Painters Chris Crites and Chris Reccardi are having a joint show at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery opening tomorrow, Friday June 13. Reccardi, known in the animation world for his work on Ren and Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, and Spongebob Squarepants, paints space age daydreams he calls "psy-fi." Crites generated quite a buzz in recent years with his paper bag paintings of vintage mugshots. For this new show, he created an entire series of firearm portraits. They resemble screenprints, but actually each color is hand-painted separately with no overpainting at all. The Roq La Rue show runs until July 5 and all of the work is also viewable online. At top, Reccardi's "Miss Mono" (acrylic on board). Below that, Crites's "M16" (acrylic on pine). Link to Reccardi gallery, Link to Crites gallery

Previously on BB:
• New psi-fi paintings by Chris Reccardi Link

Kevin Andrew Murphy sez, "I knew that Lady Puabi of Ur had d4s for the game boards found in her tomb, but it turns out the Romans had d20s and a nice green glass one is currently up for sale at Christie's. Only $17,925, for the gamer who has everything." Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Moe Zilla sez,

Judge Alex Kozinski is a friend of free speech. Now bloggers have discovered his secret online porn stash -- and forgiven him for it. Yes, there's naked women painted like cows, a man fellating himself, and two women hiking their skirts under a "Bush for President" sign...

But the L.A. Times' "neutral" editorial language made it all sound much more sinister than it really is. Looking at the photos, they're clearly standard-issue viral emails. (Apparently his music directory even included two Weird Al Yankovic mp3s and Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song.")

The judge says he didn't know the directory was world-readable, and that many of the images belonged to his college-age son.

The internet has not only changed politics, media, and freedom speech -- it also made it easier for the judge to get caught in an embarrassing situation. But I also wonder if all the MySpace/Digg/Fark users in the world will give the judge a knowing wink, and we can all finally stop being hypocrites?

Link (Thanks, Moe!)

Update: Some thoughtful commentary on this from Lessig:

Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it...

His son set up a server to make it easy for friends and family to share stuff -- family pictures, documents he wanted to share, videos, etc. Nothing alleged to have been on this server violates any law. (There's some ridiculous claim about "bestiality." But the video is not bestiality. It lives today on YouTube -- a funny (to some) short of a man defecating in a field, and then being chased by a donkey. If there was malicious intent in this video, it was the donkey's. And in any case, nothing sexual is shown in that video at all.) No one can know who uploaded what, or for whom. The site was not "on the web" in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security -- everywhere -- is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room, hacked by a litigant with a vendetta. Decent people -- and publications -- should say shame on the person violating the privacy here, and not feed the violation by forcing a judge to defend his humor to a nosy world.

When it comes to government invasions of our privacy, we are (and rightly) a privacy obsessed people. We need to extend some of that obsession to the increasingly common violations by private people against other private people. There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.

The Onion nails the future of videogaming in this clip on World of World of Warcraft, a new videogame that allows you to play at being someone playing World of Warcraft. Link (via Wonderland)

If you're a Canadian and you care about the future of culture, art, free speech and the Internet, you need to do something about the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced yesterday. This bill was prepared without any consultation with Canadian stakeholders: there was no input from industry, libraries, education, artists' groups, Canadian record labels, technology developers or citizens' groups. Instead, the bill was written to specs handed down by the US trade rep and ambassador (who kept on telling the press about the "assurances" they'd had from the Minister on the bill's features).

The bill makes it flatly illegal to break any kind of digital lock, or to violate terms in one of those absurd end-user license agreements that make you promise to agree to let the record industry kick your teeth in and drink all your beer, just for the dubious privilege of paying for a song at iTunes or watching a video on Viacom's website. This amounts to private law: under Prentice's plan, Parliament would get out of the business of making copyright law, simply enforcing whatever copyright law the entertainment industry itself dreamed up.

This is even worse than the approach the US DMCA took ten years ago, and look where that's got them. Tens of thousands of Americans have been sued, key innovative technology companies have been destroyed, computer scientists have been jailed, and what did it get them? Certainly not an end to infringement -- file-sharing is up in every country in the world. And for all the money the record industry has harvested from tech startups and music fans, not one dime has been paid to an artist.

Here's your chance to tell your Member of Parliament what you think. Kat sez, "Copyright for Canadians ) has a handy tool that makes it easy to email your MP about bill C-61. After you send your email, print it out, address an envelope and send a physical copy, too--no stamp necessary! Here's the address:

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A0A6" Link (Thanks, Kat!)

