Friday's edition of the NPR program All Things Considered included a piece by Yuki Noguchi on some suspicious whitewashing that went down in Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry just before she was revealed as the GOP's candidate for vice-president. Snip:

Someone — and apparently it was just one person — felt like the existing biography wasn't appropriate for a vice-presidential candidate. On Friday, 15 minutes before the rumor that John McCain had picked Palin as his running mate, a Wikipedia editor discovered 30 mostly favorable changes had been made to the Alaska governor's profile.

She was called "a politician of eye-popping integrity" and sections on her participation in a beauty pageant and her alleged use of influence to get her former brother-in-law fired were diminished.

That user is one "Young Trigg." He or she was thanked and lauded by other Wikipedia editors for thoroughness, before questions of a possible conflict of interest emerged.

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post writes:

Perhaps more tellingly, some of the same users editing her page were almost simultaneously updating McCain's Wiki entry, adding information dealing with accuracy, sources and footnotes to each.

Palin's Wikipedia Entry Gets Overhaul (NPR)
Tug of war over Wiki entry on Palin (SJ Merc)
Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks (Washington Post)

Hurricane Gustav has hit Cuba, and is heading straight for New Orleans with great force. From mayor Ray Nagin, who was, of course, also the city's mayor when Katrina struck 3 years ago this week:

"This is very, very serious, and we need you to heed this warning," he said. "We really don't have the resources to rescue you after this."

Mandatory evacuations to begin Sunday morning in New Orleans (CNN, via Clayton Cubitt)

Related: On the other side of the globe, Monsoon flooding in Northern India today has displaced more than 2.5 million people, and killed more than 2,000.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com reports that protesters in Minneapolis, where the Republican National Convention will soon begin, have been subjected to massive, pre-emptive police raids. Those arrested include members of Food not Bombs, and a group calling itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee," and a group that uses video to protect civil liberties by documenting police activity at first amendment events. Snip:

[They have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis. Glenn's post includes videos. One of them is embedded here, below, "from the house that had just been raided."

Glenn's Salon item also points to blog posts from the targeted protest groups, including this one from I-Witness. This group previously "videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested." The post excerpted below was published while the police raid was happening today:

The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16. We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

(via Ned Sublette)

The Fall issue of Buddhadharma magazine has a feature-length profile I wrote of Tendzin Choegyal. He is the Dalai Lama's youngest brother and was once an influential member of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala. Choegyal is a highly intelligent, worldly guy who isn't afraid to say "bullshit" and "reincarnation" in the same sentence, all the while showing great reverence for his famous brother and Tibetan Buddhism. One of the highlights of reporting this story was that I got to ask the Dalai Lama about his family life.

“My brother…,” the Dalai Lama says, an amused look on his face. He then does something he rarely does in public: he rewinds his memory back to the day he was born, and talks about each of his siblings.

You can read an excerpt here or download the PDF to read the full story. Also, here's a link to a shorter Q&A I did with him for Giant Robot.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Update: Adam Savage retracted this statement and says that the segment wasn't killed by TI or the credit-card companies.

Check out the first two minutes of this clip of Mythbusters' Adam Savage telling the folks at the HOPE hackercon about how the Discovery Channel was bullied by big credit-card companies out of airing a program about how crappy the security in RFID tags is. Arphid Watch: Mythbusters and RFID

ZDNet's Dancho Danchev has a nice little investigative piece about the underground economy in cheapo Indian data-centers that break CAPTCHAs for spammers all day long:

Data processing as a mentality is visible in all the applications a human CAPTCHA solver is using. Basically, there’s no indication which service’s authentication model they’re currently abusing, CAPTCHA breaking is replaced with CAPTCHA solving making it look like it’s a some sort of a challenge that they have to solve.

Recruitment of the people that would be later tested for whether on not they quality for the job by exposing them to CAPTCHAs from different services, and a timer running in the background, is mainly done through advertisements like the following :

* easy work
* no learning needed
* no investment needed
* weekly payout
* work from home
* work when you want
* flexible working hours
* highest rates in the industry

Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy (via /.)

