Fringe comix archivist Ethan Persoff has just scanned and posted two new mindblowingly awesome classics:

(1) Condoms and the Pill, 1956/1962 Planned Parenthood comic on Birth Control. Features a women so terrified at the thought of having a fourth baby she won't even let her husband KISS her. The husband gets so starved for sex he can't concentrate and jams his hand into heavy machinery at the plant! Amazing time capsule showing US views toward condoms and other birth control to be still heavily stigmatized as late as 1962. [Ed. Note: Boy, good thing all THAT's changed!]

Contains my favorite single comic panel seen in some time: JPEG Link (shown above). Be sure to stick around for the Malaysian version.

(2) POWER FOR PROGRESS (1972) -- Nuclear Power Plant Comic Book. Further description is not necessary here.

Previous BB posts about Ethan Persoff's archives: Link.

Reader comment: Josh Moulds says,

I enjoyed Xeni's post linking to Ethan Persoff's blog showcasing some of the outrageous attitudes towards birth control and the associated "abstinence programs" advocated by conservative groups.

I couldn't help but be reminded of this not-quite-so recent article in the Onion. Whilst BoingBoing is probably above simply linking to Onion articles, I thought you may appreciate the satire aimed at proponents of such archaic schools of thought still exercised by people today.

Link

Check out the EULA that accompanied this pre-1909, 78RPM Victor Talking Machine recording of Ave Maria. Link (Thanks, Rich!)

Ian Randal Strock, former editor of the print-zine Science Fiction Chronicle, has started a new science fiction newswire source called SFScope. It's very comprehensive, if a little terse. Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Julian Dibbell, author of the stellar Play Money (a book about making real money in virtual worlds), has a great NYT feature up about the life of Chinese gold farmers (a subject I tackle in my story Anda's Game). This story keeps on getting weirder and more interesting.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

Link

See also: Avatars, and the carbon-based meatbags behind them (that's us)

Google's public policy team (led by the wonderful Andrew McLaughlin) has opened up its internal blog, and it's great reading.

I worry a lot about Google being evil -- and about whether Google is evil today. But people like Andrew and his team go a long way to setting my mind at ease. This is going straight into my daily reads. Link (via Michael Geist)

Got a baby? Got knitting needles? You can use the latter to improve the former (and perforation of the child is not involved, you sicko) -- by making a baby viking helmet! Link (via Craft)

When AT&T bought out BellSouth, it had to promise the FCC that it would provide a basic, $10/month DSL service. However, AT&T has done everything it can to suppress information about the service. The Consumerist has found the plan.

But even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find "copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine -- a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn't piss on AT&T is if they were on fire. Link

Coverbrowser has hundreds of old comic book covers for your browsing pleasure. I'm really fond of the excellent painted covers for Turok, Son of Stone. Link.

Charlie says:

James Leatham, one of the a regular commenter on my blog just posted links to this amazing movie he made on his Apple IIe in 1985. The graphics are way beyond the capability of the computer to render in real time, so he used stop-motion. To film it he actually had the computer control a film camera and a wheel of colored filters. The computer would render a frame, spin the color wheel (made from an old record with holes cut in it) then open the shutter, repeating for each color and frame. It took about 2 minutes per frame but the results are awesome.

Link to an article he wrote in Cinemagic magazine describing how he did it.

Link to his original comment.

Link to YouTube video

Here's adorable photographic proof that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together. Link (Thanks, Charlie!)

Reader comment:

Maarten says:

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Just read your post on boingboing about the jesus and dino pic...but here's much better proof that dinos and humans lived together as little as a thousand years ago. It's a picture I took (with my cellphone [v3x if you must know]) in the Angkor area in Cambodia. It was taken in the famous temple featured in the movie Tombraider; my brother Alex pointed it out to me and it had me amazed. Now I know that quite some carving are being/have been restored, so this might be one of the restorators having a bit of fun, but the real carvings on the temples in the area have all kinds of humourous depictions in there, so who knows?

Paul says:

In the last couple days you've had some articles that have featured weird Archies and a cover from a Spire magazine.

Spires have been a fascinating subject for a myself and a friend who had a collection of these as kids growing up in conservative fundamentalist Christian homes. A couple of years ago he and I (now both best described as recovering Fundamentalists/Skeptics) started to collect them again and we made the site listed above to share them with each other as we lived at opposite ends of the country. Unfortunately, part way through our project to scan all of our Spires homeownership and children took away much of the time we both have for doing the truly important things in life--sitting at a computer and scanning old comic books. We hope to have them all scanned soon but it may take many many years at the rate we're going right now (i.e. we haven't put a new Spire up on the site in over a year).

