“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.
In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”
I'm off on my family holiday and won't be back until 2009, so I wanted to drop one last post in the queue for the wild and wooly 2008 -- a year that was busy and wonderful and that ended a little scarily. We moved continents and had a baby; I wrote two books and published three; went on a book tour and spent a month in Asia researching the next book; and to top it all off, got married three times on two continents (to the same woman!).
It's been a fantastic year, thanks to you folks. It's been an especially great year for me, writing-wise. The UK edition of Little Brother, my first young adult novel, is selling briskly, and the US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover's selling so well that my publisher's delayed the paperback for a year!). The book's made just about everyone's best-of lists for 2008: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, Amazon Editors' Picks, Amazon top teen books, Richie's Picks, Book Sense, VOYA, TeenReads, Texas Library Association, io9 -- not to mention a whopping haul of awards and award-nominations: Emperor Norton Award, ALA's YALSA Award, Cybils Award, Prometheus Award, Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, the ALA Printz Award and the Nebula Award! My agents are doing some serious talking with a film studio (though nothing's ever final until it's signed and delivered), and there are more overseas publishers signing up every month to do their own editions.
Best of all is all the fan-stuff -- videos, art, readings, translations, adaptations... All the stuff that takes advantage of the Creative Commons license to remake Little Brother to better suit the readers (and man, do I get awesome email from readers, from security researchers at Microsoft to activist students in rural schools). And of course, I was floored by the generosity of the donors who sent hundreds of copies of the book to libraries, schools, halfway houses, and shelters as a way of saying thanks for the CC license.
Who the hell knows what'll happen in 2009? It's definitely the most uncertain new year I can remember. One thing I'm sure of, though, is that whatever happens, we'll all figure it out together, that the Internet will make it possible for us to bug-in and help each other here at home, rather than heading for a defensive position in the hills. Crappy economies are often the home of wonderful Bohemias. Two recessions ago, I dropped out of school to become a computer programmer. In the last one, I quit the company I'd co-founded and went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that I'm a parent -- and now that I'm a little older -- I feel the risk a lot more keenly than I did then. But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they've ever been.
Have a fantastic holiday. Remind the people who matter to you of that fact. Ring in the new year with a big grin, and I'll see you all in 2009.
Wendy and her co-author Richard Webb conducted extensive interviews with members of WAMM (The Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana) - the patient collective that exemplifies the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" ethos when it comes to pot medicine.
In this excerpt, Wendy talks a bit about how boring ole' cannabis became demon "mari-juana," in D.E.A. history.
Exciting news! My friend and longtime colleague Steve Doss and I have been working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week non-stop (except Thanksgiving Day) to build what we think is a pretty remarkable (in many ways) new mobile app - SeeqPod Mobile for Windows Mobile.
We wanted to get the word out that we're giving away free downloads of the app starting today (we'll start selling it for $9.95 on Monday, which is still about half of what most Windows Mobile apps cost, and this one is way cooler).
Steve and I have been collaborators for several years. I did all of the design and user experience architecture, putting everything I know about making a great product cool and easy to use. Steve's been a successful mobile app designer (he's an artist, musician, programmer, and all-around genius renaissance guy). He figured out how to do lots of things that other apps don't do on the Windows Mobile platform.
We've built in a range of interchangeable color themes and skins, including a Steampunk skin (in honor of Boing Boing fans everywhere). The architecture allows customizability, so eventually we will have many skins available and people will be able to add to a growing collection of skins.
We also support both QVGA (320x240) and VGA (640x480) displays, which will be cool for people with the newest generation of Windows Mobile phones.
The village has a population of around 800 and is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges (the reason for the low temperatures). The name Oymyakon means "non-freezing water" because of the natural hot spring close to the village.
The temperature this week is pretty low and the temperature tomorrow is a chilly -63C which based on the stats at Wikipedia equals the record low for December.