Disaster Dioramas: a collection of free, downloadable papercraft depicting great historical disasters. The Hindenberg and the Titanic are presently available and more are to come. Disaster Dioramas (via Make)

Today I spotted this sign at a Tesco's grocery store in Islington, London -- it might just be the single stupidest salvo in the war on terror to date, courtesy of the London Metropolitan Police:

Terrorism: If you suspect it, report it

TERRORISTS NEED INFORMATION
Observation and surveillance help terrorists plan attacks. Have you seen anyone taking pictures of security arrangements?

TERRORISTS NEED TRANSPORTATION
If you work in vehicle hire or sales, has a sale or rental made you suspicious?

TERRORISTS NEED TO TRAVEL
Meetings, training and planning can take place anywhere. Do you know someone who travels but is vague about where they are going?

TERRORISTS USE COMPUTERS
Do you know someone who visits terrorism-related websites?

TERRORISTS NEED COMMUNICATION
Anonymous, pay-as-you-go and stolen mobiles are typical. Have you seen someone with large quantities of mobiles? Has it made you suspicious?

Translation: god help you if you worry about CCTVs in your neighbourhood, get into an argument at the car-rental agency, don't feel like telling your co-workers that you go off to have regular dialysis treatments, look at websites that the guy next to you in the Internet cafe isn't familiar with, or can't get credit and use pay-as-you-go phones instead. After all, the police here don't even need to charge you with a crime in order to lock you up for 42 days. Absolutely the stupidest salvo in the war on terror to date, Tesco's, Islington, London, UK

Edge Magazine's Brad Wardell has a great, provocative 10-point Gamer's Bill of Rights that runs the gamut from DRM to quality assurance:

1 Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
2 Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3 Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
4 Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5 Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer.

The Gamer's Bill of Rights (via /.)

From William Gibson, a playlist of ten musical tracks to get you in a Spook Country mood (sez Bill, "I have always regarded music with lyrics as a species of fiction.")

1) Country Blues, Dock Boggs. On finally learning to hear this music, you literally become some different, more primal manner of flesh. There is simply nothing else like it. It is an Ur-thing, sere and terrible, yet capable of profound and paradoxical rescue in the very darkest hour. Dock Boggs lived in Wise County, Virginia, not far from where I grew up. I am haunted by the possibility that someone could have listened to this recording in Paris, in 1927, the year it was released.

2) Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor, Lucinda Williams. A ravishingly young woman (1978) channels all the sexuality, injustice and spirituality of the American Gone World. For Smithsonian Folkways, no less.

3) Decoration Day, Drive-By Truckers. Like early Cormac McCarthy, but with three lead guitars. Hyper-literate narrative song-writing in the service of an act of stingingly efficient shamanistic cultural recall.

Living With Music: A Playlist by William Gibson (via Beyond the Beyond)

From Danny O'Brien, a nice hack for keeping your download folder tidy -- a script that deletes everything that's more than a week old. I'd like one of these to run on my ~/.Trash folder, too.

I've had bad experience with handing "delete file" powers to an automatic script before, so I'll disclaim any warranty ("TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW" as the GPL shouts), but it's pretty straightforward, and works for me: I have it in a cronjob. The tmp folder it cleans up is my default save folder on Firefox, and where I generally download everything. If I want to save anything longer than a week, I find it a place in the rest of my filing system. It's sort of like having a cleaner come around every week: occasionally you go "Garr! Where's that coffee-stained, have torn copy of last month's New Yorker! I was going to eventually get around to reading that!", but mostly your cruft just silently disappears without you noticing a thing.

the most useful simple script i have

Here's a scanned and indexed copy of a 1736 guide to thieves' cant, for those times when you want to play stern thief-taker and naughty pickpocket.

AUTEM-CACKLETUB
AUTEM-CACKLETUB, a Conventicle, a Meeting-House for Dissenters.

Canting Dictionary (Thanks, Gabe!)

Tyler sez,

Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership takes place October 25 at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose, CA, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today. Now in its third year, the Singularity Summit gathers the smartest people around to explore one of the biggest ideas of our time: the Singularity.

