Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's Laugh-Out-Loud Cats are now available in book form. "I'm selling signed and drawn in copies on my blog, or unsigned and undrawn in copies via Lulu," says the author/illustrator. Link.

Recently and related posts on BB:

* BBtv - Ape Lad: The True Hollywood Story of Aloysius Koford
* BBtv -- Laugh Out Loud Cats: The True History

Kate Black made this notebook. She has just one for sale on Etsy for $24. It's called "The Dollar's In The Shitter.

The US Dollar is worth so little now, it's cheaper to bind books with banknotes than art papers.

This book is made with two 1 dollar bills, actual US currency.

The interior covers and spine reinforcements are emerald green batiked paper.

The textblock is made from 60lb, bright white drawing paper. The paper has a good amount of tooth and can handle ink, pencil and many other media.

- 5.5" x 2.125" (14 cm x 5.5 cm)
- 140 pages.
- Bound with forest green waxed Irish linen thread.

This book opens completely flat, for ease of use.

Link (Thanks, Jenny!)

Now is your chance to own a fantastically awful waxwork from one of the world's worst wax museums. Louis Tussaud's House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, UK, is auctioning off 75 wax heads from its collection. The auction will take place at Keys on February 12. According to The Telegraph, each disembodied head is expected to go for between £50 to £80. Seen here, from left to right, John Travolta, Bob Hope, Tom Jones, and Shirley Bassey. Link

found zen 3
garbage scout
big happy funhouse
superfluous
eavesdrop
swap meat

previously on web zen:
found zen 2
found zen 1

Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Club Littlegun has photos of some very curious antique guns, including this pistol ring. I saw one of these for sale years ago at an antique shop in Aspen. The owner told me that they were popular among Nazis and the Mafia. I can't remember exactly how much it cost, but it was in the thousands. Club Littlegun also has photos of a belt gun, a watch gun, a crucifix pistol, a pen pistol, a hand cannon, and many other unique firearms.
Link (via Damn Data)

Researchers from Duke University think it may be possible to develop a composite material that would make objects acoustically "invisible." The idea is that sound waves approaching an object wrapped in the material would bend around the object and then keep going. The idea was inspired by the recently-developed "invisibility cloak" that bends microwaves. From National Geographic News:

The most obvious use of an acoustic cloak would be hiding submarines from enemy sonar—sound waves that are used to locate underwater objects.

But the advance could also be used in architecture—in music halls and theaters, for instance.

"Right now . . . the acoustics are built into whatever you're doing structurally," (Duke professor Steve) Cummer said. "So you probably have a set of tradeoffs, structurally and acoustically."

But with acoustic cloaking technology, "a giant beam that might be important structurally and bad acoustically could be rendered acoustically invisible."

Link

Previously on BB:
• Invisibility cloak is one step closer after science demo Link

Lothar Windels from the Rhode Island School of Design created this "Joseph Felt Chair 2" in 2003 -- made from "voluptuous folds of heavy red and gray felt." Link (via Cribcandy)

Clever smugglers are cloning FedEx, WalMart, Department of Transport and even US Border Patrol vans, filling them with dope, people, and cash, and driving 'em around with near impunity:

Savvy criminals are using some of the country's most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement...

A fake U.S. Border Patrol van was found to be carrying 31 illegal aliens in Casa Grande, Ariz. An alert agent recognized that the "H" in the van's serial number is a letter used only on U.S. Border Patrol Jeep Wranglers. It should have been a "P."

Link (via Kottke)

I hope this storm in Southern California dies down so I can take my daughter to Anaheim for the Monster Jam on Saturday, which features this cool Donkey Kong truck. Link

TieGuys.com sells these awesomely nerdy Star Trek neckties. They're $17.50 each except for the blue one with Kirk, Spock, and Bones, which goes for $24.95.
Link (via Neatorama)

doktor tchock says: "Chunklet has uncovered a recording of David Lee Roth's isolated vocal tracks from "Runnin' With The Devil." Link

(If the above player is blank, here's the YouTube link)

Here's the long awaited fourth installment of the hilarious (and educational!) tutorial series, You Suck at Photoshop.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• You Suck at Photoshop #2
• Funny tutorial: "You Sucjk at Photoshop"
• You Suck at Photoshop, Episode 3

Artur Bergman says:

"Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb.

He does this by cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score. He then presents it all in this nifty little visualisation."

Link (Thanks, Chaya!)

Uw Moeder posted three hours of MTV from 1983 (with Mark Goodman as VJ), including commercials, on two Google videos. Link

Two medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles have installed pot vending machines. They're accessible 24 hours a day and monitored by security guards. From Thrillist:

After cinching up your doctor's consultation, hit an AVM location to get your prescription approved, fingerprint taken, and a prepaid credit card loaded with your profile: dosage (3.5 or 7 grams, up to 1oz a week) and strain preference (choice of five, including OG Cush and Granddaddy Purple, the mildly hallucinogenic forebear to Prince). Then day or night, all you do is hit a machine and walk away with enough vacuum-sealed, plastic-encapsulated cheeba to adequately treat your illness.

