Jason Thomas of Red Rocket Farm and nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot have just released their video for his latest single, "Bizarro Genius Baby." This is one of my favorite tracks off the last Frontalot album, and the video is awesome. Link (Thanks, Frontalot!)

See also:
Video for Frontalot's nerdcore song about Zork
New MC Frontalot nerdcore album
MC Frontalot: Nerdcore rapper

The Board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has reinstated Andrew Burt as chairman of its copyright committee, despite the recommendations of the group that was chartered to investigate SFWA's work on copyright in the wake of August's illegal and damaging campaign against the text-hosting site Scribd.

Last August, Andrew Burt, the vice president of SFWA, sent a list of thousands of works that he alleged violated the copyrights of Robert Silverberg and the Isaac Asimov estate. This list was compiled by searching the Scribd site for the words "asimov" and "silverberg" and it included my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a teacher's guide to great science fiction for young readers, and the entire back-catalog of a science fiction magazine whose editors had placed their work on Scribd. Burt sent an email to Scribd's management in which he said that this list wasn't "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."

In the ensuing debacle, Burt (who's position as SFWA vice president is the result of an uncontested ballot) repeatedly claimed that his list contained "three errors" -- the real number was more like dozens, if not hundreds, of innocents who were accused of being pirates because they had quoted or merely mentioned science fiction writers.

He also singled me out for vilification, suggesting that I had timed my public disclosure of this in order to cause him damage -- I posted the information as soon as I had all the facts, in the middle of the afternoon at the World Science Fiction Convention, after taking the time to talk it over with many fellow writers, including fellow past officers of the organization (I am the former Canadian Director of SFWA). Burt persists to this day in claiming that I posted "at midnight on a holiday weekend," a gross mischaracterization that's as absurd as the claim that "only three works" were misidentified by his notice.

Burt's copyright projects for SFWA have been controversial and divisive. He created a push-poll that attempted to convince the membership to stop Amazon from indexing their books; he created a non-working system for poisoning ebooks and ruining the download experience and then patented it, in his name, at the organization's expense (he has promised to return the money); he helped create a loyalty oath in which members were told to swear to "respect patents and trademarks" and so on.

SFWA's response to Burt's embarrassing and damaging negligence in the Scribd matter was to dissolve the "E-Piracy Committee" that Burt had chaired and to charter a new committee to investigate better ways for the organization to grapple with copyright. That committee was chaired by John Scalzi, whom I respect and like. I declined to work on the committee, however, as I was skeptical that it would make progress , given that Burt was to have a seat on it. Update: John Scalzi clarifies in the comments below, "the committee of which I was the chair did not have Andrew Burt on it; I would not have participated on it if it had, for the reason that having him being the committee would not have been useful."

The committee returned its recommendations to the SFWA board and included (in the words of committee member Charlie Stross) "[a] further recommendation was discussed...brought to the attention of the president of SFWA via a back channel...at all costs, Andrew Burt must be kept the hell away from the copyright committee. In view of his earlier activities, his appointment to it would automatically destroy any credibility the new body would have."

Stross has posted an angry public denunciation of the Board's response to these recommendations -- specifically, the Board's decision to reinstate Burt as chairman of the renamed Copyright Committee. One commenter has pointed out that Burt got to vote for himself in the Board's deliberations, and did not recuse himself on the basis of a conflict on interest.

John Scalzi has also posted on the matter, in less heated voice, but with equal definitiveness: dissolving the E-Piracy Committee and replacing it with a new committee with the same chairman is not an effective resolution to SFWA's problems with copyright.

Stross feels that the Board's reinstatement of Burt was a betrayal of the committee members who volunteered to work on a new direction for the organization on copyright. I believe he's right.

To say that this is a fuckwitted decision is an understatement. Under Dr Burt, the new copyright committee will almost inevitably devolve into a reincarnation of the old piracy committee. If I thought it'd do any good I'd be resigning in protest right now; only the expense of a life membership purchased a couple of years ago is restraining me right now. Clearly the current executive of SFWA is making damaging decisions and ignoring input from committees it appointed, and and in view of this I call on SFWA president Mike Capobianco and the rest of the SFWA executive — including Andrew Burt — to resign immediately. Meanwhile, I'd like to call on all other SFWA members who don't want to see their organization commit public relations suicide to make their voices heard.

As for my own role in the affair, I consider this to be a betrayal of trust. I've been used as a stalking-horse to legitimize a process I absolutely despise; I've put in a fair amount of work on a project that was clearly intended as a distraction and which has now been set aside and ignored by the man who commissioned it. I will not forget this — and the current SFWA executive should consider that cozening and lying to their own members is not usually considered best practice for representing the members' best interests.

