Breaking cover from my paternity leave again with an important bit of news: Neil Gaiman's publisher HarperCollins have given him the green light to do a free (as in beer) web-release of one of his books and Neil's running a poll to see which one he should put online -- go vote! They'll leave it up for a month and track sales -- if the experiment succeeds, they'll do more.

What I want you to do is think -- not about which of the books below is your favourite, but if you were giving one away to a friend who had never read anything of mine, what would it be? Where would you want them to start?

Link (Thanks, John!)

Reports are circulating that a tentative deal has been reached in the WGA strike. Snip from NYT:

The agreement would let writers claim to have bettered a similar deal achieved last month between the production companies and the Directors Guild of America. In the third year of the Writers Guild deal, writers will be paid a percentage of the distributor’s revenue rather than the flat fee for Web-streamed television shows granted to the directors. The writers had insisted on this issue to ensure they not lose out on any new-media windfall the studios and networks may get from Web video. The producers yielded on this point — and the directors did not push it —arguing that Internet distribution is unlikely to become a significant business during the length of these contracts.

In the fine print, this detail:

In their message to members, [Michael Winship, president of WGA East,] and [Writers Guild of America West President Patric Verrone] focused on the WGA's contract gains, which include the studios' agreement to pay a percentage of distributors' gross on streamed online product in the third year of the deal; writers will receive a flat fee of $1,200 for the first two years, for content that airs after the promotional periods.

Kari in Toronto blogs:

When I first heard the news yesterday, that Sheridan College had been locked down because of a gunman, I felt chills run up my spine. Someone from my work had just been sent over to the school to talk about sales, and back at my office we were all concerned. Thankfully it was reported later in the day that there was no attack. Today, however, it's been revealed that the gun sighting that caused a professor to call in the emergency and the subsequent police lockdown was actually... a camera tripod sighting.

Link to blogTO post. (thanks, Jerrold)

Link to Etsy item, a Gocco print in "bright white ink on red cardstock. The paper is acid free, archival, 30% recycled and measures 5"x7"."

peter callesen
cardboard puma
wholemovement
necromancer
flying pig
ivor the engine
models
arcades
boxes
pocketmod
start here

previously on web zen:
paper zen 2005

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

And apparently, they're intended for kitty titties. Snip from Instructables:

This instructable will teach you how to make pasties with LED nipples. Obviously this is information you need to succeed in life!
First of all, thank you to clamoring for the original instructable! I followed her instructions to form the pasties, but made a few adjustments to add the LEDs. :D The pasties are so simple to make that I figured it would be nice to add something else - hence the LED "nipples."

Link.

Link to ad mashup, via hiltonjapan (thanks, DGHilton!)

You might have seen this shaded gray squares illusion before. Squares A and B are the same shade of gray. (It was created by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT.

Here's a similar illusion with colored squares. The "blue" tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the "yellow" tiles in the top of the right cube.

Don't take my word for it. Use an image editing program with a eyedropper to see for yourself. I used Photoshop's eyedropper tool to take 5x5 samples and found that both the "yellow" and the "blue" tiles are C:50 M:40 Y:40 K:5.

Take a look at the brown tile in the center of the top face and the yellow tile in the center of the side facing slightly to the left. They're the same color.

UPDATE: The color tile illusion is one of many excellent illusions created by R. Beau Lotto.

According to Barstool Sports, these photos of men with very dark spray tans were taken in New Jersey. Link (Via Why, That's Delightful!)

Real estate agents Mark Forytarz and Paul Castran of Castran Gilbert in Victoria Australia have filed a defamation lawsuit against Google. The two agents said that they asked Google to remove allegedly defaming links to articles about them, but that Google did not take any action.

The plaintiffs claim the articles suggest Mr Forytarz bullied an intellectually disabled man into selling his home in order to claim a commission of at least $200,000.

It is claimed the article paints Mr Forytarz as unscrupulous and unethical and he suffered distress embarrassment and humiliation as a result.

