So they were right. Oh, and pssst: I am wearing nothing but a glazed kaffiyeh at this very moment!

(Thanks, R. Stevens)

Update: Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, who, btw, is not a terrorist, has a most informative editorial up today about the history and the cultural significance of the garment for which Ms. Ray's unfortunate paisley scarf was mistaken. Snip:

For the record, the keffiya is not a symbol of either Islam or terrorism and predates Yasser Arafat. The head dress (which comes in white, checkered black or checkered red) came into importance in the early 20th century as part of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans who ruled the Middle East for over four hundred years left a two class system of landlords and peasants. The landlords generally wore a red high hat regularly referred to as a tarbouch or fez. Peasants wore the keffiya as a practical head cover to protect from the hot sun in the daytime and the cold winds at nights.

David P Nickle's brilliant, deeply creepy, awful and suspenseful short story The Sloan Men has just been released in audio form in Pseudopod, the horror podcast. This is a fantastic reading of a really wonderful story.

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails. If Judith hadn't been looking, she wouldn't have noticed anything strange about Mrs. Sloan's hand.

"Tell me how you met Herman," said Mrs. Sloan. She turned away from Judith as she spoke, to look out the kitchen window where Herman and his father were getting into Mr. Sloan's black pickup truck. Seeing Herman and Mr. Sloan together was a welcome distraction for Judith. She was afraid Herman's stepmother would catch her staring at the hand. Judith didn't know how she would explain that with any grace: Things are off to a bad enough start as it is.

Outside, Herman wiped his sleeve across his pale, hairless scalp and, seeing Judith watching from the window, turned the gesture into an exaggerated wave. He grinned wetly through the late afternoon sun. Judith felt a little grin of her own growing and waved back, fingers waggling an infantile bye-bye. Hurry home, she mouthed through the glass. Herman stared back blandly, not understanding.

Link to MP3 of Sloan Men, Link to text of The Sloan Men, Link to David Nickle's blog Link to podcast feed for Pseudopod

Etsy seller OctopusMe makes jewelry out of octopus tentacles, recast in sterling silver -- rings, earrings, and assorted pieces in handsome sucker style.

This ring is made from a REAL Octopus tentacle which has drilled, carved, shaped and cast in Sterling Silver! This ring is definitely one of my favorites. I like it because it's versatile. It looks different from all angles when you spin it around your finger! It has a nice sexy flowing curve to it. The texture on it is amazing! And, it has all of those cute little suction cups flowing all around the ring! There is a nice weight and chunkiness to the piece. Oh, and the best part is that it's Sushi Grade! Ha ha ha! It looks great on both guys and gals!! Make sure to get yours at this special price!!

Link (via Neatorama)

Remember Kieffe & Sons, the California Ford dealership that ran a radio ad saying that they were Christians, and non-believers could therefore "sit down and shut up" and stop demanding separation of church and state?

Remember how they apologized for saying this really dumb thing?

They take it back.

The owner of the dealership says that he was forced to issue the apology by Ford, and he doesn't stand behind it, and he only issued it to appease "blog-lo-dites."

“I don’t regret the sentiment at all,” said Kieffe, who bought the 48-year-old dealership from his father in 1974. “It’s what we believe.”

Kieffe & Sons has sites in Mojave and Rosamond.

The dealer’s Web site Thursday bore a statement about the ad that included an apology “to all who were offended.”

Kieffe said he’d been contacted by Ford Motor Co. after the manufacturer heard complaints from numerous “blog-lo-dites.”

Remember, this guy doesn't actually attend church. Link

See also:
Sit-down-and-shut-up "Christian" Ford dealership is run by a non-church attendee who is sorry about the ad
Ford dealership uses bigoted radio ads to sell cars

I have an inordinate fondness for Alice in Wonderland stuff -- it was the first book I ever read on my own -- and I'm really delighted by this sweet little Alice journal/blank book I just picked up. It features a nice mix of the Tenniel art as well as other classic public domain versions of Alice, and some great quotations from the book. It's got a nice moleskine-style elastic in Alice Blue, too. Link

Bonnie Burton of Lucasfilm has posted an homage to comedian Harvey Korman, who died this week at 81 years of age:

I can still remember being on the edge of my seat in the movie theater watching Korman as Captain Blythe in Herbie Goes Bananas. Heck, I even liked him during my full-blown Goth days when he played Dr. Jack Seward in Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

So it really shouldn’t be a surprise when years later, I was brave enough to admit in a crowded Lucasfilm marketing meeting that I was a big fan of the “Star Wars Holiday Special.”

