What happens when a legendary French taxidermy shop catches fire? "From Ashes, Reviving a Place of Wild Dreams" is the story of Deyrolle, a 177-year-old store once populated by stuffed zebras, bull heads, and preserved butterflies. When Deyrolle caught fire earlier this year, destroying much of its taxidermied contents, Parisians stepped in to help.
"From Ashes, Reviving a Place of Wild Dreams" and a slide show.Deyrolle’s stuffed menagerie — from black crows to big-game animals — its cases of butterflies and beetles, its signature pedagogic posters and century-old prints have made it a place of pilgrimage.
So after a short circuit triggered a fire in the shop, Paris seemed to come together in an unusual display of solidarity.
French soldiers on a routine patrol smelled the smoke and tried to secure the building. They were joined by dozens of firefighters and hundreds of police officers in battling the blaze. The French Army opened one of its nearby military depots as a warehouse for the burned animals and objects.
Michel Dumont, then the mayor of the Seventh Arrondissement, where Deyrolle is, rushed to the scene and lamented the store’s demise, saying, “It’s a catastrophe, the end of an institution.”
Ninety percent of the shop’s stock, including most of the animals, a celebrated fossil collection, an antique skeleton of a Nile perch and a 19th-century diorama of more than 100 birds, was lost. The dark-wood cabinets that housed birds, butterflies and beetles went up in flames.
But the 18th-century building remained intact. Prince Louis Albert de Broglie, a former banker who created a national conservatory with 650 varieties of tomatoes at his chateau, had bought the financially troubled Deyrolle in 2001 and eventually restored it to solvency. He vowed to rebuild.
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.
In the heyday of the guillotine during the French Revolution, it is said that many of the condemned were asked to blink for as long as possible after decapitation. While many reportedly did not blink at all, some complied for as long as thirty seconds. Still other observations describe much more specific reactions to stimuli following beheading. Consider the case of Languille, a convicted murderer who was guillotined in France. He was observed by Dr. Beaurieux during his execution at 5:30am on June 28th, 1905. As written in Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, here are the doctor's observations:
eToday has a photo gallery of female body builders. The photos are by Marton Schoeller, from his book, 
For the last few years I have focused heavily on environmental themes with my work. I think the stresses humans are putting on the ecosystem are the most serious problems we are facing, so it is difficult for me to paint about more personal issues or to do humorous work. I am always thinking about how fragile the world really is and how close elements of it are to collapsing.
Michael Stephan Fuchs's 2006 novel The Manuscript is just what a technothriller should be: taut, violent, smart, and very, very technical. There's plenty of "technothrillers" where the two key elements -- weapons and computers -- are treated as magic stage-props, able to do anything (or be confounded by anything) that moves the plot along. They're written by writers who confuse "programmers" with "network administrators" and think that 200 years from now, "mainframes" will be important and sexy (rather than ancient and useless).
Aftershock, run by the Institute for the Future and Art Center College of Design, is based on a 300-page U.S. Geological Survey scenario report that details the extensive damage that Southern California could experience in the aftermath of a 7.8-magnitude quake on the San Andreas Fault. The game began on Thursday and will run for three weeks, prompting users to complete real-world missions — and submit content based on them to the gaming community. 
Over at BB Gadgets, Rob spotted this delightful LED Motherboard Menorah for Hanukkah. It's $25 from Fredlare.com but I'm sure not a difficult DIY project. They should offer a kit version of this too!
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After days of resistance, I have finally succumbed to the cuteness of the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam. Live streaming puppy play, all day, every day. "The six Shiba Inu pups (3 boys and 3 girls) turned 5 weeks old on November 11th. This is the first litter from their mom, Kika."
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