They also claim another article alleges Mr Castran used dummy bidders to inflate the prices of the properties he sold.

Link

Over the last couple of days on Boing Boing Gadgets, we looked at this trailer for a documentary about the Blip Festival, how to run cable like NASA, a litter box that doubles as a planter, my new studio monitors and my ignorance about them, giant LEGO chess pieces, the first issue of Wired, the continuing lack of Nazis in LEGO games, three new Picoo-Z helicopters (including 3-channel models!), antique hand-cranked coffee mills, a modular cell phone that is supposed to live inside all your other gear, Michael Ruhlman's affection for old GE percolators, and a crappy new Zippo lighter.

David Gray says: "Old commercial (1960's?) for a kids game where you get smacked in the face with a cream pie."

In January, I posted the news that a young man had been arrested in Dubai for carrying melatonin. This BBC article looks into the story, and serves up some other examples of the draconian drug laws in the United Arab Emirates.

Examples:

• A Swiss man "is serving a four-year jail term after three poppy seeds from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow airport were found on his clothes."

• A 43-year-old Englishman who had a cigarette stuck to his shoe was sentenced was sentenced to four years in prison for possession of 0.003g of cannabis, which I would imagine is a microscopic amount.

• Customs officers held a woman for eight weeks before she was able to convince authorities that her codeine pills were prescribed by her doctor for back pain.

According to BBC article:

"If they find any amount - no matter how minute - it will be enough to attract a mandatory four-year prison sentence.

"What many travellers may not realise is that they can be deemed to be in possession of such banned substances if they can be detected in their urine or bloodstream, or even in tiny, trace amounts on their person."

Link

The fellow who uploaded this to YouTube writes:

This is possibly the most disturbing thing I've seen on the Interweb. I'm sorry for inflicting this upon all of you. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: The mushroom in this video looks like Amanita muscaria, which are very poisonous! Don't ever try this at home, people. Picking and eating random wild mushrooms MIGHT KILL YOU. After a rigorous session of super-sleuthing, I was able to find out more about this guy. It seems that he is a performance artist from Japan that goes by the name of 'wotaken.' Here's his home page: http://katura.is.land.to/index.html.

YouTube Link (Thanks, Russ Gooberman!)

The Asian Law Caucus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a joint lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over access to public records on the questioning and searches of travelers at U.S. borders.

Filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the suit responds to growing complaints by U.S. citizens and immigrants of excessive or repeated screenings by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

ALC, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization, received more than 20 complaints from Northern California residents last year who said they were grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations when returning to the United States from travels abroad. In addition, customs agents examined travelers' books, business cards collected from friends and colleagues, handwritten notes, personal photos, laptop computer files, and cell phone directories, and sometimes made copies of this information. When individuals complained, they were told, "This is the border, and you have no rights."

"When the government searches your books, peers into your computer, and demands to know your political views, it sends the message that free expression and privacy disappear at our nation's doorstep," said Shirin Sinnar, staff attorney at ALC. "The fact that so many people face these searches and questioning every time they return to the United States, not knowing why and unable to clear their names, violates basic notions of fairness and due process."

ALC and EFF asked DHS to disclose its policies on questioning travelers on First Amendment-protected activities, photocopying individuals' personal papers, and searching laptop computers and other electronic devices. The agency failed to meet the 20-day time limit that Congress has set for responding to public information requests, prompting the lawsuit.

Link to EFF.org announcement, here's a copy of the complaint (PDF).

Previously on Boing Boing:
* US Customs TSA confiscating laptops
* TSA apologizes to "blogesphere" for arbitrary gadget screenings
* Arbitrary TSA requirement: all electronics out of your bag (cables, too)

My four-year-old daughter's pre-school visited a nursing home. When they got back to class, they teacher asked them to describe what old people look like. Here are their answers.

Q: What do old people look like?

A: Very old. Their stomach is very big. They have a wheelchair. They look like they can't walk.

Link

Here are two other Flickr galleries of my kids' class drawings, containing similar sentiments: Preschoolers' feelings, What happens to people when they get old?

On Afrigadget today, the story of an organization working with people in Africa to build bicycles from a locally-available and sustainable resource -- bamboo:

The Bamboo Bike, an endeavour that aims at building bicycles in a sustainable fashion using bamboo as the primary construction material, is a joint project run by Craig Calfree of Calfree Design, a high tech bicycle design firm based in California and The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The bicycle is the primary mode of transport in Africa and it is used for everything from personal transportation to moving medicine and the sick to hospital. Sadly, the design used in most of Africa has not changed for the last 40 years to take into account the different ways in which the bicycle is used. In fact, most bikes in use in most of Africa today are based on a colonial British design tailored to individuals travelling short distances on smooth roads.

Link

Showstudio blog has an item up today about an interesting fashion advertising experiment:

[L]ast night the mighty PRADA unveiled 'Trembled Blossoms', a showstopping fashion film, at their 'SoHo Epicenter' store in New York. Directed by the performance artist James Luna and based on James Jean's Nouveau-esque wallpaper seen in the ad campaign, the film is an ambitious narrative fantasy depicting a cyber woman's journey through a magical, illustrated forest.

Link (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Bibliodyssey blog (which recently published a wonderful book about wonderful old books!) has a post up today with scans of a geomantic almanac from the mid-1500s:

The above images come from a manuscript commissioned by Ottheinrich which was completed between 1552 and 1557 (calligraphy by Heinrich Rüdinger and illumination by Albrecht Glockendon [attributed]). It's title is 'Geomantie' (Geomancy) - Codex Palatinus 833 Germanicus. The title is misleading really. This is not a work of geomancy* as any reference material describes it, although there may have been a broader medieval definition which has since been superseded. (...)

The spectacular full page images (...) are all volvelles (rotating paper wheel charts) and were used for various computations such as calculating the time and the lunar phases. The zodiac images on the wheels could be aligned with the night sky and the disk turned to reveal desired incremental measurements. Some were able to function as astrolabes, to give approximate positions of ships at sea.

Link to Bibliodyssey post. And, Amazon link to "BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet (Hardcover)," which includes selected works featured on this fine blog over the past years. I have a copy, and it's already dog-eared from too much lovin'.

The National Space Society's art contest has announced its winning entries to illustrate the NSS 2009 Space Settlement Calendar. Link to gallery. Shown here: After the Storm, by Colorado-based artist Raymond Cassel, submitted in the "Martian Settlements" category -- this one took grand prize.

Writer and sex worker Melissa Gira Grant is now contributing to Valleywag. Here is an excerpt from her first item about a sector of the Silicon Valley economy that is rarely mentioned in tech biz publications (unless, say, some high-profile exec is caught in a transaction):

# Search sfbay area -> sby -> services -> erotic. Keywords you're looking for: "college," "tuition," "arrangement," "daddy."

# When you find a few likely prospects, email them. DON'T mention money or sex. Follow any instructions she's included, e.g. send her your phone number. She may ask you to confirm who you really are and where you work. She's not a cop -- she's a contractor. You can have her call the front desk at your workplace and ask for you. She'll say she's your "trainer" or something.

Link.

"Ella" is a 12-meter-long sculpture made from peaches, as part of a promotional campaign for an Australian skin care product company. The site has a video about its design and construction. Link

Today on Boing Boing tv: What has one Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 160G hard drive, 1G RAM, buck teeth, fur, and a big fat tail? Duh, Compubeaver! This taxidermy casemod was created by Kasey McMahon of yourpsychogirlfriend. Compubeaver boasts impressive technical specs, and can chew through logs or logfiles with equal ease. We observe the critter in his native environment: a contemporary office space, with eager information workers -- and one big problem.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with video and discussion.

Want to build your own? Read this Instructables HOWTO! If you dig this video, feel free to Digg it.