Over the years the site has been "found" by the world and I get thousands of hits every month.

But, since I'm a regular Boing Boing reader I noticed two references to Spire this week so I thought I'd share the collection with you. Also, [here] are two really excellent links for more info on the topic: Vanity Fair article about Christian Archie | History of Christian Archie

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Creationist Archie comic
• Little Archie anthology
• Mark interviews Love and Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez (a big fan of Little Archie)

John says: "My wife found this odd snapping turtle beach toy at the local 99 cent store." Sand toy label reads: “Expediently Schelp” and “Be beneficial to brains” Link

Here's an MP3 interview with David Weinberger about his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Topics include the differences between how we organize and think about physical and digital information, the power of the internet to let us consume information in unique and customized ways and the implications for retailing, politics and education.

Link

The EFF's Fred Von Lohmann tells BoingBoing,

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Steven Levy introduces Congressman Mike Doyle to mash-up artist Girl Talk [aka Gregg Gillis, shown in the image above]. Enlightenment and fellow feeling ensues. Those in charge of our nation's copyright policies could use more of this sort of thing.

At our lunch, Doyle, 54 (whose own iPod is filled with the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire and Steely Dan), had a lot of questions for Gillis, 25. How many artists were sampled on his recent album "Night Ripper"? (Gillis: more than 167.) If he had to pay rights to every person he sampled, how costly would it be? (Gillis: who knows? But at the least, "we'd have to sell the album off the shelf for $100 a copy.")

Link

Gareth Branwyn says:

It's a miniature (1/4-size) version (for 30 bucks) of one of those crazy-cool, and absurdly-expensive, collectible rayguns that Weta Originals is making. This mini "ManMelter" will only be available at Comic Con next month.

Link

Snip:

Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel ended his six-year stint as chief executive officer Monday and will hand over the reins to co-founder Jerry Yang in the Internet icon's latest attempt to regain investor confidence. Semel, 64, will remain chairmain in a non-executive role. Besides naming Yang as its new CEO, Yahoo appointed Susan Decker as its president. Decker, who had been recently promoted to oversee Yahoo's advertising operations, had widely been seen as Semel's heir apparent.

Link to SF Chron's coverage.

What a beautiful series of portraits in this weekend's NYT magazine by Robbie Cooper -- people and their avatars, in virtual environments such as Second Life and Everquest. About the image shown here:

NAME Jason Rowe
BORN 1974
OCCUPATION None
LOCATION Crosby, Tex.
AVATAR NAME Rurouni Kenshin
AVATAR CREATED 2003
GAME PLAYED Star Wars Galaxies
HOURS PER WEEK IN-GAME 80
CHARACTER TYPE Human marksman, rifleman
SPECIAL ABILITIES Ranged weapon specialization

Link.

This one may be the real stunner of the set.

Also, don't miss this recent NYT feature on "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer," by Julian Dibbell: Link.

Update: Whups, my blog-mate Cory Doctorow already posted a review of the book this feature was based on, last month: Link to that May 8 post. I think I was motorboating around in the Amazon with satellite modems and banana-bark canoes or some such crap on that day. Apologies.

Update 2: Adam Bailey of the Portland Art Center says,

After seeing your post about Robbie Cooper's "Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators" in the New York Times, I thought you should know that we are currently showing his work this month at the Portland Art Center. It's part of the PLATFORM International Animation Festival and it's really something to see in person. The show along with incredible original drawings by Basil Wolverton (curated by Kenny Scharf), will remain up until the 29th of this month.

Whups 2: My blog-mate Pesco also posted a link to a New Scientist slideshow from the book: Link.

From Wired News' Threat Level blog:

Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1,000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency's use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.

Link

Link. $23.00. Coffee currency converter: equals about 5.5 venti Starbucks lattes. (Thanks, Sean Bonner)

numbers in the titles

20 things that only happen in the movies

31 best movie moments in bad words

terminator stats

555-LIST

movies in 30 seconds

100 movies, 100 quotes, 100 numbers

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

Image: A new "Movies in 30 seconds by bunnies" episode which sends up the latest Die Hard installment. Link.

BB reader Brian Moose says,

I got this model kit for Christmas back in 1968 and it was soooo cool I couldn't stand to build it. Too much pressure I guess so I stashed it away. Mind you it was just a $1.50 kit at the time but too cool just the same.

