Craftster user Zosomoto created these handsome goth reworkings of the classic Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dollies. Just in time for Hallowe'en accessorising, too. Link (via Wonderland)

Copyfightin' law prof Michael Geist tackles the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a new global treaty proposal that has expanded to cover all the bad stuff that we're more used to seeing from the World Intellectual Property Organization (which bears the same relationship to bad copyright law that Mordor has to evil in Middle Earth), like prohibitions of breaking DRM and the use of public money spent to police the private interests of a few giant corporations.

Unlike WIPO, ACTA is undertaken without input from those pesky consumer rights groups and developing nations, and without the need to come to consensus.

Despite the absence of any independent data (indeed, there is evidence that some numbers have been fabricated), politicians are easily convinced that action is needed since the lobbyists often come armed with compelling props (exploded batteries, unsafe toys) and no one actually supports counterfeiting. Of course, the issue is not whether you are for or against counterfeiting, but rather whether the proposed reforms have anything to do with health and safety or significant economic concerns.

Link

Boiler Design has a couple intriguing prototype cable-managers online: the first being a baseboard "picket fence" that forms a designy trough to run your cables along (looks like it'd be a dust-magnet, though), and the other being a nautically inspired "cleat" for your plug receptacles that you can wind your cords around when not in use (I suspect it'd be great for in-use cords too, especially vacuum cleaners, to keep the plug from being jerked out). Link to picket fence, Link to cleat (Thanks, Karl!)

Kikuya, a ramen shop near Tokyo's Kitasenjyu Station, carries a startling variety of improbable novelty ramen dishes, including Vanilla Ice Cream Ramen, Yogurt Ramen and Chocolate Ramen.

That flavors can you expect? Vanilla Ice Cream Ramen, Chocolate Ramen, and every bodies favorite… Green Tea Ramen (LIKE WHOA!) Something to remember is that ice cream ramen could be a limtied summer time edition this year (like I heard it was last year) and if you show up too late in the season you might end up with some Coffee Ramen (a.k.a. kohii gyunyu ramen). Other items on the menu include white ramen (yogurt), red ramen (tomato), natto ramen, milk ramen, hot cocoa ramen, pork kimchi ramen, and other crazy combinations. Regular ramen is 500 Yen but if you choose that option I’m sure people will look at you funny.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Glenn Fleishman sez, "Verizon Wireless has settled with the New York State Attorney General over the use of the word 'unlimited' in the marketing for their cell data service, where 'unlimited' meant 5 GB a month, regardless of use.

"The Verizon service, as BoingBoing has noted before, prohibits anything but Web surfing, email, and intranet use, although the revised terms of service indicate downloading legal music is acceptable, while P2P usage is not. The AG's office found that Verizon cut off 13,000 customers nationally over three years for violating its previously not well disclosed limits on unlimited. Verizon no longer calls it unlimited, and stopped cutting people off in April while this complaint was resolved."

(Insert "Neverending Story" Simpsons joke here.) Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

Mashing Pumpkins is a pretty swell new free album of illegal Hallowe'en mashups. I've just downloaded a smattering of them for review purposes and found myself rockin' out to DJ Engineer's "Purple Monster Bop" (Shaun of the Dead - Man Parrish (Hip Hop, Be Bop - Don't Stop) vs Dr. Demento (Purple People Eater) vs Monster Twist).

These mashup sites tend to disappear about ten seconds after they hit the net and get some serious download traffic, so I've created Coral Cache links to all the individual MP3s below -- just one of the many services we provide here at Boing Boing Global Enterprises (A wholly owned subsidiary of Harriman Enterprises Holdings (Holdings) Ltd).

• Cheekyboy - This is halloween

• Fettdog - Flesh for jigsaw
• THC - Aint nobody choose noise
• King of Pants - Silence of the cannibals
• Mr Fab & His Bag O' Heads - I want my mummy
• Pimp Daddy Supreme - Snap yo specials
• Frogthedawg - Helloween
• DJ Engineer - Purple Monster Bop
• Pimp Daddy Supreme - Thrillershake
• Cheekyboy - Bad moon Werewolves
• King of Pants - Werewolves of love
• Frog the Dawg - Van Halen vs Satan
• Frog The Dawg - DMX vs Rob Zombie
• Cheekyboy - 1-800 living dead
• DJ Engineer - Love or hate halloween
• DJ Useo - Spirit got lost in the inner marshland
• DJ Useo - Nitrogen Monster Island

Link, (Thanks, Ray!)

Copro Nason Gallery in Santa Monica is hosting a show of ouija boards and ouija-inspired work by more than a dozen Pop Surrealist artists. "Talking Board Show" includes spooky-beautiful pieces by the likes of David Stoupakis, Carrie Ann Baade, and Meats Meier. Seen here at very top, Christopher Owen's "Goober's Ghost Chasing Kit," and, above, Travis Louie's interpretation of the Ouija. The show runs through Halloween and all of the art is also viewable online. Link

Designer Roger Arquer makes non-lethal mousetraps from household items.

Using everyday household objects like a clear drinking glass, metal springs, paper clips, and a metal nut, this "friendlier" mousetrap won't kill off your rodent infestation, but instead will just provide an easy way for you to transport them outside. The designer's intent is that you can re-use the objects after you catch the mouse. I think I would probably wash them a few hundred times first.

Link

Kevin Mack is a special effects genius that I profiled in Wired in 1999. He's also an excellent artist.

Mack's work is the result of ongoing research in a wide range of fields from the mathematics of complexity to neuroscience and human perception. His work in artificial life and rule based systems, used on What Dreams May Come and Fight Club, inspired the development of tissue simulation software that is now being used for virtual stem cell research. In 2006, Mack received the title of Honorary Neuroscientist, from UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, for his lectures there on perception, visualization and creativity.

Link

Hulk smash puny trick-or-treaters!

Alek says:

After wasps and bats, I thought you might get a chuckle out of this. A guy was selling a giant Hulk inflatable on eBay and asked permission to use the images from my site. After thanking him for being polite enough to ask (my stuff is scraped all the time), we chatted a bit and I ended up buying it. The shipping cost was half of the sale price! So Hulk's long-lost twin brother is up for Halloween.

While the Hulk Brothers aren't controllable, everything else on the crazy Halloween display is using X10 powerline control technology ... plus there are three live webcams to keep an eye on all of the action.

While the site is totally free, over $18,000 has been raised via voluntary contributions for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland.

Alek's sons have celiac disease (a gluten intollerance), so consider donating a few bucks to help find a cure so when they grow up, they can go out for a beer and pizza with their old man. Link

Loren Coleman detours into "cryptobotany" as he comments on a strange news report from Uppinangady, Mangalor, India about a carnivorous tree that allegedly has a taste for cattle. From the Express News Service:

(Cow owner) Anand Gowda and the villagers struck mortal blows to the branches that turned limp and the cow was rescued. Uppinangady range forest officer (RFO) Subramanya Rao said the tree was described as ‘pili mara’ (tiger tree) in native lingo. Link

And from Loren's post at Cryptomundo:

In Roy Mackal’s book, Searching for Hidden Animals (NY: Doubleday, 1980), his last chapter is entitled “The Monstrous Plants.” It was not about cryptozoology, needless to say, but about cryptobotany, being a short treatise on the Victorian accounts of man-eating plants...

Mackal spends his final chapter detailing mostly the reports from the 1850s through the 1940s of the “Man-Eating Tree of Madagacar,” and the expeditions that searched (unsuccessfully) for the species. Link

Last week on an episode of Boing Boing tv, we featured an infauxmercial by Gabe Delahaye and Max Silvestri about How to Get the Dream Life of Your Dreams Using the Internet..

Since airing that episode, we've been overwhelmed with messages (bing bong, you got your emails) from viewers who wanted to know how they could get more out of the Internet with new technologies like blobs, and emails, and Myspaces such as the MySpace and Friendsters.

So we reached out to Gabe & Max and asked if they'd conduct a sort of internet video advice session JUST FOR BOING BOING. They agreed.

Now comes the excellent part: You, yes you, for the low low price of zero dollars, can ask your VERY OWN QUESTIONS to Gabe and Max using this internet comments form on this very post.

Act now and Ask now! Gabe & Max will answer you in a future episode of Boing Boing tv.

Previously: BBtv - Internet Cookies/Internet... Thing

Wired Test is available from Cool Tools as a free PDF.

Since it debuted a few years ago, I've eagerly awaited the arrival of these product-packed issues of Wired. Tested, reviewed and rated are pretty much every gadget imaginable in every category imaginable (much of it very newly-released, too). Again, exclusively for Cool Tools readers, Wired's editor in chief Chris Anderson has graciously provided a pdf of the Fall issue (on newsstands today). What you get: 125 pages of solid content broken into specific sections and spreads, everything from A/V to office to kitchen to automotive to garden to gaming equipment and accessories. This means: flatscreens, laptops, lawnmowers, headphones, pocketcams, DV cams, blenders, cell phones, wine openers, strollers, and more, ranging from cheap to relatively affordable to the 'yeah right.'