Link to larger size, Link to original post on dieselsweeties blog. Thanks, R Stevens and crew!

Link, via Joel's Dethroner blog, via this post on ectoplasmo. (thanks Susannah Breslin.)

The beautiful Cape Schank House in Victoria, Australia, designed by Paul Morgan Architects, has some interesting features, including a rain water tank in the middle of the living room.

Within the living room the ceiling wraps down to an internal water tank. The tank cools the ambient air temperature of the living room during summer, supplies rain water, and structurally carries the roof load.

Link (Via notcot.org)

US and Italian authorities arrested 80 suspected Mafia bosses in New York and Sicily on charges of murder, racketeering, loan sharking, conspiracy, drug dealing, and extortion.

My favorite part of the article is the silly names of the thugs:

Among those facing charges were top Gambino leaders including acting boss John D'Amico, also known as "Jackie the Nose," acting underboss Domenico "The Greaseball" Cefalu and consigliere Joseph "Miserable" Corozzo.

Link (Via The Day the Tried to Kill Me)

Stephen Worth says:

It's rare for a publisher to allow a parody of its own characters, and unheard of for the creator himself to get the opportunity to make fun of his own creation. But back in the late sixties, the powers that be at Marvel didn't take themselves quite so seriously. Here we have the unthinkable... Jack Kirby and Stan Lee doing a parody of their own Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer comics!

"The Fabulous Fantastical Four Suffer Through The Saga Of The Silver Burper!" Marvel's Not Brand Echh! #1 (1967)

Link

In 1997, the BBC aired an episode of their science show Horizon about psychedelic drugs and medicine. Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan reports that the entire program, titled Psychedelic Science, is now available on Google Video. From his post, which puts the episode in a bit of historical context:

The programme looks at the history of psychedelic drug research when it was still easily possible, focusing on Osmond and Hoffer's early work on using LSD in treating addiction and facilitating psychotherapy.

It's also got loads of great historical footage from the early research but also talks to the new generation of researchers looking at compounds such as ayahuasca and ibogaine, who are now the senior figures in this growing area.

Link to "Psychedelic Science" video, Link to Mind Hacks

Dude, seriously. Link. (thanks, amos)

Seen here is an example of a purported rat king, a giant rat beast created when many rats get their tails tangled together. Legend has it that the rats then grow together into a single creepy entity. This mummified "rat king" was discovered in 1828 in Buchheim, Germany and is currently on display at the museum Mauritianum in Altenburg, Germany. From Wikipedia:

The earliest report of rat kings comes from 1564. If real, the phenomenon may have diminished when the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) displaced the black rat (R. Rattus) in the 18th century. Sightings have been sporadic in the modern era; most recently comes an Estonian farmer's discovery in the Võrumaa region on January 16, 2005.

Most extant examples are formed from black rats (R. rattus). The only find involving sawah rats (Rattus rattus brevicaudatus) occurred on March 23, 1918, in Bogor on Java, where a rat king of ten young field rats was found. Similar attachments have been reported in other species: in April 1929, a group of young forest mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) was reported in Holstein; and there have been reports of squirrel kings. The Zoological Institute of the University of Hamburg allegedly owns a specimen.

Rat kings are not to be confused with conjoined twins, which arise in many species. Rat kings would grow together only after birth.

Link

Pressure Printing has two beautiful new framed color prints of paintings by Glenn Barr and Amy Crehore. Link

DIY splatterpunk film directors take note, Erik Beck from Indy Mogul posted an Instructable on making a cheap yet effective decapitation effect for your next slasher movie. The ingredients include: a test dummy, fake head (we used styrofoam), foam, liquid latex (preferably in a skin color), garden sprayer, valve, 6 bottles of food coloring, and a balloon. Link

During WWII, group of American pilots founded The International Association of Turtles in an English pub. The basic rules for membership:"You must think with a clean mind and you must be willing to stick your neck out for yourself and for other people in need."

