Shannon Larratt, founder of the body modification online publication BMEzine, pointed us a few days ago to a first-person essay that a person named Yard[D]og was writing, regarding the adoptive father of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove (shown in the image at left). Yard[D]og claims to have been a close personal friend of the now-deceased elder Rove.

About the essay's contents, Mr. Larratt said:

"Karl Rove's father was not only gay, but a part of the early body piercing scene and a regular at 70s piercing parties... There are pictures of him on BME."

Here is part of that essay. BMEzine just published it in entirety with detailed photos said to depict the elder Mr. Rove's numerous genital piercings.

I have no way of immediately verifying the statements in this essay, or the source of the photos. I am pursuing that now, have received responses which so far indicate that this material is valid, and I will update soon. I do know that Mr. Larratt is a friend of the author (a known participant in the body modification community), that he is personally familiar with the story, and is not given to publishing material he believes to be false. With that disclaimer out of the way, here's an excerpt:

- - - - - - - - - -

Louie loved his piercings, they made him smile. People who are pierced will understand.

So there on the floor in his library, amid teaching videos on piercings and piles of [Piercing Fans International Quarterly], I listened to one man’s account of his travels through the Los Angeles piercing community in the 70’s and 80’s — the “piercing parties” with folks getting pierced on coffee tables in private homes, nurses that helped, and a guy named Jim. I knew about Jim. I had both my nipples pierced at The Gauntlet.

Louie also knew about play piercing; I wanted to learn and so he taught me. And so between splashing in the pool, brunches, visiting his volunteer list of AIDS patients, eating at all numbers of restaurants, visiting friends who lived around the area, birding at the Salton Sea and eating TV dinners, we explored needles and the effect they have on you.

During the day I was told the names of piercings ... I hated the words but I wanted to know about each kind. To this day I’ve never gotten a dydoe because Louie told me it was a hard heal. I never copied Louie’s piercings but I never got them out of my mind. Some years after I last saw him, I found another friend, a professional piercer name Sque3z who took me on another journey recounted here on BME. Louie would be proud.

Louie and I exchanged gifts over the years. He really liked those stainless ball weights and I like gold jewelry ... so I have a 14 karat gold cock ring that once belonged to Louie, and he had a bunch of ball weights that belonged to me.

So who cares about one man’s journey into piercing? For me it is not about a gossipy story, though some people will take it that way. It is not about telling secrets or things left best unsaid; it is about a little piece of history. Perhaps in telling this story someone else will be able to tell a better one another day.

The “Jim” in this story is the Jim Ward who started the piercing industry. Louie is Louis Claude Rove whose adopted son’s first name is Karl. Louie died quietly in Palm Springs as his very secular, not-believing son ran President Bush’s campaign for President of the United States that energized the Christian evangelical base around the wedge issue of gay marriage...

As I watched the news this week, I saw a Karl Rove standing beside the President, his voice crocking, talking about his love for Bush and his country but over that “noise,” I heard the memory of Joe Koons whispering in my ear.

“You do know who his son is?”

     ... Oh My God!

And now I wondered if that son ever cried for the man who raised him and watched him grow up? I’d be curious as to how Karl Rove would ever explain his pierced, gay father? He never told the people in Louis’ phone book that he had died, nor invited them to a service if there was one. No one even knows where he is buried.

As for me? Well, I am the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s pure, solid gold cock ring! I’ve put it away with a few memories and pictures of his father. And in my garden grows a nasty, prickly little cactus from Louie’s backyard ... alive and well.

- - - - - - - -

Link to full text. NSFW advisory: Contains links to photographs of pierced genitals said to those of Karl Rove's father, with a "modesty mosaic" imposed over the thumbnail images at that main link.

FWIW, Wikipedia has this to say about Louis Claude Rove Jr.:

Rove was born the second of three children in Denver, Colorado, and later raised in Sparks, Nevada. His biological father abandoned the family early on and his mother remarried. His new adoptive father, Louis Claude Rove Jr., was a mineral geologist, and his mother, Reba Wood, was a gift shop manager. His older brother is Eric P. Rove, and his younger sister is Reba A. Rove-Hammond. His adoptive father is of Norwegian descent.