I justified my adoration of the hardly-seen TV show by saying that, in addition to Bea Arthur as the Cantina barkeep Ackmena, it was Korman’s three bizarre characters that made me want to watch the cult classic over and over again. Korman portrayed the Ackmena-smitten Cantina patron Krelman, the multi-armed Julia Child-in-outer-space Chef Gormaanda, and an Amorphian instructor that practically drives Chewie’s son Lumpy to tears.

I was devastated to hear of his passing this week. Not only did an iconic comedian leave our galaxy, but sadly I’ll never get the chance to interview him about those roles he played in “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” I had so many questions for him!

Link to Bonnie's post on the Official Star Wars Blog. Here's the LA Times obituary for Korman.

shocking cats
stunt kitty
kitten and his box
plague of kittens
kitten or spider
unagi reviews
chat noir
katnip kollege
catface
talking cats
hugo, cat of 1000 faces
mr. lee cat cam
kitty wigs
lasagna cat
ian the cat
i like cake

and the classics...
going to a gay bar
smoking in paris

and for a limited time...
something for cat
(this will disappear on 06.06.08)

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Underland Press is publishing a "wovel" -- a web-novel -- in which the author publishes a cubicle-reading-length installment, along with several possibilities as to where the story could go next. The readers vote on the direction the book should take, and the author writes the next installment to their spec.

The first Wovel is "The Living," a horror/detective novel by Brian Evenson.

The night was a symphony of whistles and gunshots.

Inside the dimly lit apartment, the old man stood by the door. He was not old enough to have lived through a war, and didn't expect to live through this one. Though he didn't count courage among his virtues, he had accepted the notion of his imminent death with curious calm. For what was there to fear? This was not a world he recognized. It hadn't been for some time. Instead it had mutated into a kind of hellish garden in which neither God nor nature prevailed. When the time came, he would be glad to leave it.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Whines and pained whimpers from the bed behind him.

In the dim glow from the lantern the man's face was a thousand years old, appearing to be more rock than flesh. The thin shadows on his sunken cheeks were like spilled ink running from his eyes. He turned and said, "Hush, Maddy."

Behind him, the keening faded to a whisper.

Link

Daniel Pink, author of many well-regarded business books, wrote his first manga business book, Johnny Bunko, after receiving a fellowship to live in Japan and study manga. Bunko is a quick, funny, and extremely, inspiringly sensible book on career-planning that throws out all the traditional bullshit about getting a straight job to fall back on if your creative gig fails on you. Instead, Bunko makes a convincing case for pursuing your dreams, working to your strengths, throwing out the idea of planning, and persevering rather than relying on talent to make it.

I spent a lot of my life ignoring (with some difficulty), the advice of well-meaning people who wanted me to know that I'd never, ever be able to live on what I made from writing. Instead, I took on a series of careers in fields that hadn't even existed when I was a student, each one bringing me closer to my dream of being a full-time scribbler. If I'd listened to the software aptitude test my high-school guidance counsellor gave me, I'd be a "geriatric nutritionist" (cook in a senior's home) today.

Johnny Bunko is a miserable accounting drone who finds a bundle of magic chopsticks. Every time he separates a pair, a genie emerges to help him navigate his way to career freedom. It's a great little device, and the manga artwork -- from the award-winning Rob Ten Pas -- is simple and clean and often very funny.

Bunko is a refreshingly frank and optimistic (but clear-eyed) story about the perils of choosing a safe, lucrative and hateful job that you'll never be able to afford to leave, and the joys of failing in interesting ways, learning from your mistakes, and making more of yourself. I wish someone had given me a copy when I was 16 or so, and forced me to re-read it every year until I was in my mid-twenties. Link

See also: Johnny Bunko Book Trailer

This poor guy tried to board a BA flight at Heathrow terminal 5 but was turned back and told to change out of his t-shirt, which featured a Transformer robot carrying a gun -- a robot with a gun that apparently posed a threat to flight safety.

Go through security, get pulled to the side. I'm wearing a French Connection Transformers t-shirt. Bloke starts joking with me is that Megatron. Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I'm not allowed to fly. WTF? It's a 40 foot tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm. There is no way this shirt is offensive in any way, and what I'm going to use the shirt to pretend I have a gun?