Now I'm cleaning out my Mom's house and I find it! (cue the 2001 theme music) My model kit of the Pan-Am Space Clipper, The Orion III Spaceplane from the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey! (f'n A!!!)

Anyway, I'm way too busy to do it justice and since 1968 I've learned that stuff makes people a lot more happy in the right hands rather than sitting in a closet. I just listed the gem on e-bay.

I'm a former Disney Senior Model Builder with seven years under the mouse and have since crossed over to the digital world as a Creative Director. I know that cool models can make lots of people happy.

Link.

This striking painting is hanging in Justin Bua's "Beat of Urban Art" exhibition at Distinction Gallery in Escondido, California. Titled "Sunset Stories" (2007, acrylic on canvas, 5" x 7"), it's one of three slum paintings in the show. The Beat of Urban Art is on view until August 4. Link to online gallery, Link to Juxtapoz photos from the opening

andy carvin says,

This weekend, a living goddess paid a visit to the DC area. She's the Kumari of Bhaktapur, Nepal, one of a small group of girls worshipped as living deities in the Himalayan kingdom. Selected at a young age, Kumaris fulfil this spiritual role until they hit puberty, at which point they retired as goddesses and are replaced by another toddler.

The most famous Kumari, the Kumari of Kathmandu, is generally sequestered in a small palace, and she's not allowed to touch the ground when she leaves the building. In contrast, the Bhaktapur Kumari, Sajani Shakya, is allowed to live with her parents and attend school, despite the fact that the faithful are known to drop to her feet to pay their respects. This is the first time a Kumari has visited the US.

The Kumari was in town for the Silverdocs festival for the world premiere of a documentary about Kumaris. While she was here I managed to shot a short video and some pics on my phone. It turns out she's a gadget geek - as you'll see in the pics, when she wasn't holding court, she was snapping pics with her digital SLR and an HDV camcorder.

Link

Reader comments: William Grewe-Mullins says,

In the post about the Living Goddess visiting DC, it sort of glosses over the fate of the Goddess, with the use of the term “Retired”. (Wasn’t that the euphemism used in “Blade Runner” for killing androids?). Check this link out for the truth behind the “retirement”:

Kumari is allowed to stay as a living Goddess until she has her first menstrual cycle. Menstruation is seen as a mark of impurity and sexual maturity in Nepalese communities. After that, the search for a new Kumari will begin and the old Kumari will turn into an ordinary girl.

The sad part of it is that the ex-Kumari is no longer allowed to marry. There is a belief that marring ex-Kumari may bring death to the groom. She is seen as a cursed woman and she is not welcomed with open arms into any household. The blessing of being chosen turns into a curse. This depiction of the Kumari reveals a bad fortune, a narcotic reality of Nepalese women's lives and sexuality.

This is how Nepalese worship the virgin girl initially by honoring her and later surprisingly ruining her whole life.

Sorry to be a downer.

Michael Wade says,

When I saw your post about the Living Goddess today I immediately thought about a story I read in The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-third Annual Collection, "The Little Goddess" by Ian McDonald. It's a first person recollection from a former Kumari in 2034 where artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and high technology are the norm. The story can be found online at Asimov.com here: Link.

Stephen Morton says,

The claim that ex-Kumaris are not allowed to marry seems a little specious to me. While I was looking for more information following the initial post you made, I came across this page which has a chart detailing the marital status of all former Kumaris since 1922. It does say that it's considered unlucky to marry one, but it seems that they mostly do get married. Really, given these conflicting sources, I'd want the word of a solidly reputable source on this. The internet doesn't seem to know a lot, and what it does know seems to be mostly about the royal Kumari and not the others.

This essay by Binyavanga Wainaina from an Africa-themed issue of GRANTA is not new. But I just stumbled on it in the course of researching a story about Africa and bloggers, and found much worth paying attention to:

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Link. Binyavanga Wainaina lives in Nairobi, Kenya, and founded the literary magazine Kwani? (unfortunately, the magazine's website appears to be dead). Image: detail crop from the cover of Granta #92, in which this essay appeared, from January 2006. You can purchase a copy online.

Following up on an earlier BB post about the forthcoming "Chimps in Space" movie, Allan Janus says:

I have to mention "Animal Aloft", a splendid book (disclosure: I wrote it) of photographs of critter of all sorts in air and space. It includes Ham, the heroic chimp in "First in Space", Able and Baker, Anita the Space Spider, Gilmore the lion, and my favorite, Kiddo the Airship Cat. Link.

and BoingBoing reader Dan Bennett writes,

Your posts on the various space monkey movies made me think of the paintings of various animal astronauts made by my super-cool wife Laura.

