Artist Stanley Donwood, whose work frequently graces Radiohead releases, has a painting show opening in Tokyo next week. (thanks, Rex of Greenplastic!)

A bunch of chatter about muxtape today from various pals on different social networks I belong to. It's a pretty neat little service. Hand-roll your own MP3 mixtapes, and folks can listen to them with an intermaweb browser.

alt.nerd.obsessive
should you be laughing at this?
garfield minus garfield
marmaduke explained
savage chickens
22 panels that always work
chocolypse now
the rise and fall of photorealistic comics
nine planets without intelligent life
the right number
teddy
the mile high collection

previously on web zen:
comic zen 2005
comic zen 2004

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

Image: from Joel Johnson's olde blogge!

Over at Wired's "Danger Room" defense technology blog, Noah Shachtman writes:

The military is scrambling for new ways to treat the traumatic brain injuries and post-trauma stress of troops returning home from war. And every kind of therapy -- no matter how far outside the accepted medical form -- is being considered. The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from "spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga" to "bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing" to mend the psyches of wounded troops.

Link. Image: an MRI brain scan, from Flickr user CaptPiper.

Over at the Los Angeles Times, David Sarno has posted a funny audio interview with the famed '80s singer after whom the Rickroll is named. And thank gopod: Rick Astley forswears doing any YouTube remixes of his own. Snip:

Over the last year or so, Astley has watched with puzzled amazement as “Never Gonna Give You Up” has been mocked, celebrated, remixed and reprised, its original music video viewed millions of times on YouTube, all by a generation that could barely swallow its Gerber carrots when the song first topped the pop charts. “I think it’s just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it,” Astley said. “But that’s what brilliant about the Internet.”

Link. Oh wait, jeez, sorry! Here you go, there's your link.

Here's a video of a Clay Shirky talk at Harvard's Berkman Center, called "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." It's a summary of the ideas in his incredible book of the same title, a book that I continue to return to nearly every day in my thinking, making it the single largest influence on my thoughts in the past year. Link (via Copyfight)

See also: Clay Shirky's masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody

Fred sez,

On Friday, March 28th (April 4th rain date), join Free Culture @ NYU and Free Culture @ Columbia on a quest to get the best shots of NYC. Bring your camera and a way to get around town for the biggest scavenger hunt in Free Culture's history.

All photos will be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons for inclusion into Wikipedia articles about NYC that need photos. We've got hundreds of locations, sites, and things to document for Wikipedia and it should be a really fun day.

Each member of the winning team will receive an iPod shuffle loaded with Creative Commons music! Second and third place teams will win copies of "Wikipedia, The Missing Manual" donated by O'Reilly.

Link (Thanks, Fred)

Update: Looks like rain on Friday the 28th, we're rescheduling Wikipedia Takes Manhattan until April 4th, same places and time.

Artist Bert Simons makes realistic papercraft heads. Link (Via about:blank)

"It is a journey. It is a way of life." (Via Bedazzled)

Museum of Hoaxes wonders whether Fred and Sharon's movie production business is legitimate or some kind of publicity stunt. They aren't sure. What do you think? Link

Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs.

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

Link

A German website, Pundo300, took photos of food products and compared them with the depictions on their packages. Link (Via Museum of Hoaxes)

New spit-based home medical tests for the likes of breast cancer may be on the horizon, but DNA paternity testing kits are already on drugstore shelves. Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel has the details on Identigene's $30 kit. Science helps answer the eternal question of "Who's your daddy!?"
Link

Via The Day They Tried to Kill Me:

A sophisticated bugging and tracking device has been unearthed in the vehicle of a member of the Dublin 32 County Sovereignty Movement. The device was secreted internally into the dashboard of the vehicle and was equipped with its own self contained power supply. The manner by which the device was installed strongly suggests that those who planted it took considerable time to effect this and was obviously professionally done. The device bears English Manufacturing Labels but as of yet it is uncertain whether it originates from a British, Irish or joint British/Irish intelligence source.