Link (Thanks, PT!)

The phenomenal Camille Rose Garcia has a show of new paintings at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery - Berlin. The pieces in this exhibition, titled The Grand Illusion, are insanely beautiful. Seen here, "You'll Be Better Soon I Promise" (acrylic, glitter, and gold mica on wood). Based in Los Angeles, Garcia says her creative influences include Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Henry Darger, Walt Disney, and The Clash. I'm a big fan of all of them. And Garcia too. Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Previously on BB:
• Camille Rose Garcia at the San Jose Museum of Art Link
• Camille Rose Garcia: Tragic Kingdom sneak preview Link

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at this perfectly silly motorcycle helmet covers; the most ancient phone book, 130-years-old and up for auction; a new fleet of buses with free Wi-Fi and power on the East Coast ($20 from New York to Boston); the Aga Four Oven, made of cast-iron and lauded by commentors; virtual worlds to visit before you die, which prompted me to mention what a bang-up job was done in Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City; Cricket, a folding laptop stand for travelers; Bushnell's Sasquatch bounty, but more importantly, a raccoon riding a wild boar (that's cryptozootainment!); a lovely outdoor shower; more video on DEKA's bionic "Luke" prosthetic arm; handmade keyboards; tiny, knife-missile-sized ornithopter UAVs; the claim that Intelius people search is a scam; multiplayer Pong and Turbografx emulation for the iPhone; the Sony Rolly review (it didn't fare so well; personally I think they're neat, but about $350 too much); a portable digital scale for people, not drugs; the tragic increase in deaths for telephone tower technicians last month; a gallery of vintage transistor radios; a hands-on of the MSI Wind, the heir not-quite-apparent of the Asus Eee mini-laptop; a place to store your porno DVDs...if you owned any; the mysterious captivation of the paper towel dispenser; and a look at the upcoming Google Android smartphone operating system, which really does look like it's going to be a great platform.

Bushnell Outdoor Products is launching a contest where the first person to snap a "verificable" photo of Bigfoot with a trail camera will win a million bucks. Details on the contest are "coming soon" but Loren Coleman has more at Cryptomundo including a slew of great trailcam shots. As Loren asks about this 2007 photo taken in the Mt. Hood National Forest, "What is it? Sasquatch? Bear? A person?" How do we know for sure?
Link to Cryptomundo, Link to Bushnell's Trail Cam page

On Kiku's Tumblr page, this photo of Stormtroopers and London cops uneasily eyeing up one another. Link (via Wonderland)

This photo released yesterday depicts members of a tribe in the Amazon rain forest firing arrows at an airplane. Apparently, the tribe has never had any contact with humans outside of their own group. And there are likely many other "uncontacted" tribes in the region too. From National Geographic:

"We are very confident the photos are genuine," said Miriam Ross, a spokesperson for Survival International, which estimates that half of the hundred or so uncontacted tribes in the world live in the rain forests of Brazil and Peru.

Some experts say few, if any, tribes have had no outside contact. It's more likely is that previous generations had negative encounters, prompting social taboos that continue to drive clans deeper into isolation.

Due to their vulnerable immune systems, these groups are highly susceptible to diseases borne by outsiders such as missionaries, loggers, or oil workers.

Link

Earlier this week, I posted that Earle Hagen, TV theme composer behind the Andy Grffith Show (aka The Fishin' Hole), Mod Squad, and other classics, passed away. Hagen also wrote the classic Big Band tune Harlem Nocturne, heard in the the Mike Hammer TV show and covered by about a gazillion other musicians. Of those gazillion, WFMU has compiled 42 of the Harlem Nocturne covers for your listening pleasure.
Link (Thanks, COOP!)

Previously on BB:
• Earle Hagen, Andy Griffith Show, Mod Squad, I Spy composer (RIP) Link

Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor-waiter-whatever, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero. In today's episode, he faces fearsome beautification trials that would surely deter lesser men, and happens upon a chance encounter with his idol: Keanu Reeves.

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

Previous Klaus Pierre episodes on BBtv:

Klaus Pierre: Red Carpet Botox Dreams

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America: Pirate Musical of Epic Fail

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America, studies Savate

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America at Coffee Shop.