Keynotes will include Ray Kurzweil, updating his predictions in The Singularity is Near, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who will examine the Singularity's plausibility. At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, he spoke about why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. "Rather than look back, we're going to look forward 40 years," said Rattner. "It's in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence."

The first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress. It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

The Singularity Summit 2008 (Thanks, Tyler!)

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival -- celebrate in nerd style with one of these moon-cake-shaped USB sticks -- 4GB for $28. USB Mooncake Flash Drive (via Neatorama)

Photographer Clayton Cubitt updated his "Operation Eden" blog today to mark the third year since Hurricane Katrina. He grew up in and around New Orleans. That's his mom on the far left. Here was his first post on that blog. She lost their (very modest) family home in the storm, as did many thousands of other moms, many thousands of other families. Clayton's mother is doing okay, but in spite of -- not thanks to -- the systems we're supposed to rely on in America, the systems created to help the helpless in greatest time of need. New Orleans -- and all the other poor communities nearby, all hard hit by Katrina -- never mended. Snip from Clayton's post today:

She recently received a creepy pre-recorded phone warning from Governor Haley Barbour telling her to evacuate in the path of Gustav, as if she wasn't planning on it already.

That's her on the left in the above picture. Next to her is her childhood friend Russell. Next to him is her sister, my aunt Lorraine, who's self conscious about her down-turned smile since the stroke, but who I think is just as beautiful and beaming as she's always been. The three of them grew up together first on Piety Street, then on McKain Street, in New Orleans.

Their dads worked together in the junkyard, chopping up cars for scrap using big hand axes. Russell had nineteen brothers and sisters, in a family poorer even than mine. Now he lives in a FEMA trailer on an abandoned lot with two dogs, a bunch of Katrina junk, a statue of the Virgin Mary he hand painted, and an old school bus backed up to a canal cruised by alligators, which he fishes out of for meals.

His sister was murdered in New Orleans last week. The New York Times wrote a piece about the crime in New Orleans, the crime that took Russell's sister.

Three Years On (Operation Eden)

We've featured the exquisite work of Jessica Joslin on Boing Boing a few times. It turns out her husband, Jared Joslin, is a terrific artist, too. He has a show currently running in Los Angeles.

Solo Exhibition of paintings by Jared Joslin.
August 14- September 13, 2008.
YARGER/STRAUSS Fine Art
354 N Bedford Drive
Beverly Hills, CA
August 14- September 13, 2008

Jared Joslin -- Shadow of the Silver Moon

In the early 1990s cyberculture, Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier was a hip multimedia technical magazine inspired in design (and consciousness) by 60s underground newspapers. This month is the 15th anniversary of the first issue. To celebrate, co-founders Jody Radzik (Art Director), Doug Millison (Editor), and Dave Pola (Ad Developer), have made the magazine's signature comic strip, Morph's Outpost On The Digital Frontier, by Fred "Sundance" Gromadski, available online. Millison has also launched an online Morph's retrospective. Dig that logo treatment by Kai "Power Tools" Krause!
Morph's Outpost comic, Morph's Outpost site (Thanks, Jody Radzik!)

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 13 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

The Boing Boing tv crew continues their hard-earned snooze in the sands of a swingers' resort on the south shore of Mars today, but we're revisiting the best of the show while we slack off in outer space. (Robot! Bring me another red Rover martini.)

Today, we feature the work of animator, filmmaker, and music video director Bill Barminski, a longtime Boing Boing fave.

Above, "Drive in," a soothing ambient work I like to watch before bedtime.

Another beloved Barminksi joint is below, S.E.X.Y. R.O.B.O.T.: Pinker Tones music video by Walter Robot.

Here's a link to all of the BBtv episodes which have featured Barminski's work.

My favorite appears in the second half of this BBtv episode: the "Fuji Apple" animated short from Barminski's production team Walter Robot, with music by Boards of Canada (song: Roygbiv, from "Music has the Right to Children.") I could just watch that over and over again, and I often do.

vintage trailering
giant lava lamp
luna parc
kate's lazy meadow
arizona state fair
roadside signs
weird america
dasparkhotel
their circular life
passing by
souvenirs

previously on web zen:
travelling zen

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!)

