In the current issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a beautiful essay celebrating the surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Gopnik is a fantastic writer himself, having written the dispatches that were compiled in Paris to the Moon. The New Yorker feature, titled "Blows Against The Empire," is pegged on the Library of America publication of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s. From The New Yorker:

Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact, Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist—concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum. If we oppress the Irish, why not eat them? Swift asked, in the model of all black satire—and if we can make quotidian and trivial the technology that has already arrived, Dick wonders, then why would we not do the same to the future yet to come, psychic communication and time travel and the colonization of Mars? Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.

Link to The New Yorker, Link to buy Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (via Total Dick-Head)

xarph says: Here's an utterly complete (down to the branded POWER CABLES for chrissake) working NeXT cube system with every accessory, document, piece of software, and even stacks of spare parts. This is pretty much the retrocomputing equivalent of finding a working, fully restored Dymaxion Car on craigslist. Link

Kasey Kazee was arrested for robbing a liquor store in Ashland, Kentucky on Friday. He allegedly disguised himself by wrapping duct tape around his face. He also apparently pulled his t-shirt around his head Cornholio-style. Don't miss the video interview with Kazee where he denies being the duct tape bandit. From WSAZ:

Miller says Kazee also had a t-shirt pulled up around his head during the robbery attempt. Miller says it reminded him of the "Cornholio" character from the "Beavis and Butthead" cartoon.

Steele says Kazee did get away with two rolls of change before Steele could grab his club. Police found much of that change in the parking lot.

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Previously on BB:
• Man disguised as tree robs bank Link

The RIAA owes former file-sharing defendant Debbie Foster more than $68,000 in legal fees after losing their case against her -- but they won't pay up. They haven't responded to polite notes asking them to turn over the dough the court ordered them to pay, so now Foster has asked the court to "enter judgement" which will let her turn the Fortune 100 delinquent deadbeats like Universal, Warners, Sony and EMI over to a collection agency. Link (via /.)

Following up on this morning's story about outing whitewashers on Wikipedia, Brian sez, "We went ahead and took a look at changes to Wikipedia allegedly made by the people from the Fox News offices - the changes originating from IP address 12.167.224.228. We've done the legwork of poring through all the edits and published a comprehensive list. An example of the changes:

From: "Many groups and commentators, including [[Media Matters for America]], and liberal broadcasters [[Al Franken]], and [[Keith Olbermann]], have claimed that Hume distorted Roosevelt's views."

To: "Many groups and commentators, including [[Media Matters for America]], and liberal broadcasters [[Al Franken]], and [[Keith Olbermann]], have claimed that Hume distorted Roosevelt's views in an attempt to ride Mr. Hume's coat tails in the ratings race as Mr. Hume hosts the highest rated political program on cable television."

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

AtomicMadhouse's line of comics sound-effect tees is pretty swell. Link (Thanks, Frank!)

An eBay seller (whose first language is clearly not English) has hand-built a replica steampunk powered monocycle from the Victorian era. This is a hell of a piece of engineering.

After many dedication compiling information about books and documentation of epoch of the 19th century, 1got a base of knowledge to make this faithful reply of this unique monocycle for it´s funcionality and elegance. It was invented in 1873 in France.

Link (Thanks, Detroit Dave!)

See also: a steely-toothed bouquet of steampunk links from Boing Boings past

Britain's Channel 4 has just announced the second season schedule for The IT Crowd, the geeky sitcom that rocked my socks when it debuted last season. They've posted some video of creator Graham Linehan (who also created the brilliant sitcom Father Ted) talking about the second season -- but they've region-locked it so I have no idea what it's like.

Boy, that's dumb. I thought that it was dumb to region-lock the web-previews of the show last season, but they supposedly had to do this due to their territorial deals -- but surely there's no territorial deal on Graham talking about the show. Someone put this on the Pirate Bay, please. Link (Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

(Disclosure: I was an unpaid consultant to Season One of The IT Crowd, and I live with a Channel 4 commissioner)

See also: The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life

Update: Thanks to Michael, we now have a 58-second WMV rip of the stream.