Reader comment: muckraker says,

While the details about Louie Rove's reported piercing hobby are new to me, his sexual identity was also mentioned in a book called The Architect, published in 2006. Regarding the essay author's question about the relationship between Karl and his dad, there's this part:

Karl Rove frequently visited his father in the 1980s. Joseph Koons said he didn't sense "any great tension" between Karl and his father. Rove keeps a photograph of his father on his White House desk and has remarked to reporters that his father "lived life exactly the way he wanted to live it."

The Huffington Post has two posts up about this book: Link 1, Link 2, and here's a CBS News report.

Related BoingBoing posts:

Karl Rove's Pierced Family Jewels, part 2: Jim Ward interview (audio)

(Images: Ivan Castro)

Click on the embedded audio below, and you'll hear a 10-minute chunk of ambient sound I taped one night in the old colonial city of La Antigua (literally, "The Old"), Guatemala: centuries-old church bells, popping firecrackers, rumbling mopeds, and a Kakchikel Maya family walking home on ancient cobblestone streets.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

[Browser-compatibility note -- The audio link in this post appears as embedded Flash, and is brought to you by our sponsor: HP's iPaq 510 Voice Messenger. If your web reader doesn't allow you to access Flash, here's a direct MP3 Link. ] (Audio licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution = remix away.)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I taped this outside my bedroom window there in November, 2006, while in the country working on a series of reports for NPR News. I'd been out in the field all day taping interviews. I was sun-fried, road-weary, hunched over a Marantz digital audio recorder and backing up what I'd taped that day to portable hard drives, ipods, and CDs for redundant safekeeping.

I heard a bunch of loud explosions -- pulled off my headphones for a sec -- an escalating cluster of pop pop pop, again and again, and the churchbells ringing nonstop. WTF? Firecrackers are familiar sounds there, lit for any and every birthday or saint's day, any excuse it seems. But the bells were just going and going and going this time. Some big Catholic holiday? An emergency? Are those guns mixed in with the firecracker sounds? Couldn't figure it out, and neither could the family in whose home I was staying.

Anyway, the editors and producers I learn from at NPR always tell me, tape first, ask questions later. So I stuck my mic out the window and hit "record."

Never did figure out exactly what was going on.

But when I listen to this recording now, it transports me back. I keep this file in my iTunes playlist and fall asleep to it sometimes. I remember the things that filled my senses while I fell asleep there: warm tortillas cooking over wood fires; copal resin burning in the church next door; cool breezes from nearby pine forests; diesel fumes from overburdened trucks; and the volcan de fuego puffing ash and intermittent red sparks off in the distance.

I hope you enjoy it. I love this old place like you might love a person. This sound reminds me of that.

- - - - - - - - - -

PHOTOGRAPHS of nighttime Antigua, Guatemala in this post ganked from the flickr stream of Ivan Castro, a prolific and (obviously) very talented photographer based in Guatemala.

Related: Link to an archive of my posts from the road in Guatemala.

Reader comment: Neil Corcoran writes,

Thanks for posting that 10 min sound clip of Antigua. I spent some time there and loved it very much also, so I enjoy with special interest when you write about Antigua and Guatemala. I had some good sonic experiences there too.

I think the loud pop noises you couldn't identify are mid-sized ground based fireworks... you can hear the 'sparkle' after the loud pops, especially towards the end of your recording. They remind me very much of the Quemar El Diablo night on December 6th every year... the night before El Virgin de la Concepcion arrives at 4am then next morning Dec. 7th. All that is a lead up to Christmas of course, complete with plenty of fireworks.

In this photo I took of Quemar El Diablo 2005, you can see a man on the right side with a white hat.. he has a large metal tube near him from which he was launching large fireworks.

I suspect that the loud pop noises you heard were something similar, and not guns. They don't sound like guns to me at least. (In the photo notice also that we're in front of a gasolina station! Actually Plaza de la Concepcion is between two gasolina stations.. very very scary to be burning things and shooting fireworks. But hey, life w/o risk leads to quiet desperation, n'est-ce pas?)

Scott Beale blogs,

Till Nowak has created a masterpiece “Salad”, a fantastic digital image of Alien made out of vegetables. His tribute to HR Giger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Link

Andrew Keen, notorious spammer, failed Web 1.0 entrepreneur, blog-hating blogger, and luddite troll author of Cult of the Amateur, appeared on the Colbert Report last evening. It's well worth watching.

(Slightly paraphrased transcript:)

Colbert: I thought the Internets was building our culture.

Keen: No, it's destroying our culture.

Colbert: I can go on the Internet and find pictures of any old art I want. That's culture, isn't it?

Keen: That's stealing our culture.

Colbert: But it's still culture. The Nazis stole culture, but it was still culture.

Keen: It's worse than that... Even the Nazis didn't put artists out of work.

Its gets even better from there. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Andrew Keen compliments Boing Boing in WSJ
• The internet is impurifying our precious bodily fluids, Mandrake
• Shirky explains why Keen is a Luddite
• Clay Shirky defends the Internet
• Andrew Keen, luddite troll author, and now -- spammer

On July 4, 2004, Nicole and Jeffery Rank attended President Bush's speech at the West Virginia State Capitol. They were handcuffed, arrested and charged with trespassing for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts. They sued the federal government. Yesterday they settled their suit for $80,000.

The front of their homemade T-shirts had a picture of Bush and the international "no" symbol over his face. The back of Nicole's shirt read "Love America, Hate Bush." The back of Jeffery Rank's T-shirt read "Regime Change Starts at Home."

"This settlement is a real victory not only for our clients but for the First Amendment," said Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of West Virginia. "As a result of the Ranks' courageous stand, public officials will think twice before they eject peaceful protesters from public events for exercising their right to dissent."

Link (Thanks, Virtual Tours Guy!)

My friend Chris Noessel found this fantastic piece of "tupperware" at a $1 store in San Francisco's Mission District. It's very plain except for the little flower motif and the words "Nice design." Follow the link to the full picture. Chris writes:

I'd like to think this was some snarky designer, but the actual design counterindicates. But even if it was a practical joke, how did it get past the fabricators? Did no one in the delivery chain speak English? What directive was given to the designer? Was it simply, "We need a nice design for the product," and the designer a literalist?

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Last year, my wife and I went to the second annual Tree Show group show at San Fracnisco's Giant Robot boutique/gallery. We fell in love with Susie Ghahremani's tiny matchbox-size paintings of little forest creatures. We bought three, but I wish we could have collected them all! (At the first Tree Show, some jerk stole several of the pieces.) Susie Ghahremani has a solo show opening this Saturday at the Giant Robot in New York City. The GRNY blog has a preview of some of the pieces in the show, titled Teacher's Pets, and it looks to be a wonderful collection.

From the invitation on Susie's own blog:

Themes of the show include patterns and fine detail, animals and nature, and interior spaces with domesticated wildlife. Ghahremani titled it “Teacher’s Pets” because she takes imaginary animals and teaches them how to do her favorite things: play the piano, make origami, ride a bike, swing in a hammock without falling out. Approximately 200 paintings, soft sculptures, unframed line drawings, framed work, wood pieces, and miniatures will be on display. A reception for Ghahremani will be held from 6:30 to 10:00 on Saturday, August 18.

Link to GRNY, Link to Susie Ghahremani's site (via Juxtapoz)

On Flickr, a scan of a an Apple-1 print ad from July 1976. (Click the image for the entire ad.) From the description:

A fast (1 kilobaud) cassette interface is available and includes a tape of Apple Basic. And ... Yes, Folks. Apple Basic is Free!

Link

Previously on BB:
• Steve Wozniak interviewed by Pesco Link
• Apple I clones for sale Link
• Apple I replicas built to order Link
• Woz on the Apple ][ Link

Two Indian tribes (neither one recognized by the federal gov't) are selling membership to unregistered immigrants for $50 and up. The federal gov't says it won't stop them from being deported.

In Nebraska, some people reported paying up to $1,200 to join the Kaweah Indian Nation, which became the target of a federal investigation after complaints about the tribe arose in at least five states.

Manuel Urbina, the tribe's high chief, acknowleged his group has sold at least 10,000 tribal memberships to illegal immigrants for about $50 each.

"We are not going against the law, we're with the law," he said, claiming membership papers can help illegal immigrants avoid being detained by authorities if they are asked for documents.

A Florida man has made similar sales pitches to immigrants on behalf of a North Dakota-based tribe.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the Kaweah group recognition in 1985 because it was not a real tribe. A Kaweah tribe did exist once, but is unrelated to the one that applied for recognition.