Rstevens, creator of the wonderful webcomic Diesel Sweeties, sez, "I finally got off my ass and finished my 10 volme set of CC-ebooks. Opted out of Wowio or any of those stinky services that are ad-supported because not all countries can sign up. Just some weekend reading for the blogosphere!"

Ten volumes of Diesel Sweeties! w00t! Link (Thanks, R!)

Brendan I. Koerner, author of "Now the Hell Will Start," will be joining us in the #boingboing IRC channel tomorrow at 11AM Eastern time to discuss his book and the story of Herman Perry. We'll put up a post about an hour before we get cooking tomorrow reminding you of how to access IRC. Here's the details about connecting to the chat. There's a web-based Java client if you don't want to fire up a whole separate IRC client, but you won't be able to private message without registering your nickname on Freenode.

Start thinking up those questions and we hope to see you there!

Previously • Review: "Now the Hell Will Start" by Brendan I. Koerner

Photoshop Disasters posted this photo from Washington Post. The guy on the left is both behind and in front of Tiger Woods. Neat trick. Link

UPDATE: Here's some background from, Chris Combs, photo editor at the Washington Post Express: "This is a Getty photo and I ran it verbatim. I don't have time for Photoshop. The one error to which our sports editor will likely admit is that it is credited to "Stuart Franklin/AP," whereas it is "Stuart Franklin/Getty Images" that took the photo. Here is the picture on Getty's site.

"You may also find it on editorial.gettyimages.com by searching for "Stuart Franklin" tiger mickelson. I can't say that Stuart Franklin didn't 'chop the image, but Express didn't touch it."

UPDATE: Stuart Franklin says: "I would like to clarify something. Several people have been writing to my web address which is stuartfranklin.com complaining about some fakery etc. Please do not confuse me - the current President of Magnum Photos - with a sports photographer of the same name who licenses his work through Getty (I believe). I have little interest in sport except cross country running and no interest in photographing sport. You will need to take up your issue via Getty or AP."

My friend, the cartoonist Roy Doty, was interviewed for this terrific profile of inventor and bon vivant Peter Schlumbohm, creator of the Chemex coffee maker. It was written by Tejal Rao for Gourmet.

The Chemex coffee maker is part chemist’s funnel, part Erlenmeyer flask, with a blond leather band in the middle corseting its hourglass curves. An iconic symbol of German modernism and simple, functional Bauhaus style, the device—a Pyrex glass container with a sturdy paper filter—produced M.F.K. Fisher’s favorite cup of coffee and still holds an alluring power over coffee purists and design geeks. Its success launched its inventor, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, into the arms of the design establishment (the coffee maker has been a part of the MOMA’s design collection since 1944, just three years after Schlumbohm patented it), and in the early years of World War II, it was considered a patriotic alternative to products made from metals and plastics (which were essential to the war effort). A Time Magazine article from November 1946 quotes the ebullient inventor as saying, “with the Chemex, even a moron can make good coffee.”

...

“He loved to drink and he loved to eat,” says Roy Doty, a cartoonist who was a friend of the late inventor, “so going out for dinner with Dr. Schlumbohm was a horrifying experience.” Guests were treated to epic all-night food crawls in his huge Cadillac Coupe De Ville, which he pimped out with built-in shades and a solid-gold Chemex coffee maker bolted to the driver’s door. (When he traded in his car every two years, he removed the golden amulet and set it on the newer, larger model.) Like many German immigrants, Schlumbohm felt at home in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, once a stronghold of German restaurants and coffee shops. He drove his guests up into the 80s, handed anyone loitering near the area a ten-dollar bill to watch the car, and then marched in for his first course. Soon, they all piled back into the car and moved on to the next joint. “Eventually,” says Doty, “you’d be somewhere eating streusel with him and by that time it was two or three in the morning.” But three in the morning was nothing to Schlumbohm, who surrounded himself with fellow night owls and often made calls around that time to discuss his newest ideas.

When he did return home, it was, unsurprisingly, to a bachelor penthouse on 5th Avenue—a peeping Tom’s paradise overlooking Greenwich Village, with thousands of dollars worth of binoculars dangling from the windows, and ice buckets stocked with perpetually chilling German beers and wines at the front door for visitors. “He loved women, Dr. S., and women loved him,” says Doty.