This fun song featuring a dancing 8-bit skeleton is actually a remix of what is believed to be the oldest Japanese song in the world. The song is called Kokoriko Bushi, meaning tune of a kokoriko—an ancient string instrument. The artist is Japanese electro-pop collective Omodaka of Far East Recordings; the animation is directed by Teppei Maki. If you like how it sounds, there's another fun video on TokyoMango today. (Thanks, Matt!)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Jonno D'Addario says:

Over the past few days, Banksy street pieces have been appearing around New Orleans. This one is in my neighborhood, and the timing seems to coincide with the third anniversary of you-know-what this week.

Someone else took a photo of this one in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. It references a local (in)famous anti-graffiti crusader named Fred Radtke, aka "The Grey Ghost", whose one man mission to eradicate street art and tagging in NO involves painting ugly grey squares over everything. (Lots more on him via Google)

More photos from Flickr user anthonyturducken, still more here from Jonno's Flickr stream, and a gallery on Sky.com.

Ethan Persoff of Comics with Problems shares this collection of Chinese political comics from 1958-60. The images address perceived exploitation and human rights offenses committed by the United States. Above, an "illustrated man" with tattoos of A-bombs and H-bombs all over his back.

This week on MangoBot—my biweekly column about Asian futurism on io9—I wrote about the yellow peril and the portrayal of Asians in science fiction:

Back in the 1920s and 30s, when Asian immigration to the US and Europe was picking up steam, prominent science fiction writers like Philip Nowlan and H.P. Lovecraft created speculative scenarios starring massive hordes of horrible, slanty-eyed, intelligent Asians who were either taking over or destroying the world.

Continue reading...

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Mad Magazine's "The Mad War on Bush" gathers a truly superlative collection of parodical and satirical material from eight years' worth of Mad lampoons between a single set of covers. As Jimmy Kimmel notes in his introduction to the book, there are many things to hate about the Bush regime, but it has been very, very kind to political satirists of all description.

Mad Magazine has had a glorious eight years with this presidency -- see, for example, the Gulf Wars Episode II poster (included as a full-size pullout, suitable for framing -- apparently the White House completely missed the joke here and used the poster internally as a morale booster; Sean Hannity showed it on his Fox "News" show!); the absolutely brilliant Dick Cheney shotgun accident cover, the NSA warrantless wiretapping poster (also included as a pull-out full-size item) and the bang-on "Bush campaign commercial if he was running against Jesus.

Mad's already warming up to have some fun with Obama, but at the end of the day, he's just not mush-mouthed, uncoordinated, and goofy to adequately serve the nation's satirists. Poor bastards. The Mad War on Bush

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's found this absolutely ugg-lovely homebrew pocket video-game system:

It looks more like a Cold War era device for the remote detonation of nuclear warheads than a game console. but modder Sam Thornley's Portable Pac-Man Mini takes one of those old Namco emulator joysticks you plug and play into any old television and melds it with a tiny 2.5-inch LCD powered by 4 rechargeable AA batteries. That D-Pad isn't very good — perhaps he's trying to duck patent litigation — but the doodad can play Galaxian, Rally-X, Bosconian and Dig Dug. Because it's there!

Meet the Pac-Man Mini, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Here's an idea whose time has come: YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin'. It works pretty damned well, too. As XKCD has pointed out in the past, YouTube has the worst, just the worst comment-areas on the Internet. YouTube Comment Snob (via Making Light)

Air Canada continues its race to the top of the list of the world's shittiest airlines by removing life-vests from its regional carrier Jazz, saving money on fuel in the process. In the event of a water crash, passengers can use their seat-cushions to float.

Come to that, they can use their pillows: the last time I flew AC, you had to buy a "pillow" that consisted of a giant ziploc bag that you were supposed to inflate. Passengers in business class got the same "pillows," but they were "free" (except for the extra thousands of dollars for a business-class ticket).

Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stuart said Thursday that Transport Canada regulations allow airlines to use flotation devices instead of life vests, provided the planes remain within 50 miles of shore.

Safety cards in the seat pockets of Jazz aircraft now direct passengers to use the seat cushions as flotation devices.

