We at Boing Boing are delighted to welcome the latest addition to the Happy Mutants family, Sarah Milstein! Sarah joins us as our first-ever Operations Manager and Chief Loop Closer! We've had concentric orbits with Sarah for years and she's the perfect person to help us focus on what needs to be done in the short term, get our heads around what's possible in the long term, and grow thoughtfully.

Sarah was a longtime managing editor at O'Reilly Media, co-wrote Google: The Missing Manual, and co-created the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference for Publishing. Sarah is also part of the extended MAKE: and CRAFT cabal. After leaving O'Reilly, she worked with Metaweb on its community efforts. And now with Tony Stubblebine of CrowdVine, Sarah's co-organizing the Web2Open unconference accompanying the Web 2.0 Expo next month in San Francisco.

We feel incredibly fortunate that Sarah is bringing her expertise to Happy Mutants so we can get busy on a slew of fun and exciting new ideas. And as always, we appreciate the continued support of you, our community, with the ongoing expansion, evolution, and, of course, mutation of Boing Boing. Welcome, Sarah!

(Thanks, Dale Dougherty, executive recruiter-at-large!)

Among the designs on display at Tokyo Fashion Week earlier this month -- bunnies and furries. If I'm not mistaken, the image above was taken from the runway show for Né-net, the line designed by Kazuaki Takashima. (Spotted on Tokyomango, thanks Marianne Shaneen!)

In Plenty magazine, this feature about the Chinese government's high-tech "weather modification" efforts for this summer’s Beijing Olympics. The big idea: keep the sun shining, through all that smog. Snip:

One thing worth considering when you tamper with nature is what sort of nature you’re tampering with. Nature is not kind to the city of Beijing. China’s capital is arid, nearly a desert, and its natural weather patterns are fickle and harsh. Winter is marked by howling Siberian winds; summer, by sweltering monsoon heat. In lieu of showers, springtime is best known for seasonal dust storms that sweep down from Central Asia. Fall is parched and gusty too, but the dust settles down. This basic brutality is overlaid with levels of pollution like those of England’s Industrial Revolution. Many things blot out the sunshine, and most have nothing to do with rain: factory and power plant emissions, construction dust, smoke from stoves burning scrap wood or pressed coal. There are more than 3 million cars on the streets—and the count is said to be growing by 400,000 vehicles annually. It is not unusual to check the AccuWeather international forecast on the New York Times website and find that while other cities’ weather is “mostly sunny” or “overcast,” Beijing’s is “smoky.” In February 2007, authorities finally abandoned a longstanding policy in which haze was referred to as wu, Mandarin for fog, and just called it what it is—mai, or haze.

Link to article. (Thanks, Choire Sicha, you gorgeous creature, you.)

Image: "Sun through the smog in Beijing," by ~diP.

Previously on BB:
* Weather modification for the Beijing Olympics

Above, two of the images from photographer Jacob Holdt currently on display at CNA gallery in Luxembourg.

[Holdt] was 24 years old when he decided in 1971, like many of his Danish compatriots, to travel across the American continent. He landed in Canada with the aim of rapidly crossing through the United States to get to the true destination of his travels: South America. But from the moment he crossed the Canadian border, Jacob Holdt was struck by an America characterised by poverty and the exclusion of the socially disadvantaged. In his outrage, he described the misery he was witnessing in letters to his parents who, for their part, remained incredulous. His father nevertheless sent him a small camera so that he could back up his accounts with tangible proof. And this is how the long voyage of the young Dane through the United States started, not to be completed until five years and several thousand snapshots later, with a deeply moving work: 'American Pictures 1970-1975', published as a book in 1978.

Jacob Holdt, who was nominated for this year's DeutscheBorse Photography Prize, has remained a key figure in Danish activist circles, despite having in the meantime more or less given up photography. His images of the America of the destitute of the seventies had great repercussions and to a large extent inspired the movies Dogville and Manderlay by Lars van Trier."

Link (thanks, Clayton James Cubitt!)

29-year-old Gregory Kats says he's sorry his science project (a model of an elevator) short circuited in his backpack and started smoldering in a NYC subway car.

Kats said he tried to reassure his fellow passengers that it was a school project -- not a bomb -- but people scrambled for the exits nonetheless. The box he was holding had a small battery, wires and a motor.

"They were panicking, and I realized their fear," an apologetic Kats said.

He said he tried to disassemble the contraption on the platform even as he reassured riders, "Don't worry. This is my science project."

Link

The Washington Post's Security Fix blog has a story about an alleged Ukrainian cybercrime boss named Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov. The story itself is interesting, but the part that stuck out was this gadget, called a "raskat" device, which comes with a wireless keychain fob that can remotely trigger the destruction of data on a computer hard drive.