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America, studies Swordfighting

Point Break and heartbreak

Over on the always-excellent Architectures of Control in Design blog, Dan Lockton takes special note of an ugly little bit of anti-kid-ism brewing in Sutton, Surrey: the local council, in the name of "cater[ing] for all sections of the local community," is planning to revise a set of steps where kids gather to, you know, sit and talk to each other and hang out in public. The ensuing discussion is, as Dan notes, "a microcosm of the attitudes, assumptions, prejudices and paranoia that define modern Britain’s schizophrenic attitude to its ‘young people’."

Explaining the need for the changes, St Helier Councillor David Callaghan said: “At the moment the steps are like ready-made seats so changes will be made to make the area less attractive to young people...

[Adrian Short responds:] One thing young people and older people have in common is a desire to be left alone to do their own thing, provided that they are not causing trouble to others. People like Emma and her friends are not. They do not want to be told that they can go to one place but not another. They do not want to be cajoled, corralled and organised by the state — they get enough of that at school. They certainly do not want to be disadvantaged as a group because those in charge — you — are unable to deal appropriately with a tiny minority of troublemakers in their midst.

Link

European airlines are prototyping a Panopticon-in-the-sky: cameras trained on every passenger in flight, married to some kind of snake-oil "terrorism detection" software that will be able to tell if the guy in 11J is planning to rush the cockpit.

. The European Union's Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger's seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or "air-rage" incidents, by tracking passengers' facial expressions...

"It looks for running in the cabin, standing near the cockpit for long periods of time, and other predetermined indicators that suggest a developing threat," says James Ferryman of the University of Reading, UK, one of the system's developers.

Other behaviours could include a person nervously touching their face, or sweating excessively. One such behaviour won't trigger the system to alert the crew, only certain combinations of them.

Ferryman is not ready to reveal specifically which behaviours were most likely to trigger the system. Much of the computer's ability to detect threats relies on sensitive information gleaned from security analysts in the intelligence community, he tells New Scientist.

Ah yes, that mainstay of great academic research: "I can't tell you why I believe this works, it's a secret." A proud tradition stretching all the way back to such proven systems of knowledge as, um, well, alchemy. Someone get that guy tenure. Link (Thanks, Peter!)

For years, Bruce Sterling has been blogging about political sex scandals around the world, calling them "centipedes" -- today, he's defined the term in a little essay explaining why they're so darned interesting, speaking sociopoliticotechnically.

Centipedes are new phenomena because the barriers-to-entry in media have crashed. This means that subversive efforts formerly isolated and punished as libel, slander and whispering campaigns can swiftly take on avalanche proportions.

While pretending to be about spontaneous indignation and moral values, centipedes are coolly calculated and all about power.

The asymmetrical advantage that enables a "centipede" is that the conspirators themselves are never outed. They plot, they find a sexual weakness, they accumulate data about it, they launch a scandal from out of the woodwork, and while exposing private deeds to the public glare, the conspirators themselves remain unseen.

My blog lists a host of these political events that have recently taken place in societies all over the world: India, Greece, Poland, Indonesia, South Africa, Britain, USA. (((And Canada.))) I named them "centipedes" because they are segmented, covert, and poisonous. They seem to have a remarkable commonality as a species.

Link

Creative Commons is spinning off its awesome remix community thing, ccMixter, into a standalone project, and they're entertaining proposals from the public at large from anyone who thinks they're qualified to run it.

Today we’re announcing a Request For Proposals from entities interested in taking over the site. Please read the entire RFP. Proposals are due within 60 days (July 29) to ccmixter-rfp@creativecommons.org. Inquiries before submitting a proposal are most welcome, to the same address. Please use this address for all inquiries rather than contacting CC or ccMixter personnel directly.

Link

New York's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference has announced its summer lineup of keynote speakers for the conference, which runs July 18-20 in NYC:

The very first of the speaker slots for The Last HOPE have been announced with many more to come next week. We have had more submissions than ever and will need to add an additional track in order to accommodate the best of them. What follows are some of the highlights to date.

Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the American Revolution and chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek.

Adam Savage, co-host of the popular TV show Mythbusters and "a maker of things."

Kevin Mitnick, "the world's most dangerous hacker" in the eyes of the government and mass media, imprisoned for over five years, and now a successful computer security consultant.

Jello Biafra, a tradition at the HOPE conferences, former lead singer of The Dead Kennedys and one of America's most interesting social activists.

Steven Rambam, private eye extraordinaire, who can find out anything about anybody and has always been willing to share his knowledge of privacy with the hacker community. (The FBI prevented his 2006 talk from being given by swooping in and arresting him moments earlier. The case against him was later found to have no merit.)

Link

From the Private Islands Blog:

French explorer and adventurer Xavier Rosset is about to embark on a 300 day trip to live alone on a remote tropical island in the South Pacific. His adventures will be filmed and used for a 52 minute documentary.

Xavier’s only luggage will be a Swiss army knife, machete[,] video camera, and a solar panel for charging the camera. He will spend 10 months alone on an island to develop another way of life through an exciting adventure, a return to the elemental sources. Xavier will survive alone on an island without human interference and without polluting emissions.

The ambition of this documentary is to make a reflection on our lifestyle, our current system and our relationship to nature. And the most important thing is to put the dream and emotion at the heart of adventure natural.

He will find timber to build a shelter, feed on the rudimentary fishing, plants and the harvesting of rainwater to survive.

Reminds me a bit of one of my favorite books, An Island to Oneself, about a man who lived off and on for years on a tiny South Pacific island.

Link

Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe says: "[I]s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull really an anticommunist movie? Does Ford's character oppose the theory of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production? Or is he instead merely an anti-Communist, i.e., opposed to a single-party regime devoted to the implementation of communist policies in, for example, the USSR? Or is Indy actually a pinko? Sounds crazy, but a couple of clues in the movie point at this possibility..."

Writing at the Globe's Movie Nation blog, recently, film critic Wesley Morris noted that when Jones is placed on leave, the head of his department asks him what he plans to do: "First, Indy says, he's going to London, then there's a job offer from the University of Leipzig he might well take. Leipzig is in what was then East Germany. Indy wants to defect!"

As if that weren't suspicious enough, Alex Golub, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, points out at Savage Mind, an anthropological blog, that in one early scene, Jones tells a student to read V. Gordon Childe. (Childe was an eminent British prehistorian whose Marxism got him into hot water in his native Australia; during the early cold war, he maintained contact with archaeologists in the Soviet Union.) "Would a die-hard anticommunist really recommend a Marxist archaeologist to a student?" demands Golub.

Link

John Ptak says: "In the world of found book objects, few I think are as deeply removed and as deeply obscure as the work by Otto F. Fleiss called White Art in the Meat Food Business. A Practical Handbook for Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for Exhibits and Advertising Purposes." Link

Tommy says:

I saw your post about the FlyCam and wanted to make sure you know about the brand new Pilot View FPV 2400.

It is basically Virtual Reality Goggles that allow you to fly your RC plane/car/whatever from the drivers seat! (a friend of mine actually fell down with the goggles on while doing a loop with his plane!).

I've been in the R/C hobby for years and I think this is really going to change things.

There's a video of Pilot View at the link. Link

Barry Ritholtz sez, "It turns out that for the past three decades, we've had a George Costanza energy policy -- every decision we have made as a country has worked to drive energy prices higher. Had we made the opposite decisions, crude oil prices would be much lower than they are today ($130.17 as I type this). What follows is a list of energy-related policies of the United States. On many of these, I have no opinion -- but I wanted to list as many as I could to demonstrate why oil is where it is. Just about every one of these policies (or non policies) has contributed to oil prices skyrocketing from $8 to $130 since 2000." Link (Thanks, Barry!)

The Nation's Christopher Hayes just turned in a fantastic long feature on Larry Lessig -- it does a great job of capturing what makes Larry so amazingly great.

In the past eight years the collusion between government and business has gotten worse, creating what economist Dean Baker terms the "conservative nanny state." Lessig sees unmaking this state of affairs as the challenge of the era. "There's a speech that Reagan gives in 1965," Lessig says, "where he talks about how democracy always fails because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well, Reagan had it half-right. It's not as if it's the poor out there who have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It's exactly the other way around."