Link

DeskLickr is a neat Mac screensaver that grabs images from Flickr, "giving you all the options to grab photos from your profile, tag searches or even the DeskLickr group filled with hand selected Desktop goodness!" Link

Looks like Wikiscanner has nabbed federal employees whitewashing Wikipedia. Snip from Reuters article:

People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program. The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday. The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.

Link. (Thanks, Virtual Tours Guy)

When implanted in the eye, mini-telescopes like this one could help aging individuals with macular degeneration, a disorder of the retina affecting more than 1.75 million people in the United States alone. The implant was a huge help for two thirds of more than 200 patients who participated in a recent clinical trial. The developers of the technology, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, hope that FDA approval for the mini-scope is imminent. From Scientific American:

The implantable mini-scope... works with the eye's cornea like a telephoto system, rendering an enlarged retinal image designed to reduce the area of diminished vision. Once implanted, the device protrudes 0.1 to 0.5 millimeter beyond the surface of the pupil but does not touch the corneal endothelium, a layer of cells lining the back of the cornea.

This is not an easy fix, however, and surgeons are developing special techniques to properly and swiftly implant the device without damaging the eye. The device is a compound telescope system that consists of a glass cylinder that is 4.4 millimeters in length and 3.6 millimeters in diameter and houses wide-angle micro-optics.

Link

BoingBoing reader Jonathan says,

Last year at theZeroOne digital art festival artist Ben Rubin unveiled the "San Jose Semaphore" atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose, CA. For a year now, the four rotating LED wheels perplexed everyone who saw it.

The answer to riddle of the wheels has been revealed. The Adobe building is transmitting the entire text of Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." A very appropriate choice for Silicon Valley if I do say.

Link

Researchers at the International Space University (ISU) in France propose that NASA's planned lunar base should also include a "biological and historical archive" of human civilization. The idea is that this "ark" would preserve humanity's history if the Earth is destroyed by an asteroid or comet. From National Geographic:

Laying the foundation for "rebuilding the terrestrial Internet, plus an Earth-moon extension of it, should be a priority," (ISU's Jim) Burke said.

The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agreed that extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions." (Read: "Killer Asteroids: A Real But Remote Risk?" [June 19, 2003].)

But the group also advocates creating a moon-based repository of Earth's life, complete with human-staffed facilities to "preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization," said ARC's Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University.

"In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth," Shapiro said.

Link

Link, by Ape Lad. "A kind reader who ordered a cat cartoon asked that I include a reference to the delicate subject of harbls," he explains. "Luckily, my great-grandfather's archives came through for me once again."

Ape Lad also posted this very sweet shout-out to BoingBoing: Link.

Andy says,

The Canadian Sasquatch that roamed Manitoba last Summer and this year was arrested:

"The creature turned out to be an 18-year-old Winnipeg man wearing a hairy gorilla mask, which Reitlo described as 'ugly' and 'scary.'"

Link.

Link. (Thanks, Jeremy Bornstein!)

Snip from a story in today's New York Times by John Schwartz:

Six inches.

After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.

Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.

By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.

“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”

Link. Image: "The 17th Street Canal pumps and, at right, floodgates. The yellow diesel engines would power pumps to send floodwaters through the black pipes into Lake Pontchartrain." (Fred Conrad / NYT).

Photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Douglas Gayeton has a show opening this weekend in Petaluma, California (Singer Gallery, August 18th, 5-7pm.) I've been a fan of these beautiful works since I first saw them a few years ago. They're dazzling full-size, and these tiny jpegs can't possibly do them justice. But I'm posting a few in this post, kindly shared for BoingBoing readers with Gayeton's permission.

Click on any image for a larger JPEG, so you can read all the little text.

Above: a photograph of the oldest living "buttero" or Italian cowboy. It was taken in Maremma, an area in southern Tuscany. (QUANDO CREDIAMO D'ESSERE A CAVALLO, SIAMO PER TERRA [2006] 100x100cm (39x39in) Lamda print / Kodak Endura paper).

Here's more about the work:

Douglas Gayeton has explored Tuscany and the heart of Italy's "Slow Living" culture since the early 90's. With a keen eye for stories and an ear for Italian dialect, he he intertwines the literal with the figurative in a photographic approach he calls the flat film. To become immersed in one of these works is to experience a world where time is at once collapsed and expanded.

