Rachel Hulin (former photo editor at Nerve) is doing get-out-the-vote in battleground state Wisconsin, and documents this choice example of anti-Obama propaganda flyers being stuffed in mailboxes, in the guise of a letter directly from "Barack Hussein Obama II."
Joshua Gill says: "Last year I went to a Korean Folk village in Suwon, South Korea. I took some video and put it on Youtube, this one is my favorite but you're welcome to browse around. "
Alex Pham of the LA Times wrote a piece about a typewriter repair shop in Los Angeles that's enjoying a small resurgence.
The simplicity of the typewriter is alluring to writers who may be overwhelmed (or underwhelmed) by increasingly elaborate technology. A typewriter is also appealing in its transparency -- whack a key, and watch the typebar smack a letter onto a piece of paper. Try figuring that out with a laser printer. Many people also find typewriters charming ambassadors of a bygone era. One recent customer asked Flores to fix her mother's college typewriter so she could type letters home when she went off to college.
All that helps to keep U.S. Office Machine humming at its inconspicuous corner of Figueroa Street and Avenue 58. Watch the video to see how three generations of the Flores family have helped keep the typewriting tradition alive.
Brandon McClelland, 24, was dragged to death beneath a truck driven by two white men in Paris, Texas last month. McClelland was black. The site of his death is about 200 miles from the location where James Byrd was murdered in a similar manner ten years ago. (Image at left: Jacqueline McClelland, Brandon's mother; photo courtesy Jesse Muhammad.)
McClelland's murder took place on September 16, 2008. Parts of his mangled body were found strewn along the highway at great distance.
First responders treated the case as a hit and run. The county district attorney's office denied the possibility of racist motivations, and said comparisons to the Byrd lynching were "preposterous."
Some bloggers and news sites associated with the Nation of Islam [ * ] have been discussing the killing as a hate crime for weeks, and claim local law enforcement ignored key forensic evidence at the crime scene.
Howard Witt at the Chicago Tribune, who has covered related stories about racial injustice and hate crimes in this region,wrote about the case as a possible hate crime earlier this month.
The story of McClelland's death -- and allegations the investigation by (white) local police investigators was botched -- seems to be gaining broader attention after having been picked up by AP today: Another Dragging Death In Texas (Associated Press).
Snip from a related story about racism in Paris, Texas, also from Witt at the Chicago Tribune:
The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place. There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.
One of the most widely-publicized lynchings of a black person in American history took place there 115 years ago. On February 1, 1893, former slave Henry Smith was tortured to death in front of a crowd of ten thousand (mostly or entirely white) people. Here is the New York Times article from that day, documenting the brutal details of his death in explicit detail.
The child's father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible--the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons--plenty of fresh ones being at hand--were rolled up and down Smith's stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.
Another snip from that century-old NYT story, which presumed Smith was guilty, and deserved the lynching:
Whisky shops were closed, unruly mobs were dispersed, schools were dismissed by a proclamation from the mayor, and everything was done in a business-like manner.
This must be viewed in light of the Ashley Todd incident this week. Todd made up a false story that a black man attacked her and carved a "B" in her face, ostensibly because she supports John McCain. In Paris, Texas, a hundred years ago, a charge like that would get a black man burned alive. Today it doesn't go quite that far but you could see the shadow of the lynch mob forming in the darker corners of the right-wing blogosphere when the Todd story first circulated.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has an interactive map of racist organizations and businesses (think: White Pride record stores, KKK branches) in this part of Texas, which you can view here. [ * ] Incidentally, SLPC also categorizes the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party as "hate groups."
Danny Hellman is a terrific illustrator who contributed a lot of work to bOING bOING, the print zine. He recently set me a copy of a comic anthology he edited and published called Typhon and I'm impressed by the quality of the large cast of contributors.
The stories in Typhon focus on some heavy themes, and aren't for the squeamish. On of my favorite stories is a near the front of this fat anthology, called "Hail Jeffrey" by Hans Rickheit. The seven-page comic is about a child dictator who takes pleasure in destroying the lives of everyone around him, and nobody dares stop him. In fact, they assist help him in his efforts to make others miserable. It's like an NC-17 version of The Twilight Zone's "It's a Good Life," only the Billy Mumy character gets all his power from the fear of everyone around him.
Of course, Hellman's contribution to the book is one of the best. Here's a sample page. (Click for full size). I have always loved his clean line work.
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.
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.
Bookride presents an enjoyable series of anecdotes about crabby booksellers.
One must not forget the Birmingham dealer, who on being asked for a discount for books would tear them in half in front of the customer. What particularly irked him was the phrase 'What can you do on this?' A red mist would descend and he would reply 'I'll show you what I can do on this...' and tore up the book. One imagines that this was selective, possibly only books under £20. Not a wise business stratagem but probably quite satisfying...