Link

Researchers have identified all of the 1000+ proteins in human saliva glands. Determining the identity of the proteins in saliva could lead to convenient new spit-based medical tests that don't require, say, blood to be drawn. From Reuters:

Already there are saliva-based antibody tests to detect human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, and hepatitis infections, (University of Rochester Medical Center researcher Fred Hagan said). He said this protein map will provide new targets.

"Monitoring disease as well as drug use could be more easily done with saliva as opposed to blood or urine," he said.

Other groups are working on a saliva-based test for breast cancer that would detect a protein fragment from the HER2 protein. Hagan said such tests could eventually replace uncomfortable and costly mammograms.

"We envision in the future spitting in a tube and looking for a marker like this breast cancer marker. It would be much easier to do, potentially at home," he said.

Link

BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site -- you make "characters" using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it -- it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site's existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service. Link (Thanks, Jesse!)

The new Indiana Jones Heritage trading cards from Topps also include sketch cards from a huge variety of artists. Patrick Schoenmaker posted his sketch cards at his blog and they're fantastic. There's apparently one sketch card in every 54 packs, but I wish all of the cards in the set were sketch cards. Link to Schoenmaker's site, Link to Topps (via Drawn!)

UPDATE: Lucasfilm's Bonnie Burton writes, "On Starwars.com, I've been interviewing the artists who are making these great Indy Sketch cards." Link

The fur on this kitten, born Sunday in Sacramento, California, seems to spell out "I (heart) (dot)." That's especially cute because the kitten's mother is named Dottie.
Link

The Occult Experience, now on Google Video, is a terrific 1985 documentary featuring footage of such magickal folk as Anton LaVey, Selena Fox, Michael Aquino, and H.R. Giger.
Link (via Cabinet of Wonders)

DON'T BLAME ME, BLAME MY BOOTY. Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits the bedazzled world of "internet ce-WEB-rity" Leslie Hall, whose gem sweaters are as sparkly as her jams are funky. We speak with the Iowa-based star of stage, YouTube, and craft marts, and experience a live performance by Leslie and the LY's.

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.

Italian police released video of a thief who allegedly hypnotizes clerks at supermarket registers. From the BBC News:

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: "Look into my eyes", before finding the till empty...

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

Link

Art sez, "I've just completed my 'Siddhartha Pod' Steampunk Lantern. Entirely hand made and it took 2.5 months to produce."

The "Siddhartha Pod" Lantern, recently completed, is entirely hand crafted of solid mahogany, solid copper and brass. Without a doubt, the most labor-intensive lamp I've ever created.

Link (Thanks, Art!)

The John W Campbell Award for best new writer is given each year at the Hugo Award ceremony to the most promising writer whose first publication falls in the previous two years. Mary Robinette Kowal, one of this year's nominees, sez, "As the only one of this year's Campbell nominees that's a short-story writer, my work is not always as easy to find. So, I'm offering a sampler of my short fiction for download."

I won the Campbell in 2000, on the strength of my short fiction, so I'm here to tell ya it can be done, Mary! Link (Thanks, Mary!)

I get a furious giggle out of this Sinistar-meets-Dick-and-Jane graphic. Anyone know where it comes from? Post to the comments! (Thanks, Spingo!)

Joe sez, "Tom Spurgeon on the excellent Comics Reporter posted sad news over the holiday weekend - Belgian publisher Raymond Leblanc passed away at the age of 92. For those who don't know, Raymond, a former Resistance member during the Nazi occupation, set up the famous Tintin magazine after the war, bringing in Herge, then labouring under a blacklist for collaboration during the occupation. He pushed Lombard into one of the top European comics albums publishers and worked with a roll call of the great and good of the medium. Fair to say the comics scene would have been far, far poorer without him and some of the characters generations of us have grown up reading might never have made it if not for his guidance and energy."

A civil servant turned member of the French Resistance in World War II, the Longlier native partnered with two friends to create a small publishing company on Rue du Lombard in Brussels. Their big coup came in 1945 when they convinced Herge to bring his Tintin into the fold of a weekly publication devoted to kids to share the feature's name. The cartoonist, already a success with a dozen albums to his credit but battered personally and professionally by the limited publishing opportunities during the war in a way that would drive criticism his way for the remainder of his days, accepted their offer. He recruited three friends -- Paul Cuvelier, Edgard P. Jacobs, Jacques Laudy -- to help him form the core of the magazine. They and their successors would take aim at the successful Spirou and forge a successful legacy for themselves at the same time.