The Silent Porn Star blog came across an early membership card, the back of which reads (typos and all):

We assume all prospective Turtles own a Jack Ass. On this assumption is the reason for the password.

This password must be given if you are ever asked by a fellow member, "Are you a Turtle?" You MUST then reply "You bet your sweet ass I am." If you do not give the password in full because of embarassment or some other reason, you forfeit a beverage of his choice. So always remember the password.

As all members are of clean mind to become an official Turtle the person must solve the following riddles with clean-minded correct answers:

1. What is it a man can do standing up, a woman sitting down, and a dog on three legs? (Answer: shake hands).

2. What is it that a cow has four of and woman has only two of? (Answer: legs).

3. What is a four letter word ending in 'k' that means the same as intercourse? (Answer: talk).

4. What is it on a man that is round, hard, and sticks so far out of his pajamas that you can hand a hat on it? (Answer: his head).

You are now a member of The Turtle Club. Govern yourself accordingly and produce new members.

You can join the Turtles by paying a $5 initiation fee. Link

"I'm Learning to Share" has posted three nice galleries of old paperback covers on Flickr: 40s mysteries, 50s and 60s mysteries, and 60s and 70s scholastic book club covers.

Link

Enjoy this clip of Tiny Tim performing in a beatnik club from the pilot episode of Ironside. (Thanks, Maddy!)

Election judges at a Far North Side Chicago precinct told 20 voters that a non-working voting pen contained "invisible ink."

It's invisible ink, officials said. The scanner will count it.

But their votes weren't recorded after all.

"Part of me was thinking it does sound stupid enough to be true,'' said Amy Carlton, who had serious doubts but went ahead and voted anyway.

As it turns out, Carlton was one of 20 voters at the precinct who were given the wrong pen to use. They were also then told, apparently by a misinformed judge, that the pens have invisible ink, elections officials said.

As a result, the votes were not counted. But officials insisted there were no dirty tricks involved.

Link (Thanks, Kerry!)

The Washington Post reports that TSA US Customs and Border Protection [part of the US Department of Homeland Security] officers have been asking some travelers to open their laptop computers and divulge their passwords so that the information on the hard drives can be inspected.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had "a security concern" with her. "I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she said.

...

"I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days," said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE's help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.

Link (Via Consumerist)

For the last several years, my friend Michelle Hansen has been working hard as a producer on Speed & Angels, a new indy documentary about fighter pilots. Directed by Peyton Wilson, the story follows two Navy officers, Jay and Meagan, through flight school, dogfights in Nevada, aircraft carrier landing exercises, and eventually the harsh realities of the Iraq war. Top Gun references may be obvious, but accurate. Meagan (callsign: Slick) decided at 12 that she wanted to be a fighter pilot after seeing Top Gun with her dad. Speed & Angels will be screened at the Sedona International Film Festival on February 29 and March 1 and at the San Jose Cinequest Film Festival on March 9. Link (Thanks, Ed Szylko!)

Jean Mansel of Kent County, Michigan called the news media last month after an 80-pound cement Jesus statue was swiped from her front yard and a ransom note left in her mailbox. The ransom note read, "We are holding Jesus ransom until you clean up the poopie from your wieners and trust us we see you take your wieners for long walks without picking up their poopie in our yards. This has upset us dearly so please clean up all the weiner poopie, if you want to see Jesus unharmed. Sincerely, Lindy Lane Residents." The story was featured on CNN. The statue has since been returned. Apparently, it was not taken by a neighbor, but rather a family member. From WZZM13:

"It has to be a young person because they put these lines around Jesus, no adult is going to waste their time doing that," (Mansel said before the statue was returned). "And referring to weiner poopie…my gosh."

Jean has four wiener dogs and admits there was a complaint last year about their leavings. But she says she's cleaned up every pile since.

"I take my dogs for walks; I carry a plastic bag with me and pick up anything that they do. I thought something like that would be safe in our yard, it wasn't, it wasn't."