Golubov doesn't dispute that he owned a Raskat at the time, but he says he purchased it online to resell it at a local market for a tidy profit.

"In the past in Ukraine it was risky to keep all company contract and clients data on computers," Golubov said. "At first -- tax inspection can confiscate computers, at second -- competitors can stole them and take over businesses."

Golubov said it was members of the law enforcement task force who used the Raskat to fry the data on his hard drive.

"Regarding information from the hard drive -- it was not me who destroyed it. But it was employee of task force who conducted a search," Golubov wrote to Security Fix. "This officer has found Raskat system remote control. He decided that it is remote from my car alarm and started to push on it in order to find which one of parked nearby car it was. I have no car and it was remote from the system Raskat, and I have clearly said this to him, but he has not listened to me, and told me to be silent. And he pushed this button several time. It can be possible he has erased all information on purpose, in order to say that all evidences are all wiped off, or more likely due to stupidity."

Link (Via the day they tried to kill me)

ill lich says: "Quick and incisive documentary on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the breadth and depth of his influence in Washington. I'm sure most people don't know just how influential and rich he is. (I sure didn't)."

In 2004, journalist John Gorenfeld scooped the Washington press corps when he exposed a scandalous party on Capitol Hill, in which members of Congress watched as Moon held a ritual coronation for himself as the "King of Peace." Wearing a majestic cape and coronet, the publisher declared himself the Messiah. The New York Times editors compared the event, sponsored by a U.S. senator, to an act of the Roman emperor Caligula.

That, as you might imagine, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Bad Moon Rising takes you into the underbelly of the Religious Right. Which is surprisingly, scandalously entwined with Moon and his business empire--an untold chapter in American political history.

Link

Enjoy the new spring colors for the Homeland Security Advisory System. It's always cantaloupe in Cheneyville! Link

Nathan Black says: "I collect pictures of people's knuckle tattoos and the stories behind them. I've got about 170 or so sets up and I've been collecting them for about a year and a half." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Subcutaneous brass knuckle implants
• Brass-knuckle purse said to land wearer in airport security hell
• LOVE / HATE knuckle tat gloves
• HOWTO knit gloves with "knuckle tattoos"
• Wooden brass knuckles

Jeff Trexler says: I've posted the judge's entire ruling.

Here's the historic concluding paragraph:

After seventy years, Jerome Siegel’s heirs regain what he granted so long ago -– the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics Vol. 1. What remains is an apportionment of profits, guided in some measure by the rulings contained in this Order, and a trial on whether to include the profits generated by DC Comics’ corporate sibling’s exploitation of the Superman copyright.

Link

TradeMark G. says:

In response to the bulletproof "anti-terrorist" bed...

Over at Dinosaur Gardens, I just posted MP3s of a radio ad campaign for Survive-All Fallout Shelters:

"The international struggles of our world may lead to… (ka-boom) NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST!"

Nothing lends itself better to a fear-based advertising campaign than your family’s radioactive death. So when the Mort Kridel Advertising Agency was asked to create a radio ad campaign for Survive-All Fallout Shelters, they did their PR-darnedest to scare the Wonder Bread crap out of nuclear families everywhere. Tense horn stabs and canned explosions bracket sales pitches like:

Radioactive fallout, that deadly by-product of a nuclear attack, will kill literally millions of unprotected families in the event of an atomic attack. Is YOUR family protected? Do YOU have a fallout shelter?

Each Civil defense approved, basement-type, Do-It-Yourself fallout shelter includes: A complete fully-stocked first aid kit! Extra strength saran and rayon bunks! A radiation meter and individual dosimeters!

Civil defense approved, FHA approved, no money down, five years to pay!

Link

Dustin sez, "This is a great picture of an old radiator cap taken in 1938. Looks like the car may belong to one of Coop's long lost relatives." Link (Thanks, Dustin!)

Wil sez, "My friend's wife made this awesome Cthulhu cake that was so awesome, I had to share it with BB readers. Also, awesome. Cake fhtagn!"

Here is Cthulhu rising from the oceans, using a convenient little island with a tower on it to climb up. The base was cherry-chip cake, the island and tower a mix of cherry chip and yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Also used small chocolate 'pearls' as rocks. Cthulhu himself is all fondant, with two chocolate pearls that I seeped in red dye for eyes.

Link (Thanks, Wil Wheaton!)

Julio Diaz, a social worker, was robbed at knifepoint by a teenaged mugger in the Bronx. Instead of getting angry or scared, he offered the kid his coat, and struck up a friendship:

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

Link (via Kottke)

Update: Boing Boing is not in a position to fact-check this story, nor any of the versions of it reported in the comment thread.

