Dwiff sez, "Custom rocket car surfaces in Los Angeles neighborhood Silver Lake, looking like something straight out of Penelope Pitstop." Link (Thanks, Dwiff!)

A poacher shot the beak off this bald eagle three years ago, and it was starving to death. But an engineer made her a fake beak and it seems to be working.

Nate Calvin, an engineer from Boise in Idaho, designed the new beak, which will eventually be replaced with a permanent tougher one.

Jane Fink Cantwell who found the bird scrounging for food and slowly starving at a landfill in Alaska said: "A bullet had to be removed from her curved upper beak, leaving her tongue and sinuses exposed, with a stump useless for grasping food. "Eating with her beak was like using one chopstick. She also had trouble drinking and couldn’t preen her feathers."

Link (Via Arbroath)

Duncan sez, "A brilliantly done spoof of GoogleNews from a parallel universe where all the world's problems have been solved, from the petty: 'Apple announces unlocked iPhone, built-in VOIP' To the more profound: 'Amnesty International reports massive drop in detainments' and 'Darfur peace process well underway'"

Link

Here's a simple Instructable for recycling old floppy-disc rings into a pair of smart earrings:

Open the two round jump rings and attach one to each v-ring. Before closing them up, attach the earring wire to each. Close both jump rings securely with pliers.

Note: when attaching the earring wires, make sure that the part that goes into your ear faces the "back" of the earring-- I consider the "front" of the floppy centers the side where the middle concaves out a bit from the edge.

Link (via Make)

Marilyn sez, "My kids always want commercial ice-cream cake for their birthdays, but the icing is always so tasteless. These ice-cream cupcakes look easy to make and the ganache topping looks yummy."

Remove the ice cream from the freezer to let soften before filling cupcake tins. Leave on the counter for 10minutes or defrost in the microwave. When ice cream is softened, use a quick hand to spoon and flatten ice cream on top of the cake. It’s a little messy, but don’t worry about that. When all of the cakes are topped with ice cream, return to the freezer to harden. I left my ice cream cupcakes in the freezer over night, but give them at least 4 hours.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is currently showing an exhibit on the Miss Rockaway Armada -- a junk-raft fleet of eco-art-maniacs who floated up and down the Mississippi being awesomely weird.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a collective of artists, musicians, and adventurers-of-all-stripes who spent the summers of 2006 and 2007 journeying down the Mississippi River on a fleet of “junk-rafts.” Hailing from all parts of the country and all walks of life, the Miss Rockaway Armada is united by the desire to create; to demonstrate different ways of living and moving that are friendlier to the environment and to each other; to indulge the urge to make something out of nothing. With this spirit and energy, The Miss Rockaway Armada comes to MASS MoCA for their first project in collaboration with a museum. Being Here is Better Than Wishing We’d Stayed, a site-specific, interactive installation in the Hunter Center Mezzanine, will open to the public on Saturday, April 19, 2008, and will remain on view through March 1, 2009. In addition to the exhibition on Saturday, April 12, 2008, at 2 PM the Miss Rockaway Armada will give a performance in the vein of the impromptu circus/theater performances they staged in towns along the Mississippi.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Nick sez, "Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It about what he calls 'generative technology' and why it's so important. It's chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate - freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship - put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation. This is definitely a book that you don't want to pass up. It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book's website."

The iPhone is the opposite. It is sterile. Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different applications,4 Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform the iPhone into an iBrick.5 The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with Apple’s permission.) Jobs was not shy about these restrictions baked into the iPhone. As he said at its launch: We define everything that is on the phone. . . . You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.6

Link (Thanks, Nick!)

Last night, I had the enormous pleasure of attending White Mischief, the semi-regular steampunk variety night at the Scala in London's King's Cross. White Mischief featured tons of bands, hilarious Victorian comedy, obscene and delightful sword-swallowing, and hundreds and hundreds of revellers in steampunk costume (some of whom were BB readers and were kind enough to introduce themselves!). I snapped a bunch of pix (pictured here, goggles from Got Steam), as did many others. Have a look at the Flickr whitemischief tag for more. Link

See also:
White Mischief steampunk night, King's Cross London, June 7
White Mischief, London's steampunk variety night

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Wacky-Packages-style breakfast cereal remixes. Link

Etsy seller Stripeyblue had plans for this lovely crocheted ice-cream sundae up for $4 each -- sold out now (how can you sell out of a PDF?) but presumably that's temporary.

Pictures are provided to help you create this dessert made even more special with layers of whipped cream and chocolate syrup...sprinkled with nuts & topped with cherry! :) It comes with wafer sticks & its very own cup.

Link (via Wonderland)