Link to YouTube video, Link to WZZM13 article (Thanks, Naomi Pescovitz!)

Xeni dons a tutu made of baby heads on today's Boing Boing tv: we visit the workshop of Your Psycho Girlfriend, creators of demented couture and cyborg marsupials from the future.

One of those mammal-machine hybrids is the text-o-possum (we meet him around 02:27). The left rear leg of this taxidermied texter hides a bluetooth keyboard projector that shoots ASCII into the ether with red lasers. No, really.

In part two of today's episode (around 3:09), a Boing Boing operative tests out the text-o-possum's capabilities for enterprise computing in an urban business environment. A elderly lady walks up and pets text-o-possum, then all hell breaks loose. And by hell, we mean comedy.

Link to full BBtv post with video, discussion, and credits.

If you dig this, feel free to Digg this.

Annalee Newitz has a great post up today on i09, Gawker's sf blog, about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains:

# Don't be afraid to hook up with a cute spaceman. We love Leela on Futurama not just because she's the only person on her ship with any kind of sense, but because she also lets her long, purple hair down once in a while. She's always tangling with spacemen and getting mixed up with strange alien pets. And that's one good reason why her goofy crew would follow her to the ends of the galaxy -- well, if she had enough beer. Lesson learned? A good leader has to get laid once in a while, and she shouldn't be ashamed of it.

# When you're about to go genocidal, get a second opinion. Admiral William Adama from the new Battlestar Galactica is one of the best leaders we've ever seen. He's gotten a group of a few thousand humans halfway across the galaxy, despite the fact that they're being pursuit by a group of homicidal, erotically obsessed cyborgs. He's had to deal with incredible loss and sheer terror, and he always keeps his head. He is also truly humane. How does he keep it together without going all Admiral Cain on everybody's ass? By sharing his power with President Roslyn as well as his circle of trusted officers and advisers.

Link

A Greenpeace activist was recently arrested for protesting in front of the US Department of the Interior while wearing an awesome polar bear suit. He was trying to draw attention to the Bush Administration’s delay in issuing a final Endangered Species Act listing for the polar bear due to global warming. Link to Greenpeace blog post.

But guess who made the costume? The exceedingly talented artisan Lionel, whose work was featured in two Boing Boing tv episodes about furries:

* American Furry #1: Life, Liberty, and the Fursuit of Happiness.
* American Furry #2.

... and in this Boing Boing post about how to make an Animatronic Lion Mask with stereo night vision and amplified hearing.

Lionel named this polar bear suit prototype "Snowshine." (thanks, Marianne Shaneen!)

A newly launched project called White House Redux invites you to design a new home for the U.S. Presidency:

What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world's most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world's most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008 and published in Surface magazine. All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party.

Link. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Dan Ancona says,

A few preliminary pictures of an Obama rallying sign created by artist, designer and maker James Home, based on the image created by Shepard Fairey. Amazing BlinkM lighting technology courtesy of Mike Kuniavsky and ThingM Global Marketing.

This thing looks completely amazing in action. It basically works like a political tractor beam, pulling in the formerly hopeless, cynical and apathetic and parking them in the warm shuttle bay of hope and action. Something like that.

Here's a pic of it doing its thing.

Link. (thanks, WdGIII!)

Previously on BB: Shepard Fairey's Obama Poster.

Last week, Mark blogged about reports that TSA agents in certain US airports were reportedly demanding that air travelers remove *all* electronics from their carry-on luggage (not just laptops, but phones, cables, cameras, everything) during screening. Mark referenced Scott Beale's post, and I believe Beale was the first to speak up about it. He experienced this at SFO, but many others traveling in or out of SFO around the same time (myself included), did not -- so everyone was confused.

Today, on the newfangled Official TSA Blog (RSS), there's a super awkward apology of sorts, and an even more awkward but hearty back-slap to bloggers for bringing the issue to public attention. That's their logo, above.

Why awkward? For starters, there's the title: "HOORAY BLOGGERS! A Win for the Blogesphere." (sic). Here's what they say to the, erm, "blogesphere."

Posters on this blog have had their first official impact on our operations. That’s right, less than one week since we began the blog and already you’re affecting security in a very positive way.

On Monday afternoon we began receiving questions about airports that were requiring ALL electronics to be removed from carry-on bags (everything, including blackberrys, iPods and even cords). This practice was also mentioned on several other blogs and left us scratching our heads.

So…we checked with our security operations team to figure out what was going on. After some calls to our airports, we learned that this exercise was set up by local TSA offices and was not part of any grand plan across the country. These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon and blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night. (Fat Tuesday of course).

Attention: LA peeps! Earlier this week, Mark posted about the Maker Faire tryouts taking place at Machine Project on Saturday. This will be fun, and you should attend!

But there are, in fact, even more events taking place at Machine Project this very weekend -- and I'll be there for all of them with the Boing Boing tv crew for an extended dance remix of hijinks with our trusty video cameras.

Mark Allen of Machine Project explains:

1. On Friday February 8th at 8pm, we’re hosting the first-ever competition for the new sport of Cabling (aka competitive cable untangling), founded by Steven Schkolne, and featuring interns in jumpsuits, a discussion of knot theory, three rounds of untangling various extension and A/V cords, and pretzels. Qualifying rounds will be two nights before on Wednesday, February 6th, from 8-11pm. If you’d like to try out for a spot in the competition, please email us at machine@machineproject.com to schedule a time to come in on the 6th. We strongly encourage aspiring competitors to come up with intimidating Cabling nicknames for themselves.

2. We have negotiated the Mithril shipments needed for the armor for Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman) that happens from 8-10pm Saturday February 9th. To recap - 10 performers outfitted in medieval/space/fantasy armor re-create Bruce Nauman’s 1973 work “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down”. Performed in slow motion and combined with movements based on computer game death animations, this piece is accompanied by a high volume binaural beats reputed to induce out of body experiences.

Link.

BB readers in LA, see you there, come join us for the Boing Boing tv taping! BB readers who are not in LA: we'll share it on BBtv soon.

(Image above: courtesy of Flickr user Clarkk / shot by Jonathan Arehart, via Cable Messes; below, courtesy Brody Condon.)

In 2002, Vincent Lamouroux built this Pentacycle to travel along the abandoned Aérotrain hovercraft monorailway built in the 1970s.

Link | Video about Aérotrain (Via VVORK)

Here's a very nice version of "One Toke Over The Line" from the Lawrence Welk show, sung by Gail and Dale. (Thanks, Tamu!)

More Gail Farrell videos here : Downtown, Three B's, An Old Fashioned Love Song, Oklahoma Hills, Southtown USA, The Merry Go Round Broke Down, Sugartime, Put On a Happy Face

Stephen Scott plays the piano from the inside out. For his compositions, Scott and nine other musicians use homemade bows, popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, guitar picks, rubber plumbing tape, and other materials to manipulate the strings under the lid of the piano. They never touch the keys. National Public Radio's Morning Edition profiled Scott yesterday. The NPR site also features audio and video of Scott and his Bowed Piano Ensemble. I listened to the music first and it reminded me of the trance-inducing minimalism of Steve Reich. Turns out, Scott cites Reich as a big influence and studied music with him in Ghana. From the feature (photo by Peter Savage):

To get a sense of what the bowed piano is, imagine a grand piano with the lid lifted off. Ten musicians crowd around, leaning over the innards of the instrument, like a team of surgeons performing an operation.

Scott says you won't find any traditional-looking bows — like the ones violinists use — in his ensemble.

"The primary sound is produced by a bow of nylon fish-line, which is rosined, and that's just threaded under the piano string and across it. There's another kind of bow, which is a stick of wood which has horse hair affixed to it, and that's rubbed against the strings to produce a short, percussive sound."

Link to NPR, Link to buy Bowed Piano Ensemble CDs (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)