Air & Space Smithsonian has a feature on the unusual and telling items that antique airplane restorers at places like the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility often find when disassembling their latest aircraft.

Last July, intern Eric Lawrence was cleaning out a Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk, a small, airship-based fighter that the Navy used in the 1930s for reconnaissance patrols along the U.S. coasts. When he was working in the fuselage tail cone, Lawrence came across a broken pencil, inscribed with the words "Hoover for President, 1928..."

A small medallion—discovered tightly crumpled around a screw in a World War II British Hawker Hurricane Mk.IIC fighter—also ended up teasing the restorers with possible storylines. Museum Specialist Will Lee, who found the medal while working on the Hawker restoration, took the time to straighten it out, make it recognizable, and do some investigating. "It's actually a watch fob," says Lee. In the course of researching the item, Lee learned the meaning of the medallion's icons: "The anchor symbol means it was made in Birmingham, England. The lion indicates that it's made of silver, and the letter corresponds to a date—in this case, 1915." But who had owned the medallion? A pilot? A maintainer? A person of wealth? And why was it wrapped around a screw?

Link

Ronald Long of Deepwater, Missouri was having a tough time installing his satellite TV system on Saturday. He couldn't seem to puncture through his exterior wall, so he decided to fire his gun at the wall. One of the shots killed his wife who was standing outside. Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Boing Boing tv presents CUPCAKE CUTTHROATS, a cakesploitation epic exploring the dark side of electric art-cars shaped like baked goods. These homemade vehicles are crafted by Silicon Valley nerds (including one engineer from Tesla Motors) and Burning Man enthusiasts in a Berkeley, California, warehouse. In today's episode, Xeni joins the marauding muffineers for a 15-mph thrillride down mean, sugar-sprinkled streets.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and the names of the maker-muffineers.

Update: Scott Beale at Laughing Squid has some photos of the mobile muffins, too.

Crafster's Flossbox has been experimenting with "scientific embroidery," illustrating principles from science by means of cute embroidered designs, to very good effect. Link (via Craft)

Ryan sez, "We have a medical transcriptionist on staff who has been using the same keyboard for the last 8.5 years. My co-worker replaced it yesterday, and when he first showed it to me I thought someone had taken a blowtorch to it! The most frequently used keys have been completely worn through, exposing the mechanism beneath. Zoom in and check out the indentation on the Backspace key! The keyboard still works fine, so there's something to be said for durability. BTW, it's a NMB Technologies model RT2358TW."

Some people are hard on keyboards -- I tend the blow the contacts on the left side of the board really fast, knocking out the Ctrl, Alt and left side of the spacebar. Charlie Stross's keyboards lose their lettering in mere months, and my pal Seth Schoen types like a machinegun, but I've never noticed any particular wear on his keyboards. Link

A student was given a portfolio of high-quality Syd Mead promotional futuristic images intended as giveaways for United States Steel International customers, and he and his teacher scanned them and popped them on Flickr. This is wonderful stuff. Link (Thanks, Dennis!)

The Pulp of the Day blog uploads a new scanned-in cover from a classic pulp magazine or novel every day. The science fiction ones are superb (Warren Ellis subtitled these both "Fuck you spaceship!") Link (via Futurismic)

This appears not to be a joke: the Quantum Sleeper is a bed that hermetically seals itself as you sleep to protect you from "Bio-Chemical terrorist attack," "natural disaster," "kidnappers/stalkers" (only those who don't possess a forklift, surely) and affords "Bulletproof 'Saferoom' protection."

1.25" Polycarbonate Bulletproof Plating/Shielding
Bio-Chemical Filtered Ventilation
Rebreather
Control Panel Mode Selection (i.e., Basic System Ops., Intruder Setting, Energy Status, Lock Down, etc.)
Cover & Door Actuators w/ Emergency Release
One way see through head cover (reflective mirror on 2 sides and front)
Safety Features (Proximity Sensor, O2 Sensor, Smoke Det., Motion Det. Ect,)
Emergency Communication system (Cellular, Short-wave Radio, CB ect.)
Audio Amplifier (Amplify sound from out side unit)

Air/Water Tight Sealing
External Override Key Pad & Remote Control
Battery Backup Power
Toiletry system

Ect! Link (via Warren Ellis)

See also: Creepy bed doubles a safe room

Avid readers of the November 1928 ish of Modern Mechanix may have been tempted to follow the advice in this article and build giant, deadly monowheels for their kiddies, powered by motorcycle engines. I know I sure am.

POWERED by a motorcycle engine and operated through the conventional handlebar control, a rubber-tired motor wheel has been invented which is claimed to represent the ideal in cheap and rapid transportation. The device is so simple that a youngster can operate it. The large wheel is fitted with a continuous inner track along which run a series of flanged wheels on which the mechanism revolves. The rider is seated inside the wheel on a regulation motorcycle saddle.