Stuart says Jazz is a transcontinental carrier that doesn't fly over the ocean.

Jazz planes do fly over the Great Lakes and along the Eastern seaboard from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Boston, Massachusetts, and to New York.

Emphasis mine. Airline removes life vests to lighten planes (via Neatorama)

Cameron sez,

The non-profit Architecture for Humanity and Lulan Artisans are vying for $1.5M worth of funding to build weaving cooperatives in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and India. These centers will be designed through the Open Architecture Network with the Creative Commons Developing Nations License.

These funds will allow 6000 women access to a stable income and create an alternative to the human trafficking going on in many of these rural villages.

Voting for the AmEx Members Prize is on September 1st and the top 25 go through. This project is currently in 27th place out of 1190.

Vote for Architecture for Humanity and Lulan at Amex Members Project (Thanks, Cameron!)

Kurt sez, "FACIL, the Quebecois Free Software advocacy group, is suing the Quebec provincial government, accusing them of abusing a legal loophole to essentially create 'no-bid' government software contracts for Microsoft. For a province that once considered independence from Canada, never mind independence from indentured servitude to US corporations, this is sublimely ironic."

Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.

"It shouldn't be the rule," Facil president Mathieu Lutfy told CBC News. "It goes against the public markets policy of the government, which requires them to stimulate competition and look for local alternatives. It's really an absurdity."

Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software, FACIL contests government practices in the Superior Court

The Yankees are serious about their bizarre prohibition on going to the bathroom during the playing of "God Bless America" during the Seventh Inning Stretch: a man was dragged out of the stadium for daring to stand up and move around instead of singing a patriotic, religious song. I really like Tommy Smothers's formulation of the principle at work here: "America, where you're free to say anything you want, and you'd better not say what you're not supposed to!"

The NYCLU seems inclined to follow through with last year's promise to sue the Yankees over their policy of confining fans to their seats during the national anthem and "God Bless America," which is played during the seventh inning stretch. Yesterday Red Sox fan Bradford Campeau-Laurion, a Queens resident, told us about his rough ejection from Yankee stadium at the hands of the NYPD after he tried to go to the men's room during the seventh inning's moment of mandatory nationalism Monday night.

NYPD Defends Ejecting Sox Fan from Yankee Stadium During "God Bless America" (Thanks, Bill!)

Starting October 1, roundly hated broadband provider Comcast will begin officially capping consumer use at 250 gigs a month, according to the company's recently-updated Frequently Asked Questions about Excessive Use.

If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use.

Comcast to limit customers' broadband usage (Reuters)

Mark F. got me this terrific t-shirt for my birthday. Great tastes that go great together! It's $19 from TopatoCo.
Pfft (There Is No God) t-shirt (TopatoCo)

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw new Walkmen from Sony, hoped that Kindle 2 will be less ugly, and praised Fujitsu Siemens' Amilo Mini netbook for its Stormtrooping style.

John found notes on how to port Pitfall 2 to the Apple IIe, gazed upon the beautifully thin Philips Essence, and laughed out virtual at NASA's space virus woes.

There was an touchscreen PC with Netbook-like specs; a Pac-Man Mini which saw Namco in a new box, and a beautiful Haight St. apartment filled with old typewriters and cameras.

We mused at Bloomberg's iMacabre Steve Jobs obit snafu, but nothing reminds us of our mortality quite like a Lego shoggoth-thingie based on the Ohmu from Nausicaä.

Finally, Rob saw some silly cellphone accessories and launched a perhaps ill-advised defense of those terrible Tiger Electronics handheld games from the 1980s.

Today on TokyoMango, I blogged about a guy who turns into a robot from a Hayao Miyazaki anime; a new technology that fights bird flu; and a silly man who kept 51 poisonous snakes in his house (and got bitten by one); and Tokyo's (slightly controversial) total dominance in the world restaurant scene. Oh, and this was yesterday, but there's a new Wii game that turns you into a competitive eater. Good night!

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

The Maker Shed, Make and Craft magazines' online store, sells lots of great books and kits, like this solar powered Theremin (list price $15.99). If you use the code "dogdays" you'll get 20% off everything in the Shed.

It's hot here in Sebastopol. So hot, that the PG&E substation across the street blew a transformer and knocked out our power yesterday afternoon. So.... Under the category of anything is a good excuse for a promotion, we'll do the "dog days" promotion now through midnight Sunday, August 31. Visit MakerShed and enter "dogdays" as the promotional code and get 20% off everything in your shopping cart. Offer expires midnight PST this Sunday (9/1).

Use code "dogdays" at the MakerShed for 20% off

The Fish 'n Flush is an aquarium for your toilet. According to the manufacturer's site, "Fish 'n Flush... makes a fun-fashion statement for the homeowner who wants to have something unique in the bathroom. It's $299 and fits most standard tank/bowl configurations.
Toilet aquarium (Fish 'n Flush, via Dark Roasted Blend)

Previously on BB Gadgets:
• Tacky Glass Toilet Dioramas

I dig the Astrobiology Rap, written by Jonathan Chase, a post-graduate science communication researcher. Chase wrote the song for the new issue of the Astrobiology Magazine European Edition.
Astrobiology Rap (AMEE, via Nature)

The always-good GOOD magazine has a short list of unusual nudges to get people to do the "right thing," from reducing teenage pregnancy to quitting nail biting. From GOOD:

Stop men from peeing on the floor.
Authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can’t help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

Tricking People Into Doing The Right Thing (GOOD)

The intrepid travelers at Curious Expeditions took this photo and many other fantastic shots at the Museo delle Cere Anatomiche (Museum of Anatomical Waxes) in Bologna, Italy. From Curious Expeditions:

These are Luigi Calori’s 2,000 human skulls, organized according to many different themes, from groupings of ancient Roman skulls to cluster of skulls from suicide victims. Calori was the head of the anatomy department of Bologna University in 1831.

Museo delle Cere Anatomiche (Curious Expeditions)

One of my favorite comix artists, Seth, wrote an essay for The Walrus about "the quiet art of cartooning." It's a lovely piece and gives some nice insight the artist's mind at work. Seth's article is accompanied by a comic strip and also an interview with him. From The Walrus:

A cartoonist isn’t like a writer. Writing requires a special kind of focus. Your mind must be utterly devoted to the task at hand. When I’m breaking down a strip or hammering out dialogue, I’m using that writer’s focus. But drawing and inking are different. They use different parts of the brain. I often find that when I’m drawing, only half my mind is on the work — watching proportions, balancing compositions, eliminating unnecessary details.

The other half is free to wander. Usually, it’s off in a reverie, visiting the past, picking over old hurts, or recalling that sense of being somewhere specific — at a lake during childhood, or in a nightclub years ago. These reveries are extremely important to the work, and they often find their way into whatever strip I’m working on at the time. Sometimes I wander off so far I surprise myself and laugh out loud. Once or twice, I’ve become so sad that I actually broke down and cried right there at the drawing table. So I tell those young artists that if they want to be cartoonists, the most important relationship they are going to have in their lives is with themselves.

Seth: The Quiet Art of Cartooning (Walrus Magazine, via Drawn!)

Nude Magazine's got a free, downloadable papercraft CCTV camera, for freaking out your neighbors. Put one in the bathroom. The dog house. Use it for a hood-ornament. Build Your Own Nude Magazine CCTV Camera (Thanks, Alice!)

Wolfenflickr is a Flash-based implementation of Castle Wolfenstein that decorates the castle's walls with random images pulled from any Flickr stream (or any Flickr tag). Shooting Nazis and looking at snapshots: two great tastes that taste great together. Wolfenflickr (via Wonderland)

Shorpy, a photo-blog devoted to super-high-rez images from a century (or so) ago, like this magnificent 1924 shot of "clerks calculating the 'soldiers' bonus' for the War Department." Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog (Thanks, Mitch!)

In an attempt to put a halt to wandering pedestrians and cyclists, Shanghai police are going to post photos and videos of offenders all over the media—in newspapers, on TV—just to embarrass them. Some lawyers are protesting the system, saying that public humiliation is exaggerated punishment, and possibly defamatory, for such a minor infraction.