The Kelsey-Hayes Company in Detroit, MI produced this brochure for their pre-fabricated fallout shelters. SyndProd scanned it and put it on Flickr for the enjoyment of the human race. Link (Via Make)

New studies of dust that form lifelike structures suggest that extraterrestrial life may not be carbon-based at all. Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in German, and the University of Sydney observed particles of inorganic dust form helical structures and go through other "lifelike" changes. The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth. These inorganic structures may have even led to the organic molecules of life that we're familiar with, and made from. From the Institute of Physics press release:

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says (V.N.) Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

Link to press release, Link to New Journal of Physics paper

BoingBoing reader Phil Lapsley says,

Joybubbles (formerly Joe Engressia), often called the granddaddy of phone phreaking, died last week at 58.

Blind since birth, Joybubbles amazed with his ability to make free telephone calls simply by whistling into a phone. He was one of the central characters in the seminal 1971 Esquire article on phone phreaking called "Secrets of the Little Blue Box."

Multifaceted, he was as famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of the telephone system as he was for listening to all 800+ episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when Fred Rogers passed away in 2003. And, he was a heckuva nice guy.

There's no one great link here, sadly; wikipedia article is here, a good tribute to him is here; news of his death here.

Reader comment: Jeff says,

"Secrets of the Little Blue Box" is the second Ron Rosenbaum article you have mentioned recently. His writings are amazing. Check them out, anthologized, here."

Fernando says,

I'm not sure if you would want to post this but he is featured in this movie.

For my birthday, my pals Michelle Hansen, Sabine Szylko, and Ed Szylko gave me a fantastic gift: Archie McPhee's Box O Fun. The cheap little plastic toys may seem kinda ho-hum on their own, but en masse they're a hoot. Each of the 25 toys is individually wrapped and it's quite a treat to open one after another. The Box O Fun, at $13.95, really is more fun than a barrel of monkeys!
Link

Link to an obsessively detailed iPhone replica made of sculpey clay -- they even did the box and the marketing materials. (Thanks, Melissa!)

Surrealist clothiers Imaginary Foundation are now shipping these long-awaited hooded sweatshirts with allover printing. Available in your choice of a cloud design or blueprint to some magical, mystery device. They're heavyweight fleece and $100 each. Link

On Slate, Jessica Vitkus, author of AlternaCrafts, challenges our presidential candidates to fight for the crafter vote. To that end, she presents a handful of sample political projects for both "DemoCrafts" and "RepubliCrafts." Seen here, "RepubliCraft No. 1: Department of Homeland Security Blanket."

From the article:

Endorsed by the White House and Fox News, this colorful scrap quilt is a guide to our ever-changing security alert levels. Each level is labeled with embroidery to distinguish a DHS Blanket from a gay-pride flag. (Note: Blanket is not a safety device. In case of a terrorist attack, DHS Blanket will not protect you.)

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

In the new issue of Cabinet Magazine, Joshua Foer, secretary of the Athanasius Kircher Society, presents a short history of miniature writing. From the article:

1665 C.E.
Robert Hooke titles his revolutionary book on the microscope Micrographia, literally, “small writing.” The second set of objects he looks at under his microscope, after first examining the points of sharp needles, is “certain pieces of exceeding curious writing,” including the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and a dozen verses of the Bible hand-written in an area smaller than a two-pence piece. Hooke’s microscope enables him to discover that, when magnified, the miniature writing consists of “pitifull bungling scribbles and scrawls” that are “for the most part legible enough, though in some places there wanted a good fantsy well preposest to help one through.” Hooke concludes: “If this manner of small writing were made easie and practicable … it might be of very good use to convey secret Intelligence without any danger of Discovery or mistrusting.”