Link

Chris Spurgeon says:

With the melting of the northern polar ice cap, the coming decades are sure to see a mad dash to claim the territories (and natural resources) of the far north. But since the laws governing the polar regions are a crazy mish-mash of international treaties, centuries-old customs, indigenous tradition, and conflicting national claims figuring out who has rights to what is no easy chore.

Iceland's University of Akureyri is taking on the task, offering the world's first graduate program in Polar Law. Graduates will gain expertise in everything from the Law of the Sea to climate change to Inuit legal customs. Could be a smart career move for a budding attorney looking for some legal adventure.

(Image from a Polar Law workshop) Link

Here's a neat extreme slow motion video of a cigarette lighter ignition.
Link

Researchers at the University of Sunderland and Durham University have developed a wonderfully whimsical looking "prototype cognitive helmet" that "bathes the brain with infra-red light and stimulates the growth of brain cells."

Its creators believe it could reverse the symptoms of dementia - such as memory loss and anxiety - after only four weeks.

Dr Dougal claims that only ten minutes under the hat a day is enough to have an effect.

"Currently all you can do with dementia is to slow down the rate of decay - this new process will not only stop that rate of decay but partially reverse it," he said. Low level infra-red red is thought to stimulate the growth of cells of all types of tissue and encourage their repair. It is able to penetrate the skin and even get through the skull.

Link

The original art for the over of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural #1 sold at auction last month for $101,575, "making it the first Crumb original - and the first underground original from any artist - ever to break the $100K barrier."

“Top-shelf underground art, by such outstanding artists as Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Larry Welz, Spain Rodriquez, and S. Clay Wilson, is undoubtedly on a growth track in the hobby right now,” [Ed Jaster, Vice-President for Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries] said. “Now that Crumb has set the new standard, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see other artists reach this lofty pinnacle within a few years. It’s clear that our clients have both the desire and the resources necessary to make this happen.”

Link

Next time you're all lost in the supermarket, you can count on Robovie to help you find your way.

In a series of demonstrations conducted from January 22 to 24, a souped-up version of ATR’s Robovie humanoid robot monitored people as they passed through a 100 square meter (1,076 sq ft) section of the Universal Citywalk Osaka shopping center. Relying on data from 16 cameras, 6 laser range finders and 9 RFID tag readers installed in and around the area, the robot was able to watch up to 20 people at a time, pinpoint their locations to within a few centimeters, and classify each individual’s behavior into one of 10 categories (waiting, wandering, walking fast, running, etc.).

Whenever Robovie spotted people who looked disoriented, the child-sized droid wheeled up to them and asked, “Are you lost?” If so, the robot provided simple directions to the destination and pointed the way. If not, the robot proceeded to recommend nearby shops and restaurants.

Link

The National Museum of Public Health has been uploading hundreds of incredible photos from its archives onto Flickr. Image at left, "Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912." Image at right, "Ossifying fibroma, frontal bone." From email that the National Museum sent to the wonderful Morbid Anatomy blog:

The National Museum of Health and Medicine has been uploading pictures to Flickr since September 2006. We've transcribed, of course, all information that we have for each picture, but have also been posting some for which we have relatively little information, such as Library of Congress is doing, with the hope that a Flickr user will recognize them and be able to tell us more.

We've been uploading the hard way, mostly one picture at a time, choosing from among the several hundred thousand we've been digitizing over the last three years. Until that database goes live, this is our way of sharing our favorite photos from our many collections.

Link, Link, and Link (Thanks, Mark Dery!)

Previously on BB:
• Library of Congress uses Flickr Link

An eyeball on its way from Queensland, Australia to Hobart for transplant was accidentally delivered to a random hotel guest instead. A spokesperson for the Australian Air Express shipping company stated that the error was a "failure in an internal handover process." The eyeball was recovered and successfully transplanted. From The Courier-Mail:

Hotel worker Gabriel Winner - who requested the name of the hotel not be used - says the agitated guest brought the esky to reception early yesterday morning.

``The guy left.. me with a box with an eyeball in it,'' he said.

``He got the box and signed for it and opened it in the middle of the night.

``I thought this is just too weird. I went and put it in the fridge because I didn't know what else to do with it. It was more than a little disconcerting.''

Link

Siva sez, "In cooperation with the Media Education Foundation and La Lutta, Free Culture @ NYU is screening Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property at 9pm on Thursday, January 31. Narrated by Naomi Klein, the film features interviews with Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig, Illegal Art Show curator Carrie McLaren, Negativland’s Mark Hosler, UVA media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Free Culture @ NYU co-founder Inga Chernyak, among many others. This 53-minute documentary will be preceded by selections from Negativland’s new DVD, Our Favorite Things, and it will be followed by a Q&A with Freedom of Expression® author and director Kembrew McLeod and co-producer Jeremy Smith."