This bookdealer reminds me of my beloved friend Loretta. About 10 years ago she had a garage sale. Carla and I were there and we watched as some guy tried to talk her into selling an ashtray, priced at 25 cents, for a dime. Loretta wouldn't budge, and the guy kept pestering her. Finally Loretta whacked the ashtray on a table, breaking it in two. "I said no!" she told the guy. The expression on the guy's face is one of my fondest memories.
Yet more Bastards with Bookshops
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Solid Alliance has introduced a USB flash drive in the form of a skull ring. It has a capacity of 2GB, sells for $150 from Geek Stuff 4 U, and comes in a variety of fashionable colors. Skull flash drive(Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
John Moe, host of American Public Media's Weekend America radio show, tells Boing Boing:
For Weekend America's Halloween show this year we invited some writers to come up with scary stories that last no longer than half a minute. We did it last year too and it was lots of fun. I figure scary stories are fun but honestly who has time for the whole "he walked down the hall, step...by...step" nonsense, GET TO THE ACTION, I always say.
So this year we have an interesting crew: David Rakoff, Dana Gould, comics creator Richard Sala, a children's book writer, a horror writer, all adhering to the strict 30 seconds or less rule.
BB pal Nate Tyler has been working on the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania for the last few weeks. He's in Scranton, and he shares this with us:
We just came across this amazing artist in rural PA who, with a group of local artist friends, painted a large-scale replica of the Obama Hope poster in his field. I was just out there and it's pretty amazing.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The latest MAKE: Weekend Project video guides you in the creation of an old-school Battlestar Galactica Cylon pumpkin complete with the scanning LED eye. Cylon Jack O' Lantern
As I trust you recall, this was a dark ride on the Universal Studios Tour in the early eighties that was ENTIRELY NON FICTIONAL, and which I visited when I was a human child. The ride was a BSG 1.0 tie-in in which your Universal Studios tram is captured by Cylons who apparently are attempting to invade the San Fernando Valley. They then hold your tram hostage in a makeshift space station, shooting their lasers around until you are rescued by two Colonial Warriors.
As I stressed to the people of Washington, it is important to know that the Colonial Warriors were not animatronic -- they were played by ACTUAL HUMAN ACTORS. (The Cylons, by contrast, were indeed animatronic, which I guess is another way of saying they were played by ACTUAL INHUMAN ROBOTS).
BUT: what I did not discover until years later, as I was piecing together my strange memories of this attraction via internet, was that these actors NEVER SPOKE. Instead, their lines were pre-recorded years before, presumably by other, better actors, and played over a loudspeaker -- a weird kind of torture which makes the ride now seem much more scary.
RECENTLY I discovered some amazing behind the scenes videos of the ride, presumably shot by these very actors, including one in which you actually follow along behind a Colonial Warrior as he runs through the ride doing his weird space mime, gesturing his head as though he were speaking. See "Following a Hero" -- the video portion begins after a series of stills.
I AM ESPECIALLY FOND of the video of the Battle of Galactica break room called "Back Stage at Battle of Galactica." See if you can spot the barbell, the completely incongruous map on the wall, and the man dressed as a Colonial Warrior writing a letter home. A letter which presumably contains only the word "WHY?" written over and over and over.
AS AN accidental TV personality and wholly fraudulent "actor," I often enjoy looking at this video whenever my head gets too big (usually at 10AM, and then again at 4PM).
MANY THANKS INDEED to Dale Long of byyourcommand.net, which is pretty much your one stop shop for BATTLE OF GALACTICA photos and videos.
Pamphlet review of 1948's "Behind the Lace Curtains of the YWCA" written by Joseph P. Kamp, an uncle of Jon Voight and a great uncle of Angelina Jolie.
Cool looking photos of the body scanners the TSA is using in airports. Wouldn't this one be a great radioactive extraterrestrial for a scary movie?
TSA body scanner images
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
A giant Golden Orb Weaver spider caught a chestnut-breasted mannikin bird in its web and made a leisurely lunch on the bird. The photo was snapped in a backyard in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. From the Cairns Post:
"Normally they prey on large insects, it's unusual to see one eating a bird," (said head spider keeper Joel Shakespeare at the Australian Reptile Park.)
Mr Shakepeare told ninemsn he had seen golden orb weaver spiders as big as a human hand but the northern species in tropical areas were known to grow larger...
"(The spider) wouldn`t eat the whole bird," he told ninemsn.
"It uses its venom to break down the bird for eating and what it leaves is a food parcel," he said.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Several students at Parkway West Middle School in suburban St. Louis are facing suspension for inventing "Hit A Jew Day," during which they smacked Jewish students.
District officials said Thursday they believe that fewer than 10 children of the district's 35 Jewish students were struck.