As I was making bath bombs to give for Christmas I felt a little heartburn. I reached for the Alka Seltzer... Wow... $8.99 for 36 tablets! One dose is made of 2 tablets, so that comes to 50 cents per dose. Then I looked at the active ingredients. Citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. Exactly what I was using for the bath bombs! Sour salt and baking soda! I made a rapid calculation: one dose comes to 2 grams of citric acid, and 3.88 grams of baking soda. If I figure that citric acid costs $4/lb and baking soda is $1/lb, the exact same dose of alka selzer's active ingredients would cost me about 2.5 cents to make myself.... Twenty times less than the store bought version! OK to be fair, I didn't figure the cost of filler, and the store bought alka selzer also contained aspirin, but I neither needed nor wanted the aspirin. Even if you end up spending more on the citric acid and less for the Alka Seltzer than I did, you'll still come out ahead.
On Tuesday a 16-year-old boy caught vandalizing at Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach, CA walked the streets for five hours with a sandwich board that read "I have wasted your tax money with dumb acts of vandalism in the public schools." His father made him wear the sandwich board.
Baltimore, Sr., found out about the vandalism Monday, when his son's school called him and told him the damages would cost $875. He said his son was trying to get attention when he tagged a fictitious gang logo on school property.
Baltimore, Jr., was suspended for four days, and ordered by the school to spend several days of his holiday vacation doing community service on Wilson's campus. He will be painting over graffiti and doing other chores.
Aside from whether or not you think it's an insult to entertain a notorious bigot at the television event of the year, why isn't Obama worrying more about Warren's charlatan-tastic profile?
If I was an underwriter, I'd say this guy has all the "tells" of a big risk.
Deja vu: major Fundie evangelist can't stop talking about how disgusting gay people are, comparing them to incestors and pedophiles. Decries loose women having abortions. Demands his enemies be offed. Then caps it all off with how much he "loves" everybody. Send your check now!
Warren has all the earmarks we saw with Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, David "DiaperPants" Vitter, et al. It's a bad rerun.
If this dude isn't found in a bathroom with a wide stance and a hooker in the next year, someone's not doing their job. Paging Jeff Gannon!
I have a different pastor for Obama to consider, if he'd like to take a second look...
(Photo: Screen capture from video of a Saddleback church service Orange County Register)
Snip from a New York Times op-ed calling for action from the Obama administration to reverse the legislation of impunity by the outgoing administration:
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.
It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.
The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.
Above, a piece by "brain artist" Marjorie Taylor. Curator Bill Harbaugh explains,
This is the world's largest extant collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art. Inspired by research from neuroscience, dissection and neuroeconomics, our current exhibition features three quilts with functional images from PET and fMRI scanning and a knitted brain. The artists are Marjorie Taylor and Karen Norberg. Techniques used include quilting, applique, embroidery, beadwork, knitting, and crocheting. Materials include fabric, yarn, metallic threads, electronic components such as magnetic core memory, and wire, zippers, and beads
I'm not convinced this isn't a hoax or viral marketing campaign, since "strange news blackout" can also mean "didn't actually happen." Even if it's fictional internet lore, it's notable as such. (Appears to be real). An anonymous friend of BB says,
There seems to be a strange news blackout around the horrifying story of the "Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs", three Ukranian teens who apparently recently performed a series of staggeringly violent serial killings and recorded them on cellphone video and then attended the victims' funerals. Supposedly this is some of the first actual video of this kind of crime that has made it into the wild of the internet - the perspective of the deranged killer.
If you Google-news "Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs," little if anything comes up, but the video and story is all over the gore/shock sites, putting them ahead of the news organizations here in the US.
I can't watch the video, and only came across the story by cruising Encyclopedia Dramatica for teh (non-violent, tsk-tsking) lulz, but I glimpsed some stills and felt a little more heartsick about humankind because of it.
A NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR: I don't want to see any more comments from people who read Xeni's description, watched the video anyway, and are complaining about how horrifying it is. Yes! It's horrifying! If you don't want to see that, don't watch the video. Furthermore, those of you who feel that stuff like this should not be given attention are hereby invited to (1.) not watch the video, and (2.) not post comments about it, either. (Ignoring: ur doin it rong.) Thank you.
p.s.: There's a large stash of unicorn chasers further down the thread. Use as needed.
--Teresa Nielsen Hayden
UPDATE: An anonymous commenter in the discussion thread for this post writes:
Hello all. I am from Ukraine, I live in Kiev, but at that time i worked with a girl whose family lived in the same entrance of the multistoried building as one of those teenagers. I remember the horror when she was speaking about what was going on and the shock when she knew it was her neighbor. What we know from the news is... they were 3. One of them was likely an initiator (his surname was Supruniuk) and second one supported him. The third one was kinda acting under the pressure. Nobody knows what moved them, because they rarely robbed. They just liked to kill, those who were weaker than they. It is totally sick, totally criminal. Some newspapers wrote that they might have been under the cover of the dad of this Supruniuk...that he kinda was selling those videos online. N tht he was trying to hide the evindece (smb threw mobile phones in the lavatory)... Some say that they got more pending crimes imposed upon them by police. They are very calm during interrogation, etc. Their parents can not believe. In the phone of one of them police found some nazi images... What can i say... I dont want to ever watch anything about that or know anything more than i know. Their souls are sick. May God do something to that.. Regards, Margaret
This crapping robot toilet-paper holder manages to signal your literacy, robophilia, and deep commitment to bowel evacuation, all in one simple package. Bravo!
Moe sez, "In Minnesota's Senate race, the candidates are now just 5 votes apart. The courts, sorting through ballot challenges, finds the leader (by 5 votes) had tried to have a ballot rejected because of stray markings.
And what were the stray markings?
In addition to the actual vote, a voter had also written 'Thank you for counting my vote.'"
Last June, I posted about the lamps from Design Heure, which feature a small slide projector that throws a single image on a nearby wall. The company's just launched its new line and there are some lovely pieces in it.
Joey Anuff tells the story of how he came into possession of a giant treasure trove of Harvey Kurtzman original art. (Kurtzman is best known as the founder of Mad and creator of the Little Annie Fanny comic strip that ran in Playboy.)
Here's an excerpt:
Take a look at the scan gallery I've assembled below and you'll get a sense of what Denis showed us: the virgin files of the Harvey Kurtzman Estate. A publisher's estate spanning three publications -- Trump, Humbug, and Help! -- and an artist's estate rich in work from the least-familiar, most mature decade of his career, roughly 1955-1965.
Picture setting your grubby eyes and paws on all that Holy Grail material -- not just the stuff below but also roughs and finals for seemingly every Humbug page, the entire Jungle Book minus the cover, a pile of amazing Annie breakdowns, among other lost treasures -- and not instantly scheming ways to smuggle it home. As a graduate of both the late-'90s tech bubble and the late-'80s comics boom, and as a market-averse twenty-something in search of a safe haven for his chumpy change, it wasn't long before I'd convinced myself that in the Kurtzman Estate, I was finally looking, at long last, at a 401(k) I could actually believe in.
Superyachtsman (and VC) Tom Perkins is said to have made his motto "When you have a great opportunity, push all the chips, all the resources that you can, to the center of the table." Something along those lines (more likely, something about Greatest Fools) became my motto that summer as Denis and I inched through terms. And after some no-nonsense pricing on my part, a nice meeting with Adele Kurtzman herself at the '99 San Diego Comic Con, and a thorough hi-res digitization by the Kitchen Art Agency, I finally became the tingly-toed owner of approximately 40 lbs. of blue-chip comic book art.
The concept is similar to my long out-of-print book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons (1994), only this time its all Warner Bros. Cartoons and we will highlight the top one hundred. In 1994, for my previous book, we didn't have the Internet to do the poll (nor did I have a blog). It should be exciting to see what the consensus of the online world is.
I'll cull the final one hundred out of what titles we receive by January 9th - and I'll credit all online contributors with an acknowledgment in the book.
Digital Foundations takes the formal principles and exercises of the Bauhaus and uses them to teach hands on design software exercises. These are supplemented with historical visual examples from the public domain and contemporary creative commons licensed work. As Media Arts professors my co-author xtine burrough and I were tired of design software books that left out aesthetics, and history. Or worse: gave terrible examples complete with author's vacation photographs, drop shadows, and the watercolor filter!