Link

Bruce Eisner's remembers Timothy Leary's birthday, which was yesterday.

If Timothy Leary were alive, he would be 87 years old today. But Timothy Leary is dead, having passed from our lives in 1996.

In remembering Timothy on his birthday, I Googled for a portion of his autobiography, Flashbacks called "My Conception of My Conception" in which he "describes" the experience of being born.

I got lucky and found this video on YouTube which appears to have been made by some of the folks living at Tim's house in Beverly Hills when he passed away. One of them reads the section from Timothy's autobiography Flashbacks that I was looking for.

Link

Nad Shot is a blog that posts comic book panels of violent punches and kicks to the groin. Link (Via Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror)

Steve says: "Its an animated gif of a machine that is driving along and punching people standing at the side of the road. Quite incredible. I would really like to know the story behind this." Link

Destiny says:

The Department of Homeland Security quietly moves closer to an invasive "Secure Flights" proposal that requires government-issued credentials for all air travelers -- and government permission for each flight! International "Advance Passenger Information System" rules were published Monday (effective February of 2008), making the U.S. version much more likely to pass.

The proposed rules also let airlines retain the information obtained, even after it's been passed it on to the government. "The Identity Group" discovered that the U.S. government's travel dossier records include everything -- the books travelers were carrying, the phone numbers of their friends, and even whether they asked for one bed or two in their hotel room.

Link

Dustin says:

The deputy mayor of Delhi, India, was recently killed by a band of monkeys. His tragic death is apparently the latest and worst attack by the city's "plague of monkeys," which has harried citizens for decades. The solution? According to a BBC article, "One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques." Monkey wars!

Link

Wired continues its series of excellent features about manga -- following up on this morning's mini-comic with a lucid and fascinating story by Daniel Pink about the faltering market for manga in Japan and the way that copyright infringing donjishi (fan-comics) are helping to staunch the bleeding, and thus attracting support from the giant wealthy corporations they appropriate from.

Also up is a great little survey of "weighty" subjects covered in manga form, from Shakespeare to college test prep.

Yet the role of manga in the broader economic ecosystem is perhaps more important than its actual sales figures. Japan's vaunted pop culture apparatus, it turns out, is really a manga industrial complex. Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga. Most anime (animated) movies and television series, as well as many videogames and collectible figures, began life as comics. Dragonball — now a multibillion-dollar international franchise comprising movies, games, and cards — debuted as an installment in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. Uzumaki Naruto, the protagonist of the mega-property that bears his name, first showed his blond ninja head in the pages of the same magazine eight years ago. Trace any of Japan's most successful media franchises back to their origins and you'll likely end up inside a colorful brick of newsprint, where 20 pages of exquisitely matched words and drawings tell the inaugural story.

But manga has become a bit like network television in the US. It reaches a wide but inexorably shrinking audience. Weekly magazine circulation is on a steep and steady downward slope; book sales are no higher than they were a decade ago despite a rise in population. Still, manga is more influential in Japan than network television is in the US. Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system. If they dry up, other media players risk losing their deepest and most vital source of material. If manga gets creaky, and by all accounts it is heading that way, it could undermine Japan's entire pop culture machine. What the industry needs is something that can rescue it from decline — a force that can reenergize its fans, restock its talent pools, and revive its creative mojo. The sound of those flapping backpacks may herald the arrival of that savior.

Link to Japanese manga industry story, Link to "Manga Shakespeare" story

See also: American Manga: Wired's downloadable mini-comic explains the history of the form

From Wired's Danger Room: "This month's WIRED mag has a fascinating profile of Shannon Rossmiller, a Montana mom who befriends and betrays online jihadists -- while she gets her kids ready for school. Her social networking has helped bust a half-dozen terror rings, authorities say."

Rossmiller succeeds by exploiting a fundamental flaw in al Qaeda's famously decentralized organization. The absence of a strict hierarchy makes it pretty easy for a cunning person to mix among the terrorists. So she poses as a potential al Qaeda soldier looking for like-minded comers. She creates multiple characters and uses her older and more respected personae to invite the new ones into private forums. There are other self-taught counterterrorists like her, but they tend to translate and discuss, lurk and report. Rossmiller works the terrorism boards as if she were playing a complex videogame. Her characters come complete with distinct personalities and detailed biographies that are as richly conceived as any protagonist on an HBO series. She keeps copies of everything, time-stamps files, and takes screenshots. She has an Excel spreadsheet that details the 640 people with whom she has had contact on these boards since 2002...