District spokesman Paul Tandy said that in most cases, the students were hit on the back of their shoulders but one student was slapped in the face.
It began with an unofficial "Spirit Week" among sixth-graders that started harmlessly enough with a "Hug a Friend Day." Then there was "High Five Day."
Soon, though, the days moved from friendly to silly. Next there was "Hit a Tall Person Day" and, finally, "Hit a Jew Day."
William Smith, an online bookseller and blogger at Hang Fire Books, acquired a stack of old Sexology magazines. Sexology was one of publisher Hugo Gernsback's many titles (his most famous being Amazing Stories). Here's an illustration using obelisks to compare the difference between the "auto-erotic act" and the "normal marital act."
You can easily see--through the dramatic difference in "the height and girth of the obelisk[s]"--that the "gratification derived from the auto-erotic act is only about 60% as much as that of the normal marital act". But hey, I'm an obelisk half-full kind of guy.
Over at NYT finance correspondent Floyd Norris' excellent blog, a snip from a terrifying report out today from The Levy Forecasting Center at Bard College. Norris says they've "Been among the most worried – and therefore, most accurate – forecasters over the past several years." Dear God, I hope they are wrong.
Most investors, businesses, and analysts, despite their deep pessimism about the consumer outlook, will be surprised by the length and severity of the consumer pullback.
The public is starting to discover the seriousness of the state and local fiscal position, but the magnitude and fallout of the developing nonfederal government crisis will prove shocking.
Many fear that the present financial mess is setting the stage for surging Treasury yields, and most will be surprised by how low yields will fall. . . .
House prices will probably fall another 20%. . . .
The emerging market sector of the global economy is facing more than a financial crisis; it is facing a depression, which unfortunately is likely to be uncontained and severe in many countries. . . .
Even if the recession does end before 2010, employment will continue to decline. It is likely to fall for another year or two as downsizing and restructuring persist. The unemployment rate is likely to reach 8.5% by the end of 2009 and will be near 10% before it reverses.
My friend Jim Munroe's just adapted his fantastic slideshow, "Time Management for Anarchists" into a free, Creative Commons-licensed comic:
Time Management for Anarchists, a comic offering productivity tips for
creative malcontents, has just been released as a Creative Commons
licenced free download.
In a timeshifted Toronto, political firebrand Emma Goldman is paying the
rent as a graphic designer… just a few cubicles down from like-minded
radical Mikhail Bakunin.
Scientists at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium found a cute deep-water squid that looks like a fat little cartoon piggie:
Piglet Squid, Helicocranchia pfefferi: This funny looking squid is about the size of a small avocado and can be found most commonly in the deepwater (greater than 100 m or 320 ft) of virtually all oceans. Its habit of filling up with water and the funny location of its siphone with a wild-looking 'tuft' of eight arms and two tentacles had prompted scientists to name it the piglet squid.
On the Freedom to Tinker blog, Timothy Lee explores the irrelevance of the economic notion of "free riding" when it comes to many kinds of online collaboration. As Lee notes, many thinkers on this subject have talked about how projects like Wikipedia "overcome" the free-rider anxiety (the idea that someone else will benefit from your labor without having to contribute to it), but that's not quite right: when someone else's enjoyment of your labor costs you nothing, and buys you fame, then you don't have a free-rider problem at all:
The second problem with the "free riding" frame is that it fails to appreciate that the sheer scale of the Internet changes the nature of collective action problems. With a traditional meatspace institution like a church, business or intramural sports league, it's essential that most participants "give back" in order for the collective effort to succeed. The concept of "free riding" emphasizes the fact that traditional offline institutions expect and require reciprocation from the majority of their members for their continued existence. A church in which only, say, one percent of members contributed financially wouldn't last long. Neither would an airline in which only one percent of the customers paid for their tickets.
Since the beginning of India's IT boom Bangalore has been the darling of globalization pundits and and development dreamers. The gist, as Thomas Friedman articulates it, is that the world is flattening so that workers and companies can compete for opportunities from anywhere on the planet. Bangalore, of course, is the shiniest example of globalization's success. However, what has been occluded from the discussion is how the massive investments and capital flows into Bangalore have also contributed to the rise of a powerful and violent mafia. Bangalore's economy is growing much faster than its judicial, regulatory and enforcement systems. The gap has proved to be fertile ground for an unregulated, informal and often criminal systems to fill the space.
In this month's issue of WIRED magazine I wrote a story called "The Godfather of Bangalore" where I showed how underworld dons have taken control of many of the city's land dealings by providing an alternate judicial system to mediate land claims. There is no easy way to solve a land dispute in India. Inherited parcels are often contested by dozens of semi-legitimate claimants and court cases routinely take 15 years to come to a judgment. But the pace of land development is relentless, and companies and wealthy individuals don't want to wait for the wheels of justice to finish, they want immediate resolutions.