Regarding his work process, Gayeton says, "I've always seen photography as being about a single moment, whereas film is about orchestrating a sequence of moments (scenes) to create a larger narrative.

Continued after the jump. Image below: "CONOSCO I MIEI POLLI," or "I know my chickens." ([2004] 93x60cm (36x24in) Lamda print / Kodak Endura paper)

Noah Shachtman at Wired News "Danger Room" blog writes,

For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity."  The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

Link to blog post, and here is the related report in Wired News: Link.

Dopiaza's Most Interesting Photos tool for Flickr is pretty cool -- it checks the comments, views, and favorites activity on your Flickr photos and auto-generates a set of your most "interesting" pics, as understood by Flickr. The set for my pictures is pretty interesting. Link (via Plastic Bag)

Congrats to my friend Brett Savory for scoring a coveted Quill and Quire starred review for his forthcoming first novel, In and Down. Brett's best known as a horror editor, and this first novel looks extremely promising.

Two young boys—one eleven years old, the other twelve—walk on either side of their father, each holding one meaty hand. Lights blaze around them. Ferris wheels spin. Carnival barkers bark.

They do this every year, because every year the carnival comes to their town, and their father brings them here, doing his fatherly duty, spending time with his sons.

For one of the boys, the carnival is always the best thing to happen all year; the other boy is a little afraid of the carnival's presence. He wishes they wouldn't go so much. Sometimes he wishes they wouldn't go at all.

Link

Ulysse Nardin's Tellurium J. Kepler watch rotates the Earth as it would be seen above the North Pole. The timepiece was named in honor of Johannes Kepler, a 17th century astronomer who formulated the Laws of Planetary Motion. Only 99 of the timepieces were made and they are priced at more than $100,000. From the Ulysse Nardin product page:

A flexible spring bends from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn to reveal the part of the Earth lit by the Sun and to indicate the time and place of sunrise and sunset. The moon rotates around the Earth.

The dragon hand indicates the eclipses of the sun and the moon. The perpetual calendar completes one turn each year.

Link (via Thoughts From The Sidelines)

My old pal and seasoned music critic Mike Breen wrote a thoughtful, nostalgic, and bummer of a blog post about Perry Farrell, currently on tour with his new project Satellite Party. For many of us, Farrell was an avant garde art-rock prophet, a multimedia visionary who emerged from Venice Beach in the late 1980s and spread the word of weird to the masses. According to Breen, who was one of fifty or so fans who bothered to catch Satellite Party at a Cincinnati, Ohio club, the shock of the new has given way to the yawn of the boring. From Cincinnati CityBeat's Spill It blog:

I have had to leave concerts for a variety of reasons. I confess, I’ve been thrown out. I’ve gotten sick. I’ve gotten bored. I’ve gotten too drunk to remember anything anyway (a sort of mental exit, I suppose).

But I have never had to leave a show due to depression. That's exactly what happened tonight...

With Jane’s Addiction, Perry was a Tasmanian devil driven by freakazoid, banshee-like impulse and dangerous debauchery. You couldn’t stop watching Perry when Jane’s was in their heyday (though Stephen Perkins is a fascinating drummer to watch play). I’ve seen different incarnations of Jane’s and I’ve seen Porno for Pyros. All good shows. And I have seen Satellite Party twice before tonight, both times at Lollapalooza in Chicago. They didn’t do too much for me. Perry seemed pretty chill at the most recent Lolla a few weeks ago. I didn’t see that hunger, that prowess, that theatrical mania in his eyes (though he's still oodles more tolerable than, say, the singer for Mink, whose Rock Star stage moves were more phony than a prostitute’s moans of “Oh yeah, baby, that feels so good”). I loved seeing Perry play the kids’ stage at Lollapalooza, where he did “Pets’ and a cover of “Whole Lotta Love” (a song with the words “fucked up” in it and a song about — just guessing — fucking?). He seemed even mellower than he had on the main stage, surveying the kiddie crowd and beaming proudly, perhaps moved by the curious generational overlap.