Link

We sometimes say that it "hurts" to part with our stuff even if it's junk, and we know it's junk. Behavioral scientists call it the endowment effect, a theory that people put higher values on things once they own them. Turns out though that it actually does hurt to sell something you own, and it has nothing to do with overvaluing. Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania psychologists recreated the endowment effect in volunteers while scanning their brains with MRI. From Nature News:

If the reason for the endowment effect came from the products being overvalued by their owners, (professor Brian) Knutson’s team expected to see a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbus change during the test. It didn’t, “whether buying or selling, the activation in the nucleus accumbus looked the same”, says (co-author professor Scott) Rick.

But others part of the brain, the insula, which has a role in the experience of pain, and the greater mesial prefrontal cortex became activated when the subjects contemplated selling one of their items. If they had ranked that item as one they particularly liked, the change in the insula was greater.

According to this research, this is because of loss aversion, says Rick. “It is not because people are overplaying the positive [aspects of a possession].” Rather, we just become attached to objects we own — so much so that it takes a lot to convince us to part with them.

Link

A wonderful scene from life. (I wish I could play banjo.) Link (Thanks, D. Forster!)

Boing Boing favorite Ape Lad says: "I just posted a finished moleskine sketchbook on flickr. Probably my last moleskine till they make a small one with white paper." Link

For several years, Stacey Gayle had seizures whenever she heard certain songs. Sean Paul's "Temperature" was a sure bet to send her into convulsions. Gayle suffered from musicogenic epilepsy, seizures caused by music. According to Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the condition was first described in 1937. A total of just 150 cases of musicogenic epilepsy have ever been reported. Once Gayle was properly diagnosed, she had a small portion of her brain removed to stop the song-induced fits. It worked. Scientific American has her story. From the article:

At first, the seizures seemed to occur randomly. In the spring of 2006, however, she noticed a pattern. At the time, Sean Paul's "Temperature" was sitting at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, continually being played on urban radio stations. It was playing at nearly every barbecue and party she went to. That was a problem: "Every time it would go on, I would pass out and go into a seizure," she recalls.

All it seemed to take was a few seconds of the song to send Gayle to the floor. "That's the last thing you would think," she explains, "but I did it at home one time and it happened again."

Link to Scientific American, Link to buy Musicophilia

Previously on BB:
• Oliver Sacks on music and amnesia Link
• Oliver Sacks explains how your brain does music Link

No Wave is a new photo and oral history book documenting the highly-influential art-punk scene in New York City from 1976-1980. The book was put together by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and indie rock journalist Byron Coley. NYC's KS Art gallery is holding an exhibition tied to the show of photos, paintings, sculptures, and ephemera from that seminal scene. The three photos above are by Laura Levine who kindly sent them to me as a sneak preview. Top right, DNA (1981); bottom left, Alan Vega (1983); bottom right, Glenn Branca (1981). Click for bigger images. The opening party is tomorrow, Friday, June 13, from 6 to 8pm. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Information will perform at the Knitting Factory across the street. The gallery show runs until July 10. From the book description:

This is the first book to visually chronicle the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. This in-depth look at punk rock, new wave, experimental music, and the avant-garde art movement of the 70s and 80s focuses on the true architects No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca, as well as the luminaries that intersected the scene, such as David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Richard Hell. This rarely documented scene was the creative stomping ground of young artists and filmmakers from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jim Jarmusch, as well as the musical genesis for the post-punk explosions of Sonic Youth. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have selected 150 unforgettable images, most of which have never been published previously, and compiled hundreds of hours of personal interviews to create an oral history of the movement, providing a never-before-seen exploration and celebration of No Wave.

Link to buy No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980., Link to invite at KS Art

Boing Boing pal and artist Shawn Wolfe says these cookies were: "on the checkout at Safeway last night. People didn't seem to be buying many of them." Link

A video from powrslave:

Shot with 3 cameras over a period of 28 hours during September 28-29th 2005. Firestorm shows a a unique look at the Simi Valley fire which consumed 25,000 acres. Look for Mars, Orion & the Moon rising in the distance...

Link (via Ursi)

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it's even worse than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research.

It used to be that Parliament got to write copyright law. Now, it's Hollywood companies, who get to overrule Parliamentary law with whatever "business rules" they put in their DRM.

Michael Geist has the depressing analysis. Makes me want to cry. Watch this space for tips on getting in touch with your MP to make sure that this farce dies in Parliament.

1. As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transfering a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital). These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill. However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2. The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes - worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent. While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada's Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM'd book, or even unlocking a cellphone. The liability for picking the digital lock is up to $20,000 per infringement.