In May 2002, [for instance,] Rossmiller saw a post from a man in Pakistan who said he had access to Stinger missiles he wanted to sell. She wrote back to the person she now identifies in her files as Rocket Man, posing as someone interested in purchasing his wares. After a few exchanges, she abruptly threatened to cut off contact unless he provided proof he was who he said he was. "And I'll be gol-danged if a few days later, a nice little zip file appears with pictures of him sitting on some crates." The inventory numbers of the Stingers were clearly visible. Rossmiller then realized that her hobby had turned into something that needed attention from the FBI.

Link

Multi-part video series teaches you how to draw a frame from Tex Avery's "Heckling Hare," episode of Bugs Bunny.

[Animator Rod] Scribner loves to draw lots of extra wrinkles and brow folds on his characters, yet he still keeps them appealing and solid. They are not just arbitray lines and details floating around on the head. They make sense.

They wrap around the structure of the head and they describe certain things-expressions, eyebrows.

At first glance all the wrinkles make the drawing look complicated, but if you break it down to it's forms first, then it will help you understand the drawings better.

Scribner uses the same classic principles that Bob McKimson and all the old animators used, but he applies them to his own style.

Link

Over at the CIA website, you'll find the DCI Counterterrorist Center's "Terrorist Buster" logo, featuring a grinning, machine-gun-waving, ninja terrorist crawling through the international "forbidden" symbol. Link (Thanks, Manny!)

AskWiki -- a natural language search engine for the English Wikipedia entries -- is now in alpha. It's like an AskJeeves that actually works.

"What is BoingBoing?"

"Boing Boing (originally bOING bOING) is a publishing entity, first established as a magazine, later becoming an award winning group blog."

Link

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Xeni Jardin is replaced as host by a pushy newsreading avatar, and we visit warlords in India who are said to be obtaining some of their weapons from Iraq:

Tired of talking hair delivering the news? The Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University has developed an avatar news broadcast. India-based investigative journalist and BBC contributor Scott Carney tells us about a violent clash between Maoists and the government.

Link to video.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is presenting an exhibition that pairs the artwork of Paul Klee with the drawings and beautiful freak folk music of Devendra Banhart. According to the SFMOMA, the exhibit, titled Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, "explores the relationship between music and visual art." It features more than a dozen of Klee's works on paper along with thirteen of Banhart's drawings, created along with his new album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. Seen here at left, Klee's "Der Verliebte (Man in Love)" and, at right, Banhart's cover art for "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon." From the SFMOMA:

Music was a consistent source of inspiration for Klee (1879–1940), spanning the arc of his career and informing much of his practice. He came from a family of musicians and, prior to turning his attention to painting, drawing, and printmaking, was an accomplished violinist who often performed in concerts. His varied experience with music influenced much of his work. Hoffmanneske Märchenscene (Hoffmannesque Fairy Tale Scene) (1921), for example, was inspired by Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, an opera Klee saw on several occasions. Additionally, Klee wrote extensively on the relationship between graphic arts and music, and he devised elaborate techniques to marry the two forms in his practice. Some excerpts from his writings are paired with selected works in the exhibition...

Banhart’s otherworldly drawings are populated by whimsical characters that seem suspended in an undefined pictorial space, recalling some of Klee’s surrealist works. Furthermore, his relationship to music, like Klee’s, is interdependent on his visual art practice: “I sing what I can’t draw and draw what I can’t sing,” he explains. Though Klee and Banhart were born a century apart, both oscillate between abstraction and figuration—a tendency enlivened by each artist’s invisible rhythmic pulse.

Link to SFMOMA press release, Link to Abstract Rhythms page, Link to Banhart's art, Link to buy Banhart's "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon"

Again With the Comics has a scan from a mid-90s comic series called 1963. The third issue was called Tales of the Uncanny and featured a story written by Alan Moore, penciled by Steve Bissette, and inked by Chester Brown. The result is a brain bending homage to Marvel's 1960s Tales of Suspense. Link

NYC perfumery Bond No. 9 is launching an Andy Warhol-themed fragrance. A collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation, the scent is named "Silver Factory. According to Basenotes, "the fragrance contains notes of Incense, Wood Resin, Amber, Jasmine, Iris, Violet and Cedarwood." Available in December, it will sell for $230 for a 100ml bottle. Warhol would be thrilled.
Link to Basenotes article, Link to Bond No. 9