Link to Charlie Stross's post, Link to John Scalzi's post

See also:
Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA
Why writers should stop worrying about "ebook piracy"

Wael Abbas is an award-winning blogger in Egypt whose work documenting human rights violations through online video has been blogged here on BB before.

Wael claims that his YouTube account, with which he has posted more than a hundred videos of alleged police abuse, has been terminated over complains the clips contain "inappropriate material."

Abbas said YouTube sent him an e-mail saying they had suspended his account. "They didn't ask me to remove it. They said 'Your account isn't working,' " he said. When asked about Abbas, a YouTube spokesperson said, "We take these matters very seriously, but we don't comment on individual videos."

YouTube regulations state that "graphic or gratuitous violence" is not allowed and violations of the Terms of Use could result in the ending of an account and deleting all of the videos in it.

Link to CNN account.

Snip from related item at Foreign Policy blog:

There are plenty of other video-sharing sites and third-party tools out there for posting viral videos, but Abbas says he's lost his entire archive, the fruit of years of painstaking work. Also this month, Yahoo! accused Abbas of spamming and shut down two e-mail accounts of his.

Link. Here's the post on Wael's blog about the suspension of his Yahoo email account: Link. (Thanks, Rafe)

Previously: Supporters Work to Free Egyptian Blogger

Drawn! ran Meomi's fabulous designs for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots. They just need to add a 'frop pipe in that Yeti's mouth and all will be good.

Leave it to Canada to have a cryptozoological beastie like a sasquatch as its Olympic mascot. Earlier today Vancouver 2010 unveiled their Olympic and Paralympic mascots: Quatchi the Sasquatch, Miga the Sea Bear, and Sumi the Thunderbird.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Boing Boing reader: Recalibrate thyself. One unicorn, one cup. Link, By Ape Lad.

Continuing in BoingBoing's ongoing exploration of highbrow internet cinema, I now present to you a reaction video of some guy's poor grandma seeing the German New Wave classic "Zwei Mädchen eine Tasse" for the first time.

Clearly, she is overwhelmed by the heady metaphysical influence of Fassbinder and Herzog evidenced in this masterwork, which treats its characters in a scope of almost Wagnerian breadth.

Link. (thanks, Jason, and Teapunk!)

Previously:

Film review: 2 Girls One Cup

Webby Awards: Most Influential Online Videos of All Time

(Warning: This is my serious voice now. The reason I will never link directly to the shock video referenced in the title of this post can best be expressed in this equation from BB reader Ivan: 2Girls_1Cup = Goatse * TubGirl / White_Unicorns).

Update: Here's a t-shirt idea for fans of this cinematic great from Flickr user Andrewc.

In today's NYT, a feature (with lots of great photos) about folks who build elaborate stereo soundsystems for their bicycles. It's not a new phenomenon, but it's neat to see it treated with such formal examination. Link, and pix here shot for the Times by Tyler Hicks. (thanks, Mark Hurst)

Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolacan, who is based in Brooklyn, is best known for her portraits of ladies wearing clothes fashioned from meat parts (tripe, guts, assorted offal). She has a new show opening today at New York's Rivington Arms gallery. Snip from a Style.com feature:

This time around, the women are Afro-Brazilian, dressed in the style of the Portuguese colonizers, and the organ in question is the placenta of cows. That sounds repulsive, but like Yolacan's earlier photographs, these have a strange and haunting beauty.

She explains why meat is her medium in the Style.com interview...

How, exactly, do you make clothes from meat?

I make the clothes the morning of the shoot, so the meat doesn't rot. In Bahia, I froze it beforehand, so it wouldn't get smelly, because it's really hot. It's quite domestic, really—I have to buy meat, clean up, sew. For this series, I got the fabrics in local markets, and the meat, too. I try to accentuate each woman's skin tone and expression with the clothes; I take Polaroids of them when I first meet them, then I work from those.

Link. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

OpenRoad.TV, the terrific video travel guide for the American West, joined CRAFT magazine blogger Natalie Zee Drieu and her pooch Lulu as they visited San Francisco's Embarcadero, home to the historic Ferry Building and Claes Oldenburg's huge "Cupid's Span" sculpture. This is the fifth episode in OpenRoad.TV's "Life Outside The Box" series where they're accompanying bloggers to their favorite real world spots. Link

Previously on BB:
• OpenRoad.tv and Pesco visit the Musée Mécanique Link

A reader writes, "South Florida artist, Sarah J. Pierce has lovingly re-created Leisure Suit Larry's ladies as little quilts. They look just like the original computer game girls." Link

The Pencil Bench was designed by Boex 3D Creative Solutions. The seat contains 1600 pencils that can be yanked out for use. I like how much it resembles a bed of nails. Link

Michael Carney, in a Teesside, England, court on charges of being a serial flasher, claimed that there's no way he could be guilty because his penis is so small that he's too embarrassed to show it anyone. The repeat offender was convicted of seven counts of "outraging public decency." From the BBC News:

During the three-day trial the defendant told the court: "It causes embarrassment to myself, even to the point where it is with my wife. I wouldn't want myself to be seen in public like that.

