Fine Art Taco Photography.

Kitteh and Pip of the early-1900s century comix classic Laugh Out Loud Cats get in on all that bloggy flowchart action. I bet they'd like the Fine Art Tacos, too.

Movie posters for Oscar shoo-in Mr. Woodcock are swipes from the earlier Matt Stone and Trey Parker ballsploitation classic, BASEketball. Ever-observant Sean Bonner called it first.

Here is a Los Angeles Times article about Wired NextFest in which I come clean about my long-running love affair with a robot named Keepon. Come to think of it, he sort of looks like two balls smushed together, too. .

John Schwartz has a great piece in the NYT on system breakdowns -- he starts out with the recent airline system clusterfck at LAX that stranded 17,000 passengers on planes for hours one day, after computers for the United States Customs and Border Protection agency went down and stayed down for nine hours. "Hackers? Nope. Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer."

WSJ article by Lee Gomes asks whether sonic technology limitations in iPods and MP3s are wrecking popular music.

Why is it important to pay attention to crackpot inventors? Jer Falludi at Worldchanging offers insights on how to spot value in kooky creations. Also my tinfoil beanie thong and matching steampunk buttplug can cure cancer, pls send money order for blueprints and investment plan.

Here is a freaky 28-second video clip in which an animated, 4-legged, headless naked ladybody crawls like a crab across a living room. NSFW I guess, but it's less than half a minute so your boss probably won't catch you anyway.

DeBeers uses zeppelins (oh sorry, "semi-rigid manned aerostats") to sniff out diamonds with gravity measuring devices.

"Lick Me in the Ass" is a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Is Bin Laden As Tall As Bigfoot?

Judge Dredd trufan Kevin Goldsmith, who has a magnificent ZZ Top beard, built himself a costume and bike based on the Judge Dredd movie.

(Thanks, susan mae, nat, Loren "Cryptomundo" Coleman, Adam "Ape Lad" Koford, Andrew "Rocketboom" Baron, Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin, Alex "Worldchanging" Steffen, PJ Holden)

BoingBoing reader Larry Carlson says,

The University of Miami has an exhibit of The Jackie Gleason Collection of Books. It includes approximately 1,700 volumes of books, journals, pamphlets, and publications in the field of parapsychology. The collection offers materials on such topics as: witchcraft, folklore, extrasensory perception (ESP), unidentified flying objects (UFOs), reincarnation, mysticism, spiritualism, mental telepathy, the occult, ghosts, clairvoyance, cosmology, demons, hypnosis, life after death, mediums, psychical research, voodooism, and others.

Link to online previews of this permanent collection, bequeathed in 1988 to the University of Miami Library by Gleason's widow.

Dude, *yes*, that Jackie Gleason. From the exhibit description:

Gleason, a comedian, television star, and motion picture actor of international acclaim, developed a deep and abiding interest in parapsychology and its many components. Gleason's interest grew from his inquisitive mind and sincere interest in the topic. However, the collection is not the product of Gleason's personal belief in the wide spectrum of phenomena represented by the term "parapsychology."

• Toy Octopus Encourages Beach Clean Up Link

• Rosy Future – An ad for the Sprint version of the upcoming Centro, Palm's smaller version of the same old thing. [Link

• Californian Standoff — Apple takes a no-aggression stance toward third-party iPhone hackers. Link

• Really? Mac? — Guitar Hero III coming to both PCs and Macs. Link

• Free as in Free – Free tool lets you unlock the iPhone for use on non-AT&T carriers. Link

• 6. Because It's Awesome – "Five Reasons You Should Be Playing Peggle" Link

• Peripher-hell – Rock Band on the Xbox 360 will not come with a wireless guitar, thanks to Microsoft's stupid tarriff on third-party controllers. Link

