
My brother Mark Pescovitz took this photo of water trickling down across a rock. The color comes from the salt deposited by the water over many years. The total area shown is approximately two feet by three feet. (Click the image to see it larger.) It's one of nine great pieces that are finalists in the 2007 Pop Goes The West Art Contest sponsored by the Indianapolis Star's INTake magazine and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.Link
HOWTO find four leaf clovers
At Instructables, Falaco Soliton posted a neat finder's guide for four-leaf clover hunters. His mounted personal collection is quite impressive. From the Instructable:
Link (Thanks, Shawn Connally!)I find four-leaf clovers frequently, even when not explicitly looking. Many find this "gift" extraordinary, and even though this mutation is reported to only occur once in about 10,000 clovers, getting lucky isn't as hard as one would think....
4-leaf clovers, or "shamrocks", are a mutation of the usually 3-leafed White Clover plant, trifolium repens. One clover is actually one leaf of a larger plant, with 3 leaflets. Mutations can occur due to a low frequency recessive gene or environmental causes. Often the reason for mutation is differentiable from one clover to another. The mutation does not stop at the 4-leafed variety: 5-leafed clovers are not uncommon. However, the more leaflets, the harder they are to find (and the luckier they are): the record is an 18-leaf clover, and the highest I've ever seen is 10-leafed.
Bacteria for data storage
Japanese researchers are developing methods to store data as genetic code in a bacteria's DNA. As a proof-of-concept, Keio University professor Masaru Tomita and his colleagues translated "E equals MC squared" and "1905," the year Einstein published his theory of relativity, into the T, C, A, G genetic code and inserted it into a living bacterium. From the Australian Associated Press:
Genetic coding is so massive that information - say, a Shakespeare play - can be stashed away somewhere in the gene without affecting an organism's overall appearance and other traits.Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)
But mutation could distort stored data. Tomita says data are stored in four places in the bacteria so the data stay intact...
"Many people never even thought about storing data for thousands of years," Tomita said.
"This may sound like a dream. But we're thinking hundreds of millions of years."
Hybrid military vehicle to hit Baghdad streets: "The Aggressor"
Well, at least the name doesn't sound as goddamned sissy as most of the hybrids we're able to buy back at home. At the Popular Mechanics blog, Brittany Marquis says:
The diesel-electric hybrid hype has met its match: the U.S. Army. After focusing on hydrogen fuel cells in its original version of “The Aggressor,” a high-performance, off-road Alternative Mobility Vehicle (AMV) for military ground exploration and scouting missions, the Pentagon is now going the way of Detroit—with batteries.Link (thanks, Matt Sullivan) ( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )The new, second-generation prototype will still utilize the same basic chassis and exterior design for light-duty capacity. But the Army’s auto research arm—part of the Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC)—has developed a battery-dominant, hybrid-electric drivetrain with a diesel engine-generator. That could make the new Aggressor the first hybrid to hit the streets of Baghdad en masse.
New uses for old tech junk: e-waste fun at Maker Faire
VonGuard says,
( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )At Maker Faire, the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) disgorged a large amount of old electronic equipment onto the floors of many an exhibit hall at the San Mateo fairgrounds. We donated junk for the people in the play room, and our booth, Silicon Death Valley, was basically a two large piles of electro junk, flanked by a propane-burning hearse and our fearless leader getting tattooed.
I've written up a photo-blog posting with lots of little stories about what people did with the things they pulled out of our piles. One woman took home an electron microscope we'd brought. Her reason for taking it? She's building a chip fab in her garage!
Electric Slide creator foreswears DMCA, embraces Creative Commons
Francis sez, "The EFF and the creator of the Electric Slide have reached a settlement; he's not only agreed to stop sending takedown notices for videos that include performances of his dance, but he's also licensed the Electric Slide under Creative Commons. The EFF is celebrating with an animation on their main page."
Link,
Link to animation
(Thanks, Francis!)
30 Days of Night: the vampires of the Arctic
Steve Niles's and Ben Templesmith's comic series 30 Days of Night is scary as hell, and beautiful in a dark, grisly way. The plot is simple: vampires seize on the idea of raiding an Alaskan town during the long, 30-day night, destroying communications infrastructure to keep their game penned up and easy to hunt.
The premise is frightening enough, but the artwork really seals the deal: Templesmith's smeary, bloody, indistinct illustration has the feel of Ralph Steadman's work for Hunter S Thompson's books, interpreted by way of an institutionalized paranoid's drawings from a bad therapy session.
The writing is tight and the ending is particularly satisfying -- a wonderful resolution that leaves you wanting more. I've just finished the first volume, and I'm looking forward to reading the other four. Link to Volume 1
Machinima noir: dark and lovely
Wagner James Au sez, "I just posted an interview with the director of "Tale from Midnight City", a dark and gorgeous Second Life machinima perhaps best described as "pagan *noir*". Just as cool, it's fully CCed, licensed Sharealike, with music from the Opsound.org collection, and sound effects from the CC-based Freesound Project."
This is the loveliest, most haunting piece of machinima I've ever seen.
Link (Thanks, James!)The inspiration began with the mask, a free gift from the “Mask and Feathers” store of dzogchen Moody. "It’s such an incredible piece that I wanted to find an outfit to show it off." She added feathers and other assorted parts from various shops. From this, Lainy's Death was born. At first, the plan was just to take some dramatic shots of her avatar from the clock tower under the permanent dark sky of Midnight City.
"The pictures weren’t really capturing the right feel and [I] decided to see how it looked as a recording," she continues. "From there I moved to the bar in the city, which I remembered had the most beautiful lighting, and continued to film shots." Only then did the kernel of a story emerge. Midnight City, she says, "reminds me of a noir movie, so tried to create a character that would live in that place."
Plain Janes appearance in LA, May 24
The author and illustrator of the fine new graphic novel The Plain Janes are coming to Los Angeles's Secret Headquarters, my all-time favorite comic shop. I've just read The Plain Janes and found it superb -- a funny, spirited little story about a gang of girls named Jane at a strait-laced high-school, rejected by the mainstream, and their art adventures.
The event is on Thursday, May 24, 8PM-10PM.
LinkLet us sum up THE PLAIN JANES for you real quick;
1. Lunch room rejects.
2. Multiple Janes.
3. Girl Gang.
4. Art attacks.
Castellucci is the author of Young Adult novels, THE QUEEN OF COOL, BOY PROOF, and most recently...BEIGE.
Her first graphic novel, THE PLAIN JANES, is illustrated by Jim Rugg of STREET ANGEL fame.
Interview with Carla Sinclair of CRAFT
Washington Post's Express ran a funny interview with my wife, Carla Sinclair (editor in chief of CRAFT).
Link» EXPRESS: What's the weirdest project anyone suggested to you? Did you print it?
» SINCLAIR: Someone talked about making paper with animal excrement, but I didn't think we should use that. But we did print how to make a tank top with flashing LEDs on it.
Al Gore's impressively messy office
I love seeing where interesting people work--artists' studios, makers' workshops, hotrodders' garages. Here's part of a fantastic photo of Al Gore in his office. It was taken by Steve Pyke as part of a Time photo essay titled "Al Gore's American Life." Click the image to see the whole image.Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)
the latest
latest episodes