Link

Comics Journal readers pick their favorite lurid covers. (some NSFW) Link

NYT on the "simulation argument": "if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation." Link

Reason's Hit & Run blog on the trend of banning plastic bags and bottles as a way to conserve oil: "The US currently uses 20 million barrels of oil per day. First we’re going to ban plastic bags, slicing away a giant 0.16% of that consumption. Now, bring on the plastic bottle ban, slashing a full 0.02% from the oil guzzling. Take that, global warming!"(numbers updated) Link

Video: Yogic "flying" Link

Photo gallery shows what happens to bacon and egg sealed into plastic boxes for a year. Link

Excellent casemod: "I've modified an old newspaper vending box to deliver the latest headlines to my living room each morning, and I don't even have to fumble around for quarters. The digital newsstand is powered by a Mac Mini 1.42 GHz G4, connected to a 17" LG Flatron monitor. It runs an AppleScript that generates a slideshow of newspaper front page images using PhotoPresenter." Link (Thanks, Josh!)

BoingBoing reader Clifton says,

Most of Sally Cruikshank's fabulous animated works from the 1970s on are available at YouTube: Link.

She's uploaded them there herself. Very cool stuff, including a number of animations she did for Sesame Street. Her work is wonderfully surreal, constantly-changing and flowing animation.

The piece I totally go wild for, in particular, is "Face Like A Frog" (1987): Video link. It's kind of Halloween-spooky themed, with music by Danny Elfman and the Mystic Knights (the original persona of Oingo Boingo.) I first saw it on 'Alive From Off Center' on PBS in the '80s. "Don't go in the basement!"

Man, my only complaint on the videos is the painfully lossy compression. The beauty of her animation work is those fast-morphing, flat pools of vivid color. YouTube craps that up so mercilessly. Sigh.

Link to Ms. Cruikshank's website, where you can purchase more recent original art. Hey, she has a blog now, too! And posts her paintings to Flickr. Image above: "Casting Session," one of her wonderfully weird expressionist paintings.

UPDATE: Oh, excellent! All of these Cruikshank videos, including "Face Like a Frog," are available in far better quality on Brightcove: Link.

Reader comment: Aaron B says,

The Sally Cruikshank post reminded me of the great sequence she did for the 1983 Twilight Zone movie: Video Link.

Reader comment: Gary Peare of ukelelia points us to the missing ukelele connection:

Don't forget the Sally Cruikshank post we have on Ukulelia. R. Crumb Cheap Suit Serenaders Bob Armstrong and Al Dodge did music for at least two of her animated classics! Link.

Radar has just published an extensive profile feature on John Young, the New York-based architect who is better known as one of the net's most ardent foes of government secrecy:

Cryptome is, in the words of washingtonpost.com columnist and NBC News military analyst William Arkin, "the Google of national security." It is a meticulously maintained online compendium of information—some previously available to the public, some not—devoted to plumbing and exposing the secrets of the intelligence world. With a clean, crisp design, it presents, in no discernible order, simple red links to documents and text files against a white background. Much of the material Young collects is stultifyingly dull—"RFC Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code" will take the reader to an announcement in the Federal Register concerning a "mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions and shared secret keys" from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for 
instance—but some of it is dangerous and even breathtaking.

During the past few years, Young has published detailed overhead satellite imagery of Site R, a military installation in Pennsylvania that he claims is Vice President Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Hours after the FBI announced charges in June against four men for plotting to blow up jet-fuel tanks at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Cryptome ran photos of the airport tank farms, pointing out the exact route of a jet-fuel pipeline buried beneath nearby residential neighborhoods. He regularly publishes satellite photos of the homes of intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden's Washington, D.C., residence. He has exposed the names of what he claims are 276 British agents covertly working for MI6, the names of 400 secret Japanese intelligence agents, and the names and home addresses of what he claims are 2,619 CIA sources.

(...) The closest Young comes to explaining to me why he created Cryptome is this: "I'm a pretty fucking angry guy."