He surveyed the small crowd at Bogart’s tonight, too. His glance around the venue seemed to say, “Wow, how humbling, but these people really love me.” The audience may have been small in numbers, but almost everyone there seemed to love seeing their hero on stage. Perry’s children’s-stage haze seems to have stuck with him and, while he’s graceful and still somewhat engaging on stage, he came off a little like an AltRock Icon version of Perry Como. Comfortable and familiar, but not even remotely provocative.

Link (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

I filed a report for NPR News today about how and when our government -- city, state, and federal -- hangs on to official email, and what that means for both IT budgets and public knowledge.

Short version: policies are all over the map, there's no consistency, and government watchdogs believe more frequent purging means the public loses access to valuable historic information.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty recently ordered that all e-mails not flagged as "save" by city government workers will be deleted and purged from the city's email system in January of 2008. After that initial purge, all city employee email older than 6 months which is not specifically flagged as "save" will be auto-deleted.

The more e-mail government employees send, the more there is to store, costing taxpayers money. But costs must be balanced against the need to preserve history, and ensure government transparency. If individual officials decide which emails to save and which to delete, will they choose to save potentially incriminating or embarassing emails?

We hear from Wired News reporter Ryan Singel, who often covers news involving technology and government transparency; Purdue University professor and cyberforensics expert Marcus Rogers, Christina Fleps, general counsel for the office of the Chief Technology Officer for the DC city government, and Kevin Hall, who is spokesperson for Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine.

- - - - - - - - - -

Link (and direct MP3 Link) for "How Long Should Government Email Linger?"

Link to audio streams for a related conversation that ran today with Day to Day host Madeleine Brand, about deciding when and how to delete or archive personal email.

Or, listen in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). NPR "Xeni Tech" archives here, and "Day to Day" archives here.

Fellow internet funnyhunter Jesse Thorn turned us on to the amazing "SkyMaul" publication by San Francisco-based comedy troupe Kasper Hauser some months ago. The group came to Los Angeles this week for a live show, and I went to check 'em out with Jesse and others.

They were great live! This particular show incorporated much SkyMaul material, and videos they've uploaded to YouTube and elsewhere.

I bugged Jesse for links to more of their online material, so here it is (thanks Jesse!): Link to their collected YouTubery.

Also don't miss their hilarious audio podcast episode Phone Call to the 14th Century, and more recent KH podcasts are here.

My two favorite videos are probably the one where the 14th century monk Jacobus sings a song about LonelyGirl15 being a witch, and the one about MCT (male camel toe) treatments from SkyMaul.

The act that followed their show at Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles was the sketch comedy group Hendershaw, and they were terrific.

Previously:

SkyMaul: Happy Crap You can Buy from a Plane -- book pick

Researchers have shrunk Sharper Image's bestselling Ionic Breeze fan down to the microscale. Well, kinda. Purdue University engineers developed a tiny "ionic wind engine" to help cool computer chips. As processing power increases in line with Moore's Law, they also get much hotter. According to experiments, the ionic wind engine increased a chip's cooling rate by 250 percent. From a Purdue University press release:

The experimental cooling device, which was fabricated on top of a mock computer chip, works by generating ions - or electrically charged atoms - using electrodes placed near one another. The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10 millimeters above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an "ionic wind."

This breeze increased the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip.

Link

UPDATE: BB pal Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics writes, "Meanwhile, the architects at Solomon Cordwell Buenz have expanded Sharper Image's bestselling Ionic Breeze to macroscale, right alongside the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. Well, kinda." Link

Astronomers have captured the first image of a comet-like tail behind a star. The star, Mira, is named for the Latin word meaning "wonderful." The tail is 20,000 times the distance between Pluto and our sun. Mira is hurtling through space at 291,000 miles per hour.

From NASA:

"I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star," says Christopher Martin of the California Institute of Technology. "It was amazing how Mira's tail echoed on vast, interstellar scales the familiar phenomena of a jet's contrail or a speedboat's turbulent wake." Martin is the principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (telescope), and lead author of a Nature paper appearing today to announce the discovery.

Astronomers say Mira's tail offers a unique opportunity to study how stars like our sun die and ultimately seed new solar systems. Mira is an older star called a red giant that is losing massive amounts of surface material. As Mira hurtles along, its tail sheds carbon, oxygen and other important elements needed for new stars, planets and possibly even life to form. This tail material, visible now for the first time, has been released over the past 30,000 years.