Dark Roasted Blend showcases a selection of unusual and extreme office supplies. Seen here at left, a dinosaur staple remover from Jac Zagoory Designs. And at right, Tom Balhatchet's hamster-powered paper shredder. (It's an art project.) Link

Secret Storage Books sells old hardcovers (mostly remainders and what look like library discards), professionally hollowed out and glued together to form hollow book stashes. You can choose the book that will look most convincing on your shelf. Most of the titles run less than $35. Link (via Schneier)

Mara sez, "The Swiss Alpine engineers: Were they drinking or suffering thru a very bad winter of cabin fever when they dreamed up that idea for bringing tourists to the top of the Jungfrau mountain (4,158 metres, or 13,642 ft)? A thousand-meter-high lift built inside a gigantic Eiffel Tower structure, put in the middle of an Alpine valley, with the top of the tower connected to the top of the Jungfrau by a suspended cable car? It's an amazing undated drawing, probably from the end of the 1800s." Link (Thanks, Mara!)

If you're like me and didn't make it to the Maker Faire Austin last weekend, MAKE: blogger Phil Torrone has collected a slew of photos, videos, news articles, and other documentation of the DIY extravaganza. Maker Faire is definitely one of those "you had to be there" events. But if you weren't, this is the next best thing. (Photos by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.)

Link

The Daily Iowan reports that Sioux City's Gateway Airport has come to terms with its "unflattering" three-letter acronym, SUX, by incorporating it into its promotional campaign.

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier - SUX - and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned Web site - www.flysux.com.

Link (Via State 29)

CNN's Rush Limbaugh knockoff, Glenn Beck, made a particularly intelligent comment on his radio show yesterday:

I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.

You stay classy, Glenn Beck. At least one person dead, ten firefighters injured, at least a thousand homes destroyed, 100,000 acres burned, 250,000 Jesus, HALF A MILLION people evacuated from their homes, 10% of San Diego population displaced, the largest internal evacuation in America since Katrina.

Nothing more America-loving than sneering at your fellow countrymen while they run fleeing with their children and families from giant wildfires destroying their homes.

And Beck's comment is particularly astute, given that some of the areas suffering greatest damage happen to skew conservative/GOP-voting, not to mention proximity to some of our nation's largest military installations. Link.

Don't bother visiting our scorched 'hood, buddy, because I suspect there are a bunch of Marines and firefighters here who'd like to offer you a tall, cold glass of whupass.

Previously: Southern CA wildfires: good Lord they are huge.

An excerpt from my favorite weekly news update, Harper's Weekly:

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. "Every family," said the Obama campaign, "has a black sheep." A New York man was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his parole meeting, an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up her ex-boyfriend's grave and stealing his ashes, and a Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and Internet connections. "I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor and I went to hit the telephone," she said. "I figured, 'Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.'" A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don't use as much Silly String today as they did at the beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey residents admitted they'd rather live somewhere else. Taku the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio SeaWorld, 5 of the world's 350 remaining Asiatic Lions were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian waxes. "When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice," he explained, "can't live without pubic hair."

Link | Subscribe to Harper's Weekly email list

Sf writer Jeff VanderMeer is doing a series of blog-interviews with "bookless" sf writers who focus on short stories. This week he talks to Nathan Ballingrud, who attended Clarion with both Jeff and me. Nathan refused the free PCs that Clarion offered us, and typed his manuscripts on a portable manual typewriter. Most expressive manuscripts I've ever seen -- hand-written corrections; dark type when he was pounding on the keys, light type when he was pensive and picking; lines that went all the way to the margin when he was on a roll.

What do you like most about short fiction?

Its seriousness of intent–even when humorous. In short fiction the energy is focused and precise; everything works in service to the theme. It’s distilled fiction. I view a short story as a promise from the writer: I’m going to try to move you, and I’m going to do it quickly. That’s hard to do, and it’s so exciting when it works. Some of my favorite short story writers are Richard Ford, Maureen F. McHugh, Mark Helprin, Annie Proulx, Lucius Shepard, and Dale Bailey (a friend, I confess, but I don’t list him out of a sense of duty: many of his short stories are heartbreakingly beautiful). And I still think Ernest Hemingway is the best short story writer of the last hundred years.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

See also:
Jeff VanderMeer and the weird art he inspires
Urban spaces and sf: interview with Jeff VanderMeer
Economics in fiction with Stross, VanderMeer, et al
Photos of you acting dead needed for indie film
Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases