The Consumerist has posted a giant round-up of their advocacy articles called "The Ultimate Consumerist Guide To Fighting Back." It breaks down into three sections:

Section 1: "I've been wronged! What do I do next?"
Section 2: The Consumerist Corporate Executive Directory
Section 3: Success Stories

and each section contains links to excellent articles on everything from timestamping your communications with customer-service lines to "launching an executive email carpet-bomb" to the delightfully named "Underlying Principle For Forcing An Uncaring And Adversarial Company Fix Your Problem." The next time I'm ripped off, I'm starting here. Link

John sez, "Shimmer Magazine just released The Pirate Issue, which was guest-edited by me, John Joseph Adams. In addition to all the bloodthirsty pirate action you would expect to find in an issue labeled "The Pirate Issue," the issue also features a story that should be of particular interest to Boing Boing readers: "Captain Blood's B00ty," a story in which magic is real but every spell has been copyrighted by an RIAA-like organization. In the story, there is a pirate website that lets you download stuff anyway (like The Pirate Bay, but for magic)." Link to site for story, Link to story download page (Thanks, John!)

Christopher Locke makes spider-sculptures out of confiscated scissors bought at TSA auctions ("The larger ones are made from barber scissors, and the smaller ones are made from cuticle scissors.") Link (Thanks, Christopher!)

See also: California kleptocrats auctioning airport confiscata on eBay

Danny sez,

The Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers is a documentary on one of the first programming teams: Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence.

The six-woman team hardwired code for ballistics trajectory calculations, but were overlooked in the previous accounts of the first US large-scale, electronic, digital computer in 1946.

The documentary is being previewed at Google next Thursday -- they production team are looking for donations to finish it off and show it elsewhere.

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

Bonnie sez, "Need a cool Star Wars Halloween disguise that you can create yourself? Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy author Matthew Reinhart shows you how to make this simple pop-up mask that changes you from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader in a flash. Now you can go to the dark side and back again and again!" Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

M.E. sez, "I just spent well over a month working on this article about Disney's Haunted Mansion & various related DIY and craft projects. (There's plenty of introductory information for people who have never been on the ride or who don't remember it in much detail.) I talk about the illusions involved in creating some of the effects, how people are using elements in their own lives (esp around Halloween), all the crafts I could find, some other craft ideas, and so on." Link (Thanks, M.E.!) (Photo credit: Gingerbread Haunted Mansion, Craftster)

On Friday, I got the Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition -- a 10 DVD set of David Lynch's mind-bendingly creepy/dreamy TV series.

In addition to the remastered versions of all 29 episodes plus the US and European pilots, it's loaded with excellent supplemental material, including lots of making-of documentaries and interviews. It's a terrific package of stuff.

This 10-disc set includes "Greetings from Twin Peaks" collectable postcards and a plethora of special features, including hours of newly-minted bonus content, featuring exclusive cast and crew interviews and rare footage never before released on DVD.

"Secrets from Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks" is a collection of four new documentaries exploring the origins, production and impact of the show. The cast and crew, including co-creator Mark Frost, composer Angelo Badalamenti, singer Julee Cruise, actors Kyle MacLachlan, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Ray Wise, Sheryl Lee, Kenneth Welsh, Maedchen Amick, Miguel Ferrer and many others share their memories of creating the show in this in-depth piece covering the sensational and tumultuous evolution of TWIN PEAKS in four parts: "Northwest Passage: Creating the Pilot," "Freshly Squeezed: Creating Season One," "Where We're From: Creating the Music" and "Into the Night: Creating Season Two."

Co-creator and four-time Academy Award(R) nominee David Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan and Maedchen Amick take an amusing look back at the series in "A Slice of Lynch," an all-new get-together of friends over piping hot coffee and sweet cherry pie.

"Return to Twin Peaks" follows a group of devoted fans to the 2006 Twin Peaks Festival, where the show's faithful have been regularly gathering for costume contests, celebrity sightings, trivia games and other wildness in the woods outside of Seattle. And an Interactive Map allows viewers to revisit the show's unforgettable locations as they appear today...and how to find them in real life.

Newly remastered from the original negative and personally approved by David Lynch, the episodes have never looked better. Moreover, viewers will have the option of enjoying the episodes in either new 5.1 Surround Sound or the original 2.0 network television audio.

Link

Kris Kuksi makes fantastical sculptures that are microcosms of a bizarre, grotesque, and surreal world that HR Giger, Hieronymus Bosch, and HP Lovecraft would happily call home. Seen here, "The Macabre Ride" (mixed media, 23" x 18"). Dark Roasted Blend interviewed Kuksi:

DRB How long have you been doing this, and how do you define your genre?

Kris I started my first one in 2004 called "Parasite and Host", and from there they have evolved into what I call an appropriated onslaught of shit put together that otherwise shouldn't be together in order to create a physical world of what is in my head...

DRB What kind of "mixed media" do you use in your sculptures?

Kris Mixed media is a very simplified term for what materials I use, but the list would be to long for this interview. I use "things". These things are pre-fabricated, injection-molded, press-molded, mass-produced, kitschy, weird stuff all brought together in a very articulated way that involves imagination, skill, math, craftsmanship, paint, and lastly, magic.

Link to Dark Roasted Blend interview, Link to Kris Kuksi's site

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv:

Here's what happens when you take Halloween too far. A cautionary tale provided courtesy of Danny Diamond and a crew of video guerrillas who say: "We dedicate this to the memory of Tim E Woodsman, 1972 - 2007. We miss you. -- Jason, Jolon, Glasgow, Martha, Brody, Danny & everyone who made CRAPtv possible."

Link.

Remember the strange circumstances surrounding the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan last month? There's more.

According to Mad Cow Morning News, the plane was once owned by ultra-rich Bush supporter Stephen Adams. (In July, the Federal Election Commission filed suit against Adams on charges that he "failed to report and include proper disclaimers on $1,000,000 in billboard ads during the 2004 Presidential race.")

Not only that, but Mad Cow alleges that Adam's business partner owned the other American drug plane that was found in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine in 2006.

Recently-released FAA records from the Gulfstream II business jet that went down in Mexico a month ago with four tons of cocaine reveal that before it was “parked” in the name of a New York real estate developer with ties to the Russian Mob, the plane was owned by a secretive Midwestern media baron and Republican fund-raiser, who had a business partner who, incredibly, owned the other American drug plane, the DC9, recently busted in Mexico.

Adams was in business with Miami attorney Michael Farkas, who founded SkyWay Aircraft, which owned the DC9 busted in Mexico 18 months ago with 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard.

Moreover at the same time the Bush Ranger extraordinaire Stephen Adams owned the Gulfstream (N987SA) in 1999 and 2000, he was personally buying over $1 million of billboard ads for George W. Bush for his 2000 Presidential election bid.

Link

This gent in this video is wearing a Hello Kitty mask while enjoying a cigarette and a beer. He's one of many Japanese and gaijin who attended to last year's "Yamanote Halloween Train Party."

But this year's party, held on October 28th, has "ignited a huge anti-foreign backlash from the Japanese blogosphere," according to Japan Probe.

Some facts:

• There were perhaps 200 to 250 foreigners present, most of them Caucasian. There was also a number of Japanese participants, most of them Japanese women.
• After getting on the train, the party-goers became drunk and loud, shouting in English and becoming aggressive towards a few Japanese.
• At some point, an idiot removed or disabled the lighting in the train car, forcing the train to make an emergency stop at Shinagawa station, where police forced everyone out of the train and tried to see what had gone wrong with the lights. It is unclear whether this put an end to the party, or if it continued afterwards.

Here's an interesting letter of complaint about the unruly party:

Link

Fee says:

The Daily Telegraph reports on a bizarre case in which a man staying at a hostel was surprised by workers with a master key, having sex with a bicycle. He has been placed on the sex offenders register, despite apparently indulging in his practices in private with an inanimate object. I am wondering how this is different from using, say, a vibrator or blow-up doll? Do people in hostels have no right to privacy?

The real killer paragraph is the last one - apparently someone was jailed in 1993 for having sex with the pavement - or sidewalk in US English.

Link

I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World sounds like a wonderful book. I want T-shirts of every single one.

Shown here for the first time, these seventy-five patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names ("Goat Suckers," "None of Your Fucking Business," "Tastes Like Chicken") and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches-which are worn by military units working on classified missions-are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known.

By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume the best available survey of the military's black world -- a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

Link (Via Super Punch)

This article in Harvard magazine explains that plants, animals and fungi are just a tiny part of the tree of life.

The modern “tree of life,” based on genetic analysis, shows that the bulk of Earth’s biodiversity resides among the Archaea, Bacteria, and that portion of the Eukarya that does not include plants, animals, and fungi.

Scientists had known that there are more microbes in an ounce of soil than humans alive on Earth, but that was just a measure of abundance. Pace’s discovery demonstrated something new, a previously unfathomed repository of biodiversity. Scientists began sequencing DNA from all sorts of environments. After looking at human gut microflora, they learned that each individual has his or her own characteristic set of a thousand species. “These represent three million genes that you carry,” points out Kolter, “as compared to the estimated 18,000 genes of the human genome. So you are living and exchanging [metabolites] constantly with a diverse pool of some three million genes.” Microbiologists continue to find new taxonomic divisions of microbes far faster than they can figure out how to culture them.

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

This condom advocacy PSA from India has a catchy little ditty. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded!)

Ryan Johnson says: The members of Lännen-Jukka, an Finnish folk band playing finnish-american folk tunes and headed by Finnish pop legend J. Karjalainen were detained in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for suspicion of either sneaking drugs in or attempting to seek work illegally. Bored security agents strip searched one of the members, and refused to actually listen to the band members' own account of why they were there.

From Twin Cities Daily Planet:

Perhaps the most damning comment on the incident was delivered by [J. Karjalainen] who was strip-searched. On a couple of occasions prior to 1991, he was detained by the KGB and interrogated. Compared to the ICE agents here in the Twin Cities, the KGB operatives, he says, "at least acted like human beings. Not a bunch of animals."

What's more, their passports now show permanent evidence of "DENIED ENTRY" that was hastily crossed out in pen. Sounds like it will be tough for these folks to travel in the future -- how many times will they have to explain the situation?

"It was almost three hours of screaming, door-slamming and accusations, according to the report I received," said Marianne Wargelin, honorary Finnish consul for the Dakotas and most of Minnesota, which has the second largest Finnish-American population in the nation.

Erkki Maattanen, a filmmaker for Finnish Public Television who accompanied the musicians on the September trip, said his questioners seemed to think the entourage was smuggling drugs or intending to work without a permit. "I kept trying to tell them why we were here, but they'd just yell, 'Shut up!"' he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at the airport declined to comment, referring questions to regional press officer Brett Sturgeon.

Sturgeon said such behavior, if it occurred, would run contrary to the agency's policy that travelers must be treated in a professional manner. The complaint has not yet arrived at the Chicago regional office, but when it does, it will be fully investigated, he said.

Link

Our dear publishing pals at Process just released two new books that tell the strange stories of two very different music acts of the late 1960s who had profound impact on much experimental, punk, garage, weird America, and psychedelic music that's come since. Robert Scott's biography of Moondog recounts the life of the eccentric Viking-garbed Louis Thomas Hardin whose avant-jazz, modern classical, and psych-folk has been performed and lauded by the likes of Janis Joplin, Julie Andrews, Elvis Costello, and his onetime roommate, Philip Glass. The other new Process book, Paul Drummond's Eye Mind, tells the sordid 60s story of Roky Erickson And The 13th Floor Eleevators whose pioneering psychedelic garage rock was heavily dosed with their own cosmic agenda. Both books were separately featured in yesterday's New York Times.

From the New York Times feature on Moondog:

A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog’s Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and “Today” to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.

“Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,” Robert Scotto, author of “Moondog,” a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. “And everybody had his own Moondog.”

Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-’90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog’s idiosyncratic forays into their world, “the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.”

Link to Moondog profile, Link to buy Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue

From the New York Times blurb on Eye Mind:

Mr. Drummond has talked to sisters and brothers and cousins, and cops who busted the band. He shows you how psychedelic drugs advanced on Austin — first a rumor off in the distance, then flooding the city in 1965. He shows you the band’s controlling philosopher king, Tommy Hall (the guy with the electric jug), and exactly what books he read. At a certain point the story becomes too depressing for words, flattening out into madness with daily LSD ministrations, trial transcripts, religious visitations. But it’s valuable cultural history...

Link to article with 13th Floor Elevators blurb, Link to buy Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound

Dwiff sez, "Norwegian artist Matt Skull has built a large, detailed scale model of Uncle Scrooge's money bin based on plans done by Duck Artists Don Rosa and Dan Shane." Link

Bill Shunn sez, "In his ScientiFicShunn podcast, SF writer William Shunn offers an original, never-before-published Christmas story in the Halloween spirit, 'Jolly Saint Nick Is Dead, Alas.' Credited to pseudonym Perry Slaughter, the story is Creative Commons licensed and freely available for downloading." Link (Thanks, Bill!)

The Consumerist's Meghann Marco sez, "Reader Sam ordered a hard drive from Best Buy. What he got was a box of bathroom tiles." Best Buy won't give him a refund, saying that he needs to take it up with the manufacturer.

I got into my car, raced back to Best Buy and voiced my complaint. The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer.

Link (Thanks, Meghann!)

Ed Felten Andrew Appel has some fascinating analysis of the "guilt by association" algorithm that AT&T uses to help the FBI figure out whose life to ruin with baseless accusations of terrorist involvement. Other phone companies like Verizon refused to help out with these fishing expeditions, but AT&T jumped right in. The thing is, after three hops, your social network encompasses half the planet, including many of its terrorists (or even "terrorists").

What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly in a 2001 research paper from AT&T itself, entitled “Communities of Interest” (by C. Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky). They use high-tech data-mining algorithms to scan through the huge daily logs of every call made on the AT&T network; then they use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the connections between phone numbers: who is talking to whom? The paper literally uses the term “Guilt by Association” to describe what they’re looking for: what phone numbers are in contact with other numbers that are in contact with the bad guys?

Link

Update: Wired/Threat Level's Ryan Singel sez,

Following up on Freedom to Tinker's post on AT&T's calling circle research adopted by the FBI, it seems that data mining program was made possible through AT&T's development of a mass surveillance programming language called Hancock.

A variant of C, Hancock is used to process millions of records in streams as they get dumped into various databases. Uses include creating maps of cell phone users locations and tracking IP and websites addresses.

AT&T even snagged patents on some of the data mining methods, which may seem eerily familiar to the phone record data mining the NSA used post-9/11 to find targets for their warrantless targeting of American citizens.

Satellite Dish Stickers are just what it says on the tin: giant all-weather stickers for your unsightly satellite dishes. Choose from original sunflower or the geometric "Turkish" design. Link (via Geekologie)

Momspit is a gentle cleaning agent intended to be vigorously scrubbed into the exposed skin of filthy children -- and it has the best product name ever. Link (via Babygadget)

Punk cartoonist Gary Panter's legendary post-nuclear protagonist Jimbo is jumping off the printed page and into the 3D realm. The well-crafted (and anatomically-correct) 9.5-inch vinyl Jimbo was sculpted by Yoe! Studio and produced by the good people at Dark Horse. For those who aren't familiar with Panter, his roots are in the 1970s Los Angeles punk paper Slash and later reached a wider audience through Art Spiegleman's RAW magazine. Panter also won three Emmy Awards for creating the surreal set of Pee Wee's Playhouse. The $50 Jimbo figure is limited to 750 copies and comes with a 32 page book.
Link

Photographers Robert and Shana Parkeharrison created these photograph in 2003 as part of a magical series called "Listening to the Earth." From their artist statement:

Inherent in this civilization of consumption and technology is the waste and destruction of the vulnerable earth. The mythic world we create in our photographs mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes we depict however, display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. We portray these attempts within our work by inventing machines and contraptions from junk and obsolete equipment. These contraptions are intended to help the character we portray to jump-start a dying planet. We patch holes in the sky, create rain machines, chase storms to create electricity, communicate with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, we create less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroy it.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Last week, I posted this magnificent promotional poster that comic artist Jaime Hernandez created for Bob Dylan's XM satellite radio show, "Theme Time Radio Hour." Boing Boing reader Simon Nielsen was so taken by the poster and the show that he made a short movie tribute using Hernandez's artwork and the audio from Ellen Barkin's noir voiceovers that open each episode of Theme Time Radio Hour. Nielsen writes:

Ellen Barkin introduces each episode of Theme Time Radio Hour with an evocative vignette describing the nocturnal activities of the restless characters living in the big city. It is from these spoken word vignettes that Hernandez was inspired to create his artwork. The illustration is detailed with many of Ellen Barkin's night time characters - some asleep, some consumed in thought, others burning the midnight oil long into the night. Prostitutes, homeless men, drunks, lost souls and lovers intersect near a street corner of the Abernathy building. I was so fascinated by the world within this poster I set about finding all the spoken word vignettes and weaving them together into a whole. I started from show number one and worked my way through the spoken word introductions of all 50+ episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour. The following movie is my modest attempt to bring to life the inhabitants of the mythical Abernathy Building and the art created by Jaime Hernandez.

Link to Nielsen's movie on Blip.tv, Link to download the Quicktime version into iTunes

Previously on BB:
• Jaime Hernandez's poster for Bob Dylan Link

Teresa Walker, 44, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was annoyed that a police officer who was writing her a speeding ticket on Saturday night seemed to be taking too long. So while he was preparing the citation, she called the police department and complained. According to police, she said that if the officer didn't hurry up, she'd shoot him. Now she's in jail. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Terrence McNamara, the attorney for Walker, said today in court that Walker insists her car was pulled over because she is married to a black man and police were using racial profiling.

Walker, an Arby's manager, doesn't remember saying she would kill Police Officer Jeff Bley, the lawyer added, but does remember saying she'll sue him.

Link (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)