(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.

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[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.)

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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.

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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)