In fighting this corporate socialism, Lessig thinks there are allies to be found among the "intellectually honest" right. He points out that the need to raise money from industry provides an incentive to grow government and maintain regulation as a kind of leverage to extract donations from industry. He's made battling earmarks, a conservative cause célèbre, a Change Congress core mission; the first member of Congress to endorse Change Congress was Jim Cooper, a conservative blue-dog Democrat who is eyed suspiciously by the party's activist base. Lessig's touchstone in his conservative outreach is his father, who struggled every year to meet his company's pension obligations, only to learn years later that big companies like Bethlehem Steel had an exemption in the law so they didn't have to meet the same standards. "Now, from my modern political perspective, that's exactly the thing I think is most outrageous about how the government functions," says Lessig. "And from my dad's perspective, that's the most absurd thing about how government functions."

Link

Steampunk Maker Jake von Slatt sez, "Here's a delightful short from some SF Steampunks I met at Maker Faire. I'm not sure if they are LARPers, but from the appearance of a McIntosh MC240 tube amp and a _serious_ electronics workbench in one scene, I know that these are the sort of kids that Marcus Yallow would've hung out with! " Link (Thanks, Jake!)

The Placebo Store sells cherry-flavored chewable tablets called Obecalp (get it?) for parents to administer when they don't think their kid is really sick.

Hi. Welcome to the Placebo Store. I'm Jen. I am a mommy. It's what I love. It's my job to make owies go away. Whether it's a kiss or a big hug, the magic happens immediately. This is the power of placebo. I have a baby girl and two sons. One of them always needs my comfort and the knowledge that I will make them feel better. I invented Obecalp when I realized that children might need a little more than a kiss to make it go away. Obecalp fills the gap when medicine is not needed but my children need something more to make them feel better. You'll know when Obecalp is necessary.

Link | NY Times story about placebos made for kids

Woodcraft has an article about hidden drawers in furniture. The one shown here has a double-secret box! Link (via Make)

Slate posted a letter from John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House judiciary committee, to the DEA's acting administrator Michele Leonhart about the agency's "dramatically intensified … frequency of paramilitary-style enforcement raids" on legal cannabis users and dispensaries.

Conyers asked for an accounting of the agency's costs for these measures against "individuals who suffer from severe or chronic illness" and for its rationale for threatening landlords of licensed dispensaries with "arrest and forfeiture of their property." Meanwhile, the California State Legislature is considering a measure that would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to refuse cooperation with the DEA.

Link

I like the look of this electronic noise maker built inside a pill bottle.

I found this pill capsule because someone in my house needs horse pills, evidently. I basically drilled the holes, used Epoxy to secure the battery holder to the speaker, and crammed everything in there. I love one night projects.

Link

Sharon Stone pulled a Pat Robertson / Jerry Falwell by suggesting that the earthquake in China was the result of "karma."

"And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma -- when you're not nice -- that the bad things happen to you?"

Now China is boycotting all things Sharon Stone.

Theaters are dropping her movies, department stores are taking down her image, and cosmetics brand Christian Dior has been scrambling to distance itself from the actress, who since 2005 has been the face of one of its skin products.

It makes me wonder what bad thing Phil Bronstein (formerly Mr. Sharon Stone) did to get his big toe nearly bitten off by a Komodo dragon in 2001? Link

Here's one photo of a series of about 20 photos showing a chicken developing in an egg. Before I saw these photos I had always thought that the yolk turned into a chicken, but it looks like the chicken forms outside of the yolk and absorbs the yolk as it develops. Link

Los Simpson is an incredibly creepy live action Simpsons spoof in Spanish. Link

For $20, John Deese of Decatur County, Georgia, will sell you a bottle with a ghost in it. It's not entirely clear if he is serious about what he's selling or not. He says that he doesn't collect the spirits personally but relies on professional, er, ghostbusters. From WKMG:

“Some people will open the bottle and say they don’t get results and it’s just a fun conversation piece. Others say, ‘There’s strange things happening in my house. Where're my car keys? Where's the remote to the TV?” Deese said. “The ghost in the bottle is more toward Casper the Friendly Ghost than the Exorcist. We're kind of in the middle.”

Link to WKMG story, Link to A Ghost In A Bottle (via Cabinet of Wonders)

Brendan I. Koerner's "Now the Hell Will Start" follows the true-life story of Herman Perry, a young black playboy from Washington, D.C., drafted into the Army and shipped to the Indo-Burmese jungles to build the Ledo Road, a Sisyphean attempt to connect Allied supply depots with China during World War II. Years of nigh-on-forced labor in the sweltering, tiger- and headhunter-infested slog caused many of the soldiers to clutch consolation in cheap drugs, getting high in dark, wet tents while their uniforms literally rotted off.

Perry succumbed. Worse, his drug use provoked insubordinance against the white officers who commanded the predominantly black recruits, awarding him multiple visits to the brig. Horribly, after a year of hard work, incessant rain, flippant officers and cheap opium, Perry — provoked — killed a superior officer. He escaped into the jungle, certain he'd be captured within hours. Instead, he became the focus of one of the most notorious manhunts of the war, living with the mountain tribes of headhunters and becoming a folk hero some called "The Jungle King."

Koerner's an amazing reporter — my first mentor, along with Choire Sicha, to drum into my head how effective informed, dense writing could be — and has a knack for transmuting reams of research into taut narrative. (He was one of Slate.com's excellent "Explainer" columnists for years.) It doesn't hurt that Perry's story cuts a path through subjects with which I am endlessly entranced: racism, drugs, survival, war, sorrow, and death — all wrapped in one man's outrageous, tragic adventure.

It should be implicit since I'm writing this in the first place, but "Now the Hell Will Start" is recommended! If all goes to plan, we'll get Brendan online soon for a Q&A session on the #boingboing IRC channel.

Link

In 1945, John Webber's grandfather, a scrap metal dealer, gave his son a random mug to play with that he had picked up along the way. John always thought it was brass and kept it with a bunch of other random stuff in a shoebox under his bed. Then when John, now 70, was moving out of his home, he decided to have the mug appraised. Turns out, the mug is gold and was made in the third or fourth century BC. It's expected to sell at auction for nearly a million bucks. Antiques Roadshow, eat your heart out! From AFP:

Webber... told The Guardian newspaper that his grandfather had a "good eye" for antiques and picked up "all sorts" as he plied his trade in the town of Taunton in south-west England.

"Heaven knows where he got this, he never said," he added, revealing that as a child, he used the cup for target practice with his air gun.

Link (via Fortean Times)

MediaDefender, the thugs paid by the entertainment industry to spy on file-sharers and attempt to cripple file-sharing networks, attacked a legitimate Internet TV company called Revision3 over the weekend, launching a massive denial-of-service attack in retaliation for having their spy-bots locked out of R3's BitTorrent trackers:

Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores...

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions...

“Media Defender did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3″, claims Grodsky. “We didn’t do anything to increase the traffic” – beyond what they’d normally be sending us due to the fact that Revision3 was hosting thousands of MediaDefender torrents improperly injected into our corporate server. His claim: that once we turned off MediaDefender’s back-door access to the server, “traffic piled up (to Revision3 from MediaDefender servers because) it didn’t get any acknowledgment back.”

Putting aside the company’s outrageous use of our servers for their own profit, and the large difference between one connection every three hours and 8,000 packets a second, I’m still left to wonder why they didn’t just tell us our basement window was unlocked. A quick call or email and we’d have locked it up tighter than a drum. ..

If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.

Link (Thanks, Burris!)

The Canadian Space Agency has, er, launched a recruitment campaign for astronauts. Two lucky applicants will be chosen to join the Canadian Space Agency Astronaut corps and a "pool of qualified candidates will also be created for future needs." From the job description:

The Canadian Space Agency is seeking outstanding scientists, engineers and/or medical doctors with a wide variety of backgrounds. Creativity, diversity, teamwork, and a probing mind are qualities required to join the Canadian Space Agency's Astronaut Corps. To withstand the physical demands of training and space flight, candidates must also demonstrate a high level of fitness and a clean bill of health.

Astronaut trainees will train for tours of duty on the International Space Station (ISS), the largest human spacecraft ever built...

Long-duration missions aboard the ISS generally last from three to six months. Training for long-duration missions is very arduous and takes two to three years. This follows basic training of about one year. This training requires extensive travelling, and includes assimilation of the ISS assembly sequence and its on-orbit operations.

Link (Thanks, Douglas Rushkoff!)

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has just posted a gallery of terrific illustrations from the 1950s by illustrator Boris Artzybasheff.

In his introduction to the section titled "Machinalia" in his book As I See, Boris Artzybasheff says, "I am thrilled by machinery's force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines."

Link

Yesterday, I got two really awesome new graphics related to my young adult novel Little Brother (now in its third week on the bestseller lists!). The first, seen above, was a side-project by Tor Books's Pablo Defendini, a poster design that started out as concept art for the paperback of Little Brother. Pablo actually gave me one of the very small number of prints he made of this and now I can't wait to get it framed and hung up -- I love every little thing about it, from the RFID tag to the hidden message in the binary around the border. Oh, and Pablo does great hands.