"My genitalia are underdeveloped and it is so much smaller than average."

He showed the jury photographs taken by his wife to prove his claims.

Link (via Fortean Times)

The UK's first SMS service for finding the nearest toilet launched in London today. Just text the word "toilet" and SatLav, run by the Westminster City Council, points you the nearest public toilet. Someone should build a recommendation system on top of that and name it George, after the Seinfeld character who knew the location of every good bathroom in Manhattan. From the Associated Press:

The system, which covers 40 public toilets, pinpoints the caller's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost about 50 cents, and most of Westminster's toilets are free.

The council said it hopes the service will stop people from urinating in alleyways, saying some 10,000 gallons of urine ends up in Westminster streets each year.

Link

Reason's Hit and Run blog reports that a British schoolteacher is will be tried for "blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam" because she named a teddy bear Muhammad.

Contrary to reassurances from the Sudanese embassy in London, Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Khartoum who did not realize naming a teddy bear Muhammad was verboten, has been charged with blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam. The possible penalties include a fine, 40 lashes, and six months in jail. The government promises a "swift and fair trial," saying, "she will be brought in front of a judge, and now she must prove her innocence"—which gives you a sense of how the court system works in Sudan. Gibbons' lawyer says the defense will be straightforward: She had "absolutely no intention to insult religion, and for blasphemy to take place there must be an insult."

Link | Time Online article

Nice Reuters graphic shows the people, animals, and vehicles that travel with the United States President.

(Update: This graphic probably isn't from Reuters, but the numbers match this New Zealand Herald story.) Link

Here's a clip from a Japanese TV show that sends a fake gang of murderous Samurai after the world champion race walker to find out if he will run or walk quickly from the perceived threat. Link

Twenty-two-year-old Felix Kha will be reunited with the marijuana police took from him two and a half years ago, ruled the 4th District Court of Appeal.

Lawyers for Garden Grove said they were not seeking to have the state's medical marijuana laws declared unconstitutional on pre-emptive grounds, but were simply arguing that the city did not want to be in the position of having to return marijuana to a patient once it has been seized -- lawfully under federal law -- by police.

Kha's attorneys argued that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution effectively prohibits federal interference with California's medical marijuana laws, and the three-justice panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal agreed.

The justices found that because, under state law, Kha was lawfully entitled to possess the marijuana, "due process and fundamental fairness dictate that it be returned to him."

The justices said Kha is "nothing more than an aggrieved citizen who is seeking the return of his property."

Link (Via LAist)

Jason Hackenwerth creates massive surreal balloon sculptures that can take more than a week to complete. This bizarre organism was blown and twisted for a gala last year at the New Museum New York. Link to Jason Hackenwerth site, Link to photos of a Hackenwerth installation at a wedding party (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio show Search Engine is soliciting your questions for an interview with Industry Minister Jim Prentice about the upcoming Canadian DMCA legislation, which will give Canada one of the most backwards copyright regimes in the world.

We want to give Canadians one last chance to be heard on this subject before their government moves forward, and that's why we're asking Industry Minister Jim Prentice on to Search Engine, to answer questions posed by you. We have every confidence that when Minister Prentice sees the amount of public concern on this topic, he'll make himself available for a conversation. Submit your questions in the comments.

Link

See also:
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

The latest installment of the Hijinks Ensue webcomic dramatises the now-infamous Wired interview with Universal Music CEO Doug Morris in which the scared old man claimed that the record industry had been unable to respond to Napster because they don't understand technology and are too naive to hire a technologist to explain it to them because in their ignorance, they wouldn't be able to tell if s/he was lying. Link (Thanks, Emily!)

See also:
Universal Music CEO: Record industry can't tell when geeks are lying to us about technology Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves

The organizers of last week's "cocktail robotics" festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual "Roboexotica" event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called "A Singular Metaphor" in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called "The inmates have taken over the asylum...," while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine's Bre Pettis gave a talk called "Machines: If you can't beat them, join them," about the utopia of apocalypse. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

Mark shows us how to make an explosive miniature cannon out of some breath spray and an empty film canister (don't try this at an airport, folks). Then, good foods gone bad -- an excerpt from "Snack Mansion," a short claymation film by Lauren Adolfsen. When the pizza makes out with the cookie and the banana barfs, you know it's a party.

Link to video, BBtv post, and comments.