The New Scientist has the skinny on the latest salvo in the war on Darwin: a resurrection of Cartesian dualism, with the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard:
Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?
Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.
We’ve had about half a dozen returns for tonight’s “Piracy vs Obscurity” event at the Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell, London, UK - the first date on Neil's UK tour and a special Open Rights Group benefit gig. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, and you’d like to attend, email info [AT] openrightsgroup [DOT] org and we’ll try and squeeze you in.
Tickets are £10 (or £5 for ORG supporters) payable in cash on the door. In return you’ll get to hear ORG's illustrious patron talk about piracy from the perspective of the creator, you’ll get to quiz him on his views and work, and you’ll even get the chance to win a copy of his new title The Graveyard Book.
Date: Today!
Time: 1900 for 1930
Place: The Crypt on the Green, St James Church, Clerkenwell, Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0EA, UK
Tax: £10 on the door, or £5 for ORG supporters (but NB email info [AT] openrightsgroup [DOT] org to be sure to get your name on the list!)
Duke University Press has just released an expanded edition of “Bound By Law”, the comic book by three law profs about copyright, fair use, and documentary film. It includes a wonderful new Introduction by BoingBoing’s own Cory Doctorow and Foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, and is freely available under a Creative Commons license.
From Cory’s Introduction: "This is a sensible book about a ridiculous subject. It’s an example of the principle it illustrates: that taking from the culture around us to make new things is what culture is all about, it's what culture is for. Culture is that which we use to communicate.
"The comic form makes this issue into something less abstract, more concrete, and the Duke Public Domain folks who produced this have not just written a treatise on copyright, they’ve produced a loving tribute to the form of comics.
"It’s a book whose time has come. Read it, share it. Get angry. Do something. Document your world."
Matt "Metafilter" Haughey's laid out a 10-point plan for winning the nerd vote that I heartily endorse -- this is a platform I'd stand up and salute if any politician had the guts to endorse it. The points are: Broadband everywhere, universal healthcare, no federal tax on Internet purchases, renewed commitment to education, renewed commitment to science, real changes to transportation, early voting by mail, revamping copyright, a better job from the patent office, and open government.
1. Broadband Everywhere. I want crazy South Korea/Japan style broadband I've heard about for years: 100Mbps (upload and download) fiber connections for less than $50/month with unlimited bandwidth and the ability to run your own servers. I know the US is a big spread out country and it makes this stuff somewhat difficult/costly, but it's an ambitious goal with a ton of payoff. We don't have manufacturing jobs in the US anymore: we don't make things, we don't build things, we don't sew things here, but we do have lots of ideas and inventions.
The economy of the future in the US is going to be intertwined with the internet and if every man, woman, and child in America has all the internet access they could ever need and could quickly program, build, and deploy their own stuff on their own mega-fast lines, we'd have a million and one programmers and designers and crafters and more contributing to a new vibrant future economy. If fiber everywhere is too much, at least get 3G coverage in more places.
T-Mobile's new Google Android phone, the G1, is not as open as you'd hope -- all the good hardware is sandboxed off from the development environment and requires a signature to run. But hackers are already working to crack open the firmware. From the #android channel on Freenode:
I hacked my camera's firmware manually by using an exploit to cause it to execute arbitrary code - and then blinking out the entire firmware in 0's and 1's on the autofocus LED - read in by a photo transistor attached to a sound cable plugged into my microphone port - and then put back into 0's and 1's... Then disassembled the ARM9 code in it and worked on porting CHDK to it... I'm pretty sure having a whole OS at my disposal should make this a lot easier
Here's a lovely Instructable from Scoochmaroo, explaining how to make an edible (well, more edible) brain out of a watermelon -- suitable for vegan zombies.
# Slice off bottom of watermelon so it won't roll around.
# Peel green skin off of the watermelon.
# Score brainy folds in white flesh.
# With a sharp paring knife, carve channels out of melon to resemble cortical folds.
Iain sez, "Icelanders hit back at the freezing of assets under terror legislation by the UK Government. Postcards of cute Icelanders in cuter knitwear."
Icelanders Are Not Terrorists
(Thanks, Iain!)
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.
The latest MAKE: Weekend Project video guides you in the creation of an old-school Battlestar Galactica Cylon pumpkin complete with the scanning LED eye.
Time Management for Anarchists, a comic offering productivity tips for
creative malcontents, has just been released as a Creative Commons
licenced free download.
We’ve had about half a dozen returns for tonight’s “Piracy vs Obscurity” event at the Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell, London, UK - the first date on Neil's UK tour and a special Open Rights Group benefit gig. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, and you’d like to attend, email info [AT] openrightsgroup [DOT] org and we’ll try and squeeze you in.