• Bleepin' Bleeper – "I Just Spoke to a Robot Telemarketer" Link

• Bauhaus-Inspired Gift Kodak No. 1A Link

• Gothic Castle Decor: Bat Light Fixtures! Link

• Palm Treo 500v: New Look, Same Limitations Link

• Pure Digital Flip Video Ultra Link

• Cocoon Tent Concept by John Moriarty Link

• Lenovo's Power-Efficient ThinkCentre A61e Desktop Link

• What the Fuck is Steampunk? Link

• Di Blasi R7E Folding Motorbike Link

• Aether Glowing Knife Block by Vincent Hudson Link

• Japanese Arcade Game Blamed for Rise in Illegal Stag Beetle Imports Link

• Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye Link

• FlatWorld: Enhanced Military VR Simulator Link

• LEGO: Post-Apocalyptic Mutant Cityscape by Legohaulic Link

• Team Fortress 2 "Meet the *" Trailers Link

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights Link

• Saitek Cyborg Gamepad with Flippable Controls Link

For those of you waiting on the edge of your seats for the invention of the gamma-ray annihilation laser, relax. The BBC reports that scientists in the US have successfully combined electrons with their anti-matter counterparts, positrons, to create Di-positronium, bringing the dream of gamma-ray annihilation lasers one step closer to being realized.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is a key step in the creation of ultrapowerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers.

"The difference in the power available from a gamma-ray laser compared to a normal laser is the same as the difference between a nuclear explosion and a chemical explosion," said Dr David Cassidy of the University of California, Riverside, and one of the authors of the paper.

Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

PeaceLove says: "Clear and unambiguous footage of Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus being attacked by Capitol police. Yearwood had stood in line to get into the Petraeus hearings but was denied entry. When the Reverend protested, he was assaulted by Capitol police, who broke his leg and arrested him for 'assaulting a police officer.'"

Capitol Hill Police "football tackled" Hip Hop Activist who was in line to enter hearing room for General Petreus' testimony on Capitol Hill

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus, was attacked by six capitol police today, when he was stopped from entering the Cannon Caucus Room on Capitol Hill, where General Petreaus gave testimony today to a joint hearing for the House Arms Services Committee and Foreign Relations Committee on the war in Iraq.

After waiting in line throughout the morning for the hearing that was scheduled to start at 12:30pm, Rev. Yearwood was stopped from entering the room, while others behind him were allowed to enter. He told the officers blocking his ability to enter the room, that he was waiting in line with everyone else and had the right to enter as well. When they threatened him with arrest he responded with "I will not be arrested today." According to witnesses, six capitol police, without warning, "football tackled him. He was carried off in a wheel chair by DC Fire and Emergency to George Washington Hospital.

Rev. Yearwood was examined for possible head and leg injuries then transferred to Central Processing. He has been charged with "assaulting a police officer."

Rev. Yearwood said as he was being released from the hospital to be taken to central booking, "The officers decided I was not going to get in Gen. Petreaus' hearing when they saw my button, which says 'I LOVE THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ.'"

Link

My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary about a 4-year-old girl whose abstract paintings fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars. She was a darling of the media, a target of art critics, and an alleged victim of manipulative parents.

It opens October 5 in LA and NYC.

In the span of only a few months, 4-year-old Marla Olmstead rocketed from total obscurity into international renown -- and sold over $300,000 dollars worth of paintings. She was compared to Kandinsky and Pollock, and called "a budding Picasso." Inside Edition, The Jane Pauley Show, and NPR did pieces, and The Today Show and Good Morning America got in a bidding war over an appearance by the bashful toddler. There was talk of corporate sponsorship with the family fielding calls from The Gap and Crayola.

But not all of the attention was positive. From the beginning, many faulted her parents for exposing Marla to the glare of the media and accused the couple of exploiting their daughter for financial gain. Others felt her work was, in fact, comparable to the great abstract expressionists ñ but saw this as emblematic of the meaninglessness of Modern Art. "She is painting exactly as all the adult paintings have been in the past 50 years, but painting like a child, too. That is what everybody things but they don't dare to say it," said Oggi, the leading Italian weekly. Through no intention of her own, Marla revived the age-old question, ëwhat is art?'

And then, five months into Marla's new life as a celebrity and just short of her fifth birthday, a bombshell dropped. CBS' 60 Minutes aired an expos? suggesting strongly that the paintings were painted by her father, himself an amateur painter. As quickly as the public built Marla up, they tore her down. The New York Post asked whether "the juvenile Jackson Pollock may actually be a full-fledged Willem de Frauding," the Olmsteads were barraged with hate mail, ostracized around town, sales of the paintings dried up, and Marla's art dealer considered moving out of Binghampton. Embattled, the Olmsteads turned to the filmmaker to clear their name. Torn between his own responsibility as a journalist and the family's desire to see their integrity restored, the director finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a situation that can't possibly end well for him and them, and could easily end badly for both.

Link (Thanks, Gord!)

I Hate Young People is an archive of on-the-street videos of young people complaining about old people and old people complaining about young people. The old people don't like young people's music, manners, and clothes and the young people don't like the old people's odor and old-fashioned ways. Link (fixed link)

Todd Lappin took this photo of a sock exchange at a laundromat in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. Link

Director and cinematographer Grant Gee, whose work you may know from Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy and Demon Days Live (with Gorillaz), has a new film out soon: Joy Division. THR, Variety, Cinematical, and more on Cinematical. (thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Previously on Boing Boing:

New biopic on Joy Division, Ian Curtis: Control

The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona has developed a National Science Foundation funded system "to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web."

Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Link (Thanks, Lance!)

Osama Bin Laden spotted on Coney Island.

Canada's Privacy Commissioner has raised concerns that Google Street View may violate "many basic rights of citizens".

British couple has been living a Travelodge motel for the past 22 years.

A regional governor in Russia declared today to be "Day of Conception," and has offered couples time off from work to make babies. Couples who give birth nine months later on Russia's "national day" (June 12) could win cars, cash, home appliances, and other fabulous prizes.

On the fine television program Judge Joe Brown, a professional Chewbacca impersonator states his defense during an unemployment check case to the amusement of both court and judge.

Apparently, Palestinian territories -- including Ramallah -- produce some pretty awesome micro-brews. BB reader Ghassan says, "I myself love Taybeh beer. In Arabic 'taybeh' means good or yummy, and in the case of this beer it also stands for the name of the village in which it is made. I wanted to head over to the festival last weekend but checkpoints on the way are a pain."

The BBC reports on a creative, collaborative, web-based approach for individuals to help in the search for missing billionaire Steve Fosset.

Dave Bullock has posted some fun photos of Keepon, the cute, dancing robot, getting fresh with the ladies at the Wired Nextfest benefit concert for Creative Commons.

(thanks, Jesse, Andrew, JFR, Bonnie Burton, Ghassan, William Drenttel, eecue, iPienso)

The Bibliothèque nationale de France has a wonderful gallery of illustrations by Villemard from 1910 imagining what life would be like in the year 2000. It's part of a larger exhibition titled Utopia: The Quest for the Ideal Society in the Western World. BB's Paris liaison, Alex Boucherot, editor of Fluctuat, kindly provided a rough translation of the Villemard gallery description:

Visions of The Year 2000
These labels, most probably intended to be found in food products, were presented on panels of a dozen little scenes. They illustrate the way our grandparents imagined the year 2000. The inventions meant to improve everyday life are seen side by side with more erudite or searchful vocations, but curiously the clothing fashion remains that of the Belle Epoque!

Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Jacob Loshin, a law student at Yale, drafter a paper exploring how stage magicians protect the secrets behind their tricks, and continue to come up with great new ideas, without getting caught up in the insanity of intellectual property law. Basically, magicians police themselves based on a set of norms for treating secrets, presentation styles, and techniques of making magic. Violate the norms by, say, stealing a trick or not giving credit where it's due and you'll be shamed and shunned by your fellow magicians. From the abstract:

Intellectual property scholars have begun to explore the curious dynamics of IP's negative spaces, areas in which IP law offers scant protection for innovators, but where innovation nevertheless seems to thrive. Such negative spaces pose a puzzle for the traditional theory of IP, which holds that IP law is necessary to create incentives for innovation.

This paper presents a study of one such negative space which has so far garnered some curiosity but little sustained attention - the world of performing magicians. This paper argues that idiosyncratic dynamics among magicians make traditional copyright, patent, and trade secret law ill-suited to protecting magicians' most valuable intellectual property. Yet, the paper further argues that the magic community has developed its own set of unique IP norms which effectively operate in law's absence. The paper details the structure of these informal norms that protect the creation, dissemination, and performance of magic tricks. The paper also discusses broader implications for IP theory, suggesting that a norm-based approach may offer a promising explanation for the puzzling persistence of some of IP's negative spaces.

Link (via TechDirt, thanks Sean Ness!)