Crossing the street in Shanghai is like crossing the street in Manhattan—people wait for an opportunity and just do it, with little regard for what the traffic light says. Which makes me wonder how effective of a punishment this is. If they did it in NYC, people would probably either not give a crap or start posing for the camera. But being outed as a law-breaker is considered shameful—and maybe even a little scary—in China. I suppose police wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think it would work in the first place. Image by d'n'c' via Flickr

Police to shame jaywalkers on TV

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Archeologists in Mexico think they might have discovered Xibalba, a mythical Mayan underworld also known as the "place of fear." After some serious scuba diving and inching across deeply submerged underwater tunnels near the Yucatan peninsula, investigators reached an entrance to a bunch of dry chambers with the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and a 330-foot long road. There were also lots and lots of human bones. According to the ancient Mayan scripture Popol Vuh, the entrance to Xibalba was once protected by rivers filled with blood, scorpions, and pus, and houses swarming with shrieking bats.

Link to Reuters article
Xibalba on Wikipedia (Thanks, Baker!)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Boing Boing tv is taking a week off for organic yak-yogurt wrestling on a private Himalayan island; we leave you to enjoy some of our crew's favorite past episodes in the meantime.

"Gem sweater diva" and midwestern maven Leslie Hall has appeared twice on our show. The video featured above is a tour diary she recorded just for us. If you like that, check out our backstage visit with her during a stop in San Francisco, below. "With these shoulder pads, I have the strength to destroy villages, homes and crops."

Original BBtv posts:
* Leslie Hall: Dear Diary
* Leslie Hall: ceWEBrity, gem sweater diva, jammer of jams.

Annalee Newitz, Editor and Time Distortion Field Operator for science fiction blog io9.com, has posted a nonlegal legal complaint for injunctive relief from "possibly the worst movie ever made, the recently-released, straight-to-DVD flick The Mutant Chronicles."

Snip from the blog for Bush League, who are Boing Boing tv's (loopy, sometimes drunk, always hi-LAR-e-ous!) studiomates:

I desperately have to sign offline and move on with my life, but I just got hijacked by that guy who makes “tribute videos” of celebs singing. I found that he’s done them not just for Jer and Sinatra and Elvis and Marilyn and JFK, but for Diderot, Che, Voltaire, Blaze Starr, Brad Pitt, and King Frederick of Prussia. He just might be my brain-warping hero of YT this month.

The episode featured above is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "singing" Stride Toward Freedom from "the new music theater show Crisis in Camelot by Ernest R. Tello."

WTF? Wednesday (Bush League, thanks John Walsh!)

Today happens to be the anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The text-to-speech robots who secretly control Boing Boing consider this an appropriate homage; please forgive me if you do not. Here's video of Dr. King's historic speech, btw, all LOLs aside.

Above, a short experimental video by Thom Yorke. More please.

A little bird tells us that Radiohead are planning some kind of webcast from tonight's show in Santa Barbara, the last date <snif> on their North American tour. I saw them at Outside Lands in San Francisco on Aug 22, and the show was absolutely phenomenal.

More on Radiohead.com, sort of. Update: confirmed, more here. (thanks, Rex!)

Incidentally -- some noodling around on the band's blog digs up an older pro-net neutrality item from Colin Greenwood: "We didn't put In Rainbows out on the internet so that the next time AT&T would be releasing our music." Word.

Related: Sean Carlson was distributing flyers with a pal for this weekend's F Yeah Fest at the Radiohead Hollywood Bowl show, which I also hear was kickass. Sean's friend Michael Reich of Videothing.com was filming Sean and his friend for a documentary. Carlson says he was beaten up by goons from security firm CSC, contracted by the Hollywood Bowl. Here are photos and an account of the incident.

[A]fter Sean was pushed to the ground by a security guard, they decided to get out of there. But before they could get too far, a foot chase ensued because the security guards allegedly said "that shit's going to be on YouTube. We gotta get that tape."

(Thanks, Zach Behrens)

Update 2, 9:17pm PT: The webcast is live at radiohead.tv, and working very well on this Mac, snapshots below.