We are thrilled to have the book in print... with a Creative Commons license! This is a first for AIGA Design Press, New Riders, and Peachpit, and the result of 9 months of negotiation. The whole book was written on a wiki and that is all available for use under a CC license.
We are reaping the fruit of that license already: February 6-8 Adam Hyde and his FLOSSmanuals.net crew are going to come to Eyebeam in NYC to translate the book from Adobe to FLOSS applications.
Who can blame Galveston plainclothes police who thought a 12-year-old girl standing outside her house (flipping the switch on the circuit breaker as her mother has asked her to do) was a prostitute? After all, she was wearing "tight shorts" according to the vigilant officers, and she happened to live only two blocks away from a location where someone had complained that prostitution was taking place.
So the three brave officers did the natural thing: they allegedly jumped the girl and beat her up, according to Courthouse News and the Houston Press.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.
As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.
After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.
I guess the silly family expected an apology from the police. Like I said, silly. Instead, here's what happened.
Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.
UPDATE: This case was filed on 22nd August 2008, and the alleged attacked occurred in August 2006, according to this court document. Here is the Courthouse News article.
I emailed Radley Balko about the apparent age discrepancy that some commentator have brought up. On a couple of social networking pages, the girls says she's 17, which would have made her 15 in 2006, not 12, as the article indicates. Radley says:
My guess would be that she exaggerated her age on her profile for those pages (as teen girls will do).
This track results page puts her birth year at 1993. If her birthday comes later than August, she'd have been 12 when the incident took place.
Tonight in San Francisco, Creative Commons is celebrating its sixth birthday with a party at 111 Minna Gallery.
There will be a special live performance by Jimmy Tamborello (of The Postal Service), frosty, Professor Cataloupe, and matthewdavid - who will be representing LA radio/art collective Dublab with an improv session based on the hundreds of 8-second sound loops that are part of the remixable CC-licensed art and music exhibition Into Infinity (http://intoinfinity.org). The very awesome Kid Kameleon and DJ Ripley will be playing music throughout the night.
The event is 21+. There's a hosted bar from 9pm-11pm, and a cash bar from 11pm-2am.
Tickets will be sold at the door, but please RSVP to rsvp@creativecommons.org so we know you're coming.
Joe sez, "Neuros has published its first round of bounties for its new Ubuntu powered set-top device, the LINK. The bounties are largely Ubuntu tweaking on the Neuros hardware, which is pretty standard x86 components. Ownership of the device isn't necessary for completing the bounties, although its a help for some of them."
1.) Netflix
$2500 to get it working, connecting directly with the Netflix service
$500 to get it working using PC software as an intermediary (ala MediaMall PlayOn but preferably something open source)
Conditions:
1.Working. Can still have plenty of rough edges and doesn't have to demonstrate all the features, but we need to be able to play movies on a LINK in our office with it.
2. Have to beat Boxee to the functionality, which is planned for early '09. Once Boxee works on Ubuntu, the problem will have already been solved.
3. Have to beat Netflix to the functionality. It has been stated that Ubuntu will be a supported operating system, and once that client comes out this bounty is null and void.
3. Documentation to replicate or a downloadable package for the LINK.
I've never tried the Zuca Pro ultraluggage, but the heavy traveler in me responds to it in an absolutely visceral way. It's got a built-in seat and internal, stacking drawer-like sub-luggages, and it fits into overheads. If only I hadn't sworn off two-wheeled luggage for four-wheeled spinners, I'd seriously consider this thing.
This project is especially awesome as a European company sells a licensed replica for 990 euros. MPR's project (not a replica, but a chair that functions in the same way) uses a $35 chair from Costco. This sort of homemade ingenuity and beauty made me think of Make.
JD: [W]hat I really enjoyed was the stories. Some of those are pretty wild and pretty intense. The political section is almost scary. Can you say a bit about that?