"This is an utterly new phenomenon to us, and we are still in the process of understanding the physics involved," says co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena. "We hope to be able to read Mira's tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star's life."

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

James Hathaway from the landmine victims' aid group Clear Path International (CPI) tells BoingBoing,

Recently I was very fortunate to be invited by Jack Hanna's staff to Rwanda where he was taping a special on mountain gorillas.

Sadly, a few weeks after my return, 4 gorillas were killed in neighboring Congo.

I spent some time while in Rwanda with Dr. Lucy Spelman. Her team at the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project are working to save the surviving infant gorilla, Ndeze. Here is a first-person account on Dr. Spelman's blog.

Link

A few months ago, I blogged about the story of an LA Times sports writer who announced -- by way of a newspaper column -- plans to transition from male to female.

This week, host Madeleine Brand on the NPR News program "Day to Day" (disclaimer: I'm a contributor to the show) did an amazing and extensive interview with the person who is now Christine Daniels.

Snip from transcript:

Madeleine Brand: And what was it about Christine that you liked so much?

Christine Daniels: Oh, there are a lot of things. An icon of mine — well, several icons of mine. One was Christine Jorgensen, who was the first high-profile transsexual in the late 1950s. I just think she had a — well, it's pretty obvious she had a lot of courage to do what she did when she did it.

Readers of my blog know that I'm a punk-rock girl. I love music, and especially the New Wave punk era. So The Pretenders and Chrissie Hynde — always a hero of mine. I still dig out that first album; I was playing that the other night.

Madeleine: There's that Siouxsee and The Banshees song.

Christine: And the Siouxsee and The Banshees —

Madeleine: [The song] "Christine."

Christine: Now you're reading my mind on this one. [Laughter.] Yeah, Christine. All my — a lot of my friends call me strawberry girl from the lyrics, you know. And also, being a sportswriter and having covered her — Chris Evert. Chris Evert was as tough a competitor, male or female, as you're going to want to find. So anyway, it's those four reasons. I guess it's pretty involved — and also a fifth reason: I just think Christine's pretty. (Chuckles.)

Link to full transcript and audio.

Here's Christine Daniels' sports blog: Link.

Daniels is also maintaining a more personal blog about her gender transition here: Link.

Here's the "coming out" column: Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

LA Times journalist: "I am a transsexual sportswriter."

Update: Our pal Marty Cortinas at Wired says,

Christina (nee Chris) Kahrl went through the same thing as Penner/Daniels in 2003. She's a writer for Baseball Prospectus, a highly regarded group of baseball geeks. Link. Looks like she's been giving the other Chris some help: Link.

Last week here on BoingBoing, we watched Tibetan independence activist Lhadon Tethong (president of Students for a Free Tibet) liveblog her way through Beijing. At one point, she and others were arrested in an investigation around who unfurled a "Free Tibet" banner on the Great Wall of China. Ms. Tethong has since been released, and she's continuing to blog about human rights issues involving ethnic minorities in China, and related controversy around the 2008 Olympics:

The most amazing development since my last post is that Ai Wei Wei, one of China’s most celebrated artists and the designer of the [Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed the] Bird’s Nest, has come out against Beijing’s Olympics.

In this unbelievably damning report from Al Jazeera posted on YouTube, Ai Wei Wei says that the Olympics don’t represent the true face of China and he wants nothing more to do with them anymore.

I guess it’s not suprising that Ai Wei Wei has spoken out. Not only is he a brilliant independent artist, but he grew up watching his father - the famous modern Chinese poet, Ai Qin - and family suffering in a labor camp in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) after his father was exiled there during the Anti-Rightist Movement under Mao.

Link to full text of her post.

Snip from a related story in the UK Guardian, "Olympic artist attacks China’s pomp and propaganda" -- in which Ai lambasts director Steven Spielberg, Zhang Yimou, and other A-listers tapped to design the opening ceremonies:

“All the shitty directors in the world are involved. It’s disgusting,” said Ai. “I don’t like anyone who shamelessly abuses their profession, who makes no moral judgment. It is mindless.”

Link.

Below, a snapshot of that Tibetan sovereignty protest on the Great Wall, captured by phonecams and blogged around the world.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Tibetan independence activist blogging inside Beijing - UPDATED