Freedom of Expression Screening and Q&A with Creators
Sponsored by Free Culture @ NYU, NYU ACM, and WiNC
Free and Open to the Public (bring ID if non-NYU)
Thursday, January 31, 2008
9:00pm
NYU's Courant Institute
Room #109
251 Mercer Street b/w Bleecker and W. 4th

Link (Thanks, Siva!)

Boing Boing tv's Matt West visits Machine Project, where scholars and gladiators have gathered to reconstruct Rome in exactly 24 hours.

Link to BBtv post with video and discussion.

Slice, the pizza blog, has a good roundup of US regional pizza styles, tracing the hereditary links between different styles as different groups of Italian immigrants spread across the nation.

(My favorite slice? Hands down, no question, absolutely Massimo's on College Street in Toronto, a slice so good that I don't think I've ever eaten a slice of pizza one tenth as delicious, nothing even in the running. Truly in a league of its own. My mouth just flooded with saliva as I typed those words, and I'm presently 6,000 miles from Massimo's)

Midwest-Style
Variations, I believe, are found throughout the Midwest—from Ohio to Milwaukee to Chicago to wherever. I'd even go so far as to say that the "Chicago-style" pizza just above is really a variation of "Midwest-style." The Midwest style is round, thin, very crisp yet tender-flaky, and is party- or tavern-cut into the grid. Sauces and topping preference may differ from city to city and region to region, but this style seems to crop up often in the heartland.

Link (via Kottke)

(Image: Spanish Chorizo Pizza, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licensed photo from Avlxyz's Flickr stream)

The bookshop by my office has a huge, blown-up quote from George Orwell's 1936 essay "Bookshop Memories" over the counter, which inspired me to go look up the original essay. It's a hilarious, ill-tempered, mean-spirited and vastly entertaining rant about what's wrong with the booky trade -- sure to be appreciated by recovering booksellers like me, and bookstore junkies (like me):

A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

Link

(Image: Community Bookstore, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Phooky's Flickr stream)

Earlier this month, I blogged about The Black Mustang Club -- a fan-club for owners of Ford cars -- being told by CafePress that they weren't allowed to publish their calendar because Ford had contacted CafePress and demanded that the calendar be removed on the grounds that it infringed their trademarks.

A few days ago, I heard back from Ford, with a different side to the story. According to them, they hadn't said anything of the kind to CafePress -- rather, Ford had taken the opposite tack, releasing tons of pictures and bric-a-brac under generous Creative Commons license to encourage Ford fans to do cool stuff with their work.

So what happened? After a few rounds of correspondence with CafePress, here's where I've netted out:

* Ford had previously sent very stern letters to CafePress about similar projects, warning them in no uncertain terms that CafePress had better not produce projects similar to the Black Mustang Club Calendar

* CafePress contacted the Black Mustang Club and either said "Ford told us that you can't do your calendar, because they control all images of their cars" or CafePress contacted the Club and said "Ford told us that we can't can't do projects like your calendar, because they control all images of their cars" (I haven't been able to reach the Black Mustang Club people to confirm which it was, though they certainly wrote that it was the former)

* Ford has since contacted CafePress and The Black Mustang Club to say that this project and future fan-run projects (that don't imply an endorsement by Ford) are OK -- this is consistent with trademark law and a reasonable position for them to take

There's a couple of interesting lessons for Ford and CafePress to take away from this. For Ford (and companies like it), the lesson is surely to tighten the reins on your legal department. When they send stern letters to online service providers that threaten legal action, the natural outcome is that OSPs are going to get gun-shy -- and they'll tell your fans that they can't do anything and blame it all on you. The usual overkill approach from corporate counsel will come back and bite you on the ass.

For CafePress, the lesson is to take your customers' side when the law is with them. Even if Ford did tell CafePress to kill the BMC calendar, they'd have been wrong. The BMC calendar is legal -- even without Ford's blessing -- and when you protect yourself from legal liability by shutting it down, you incur PR liability by seeming like a bunch of candy-asses who can be bullied into submission by a memo from some white-shoe legal goon from a Fortune 100. Word gets around.

I don't know that we'll ever be able to find out whether CafePress told BMC that Ford was down on their specific calendar, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Ford's earlier letters on the subject clearly scared the hell out of CafePress, and CafePress's lawyers clearly need a refresher course in trademark and liability.

There's one very good piece of news to come out of this, though: Ford's program to let its fans do whatever they want with high-quality shots of the cars is a damned forward-looking and decent bit of strategy.

For the record, here's what Ford and CafePress had to say about this: