Medical illustrator Leslie Arwin's Skeletees feature highly detailed, stark anatomical drawings of the bones, muscles, nerves and digestive tract, printed on the front and back. I picked up a skeleton shirt today and I'm delighted with it -- it's a great, thick, high-quality tee with a nice cut and the design is wonderful. Link

The latest thing in "experience" funerals is a Harley Hearse from Milwaukee's Krause Funeral Home -- it joins a host of specialty funeral options available around the world, including "farmers being pulled to their rest by John Deere tractors" and "cremation urns that look like tear-drop motorcycle gas tanks."

Now, he has what he prefers to call "the Krause Funeral Home Motorcycle Hearse" out of sensitivity to local manufacturing icon Harley-Davidson Inc., which carefully guards its famous brand.

"For so long, funerals have been so reactive," Krause said. "I think that's part of the reason that people don't like funerals - that they've been so traditional. . . . If we can offer people more options and be more creative in the way we say goodbye, it will certainly broaden our clientele."

Link (Thanks, Michael!) (Image: cropped and downsized version of a pic from JSOnline)

After being totally blown away by Brian Wood's comic DMZ, I decided to seek out some of his earlier works, starting with 2005's DEMO, a collection of 12 short stories about "teens with power." Wood's introduction says he came up with the idea after working on franchise comics about teen underwear perverts, and he wanted to revisit the subject from a grittier, more inventive place.

He succeeded. The stories in DEMO are incredibly diverse in their interpretation of what it means to have "power," from telekinesis to lying convincingly. In each case, the power forms the center of a hard-edged little story about the rottenness and the wonder of being young, the endless redemption available and the endless difficulty of achieving it.

It only took me about five pages to get hooked on this thing. A lot of that is due to Becky Cloonan's wildly versatile illustration style which fearlessly changes from story to story, to suit each piece best.

There isn't a single story here that I didn't love, that didn't make me think, that didn't thud home in my heart, though they hardly take more than five minutes apiece to get through. Link

See also:
DMZ: graphic novel, a worthy successor to Transmetropolitan
DMZ comic t-shirt

Some silly creationists are finally opening their wacky $27 million Creation Museum on Monday in Petersburg, Kentucky. The slogan on the museum's site? "Prepare to believe." From Reuters:

Here exhibits show the Grand Canyon took just days to form during Noah's flood, dinosaurs coexisted with humans and had a place on Noah's Ark, and Cain married his sister to people the earth, among other Biblical wonders.

Scientists, secularists and moderate Christians have pledged to protest the museum's public opening on Monday. An airplane trailing a "Thou Shalt Not Lie" banner buzzed overhead during the museum's opening news conference....

A Gallup poll last year showed almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Three of 10 Republican presidential candidates said in a recent debate that they did not believe in evolution.

Link to Reuters article, Link to reactions at the National Center for Science Education site, Link to New York Times coverage, Link to Scientific American's "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Previously on BB:
• Profile of Creation Museum founder Link
• Kentucky creationist museum online Link
• Creationist museum opening soon Link

Yesterday, I flew into Oakland airport on Southwest Air and dropped by the Fox Rent-A-Car counter to pick up the car I'd reserved using Southwest's website. Ten minutes later, I left, without my car, hopping mad and swearing never to do business with Fox again.

The problem was that I wanted to use a debit card to pay for my car (I got rid of all my credit cards a few years back when I paid off the last of my debts). I rent cars all the time with a debit card and I'm used to rental agencies taking a small deposit (usually $250) on the card, or, in some extreme cases, requesting my Social Security Number and doing a credit check on me.

But Fox had a genuinely idiotic policy for debit-card payers: they needed a copy of my Southwest flight itinerary. It wasn't enough for me to show them the itinerary on my laptop's screen. They couldn't take it on a USB stick and print it themselves. I either had to take a taxi to a Kinko's and print it and come back or call Southwest and have them fax the itinerary to Fox.

An itinerary proves exactly nothing, of course. You can make any itinerary you want on your computer and print it off. Given that Fox got this reservation from Southwest, anything I printed for them was totally redundant. The clerk kept repeating that he needed "proof" that I was flying out of Oakland again. I offered to let him photograph my screen with his cameraphone, but for some reason, that isn't "proof," while going to a print-shop and screen-dumping to a printer would be.

I spoke to a supervisor (who told me that this was my fault for not noticing this bizarre requirement in the five screens' worth of fine print in their reservation "agreement"), called Fox corporate HQ and left a message, then turned around, walked up to the Hertz counter with my debit card and drove off in one of their cars five minutes later.

Update: Brendan sez, "I recently did a little googling about Fox Rent-A-Car in preparation for a trip to California. It turns out they're listed with the Better Business Bureau for bad business practices. The Attorney General of California seems to have some interest in them too. Maybe it's a good thing they made it so difficult to rent."

Update 2: Doug did some digging into Fox: "I followed one of the links to the California Attourney General's site and found that there was a judgment in place against Fox Rentals for various business practices which were illegal under California law.

"What made the hair on the back of my neck stand up however, was the statement on the Attourney General's Website that Fox routinely tracks their customers by GPS. They have used this to illegally charge their customers for driving out of a three state area, but hey, they could certainly use it for other purposes."

Glenn "WiFi News" Fleishman sez, "The BBC recently ran a terrible half-hour program on the risks from Wi-Fi to 'the children.' While there's no reason to not study the matter further, the report relied on measurements taken by a lobbyist who also sells tinfoil hats and measurement devices to those afraid of wireless signals. The report also seemed to systematically avoid using the scientific method, instead relying on vagueness and analogy. There's no reliable (peer reviewed, etc.) that shows any risk from Wi-Fi, and the cell phones studies performed on real populations (instead of lab conditions with high signal strength and rats and such) show no increased risk for specific cancers. Bad Science tears apart the report and shows how the BBC itself, in a follow up, reamed the show's presenter about the information presented, too." Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

Update: Chris sez, "Wellington Grey's 'Miscellanea' has a great take on the WiFi scare.

In honor of Tim Biskup's new gallery exhibition, Ether, he's created a limited "War Dragon" edition of his Dragamel vinyl figure and filled its guts with custom-cast miniature pewter weapons and assorted odds and sods from other Dragamel figures. The edition consists of just 25 figures, each signed, numbered, and packaged in a stenciled tin box. Ten of the 25 go on sale today at 5pm but can only be nabbed in person at Tim's show at the Billy Shire Fine Arts gallery in Culver City, CA. The rest will apparently become available Two new limited edition prints, Armor Totem and Tyrant, are also being released.
Link to images of Dragamel "War Dragon," Link to Billy Shire Fine Arts

Previously on BB:
• Tim Biskup's new art exhibition, Ether Link
• Win a copy of the new Gama-Go book Link
• Biskup mural for Helio: part 3 Link

Love this bicycle/bike-lock sculpture from Vancouver. Having had a dozen bikes stolen over the years, I feel the artist's pain. Link (Thanks, Dustin!)

God help you if you need a new screw for your Sony stuff: Sony charges 61 Euros (more than $82) for a replacement. Sony: we know screw-jobs. Link (via Global Nerdy)

In 1952, the Asbestos-Cement Products Association released "According to Plan," a 15-minute commercial extolling the virtues of miraculous asbestos as the ideal construction material, especially for young couples setting out to build houses to raise their families in. Part 1, Part 2 (Thanks, Tom!)

Update: Rick Prelinger sez, "The asbestos video you just posted is a low-quality derive from the high-quality version from Prelinger Archives. Hey, no problem, it's public domain, but the mpeg-2 is much better for remixing!"

Update 2: Scott sez, "I used the actual audio from the original and animated it, with an MST3K-style onscreen commentary. I did this just after my animation-a-day-for-a-year project ended and just before my show on PlumTV began."