Link, Link to interview with Leblanc (Thanks, Joe!)

Loss sez, "Night Shade Books has just made Jon Armstrong's novel GREY available as a free download (as they did with Richard Kadrey's BUTCHER BIRD last month). This stunning 'high-fashion dystopia' has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and is one of the best books I read last year. If you haven't yet checked out GREY, you should."

Nora and I finished our fried whale and plum sandwiches, our cream coffees, and the cocoa and coca pastries, and sat in a comfortable silence as landscapes of buildings and millions of well-wishers whirred past the windows at six hundred kilometers per hour. Halfway on our train-date, after the conductor blew the massive, buzzing horn, and the waitresses in their black-and-yellow-striped honeybee uniforms, complete with dangerously sharp-looking stingers, cleared the dishes, Nora closed her right eye and gazed at me with her left; I, in turn, did the same, and it was like we were the perfect couple.

This was our fourth and last date before our marriage, and while the whole thing had been arranged between our parents to complete the merger of our families’ companies, I could not have imagined or wished for someone as wonderful as she. Standing just an inch below my six foot three, with shiny black hair, a light walnut complexion, and obsidian eyes, her features were wide and open like an innocent doll, but she was also intelligent and witty. Most impressive of all was that she, like myself, loved the fashion magazine Pure H. We quoted from it, dressed and struck poses like the models, and felt that we were just like the beautiful and tragic people of our dreams.

Link (Thanks, Loss!)

See also: Kadrey's Butcher Bird -- free download

Avi sez, "Here's a cool project that maps the world according to the attention each country gets from major western mainstream media outlets- interesting that Israel with a population of 7.2 million usually ends up getting more media attention than India with a population of 1.12 billion."

(Shown here: the New York Times's heatmap) Link (Thanks, Avi!)

Kim sez,

Pandit Surinder Sharma, a famous Indian tantrick (magician) was on a televised panel discussion when he claimed he could kill any man with black magic in under three minutes. Fellow panelist, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged the tantrick to kill him right then and there. Hilarity ensued as Sharma chanted the death mantra, and, when that failed, waved a knife and sprinkled water on him, as Edamarku laughed the entire time.

After two hours of this, the show's anchor pronounced the attempt a failure. The tantrick said he must be under the protection of a very powerful god, to which Edmarku replied "I am an atheist". The tantrick claimed nobody could stand up to his extra-special death spell, but that could only be performed at night. The TV station promptly arranged another trial at night, with predictable results.

Link (Thanks, Kim!)

Rose sez, "Folks in Brooklyn have started a CCC-style hacker collective, NYC Resistor, which meets regularly to share knowledge, hack on projects together, and build community. Group members are offering classes to the public -- the first class list includes basic electronics, soldering, video-making, and Game Boy programming. NYC-area BoingBoing readers are welcome!" Link (Thanks, Rose!)

The Aetheric Dynamo from steampunk sculptor Dan Cohen is a notional ghost-catching apparatus of great loveliness:

The primary purpose of this machine is the attraction and capture of a lower Aetheric Shell, otherwise known colloquially as a ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit. The secondary function is the transformation of the Shell into remote aetheric antennae, and the transduction of aetheromagnetic energy into electromagnetic current.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

David sez, "This sweded version of Jurassic Park is truly excellent, from the hammy impressions of characters to the parcel tape velociraptor costumes." Link (Thanks, David!)

See also: Sweded remake of Star Wars

Here's a short video mapping in time-lapse the spread of Wal*Mart stores in America, from a few lonely dots in the sixties to a rising torrent that ends with an America blanketed by the blight. Link

Check out Post Punk Kitchen's gorgeous, David-Lynch-inspired "Blue Velvet cake" -- it's vegan and it's gruesome! Link (Thanks, Kimberlee!)

George Rhoads makes magnificent kinetic sculptures, including this Cuckinetic Clock. They're grand Rube Goldbergs. Link (via Make)