Link to "Secrets and Lies," by John Cook. (Thanks, David Cho)

Previously on Boingboing:

Cryptome.org, repository of sensitive docs, gets shutdown notice

ABC News story on Cryptome.org

Two of ten items listed in US News & World Report:

# Karl Christian Rove was born on Christmas Day 1950 in Denver. His family moved a lot until settling in Salt Lake City. Rove's parents divorced when his stepfather, whom he considered his father, came out as gay. Rove would meet his biological father 20 years later.

# President Bush is known to give people nicknames. Among Karl Rove's nicknames are "Boy Genius" and "Turd Blossom," which is a flower that grows in cow dung.

Link. (Thanks, John Parres)

Wikiscanner is a new Wikipedia search tool created by a Caltech grad student named Virgil Griffith -- it scours all the IP addresses associated with Wikipedia edits and attempts to figure out which edits have been made from within government agencies, corporations, ad agencies, political campaigns and so on.

Wired News has a wiki up for readers who've uncovered damning whitewash edits by self-interested parties. Among them is this gem:

Disney User Deletes Reference to DRM Critic Doctorow

On Christmas Eve 2004, a Disney user deleted a citation on the "digital rights management" page to DRM critic Cory Doctorow along with a link to a speech he gave to Microsoft's Research Group on the subject. Later, a Disney user altered the "opponents" discussion of the entry, arguing that consumers embrace DRM: "In general, consumers knowingly enter into the arrangement where they are granted limited use of the content." 2nd diff: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=14809929

Link

Samuel Mullin has a full sleeve's worth of beautifully executed Super Mario tattoos -- his site has a small gallery of them. He's doing a Zelda sleeve next for the other arm. He says he was inspired by a childhood spent in a military family, passing many days stuck in residential hotels, playing NES. Link (via Neatorama)

My latest Guardian column has just gone up -- it talks about the "Potemkin Village" effect with DRM, whereby DRM vendors walk their potential customers through a faked-up demo showing how great DRM is, how much people want it, and how easy it is to use. The latest victim of this scam is the BBC, who've just decreed that their TV shows will only be delivered online through the iPlayer, a DRM service that lets you do less than you can with your old TV and VCR. Because that's what the public is crying out for: an Internet TV that does less than a regular TV.

These demos almost never involve real hardware. It's so much easier to do interoperability when all it takes to make two devices communicate is to draw a dotted line between them on a slide. And when the demos do involve real hardware, it's usually all from one vendor, and only within a constrained universe of uses.

In reality, it's bloody hard to get any two technologies to talk to each other successfully. Remember how hard it was to get your new wireless card, printer or DVD recorder to work? Now, imagine that these technologies had been deliberately designed not to work with each other - except under the exactly correct circumstances.

Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform is typical of this. All such devices, "certified" to work with each other, barely ran on their own. And God help you if you tried to connect them to a competitor's device (even Microsoft's Zune won't handle PlaysForSure music).

Link

See also: Cory's column on "Digital Lysenkoism" for the Guardian

According to this article in a Chinese newspaper, beauty-seekers in Southern China (and other parts of the world) are soaking themselves in pools filled with a type of small fish that eat human skin:

Garra Rufa, a type of small tropical fish, also nicknamed Chinchin Yu, nibble fish or simply doctor fish, are put in hot springs. As they can live and swim freely in at least 43-degree-hot waters, they are naturally used for the treatment of skin diseases in such spas. When placed in the spa, these fish can feed themselves on the dead cells of the human body, since they only consume such cells, leaving the healthy skin of the human body to grow. The whole process is reportedly free of pain. It won't hurt and the bather might feel a pleasant tingling on his or her skin.

Link. Wikipedia says the fish only do this when they don't have anything better to eat: Link. Image: photo.eastday.com. (Thanks, C.M.)

Reader comment: Jon Power says,

Following your fish-eat-dead-skin story, I'm sure you're aware of the use of fly maggots to clean wounds. The maggots only eat dead flesh and so keep the wound raw and healing. They have a remarkable effect on closing up deep wounds over time, but not surprisingly, people are a bit squeamish of the idea. Link.