HIS: Yeah, well some of the trip stories are pretty intense too. But you're probably referring to the story involving Mary Pinchot, who was one of President Kennedy's lovers. And it seems pretty clear that she involved Leary in a successful conspiracy to turn JFK on to LSD. The material, in this case, is from his autobiography, Flashbacks. But in Flashbacks, this particular narrative was sprinkled throughout the book as you go through his life chronologically. When you actually isolate the sections about Pinchot and then stitch them together as an entry, it makes a stronger impression.
The other thing you may be referring to is the conversation at the end of the book that Leary had with a hardball Swiss political operative with various intelligence connections while he was in exile from the U.S. government in Switzerland. The entry is almost painful in its sophistication and leaves the book on a solemn note — we are still all prisoners of men who lust for power, from Leary's point of view.
This story is by farmer/blogger Andy Griffin, of Mariquita Farms, who co-owns the CSA veggie-box scheme I belong to. He writes a weekly Ladybug Letter, that our members read religiously!
The Christmas miracle on the road to Oaxaca
By Andy Griffin
Until the Aswan Dam plugged her up, the Nile River flooded every year, spreading her chocolate waters across the land of Egypt, depositing the rich sediment of eroded topsoil from the heart of Africa to fuel another year's productivity in the fields.
As regular as the Nile's rising waters, a seasonal flow of migrant Mexican farm workers heads south from the States, going home for the Christmas holidays. Like the Nile, they carry with them a load of riches to deposit from one end of Mexico to the other. Pick-up trucks and TV sets, kitchen appliances and talking baby dolls, chainsaws, mattresses and blow driers -- anything that is more expensive to obtain in Mexico than here, will end up riding the river of people back home.
This yearly tide of travelers has spawned a parasite class of thieves, extortionists, and pick-pockets, who line the highways home. Crooks are crooks the world over, but among the various rateros who afflict the homecoming Mexican farm workers, the most reprehensible element is the corrupted law enforcement officers of their own government.
The plot is about physical and sexual abuse in a religious cult... and a couple who escapes from the "pod" and begins to consensually re-enact some of the same rituals.
I've known Greta since we both worked at On Our Backs in our babyhood, but at that time, oddly, I had no idea she could write.
Now, I'm trying to make up for lost time...
Greta, has any of your writing been produced in popular movies?
Well, I wrote the narration for a video how-to guide on electrical sex toys, titled "Our Friend the Volt."
You were raised as an atheist, but when do you remember being fascinated with the "cult" experience?
I wouldn't describe myself as fascinated by cults, although I do find religion to be a compelling subject.
It sounds like you want to know is what inspired me to write this piece. It's not a very nice story, but it is a true one, so I'll tell it.
I was watching a documentary about Jim Jones (of Jonestown fame) and his People's Temple. At the point in the story where things were starting to go wrong in the church, it said that members who disobeyed the rules were punished by being spanked.
It's a terrible story. They described the incidents -- and what they called "spanked," I would call "badly beaten." But there's a deeply ingrained part of my mind and my libido that inevitably gets turned on when I hear the word "spank," that starts to conjure erotic images and stories. So I found myself having sexual fantasies about this scenario... while at the same time being horrified by it and ashamed for being turned on by it.
My story isn't specifically about the People's Temple. It's about a fictional religious cult that I made up. But it's definitely influenced by real cults that I've read about...
Does your family know about your erotic writing? Have they read it?
I've asked my family not to, actually. My porn is like a window into my libido, and it crosses a boundary for me to have my family looking through that window. I don't want my family to know what I think about when I jerk off. Call me old-fashioned.
Have you written any Manifestos?
Definitely. Many times. In my blog. Probably the best known and widest read is "Atheists and Anger" -- an attempt to answer, in detail, the question, "Why are you atheists so angry?"
I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe --
Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives --
simply because believing those things would make death easier to
accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to.
I think
there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give
peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us
more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any
kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.
I started ego-Googling my name and the title of the piece... and found that several Christian ministers were quoting from the piece out of context, as an example of how even atheists admit that life without the promise of life after death is bleak and hopeless.
They would quote a part at the beginning, where I talk about how atheism seems to offer no comfort in the face of death. And they would completely ignore the entire point of the piece... which is that, while that might seem on the surface to be the case, it most emphatically is not.
When I find this happening, I write to these ministers; I point out that they're quoting me as saying the exact opposite of what I'm actually saying. I remind them about the commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." (Exodus 20:16).
More of Susie's interviews -- dozens of them -- with erotic writers here.
Boston.com's "The Big Picture" has an amazing portfolio of photos from the riots in Greece, which erupted after Special Guards of the Greek police shot a 15-year-old boy.
Shown here: "Youths vandalize the inside of a bank branch during a night of riots in Athens on December 08, 2008." (Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)
The estranged wife of United Technologies Corp.'s chairman George David filed a document with the court that shows that she requires $53,000 a week to support her lifestyle. If you're curious to see how one person can spend that much money a week, here's the PDF of the court filing.
Real estate accounts for a lot of it, including mortgage, maintenance fees, rent or other costs for a Park Avenue apartment, a Hamptons residence and several properties in Sweden.
But travel ($8,000), clothing ($4,500), hair and skin care ($1,000), dry cleaning ($650) and flowers ($600), among many other items, contribute to the total.
Dry cleaning does not include fur storage and cleaning ($45).
And that's when Douglas-David is cutting back.
"While recognizing that many of these expenses may seem high, most are lower than prior to the commencement of this case in August 2007," a footnote in her financial affidavit says.
Between 1584 and 1590, gentleman-artist painter John White rode along on five British journeys to the New World. His job was to "draw to life" what he encountered. Sometimes he succeeded, but even when he didn't he still made beautiful art. Smithsonian has a profile of White, including a fine selection of his watercolors. From Smithsonian:
John White wasn't the most exacting painter that 16th-century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief, has two right feet; his study of a scorpion looks cramped and rushed. In historical context, though, these quibbles seem unimportant: no Englishman had ever painted America before. White was burdened with unveiling a whole new realm.
A pediatric brain surgeon Colorado Springs, Colorado was operating on a 3-day-old baby and found a foot growing in his brain.
"The foot literally popped out of the brain," Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.
The appendage threatened the newborn's life.
When [Dr. Paul] Grabb performed the life-saving surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children in Colorado Springs, he was in for another surprise: he also found what appeared to be parts of an intestine in the folds of the infant's tiny brain, in addition to another developing foot, hand and thigh.
I'm enchanted by the curious menageries painted by Laurie Hogin. According to her gallery page, the "allegorical canvases of faulty fauna, mutant fruit and brand-loyal monkeys suggest the lavishness and opulent detail of the 17th through 19th century European traditions to which they refer, but these painterly flourishes and delicate details belie subversive cultural critique." Seen above, "Diorama with Endless Desires" (oil on canvas, 48" x 60"). I celebrate the beasts' strange and subversive mutations.
Laurie Hogin at Littlejohn Contemporary Gallery(Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
The cool kidz at the Webby Awards launched a simple Tumblr blog where they're posting fun promotional videos and highlarious classics from Webby Awards ceremonies past, including new and old work by The Onion, Tim & Eric, You Suck at Photoshop, and Jake and Amir. "You Suck At You Suck At Photoshop" is one of my faves.
City workers in Ankeny, Iowa are sprinkling garlic salt on roads to help melt the ice. A local spice producer donated 18,000 pounds of the special seasoning. From the Associated Press:
(Public Works administrator Al) Olson says the city mixed the garlic salt with regular road salt and it works fine. He says some road workers say it makes them hungry, but Olson doesn't recommend it to spice up lunch or dinner.
This Saturday (12/20), the History Channel will air an episode of The Universe on the subject of "Sex in Space." What are the challenges and, er, opportunities? From History.com:
As man moves to colonize the cosmos, the realities of sexual relationships and reproduction need to be addressed. Probe the physiological, psychological and cultural challenges of sex in space. From the sex act through birth, look at how the extreme environments of space exploration might effect copulation, conception and developing human tissues, as well as how issues around sex might impact the emotional lives of astronauts. Get to the bottom of the rumors to find out if space sex has already happened, and look at how the burgeoning space tourism business may soon lead to a boom in space sex.