Link

In this transcript from the notorious fictional trial of a British man who stole 40,000 coat hangers from hotels, the defendant, a sharp-witted loony, runs rings around the opposing counsel, making highly entertaining (and disturbing) fun of him:

Judge: I think Mr Chrysler is running rings round you already. I would try a new line of attack if I were you.

Counsel: Thank you, m’lud.

Chrysler: And thank you from ME, m’lud. It’s nice to be appreciated.

Judge: Shut up, witness.

Chrysler: Willingly, m’lud. It is a pleasure to be told to shut up by you. For you, I would…

Judge: Shut up, witness. Carry on, Mr Lovelace.

Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler - for let us assume that that is your name - you are accused of purloining in excess of 40,000 hotel coat hangers.

...

Counsel: Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who prefer hotel life to home life?

Chrysler: Certainly. A lot of businessmen would never go home if they had the chance. So when they get home they like to recreate the hotel experience in their own house. Many of my clients have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. They have TV sets at the end of the bed on a raised shelf, often with an adult sex channel on it. All their bathroom products come in wrappers and are thrown away each day. I have even known people in their own home put out “Do Not Disturb” notices on the door of their own bedroom.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Blake sez, "In a previous BB post, Mark wrote about a Japanese man who has been documenting online the life of a vending machine since 2005. He just created a little papercraft version of that self-same vending machine so you can feel like you're right there with him." Link (Thanks, Blake!)

See also: Japanese man documents the life of a vending machine

The SFinSF free science fiction reading series continues apace: this month, it's Patricia McKillip and David Lunde, reading and speaking gratis on the 20th of April:

PATRICIA MCKILLIP - "one of the foremost American authors of fantasy and science fiction novels, distinguished by lyrical, delicate prose and careful attention to detail and characterization." She won the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD, the Locus Award in 1980 for HARPIST IN THE WIND and the World Fantasy Award in 2005 for OMBRIA IN SHADOW. Her novels have the further distinction of beautiful cover paintings by artist Kinuko Y. Craft. She is also the author of The Riddlemaster trilogy, comprising THE RIDDLEMASTER OF HED, HEIR OF SEA AND FIRE, and HARPIST IN THE WIND; her most recent novels include ALPHABET OF THORN, OD MAGIC, HARROWING THE DRAGON,and SOLSTICE WOOD, winner of the 2007 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. She is married to David Lunde, a poet.

DAVID LUNDE - "Lunde has been Co-Editor and Publisher of The Basilisk Press, Managing Editor of Drama & Theater, and Poetry Editor of The Riverside Quarterly. He is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are BLUES FOR PORT CITY (Mayapple Press), HEART TRANSPLANTS & OTHER MISAPPROPRIATIONS (Mellen Poetry Press), and NIGHTFISHING IN GREAT SKY RIVER (Anamnesis Press). He has won the Academy of American Poets Prize and two Rhysling Awards for Best SF Poem of the year. Lunde's poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies, Renditions, Field, Northwest Review, Asimov's SF and more than 230 other magazines and anthologies." He is married to Patricia McKillip, an author.

April 20, 5:30PM
The Variety Preview Room
The Hobart Building, 1st Floor
582 Market St. @ Montgomery, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART
Entrance to the Hobart Bldg. is between Citibank and Quiznos

Link

David sez, "I made these 1UP Cakes for the one year anniversary of a Nintendo DS night near me, and have now put the recipe up on Instructables." Link (Thanks, David!)

Greg sez, "In its claims for trademark infringement against an online parodist, Wal-Mart claimed that it had trademark rights in the ubiquitous yellow smiley face. Not only did Wal-Mart lose its case, the judge held it had no rights in the smiley face mark. The smiley face has been liberated!"

"This ruling shows that even the biggest company in America is subject to parody, and that trademark rights must yield to the right of free speech. This is a resounding victory for First Amendment rights and sends a clear message to big corporations that would try to use their deep pockets to intimidate and silence their critics."

Link

(Image: K_Day-09.09.2005_163136, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lordcolus's Flickr stream)

Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas is building 50 new super-premium theaters across the nation, with leather armchairs, valet parking, and chairside waiters who serve freshly prepared sushi and other seat-treats. Tickets will cost $35.

Each complex will sport theaters featuring 40 reclining armchair seats with footrests, digital projection and the capability to screen 2-D and 3-D movies, as well as a lounge and bar serving cocktails and appetizers, a concierge service and valet parking.

But the circuit will especially push its culinary offerings — made-to-order meals like sushi and other theater-friendly foods from on-site chefs (a service button at each seat calls a waiter). Moviegoers will have to pay extra for any food they order, however.

Link (via The Consumerist)