While that is the similar to the U.S. law, the exceptions are worse. The Canadian law includes a few limited exceptions for privacy, encryption research, interoperable computer programs, people with sight disabilities, and security, yet Canadians can't actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned. In other words, check the fine print again - you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal. Dig deeper and it gets worse. Under the U.S. law, there is mandatory review process every three years to identify new exceptions. Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed. Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.

Link

Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive says:

In his blog, All Kinds Of Stuff, John Kricfalusi has been discussing how he structures his stories. It's fascinating reading, you should definitely check it out.

John generously donated the archives of Spumco to the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive last year. We're still in the process of cataloging the material, but I wanted to share a particularly important item with you today.

Here is an excerpt from the original storyboard to "Stimpy's Invention." Most of this board is by Bob Camp; supplemented by a few xeroxes of layout drawings by Chris Reccardi. Take a moment and read John K's notes on how he constucts his stories... (Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four and his post on Outlining Stories) and then take a look at how the theories are implemented in this section of board.

Link

Chris Cocker, 36-year-old man from Blackburn England, was watching a comedy show at home. He laughed so hard he fell off his sofa. His neighbor in the apartment below heard the thud and called the police. When the police came to Cocker's door, he refused to let them in. Cocker tried to shut to door, but the officer stuck his foot in the door and pepper sprayed Cocker.

After being sprayed with pepper spray, Mr Cocker was put into a police van and taken to a police station where he said he was stripped naked and spent a night in the cells.

A spokesman for Lancashire Police said officers used a pepper spray as "reasonable force" for their own protection after they feared for their safety when he became aggressive.

The BBC has a video. Link (via Arbroath)

T. Campbell writes in to announce that he's revived his long-running webcomic, Fans: "One of the first science-fiction webcomics, "Fans," returned this February. The premise's appeal is pretty obvious: science-fiction fans are the ones most qualified to save the world from science-fictiony threats. From such beginnings, the series has pushed outward in all directions, mixing humor and intensity, science-fiction and fantasy, historical and pop-cultural references, tributes to the power of imagination and portraits of flawed dreamers. The latest stories have seen the creation of a fan-based armed services division, and the beginnings of a menage a trois between three central characters. With over 1600 installments, the series is a time-wasting treat for fans everywhere. Hope you enjoy!" Link

Emmanuel Goldstein will release The Best of 2600 at this year's Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC -- this is a three-decade-spanning, 900-page anthology of the best articles from the venerable hacker 'zine 2600. As a one-time contributor, I am stoked. Link (Thanks, Aestetix!)

In today's episode, Boing Boing tv presents an animated short by Joaquin Baldwin, a UCLA grad student working towards his MFA in animation. Joaquin has recieved numerous awards for his work, including Best Animated Short at the Sedona International Film Festival and has been featured on the front pages of Youtube, Crackle.com, and Dailymotion.com.

In this piece, entitled "Sebastian's Voodoo," a voodoo doll must find the courage to save his fellows from being pinned to death. For more on Joaquin and information on festival screenings, you can check out http://www.pixelnitrate.com/

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

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who may be on John McCain's Vice President shortlist, has quite a resume: state university system president, Congressman, governor, and, er, exorcist. In 1994, Jindal apparently wrote an essay for Catholic journal New Oxford Review about how he helped drive out a demon from a friend named Susan, and posits that the ritual may have even cured the young woman's skin cancer. Talking Points Memo recounts the weirdness and quotes Jindal's essay:

The students, led by Susan's sister and Louise, a member of a charismatic church, engaged in loud and desperate prayers while holding Susan with one hand. Kneeling on the ground, my friends were chanting, "Satan, I command you to leave this woman." Others exhorted all "demons to leave in the name of Christ." It is no exaggeration to note the tears and sweat among those assembled. Susan lashed out at the assembled students with verbal assaults...

Whenever I concentrated long enough to begin prayer, I felt some type of physical force distracting me. It was as if something was pushing down on my chest, making it very hard for me to breathe. . . Though I could find no cause for my chest pains, I was very scared of what was happening to me and Susan. I began to think that the demon would only attack me if I tried to pray or fight back; thus, I resigned myself to leaving it alone in an attempt to find peace for myself.

Link (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

Amazon's got a four-pack of Alice in Wonderland temporary tatts (inspired by the Tenniel engravings) for a mere $1.50. Link