Next up is this:

It's the artwork (not yet final) for the UK edition of Little Brother, which will be published in November by HarperCollins UK. It's a little less upbeat than the US cover, but I like the stencil-graffiti look, which hearkens to all the political movements (starting with early Christianity) that were bound together by illegal writing on walls. (If you'd like to get a notice when the UK edition is available, mail me).

Link to Pablo Defendini's print

Update: The initial print run for Little Brother is almost completely shipped, so my publisher has just ordered a new batch of hardcovers. Those books on the shelf now? They're the last of the first edition -- get 'em while they last!

These "Ghost Goblets" ($75 for 4 at Cocktail Vibe) achieve a nice effect with a double-chambered tumbler in which the inner chamber is shaped like a traditional goblet. You could really go to town with this idea, making the inner chamber resemble pretty much anything -- I'm thinking of a giraffe... Link (via OhGizmo)

Legendary horn player Louis Armstrong was also a collage artist! He collaged the fronts and backs of his personal collection of reel-to-reel recordings, more than 500 total. The Paris Review posted several examples and the story behind Armstrong's other medium for improvisation:

Only occasionally do the collages indicate the musical content within; usually there is no correlation. Armstrong made generous use of various kinds of adhesive tape not only to attach images to each box but also to laminate, frame, or highlight them. The works are untitled and undated, but he was making them as early as the 1950s; in a letter from 1953 he wrote, “Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape . . . My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own.”

Link (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Jeff sez, "Researchers often use Photoshop to clean up the images they produce in the laboratory. If the experiment didn't go quite right, a bit of tampering can make a gel look like things did work. Editors at Science, Nature, and other journals are turning into detectives, using new tools to hunt for fraudulent images."

And the level of tampering they find is alarming. "The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for the causes and cures of disease.

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough investigation, says Ms. Neill. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.)

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

The Unusual Suspect writes, "blogTO writes of a Canadian PhD student studying Social Political Thought who was intercepted by Kelowna Airport screeners when they spotted her necklace, which has a charm in the shape of a gun. (Article includes a photo of the actual necklace.) The charm is less than 2" in size, and has no moving parts."

"How do you know it wasn't a real gun?" asked Guy, a security agent with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, who also declined to provide his last name.

"Who knows if there is a gun that small that can shoot bullets? You don't know that. They followed the rules."

Hey, Guy? If I could make a miniature gun that was 1.7" long and contained no moving parts and could still fire bullets, I could also make it in shapes other than gun. If your security seriously contemplates defending against that level of technology (firing bullets out of a solid object less than 2" long), then you'd better confiscate all metal objects, period. Also, what are you doing about other conceivable -- but technically impossible -- threats, like telekinesis, voodoo, and directed sunspot radiation? Link

Xeni goes backstage at a wearable technology fashion show held at the San Francisco Exploratorium, and tries digital and analog clothing on for size.

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

(Still photographs that appear in this episode by Amy Snyder, used with kind permission of the Exploratorium)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has spotted a delicious "Refined Cereal Light Fixture":

The Refined Cereal Light Fixture turns a row of fluorescent-colored, sugary cereal boxes into a wall mountable light fixture. The omission of Apple Jacks from the design seems like a weakness in the design: everyone is familiar with the eerie sight of a box of Apple Jacks radioactively pulsating in the dark by dint of super-charged sweetness alone.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus (late of one of my favorite punk acts, L'Etranger) has introduced a private member's bill on Net Neutrality in Canada:

Charlie Angus, who represents Timmins and James Bay, launched his bill one day after 300 people showed up in Ottawa to protest the issue. "You are citizens of a digital realm and you have rights," Angus told the crowd, according to the CBC. The crowd then chanted, "Whose net? Our net!" As a slogan, this leaves something to be desired, but it does get the point across.

Angus wants Parliament to debate the topic, and his brief bill amends Canada's Telecommunications Act to prohibit various forms of discrimination. P2Pnet hosts a copy of the text, which outlaws "network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritise any content, application or service is transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination." Reasonable network management is still allowed, and ISPs are explicitly allowed to charge different prices for different levels of bandwidth.

Link