Monochrom sock puppets Kiki & Bubu return to us today, for a very special holiday-themed episode: Kiki & Bubu & The Feelings. The yuletide song they perform for us is sure to be an instant classic -- Killing Capitalism with Christmas. You can grab it on iTunes, on the 2008 album "Monochrom: Carefully Selected Moments".
Bonus: Watch this behind-the-socks footage, from the secret filming location in the Austrian alps.
SYNOPSIS (some spoilers):
Yes, it is a time of crisis, but it is also a time of Christmas. Slovenian hackers crack CNN's hologram thingie, and bring us the avatar of gender-ambiguous singing sensation Enron Hubbard. Enron sings a hypnotic call to reject holiday consumerism and replace malls with meaning. Or if not meaning, post-internet nihilism and the ironic use of MySpace smiley-gifs. Online porn monster shows up after Enron is finished singing his holiday song, then Kiki and Bubu scamper off for eggnog frappucinos.
This is PhysOrg's post regarding the scientists at the Cluster Workshop, a group funded by the National Science Foundation, Sony, IBM, and some others, that formed a supercomputer out of PlayStation 3's last year. Now the developers have written a guide on how to build your own (at http://www.ps3cluster.org), including downloadables and directions on how to run your new supercomputer on Linux.
Researchers typically rent the use of supercomputers to simulate experiments, but with these they can build their own for about $4K, saving cash and freeing up time for additional experimentation. Moreover, with guides like these floating around, communities can build their own: imagine every major city running its own sims on agriculture, employment, energy infrastructure, virus transmission...with your own supercomputer, the sky's the limit.
A nice complement to yesterday's post on XKCD's flowchart of how to read flowcharts -- here's Thinkin' Lincoln's flowchart on whether you should make a flow-chart.
Flowchart =====> Comics
(Thanks, Miles!)
"Video: beyond awesome
Music: pretty damn good
Vocals: ruins the entire thing
The guy from Modest Mouse needs to STFU and stop ruining their music!..."
"Whoa. I'd LOVE to have one. Just walking around at Halloween with that thing, seeing the people's reactions. Damn i'd love that. Only one question, where's the drill?..."
"Yo momma so ugly she appears in C'thulhu's nightmares.
Yo momma so popular she got her own O'Reilly series.
Yo momma so nerdy she counts her age in seconds since the epoch...."
"Your mother is so dumb, when the cops knocked, she told the dungeon master to flush her Bag of Holding.
Your mother is so dumb, she thinks Chimera is Russell Simmons' ex-wife.
Your mother is so dumb, when she rolled D12, Eminem lost half his posse.
Your mother is so forgetful, that's why they're called the *Lost* Caverns of Tsojcanth.
Your mother is so dumb, she thinks the tv show Firefly was based on the novel by Piers Anthony.
Your mother is so ignorant, she thinks "T'Pau" is the onomatopoetic name of the..."
"Seconded: Huh? I post anonymously when I'm in too much of a hurry to sign in, or on rare occasions when I want to make a comment without my identity biasing how it is interpreted. No other significance.
Sure, anonymous posting _can_ be misused (or could if the moderators permitted it), but I really don't think any threat is implied here on BB. Elsewhere, deponent saith not...."
"Knodi: That looks like traditional stop-motion video to me, using a series of cardboard cutouts painted appropriately and using replacement animation to achieve motions within the cutout such as walk cycles.
Yeah, it could have been done more easily in post. But the fun thing about it is that they *didn't* take that shortcut...."
“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.
Today, on my 
Aside from 
This crapping robot toilet-paper holder manages to signal your literacy, robophilia, and deep commitment to bowel evacuation, all in one simple package. Bravo!
Last June, I 
Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Brownlee posts about a well-curated Flickr stream of vintage Apple ads and ephemera. 
Michael Leddy says: 
Boston.com's "The Big Picture" has an amazing portfolio of photos from the riots in Greece, which erupted after Special Guards of the Greek police shot a 15-year-old boy. 
The cool 
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