Why did different countries send different species? Are monkeys more patriotic than dogs?

Link to flickr set.

Michael Simmons says,

This "Space Today" article includes a list of the Russian dogs that went into space, including Strelka, who was the first dog to survive the trip. Khrushchev gave one of her puppies to JFK who gave it to Caroline Kennedy, which is just about the coolest state gift ever. Link.

BB reader William Grewe-Mullins, of The Fernbank Museum of Natural History, says:

I found a few more details on the Belka and Strelka story, and posted them on my useless blog a while back: Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Space Chimps, the movie

Space Chimps isn't the first film to honor astroprimate history

The sippy cup terrorist secret agent mom, and TSA's weird "Mythbusters" denial.

Giant snake terrorizing Pennsylvania (Pesco)

Scans of old comic book ads, a screensaver, ad for paper spaceship, photo of the genuine article. (Mark)

Map shows how kids aren't allowed to roam around (Mark)

Video: Doze Green one-liner drawing (Pesco)

Taipei street-basket virtuoso throws 140 balls/minute (Mark)

Laugh Out Loud Cats: rediscovered short film (Xeni)

Pac Man Skull (Pesco)

Jamais Cascio on his new hearing aids (Pesco)

The Cosmoboy jacket (Pesco)

SciFi.com is going to nuke its fiction archive (Cory)

Cory's column on the origins of the copyright wars (Cory)

Mr. Wizard (1917-2007) (Pesco)

Cyber-walrus (Cory)

Creationist Archie comic (Mark)

EFF privacy attorney is a magnet for privacy invading street-searches (Cory)

Ice cream patent wars in the 1930s (Mark)

Sexual predators online - the real story (Cory)

White Stripes album sold on thumb drive (Mark)

Terrorists are stupid (Cory)

Flickr users in Germany and Asia complain of image censoring (Xeni)

(Image: Respectful LOLdaptation of a truly amazing photo by Paul Nicklen, as blogged in this BB post).

Jill says: "John Heilemann looks at the man behind Apple Inc. and asks if the iPhone will make or break his career."

“Now, however, Jobs is departing from classical structure and undertaking an Act Four. With the iPhone, in particular, he is hurling Apple into foreign waters. His motivations for doing so aren’t difficult to discern. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion cell phones are sold worldwide every year; in terms of scale, ubiquity, and relevance, it’s the mother of all consumer-electronics markets. The chance to upend this sprawling industry, bend it to his will, is one that Jobs, being Jobs, finds irresistible.

Apple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. ‘The entire fucking Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,’ says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. ‘But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?’”

Link

Eleganza made some sharp duds back in the 70s. Link to Eleganza ad from a 1973 Playboy. Link to ads from Eleganza and other fashion-forward firms that appeared in Ebony Magazine, 1970-1976. As iowahawk says, "When it comes to attracting the foxy ladies, Eleganza is better that a double splash of Hai Karate Body Musk. Or a Stutz Blackhawk." Things happen when Pesco wears ELEGANZA! (Thanks, COOP!)

A reader writes, "Like many European TV channels the state-owned CT2 broadcasts live panorama / weather streams from popular recreation areas in its morning programme, fully automated 30 second pans per site with music in the background. Initiative Ztohoven, a collective around Roman Tyc, somehow managed to inject a pre-recorded pan with a sudden atomic explosion in the midst of a beautiful countryside. No word how they did it, assume they tricked the cabling on the unmanned camera site. Tyc also replaced traffic light icons in Prague with illustrations of drunk, pissing or ranting figures a few months ago." Link

A barman at Dublin's Ryan's Pub is captured balancing pints of Guinness atop each other in this phonecam series. Three is no problem. Four is a little wet. Link (via Grow A Brain)

Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko," which describes the failure of the American health system (and ends with Moore taking 911 rescue workers to Cuba to get the health-care they'd been denied in the USA), has been leaked onto the net, a few weeks before its theatrical release.

I watched this yesterday on my laptop and I was just floored. This is Moore at his best: savage, smart, and so funny and outrageous the milk squirts out your nose. I was so engrossed, I nearly missed a flight. I can't wait for the theatrical release so that I can enjoy it again with an audience -- this is definitely a movie to see with a group. Link