The only thing in the world I hate more than Crocs are Uggs. Evidently, the two have mated, spawning this vile demon bastard footwear spotted recently in Houston. Where it is 100 degrees. (Thanks, Katie)

Reader comment: Samir M. Nassar says,

I might not be a proud Crocs owner, but my feet are happy. I work a twelve-hour night shift at a hospital. This entails lots of walking to and fro. After years of suffering at the hands of sneakers and tennis-shoes I put down my money for a pair of Crocs and my feet have been singing the praises since.

For the record, mine are black, and don't have the stupid holes on top and I do cringe when I see them worn out in the street. Tacky!

Brett Burton says,

How did you miss the opportunity to make one of the nearly limitless puns available for your Cruggs post? Say No To Cruggs, Don't Get Hooked on Cruggs... Crugg Abuse ? Anyway, thanks for helping raise Crugg Awareness. It's good to see Boing Boing doing it's part to aid in Crugg Prevention.

Previously:

Crocs banned in Swedish hospital for generating a "cloud of lightning"

Link to a feature article on cat macros and the websites that love them, including Eric Nakagawa's icanhazcheeseburger. LOLcats may not have started there, but whatever, I love that site. In other news, HELLL FREEEZIZ OVAR.

Scott Beale points to this video, inspired by a classic Monty Python sketch.

LIVE, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Hipster Olympics! Brought to you by POYKPAC Sports.

Hurrah! The first episode of season two of The IT Crowd has aired and it's already available for download!

The IT Crowd is the nerd sitcom about sysadmins from Graham Linehan, creator of the convulsively, piss-yourself funny Father Ted. The US adaptation of it that NBC picked up is reportedly not so hot, but I loved the Brit version and was immensely pleased when it got picked up for a second season.

Channel 4, the show's homebase, has a ridiculous DRM-based web-viewing option, but I can't get that to work (though I live in London, I'm travelling in Australia, which means it won't let me get access to the show, and even if I could get at it, it won't play on Linux). Lucky for me -- and you -- intrepid fans of the show have already put episode one online on a variety of torrent servers, and I'm downloading it now with eager anticipation.

Season two, episode one is called "The Work Outing."

Pirate Bay torrent, Eztvefnet torrent, Mininova torrent

IMBD info about the episode (Thanks, Sebadog, David and Clay!)

See also:
Season 2 of the IT Crowd announced
The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life

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

Update: Chirag's put together this handy streaming page for all the old episodes!

UPDATE, 2:10pm PST: Looks like MSFT has fixed the immediate problem with WGA, for now: Link. But the product is still, as they say, defective by design. (Thanks, Marius)

- - - - - - - - - -

BB reader David McBride says,

DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today.

The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation -- except possibly those with volume license keys -- is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in. Installations which are flagged as counterfeit switch to a "reduced functionality mode" which results in features like Aero and DirectX being disabled.

So far, the only public response from Microsoft has been indirectly via their technical support forums, where a user has posted the following snippet from an email he received from MS's technical support address:

Thank you for your response.

I’m sorry to inform you that the Windows Genuine server might be down for few days. I have escalate the issue to our Genuine team, kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007.

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Technical Support.

Link.

Update, 12:03pm PT: David McBride says,

Phil Liu, the WGA Program Manager has responded on the Microsoft forums to say, effectively, "we know, we're taking it seriously and we're working on it."

I understand the frustration you all are going through. I'm investigating the issue right now.

I guarantee that we're working on this issue right now. For folks wondering, MACHINES ARE NOT SHUTTING DOWN with reduced functionality.

I guarantee that I will personally resolve this issue before I go to sleep - whether or not it is Tuesday I sleep. My goal is to identify a FIX for this issue - afterwards get you all what you are looking for, an explanation and cause.

The message from the Supportability team will be addressed appropriately as well. I encourage folks to keep an eye out on these forums.

I promise I will have an explanation and resolution as soon as humanly possible.

-Phil Liu @ Microsoft
Program Manager, WGA

Link. This is also not the first time that this has happened.

Reader comment: Thomas Hruska says,

Here's a possible explanation for what happened, spanned across two blog entries over the past 24 hours: one, two.

Colin sez, "I operate a current events and free culture blog for Red Hat. We made this anti-DRM agit-prop cartoon, and are inviting people to mash it up and add to it. It's licensed to share. Originally, it was supposed to tell the whole story of music, throughout all of civilization and its inevitable industrialization and ultimate trascendancy, but we couldn't actually handle that, so we got as far as we could using a cute bird. If this one flies, we intend to make a lot more. It was fun, and we're really proud of it." Link (Thanks, Colin!)

Earlier this month, Mark posted that David Hahn, the "radioactive boy scout" who years ago tried to build a nuclear reactor in his basement, had been busted again. This time, he was nabbed for stealing smoke detectors allegedly to get at the bit of radioactive material inside for experimentation. For the back story on Hahn, check out Ken Silverstein's 1998 Harper's Magazine article "The radioactive boy scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breed reactor," now freely available on the magazine's Web site. And if the article doesn't satisfy your curiosity, Silverstein later expanded the feature into a book. From the article:

David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom–the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out–Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.

Which was fine with David. Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager’s sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really big explosions. David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food joints, grocery stores, and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student and always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school. During his junior year at Chippewa Valley High School–at a time when he was secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard–David nearly failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he aced the test in science). Ken Gherardini, who taught David conceptual physics, remembers him as an excellent pupil on the rare occasions when he was interested in classwork but otherwise indifferent to his studies. “His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table,” Gherardini told me with a laugh during an interview at Chippewa Valley before his 8:20 A.M. class. “I don’t know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car.”

Link to the Harper's article, Link to buy the book The Radioactive Boy Scout (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

In order to study how fear is manifested in the brain, researchers created a Pac-Man-like videogame that shocks the player if he or she gets caught by a digital predator. The scientists from University College London's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging used fMRI to scan the players' brains and see which part lit up during gameplay. From a Wellcome Trust press release about the study, published in the journal Science:

When the artificial predator was in the distance, the researchers observed activity in lower parts of the prefrontal cortex just behind the eyebrows. Activity in this area – known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – increases during anxiety and helps control strategies on how to respond to the threat.

However, as the predator moved closer, the brain activity shifted to a region of the brain responsible for more primitive behaviour, namely the periaqueductal grey. The periaqueductal grey is associated with quick-response survival mechanisms, which include fight, flight and freezing. This region is also associated with the body's natural pain killer, opioid analgesia, preparing the body to react to pain.

"(An animal's) most efficient survival strategy will depend on the level of threat we perceive," (says researcher Dean Mobbs. "This makes sense as sometimes being merely wary of a threat is enough, but at other times we need to react quickly. The closer a threat gets, the more impulsive your response will be – in effect, the less free will you will have."

Link to press release, Link to Science abstract

The University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has scanned and published a full set of playing cards created in 1945 by an inmate at the Dachau concentration camp. They are the size of normal playing cards.

Boris Kobe (1905 - 1981) – Slovenian architect and painter was a political prisoner at the concentration camp of Allach, a sub-camp of Dachau. (...) As a whole, this work of art represents a visual summary of life in a concentration camp, the main vehicle of which consists of Kobe's tragic and humiliating sequences spiced with acrid humor. At the same time, this tiny exhibit is a miniature chronicle of the twilight of humanity brought about by Nazism, which regarded a human being, and therefore the artist himself, as a mere number.

Link. (Thanks, Yaffa)

Reader comments: Doug Rushkoff says,

FYI: It's not a full deck. it's most of a deck, but he either didn't finish it or some was lost.

Jody Wickson says,

The university's article unfortunately fails to put these cards in their proper context. The author seems to be unfamiliar with Tarot decks used for card games. This deck is based on a conventional Austrian style Tarot (or Tarock) design in which the trumps and court cards are double figured and the suit signs are hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. Link. This type of Tarot deck is not used for the occult or for divination. It is only used for playing Tarot/Tarock card games.

I am also disapointed that the "all about the occult" link is a very biased anti-occult sermon which is unrelated to the type of Tarot (gaming, not fortune telling) depicted in the article. The article gives the unfortunate and false impression that these cards were used for the occult. Not all of Tarot is related to the occult or fortune telling. In fact, Tarot cards were originally designed in the 15th century for playing a card game and the fortune telling practices date no earlier than the 18th century.

Here is a link which I think better explains the cultural context of this type of Tarot deck.