Afghan youth have learned to recover almost instantly from such routine violence. One person determined to inject some normalcy into their lives is Oliver Percovich. A 34-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, he plans to open this country’s first skateboarding school, Skateistan, this spring. He sees sport as a way to woo students into after-school activities like English and computer classes, which are otherwise reserved for the elite.
“Teenagers are trying to dissociate from old mentalities, and I’m their servant,” Percovich said. “If they weren’t interested, I would’ve left a long time ago.”
Now, when he pulls his motorcycle into a residential courtyard here, a dozen youngsters pounce before it comes to a stop, yanking six chipped skateboards with fading paint off the back. The children, most participating in a sport for the first time in their war-hardened lives, do not want to waste any time. Their skateboard park is a decrepit Soviet-style concrete fountain with deep fissures. The tangle of novice skaters resembles bumper cars more than X Games.
But Percovich has raised the money needed to build an 8,600-square-foot bubble to house the nonprofit Skateistan complex, and the Kabul Parks Authority has tentatively donated land. He is still waiting for official permission to begin the project. And since a spate of kidnappings and the car bombing in late November, he has reduced his daily sessions at the fountain to once or twice a week.
Among those who look forward to his visits is Maro, an elfin 9-year-old girl who was terrified of skateboarding at first. “It gives me courage, and once I start skating, I completely forget about my fears,” she said.
The photographer and craftsman Todd Schellinger asked me to design some metal business cards for his studio Hand + Eye. He gave me pretty broad creative license, asking only that it speak to the tradition of craftsmanship that he brings to each job.
Designing for metal presents many challenges and opportunities. I knew from the start that I wanted to make something that would transform from one state of being to another. What I ended up producing was a semi-articulted metal hand that could hold onto an envelope or an invoice.
Kristen's Zombie Hello Kitty cake combines every wonderful thing: zombies, Hello Kitty, ganache, and trademark infringement. Well done that cake-maker!
Wikipedia's list of confidence tricks is a globe-spanning journey through con-jobs ancient and modern. Required and fascinating reading:
A clip joint or fleshpot is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service, in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor, or no, goods or services in return. Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money. The product or service may be illicit, offering the victim no recourse through official or legal channels.
The Melon Drop is a scam in which the scammer will intentionally bump into the mark and drop a package containing (already broken) glass. He will blame the damage on the clumsiness of the mark, and demand money in compensation. This con arose when artists discovered that the Japanese paid large sums of money for watermelons. The scammer would go to a supermarket to buy a cheap watermelon, then bump into a Japanese tourist and set a high price.
A million congrats to Neil Gaiman for winning the prestigious and much-deserved Newbery Award for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, a magical ghost-story retelling of The Jungle Book. You earned it, Neil!
The Places We Live is an utterly riveting narrated Flash slideshow of the world's slums. It takes the form of a series of panoramic photos of slums around the world, with voice-over from people who live there (in translation). I'm currently watching the segments on Dharavi, in Mumbai, said by some to be the largest slum in the world. I visited Dharavi with an NGO last September while researching a book and it made quite an impression on me as a place of immense self-reliance and industry, but also bitter poverty. I'm working on a scene set there now, so this could not have come at a more opportune moment for me.
At an indoor minimall in Aomori I found this skin-tight black-and-gold-printed t-shirt, apparently catering to a Japanese teen subculture that pays lifestyle homage to punk bands of the 1980s, especially the Sex Pistols. I couldn’t resist buying it even though the idea of wandering around my neighborhood in the USA with “LOvE HErOiN” on my chest seems a little unwise. (Of course, confessed cocaine user Barack Obama will be ushering in a new regime of tolerance real soon now.)
Among the various incantations on the shirt, “Have a nice punky day” seems not quite congruent with the message that Sid Vicious delivered—but the Japanese always tend to add a feelgood spin. This is, after all, the nation where even the shrine at Hiroshima sells key chains with a happy Hallmark-style romantic message on the back (see below).
If I were more of a global traveler, I’d like to compile a book of pictures of table settings in different nations, showing the remarkably different ways in which human beings eat on an everyday basis.
This picture is of a typical evening meal at the house where I stayed in Aomori. For reasons that seem primarily rooted in tradition, economy, and availability, fish is the primary source of protein. Local supermarkets offer at least ten times as much space for fish compared with meat (whereas in the United States, the ratio is reversed).
It’s hard to find anything unhealthy in this setting. The caloric content is minimal. Nothing is fried, and nothing is heavily loaded with fat or sugar. I guess it’s no surprise that the Japanese still show few signs of obesity, unlike the populations of most western nations, and have an astonishing average life expectancy of 79 for men, 85 for women. (In the United States, the average numbers are 4 years lower.)
In part because my books have had a habit of weaving multiple disciplines together, and in part because I've written quite a bit about technology, I'm often asked about the tools I use to research and write my books. Given that Boingboing has its own wonderful multi-disciplinary sensibility, and of course a major obsession with DIY movements, I thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books.
My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)
Since I wrote that essay, I've developed a new approach to using Devonthink that was enormously helpful in writing Ghost Map and Invention. The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink.
When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. With Ghost Map, for instance, there's a cool little trick I figured out before I started writing where each chapter maps to a single day in the epidemic, but also connects to one of the themes of the book: the shit and scavengers, miasma, the map. (No one seemed to notice this in any of the reviews, but it's one of the things that I'm most proud of with that book.) And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. And as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful. Some snippets get dragged to multiple folders; most don't make it into any folder. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.
And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.
This long NYT retrospective on the seminal news-photos of some guy named George Bush during his presidency ends with photos of the man on his way to his farewell address, during which it appears that he's been crying in the bathroom. I've looked at it several times now and I'm not sure I agree that's what's going on -- this facial expression seems to contain a lot more than mere sorrow.
And I turned to one of my editors – First I said, “Oh, my God.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “You’ve got to see this picture of Bush. This is really stunning.” And I flipped it over to him to process and his first reaction was, “Wow.” And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.
Hello, I am a ukulele player I lives in Tokyo , Japan.
This ukulele is "Cake ukulele" I decorated.
It might be tasty. But I can not eat.
This cream is Imitation and
ice cream is made of clay.
This ukulele can be good played.
I played "Crazy G" with this cake ukulele.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
BB pal Jess Hemerly has become fascinated with "cop talk" as of late. She's even been practicing the skill in instant messages to me. Yesterday, she found this helpful insider's discussion of "cop talk" in a 2008 article from Officer.com, the "source for law enforcement." The article, titled "Cops Talk Funny," was written by a law enforcement training expert. The author discusses officers using cop talk on the stand might hurt an officer's credibility. She advises unlearning the language and suggests a fun exercise to help. From Officer.com:
Make up some flash cards. On one side, write a phrase or sentence the way you now talk on the stand. On the other side, write the same phrase in plain English. Have one of your kids work with you with your flash cards. It'll be a nice Hallmark family moment. I'll help you get started.
* He indicated... He said
* I have been employed by... I worked for
* I exited the patrol vehicle... I got out of the car
* I observed... I saw
* I ascertained the location of the residence... I found the house
* I proceeded to the vicinity of... I went to
* I approached the entrance... I went to the door
* The subject approached me... She came up to me
* I apprehended the perpetrator... I arrested the man
* I obtained an item that purported to be an envelope from the individual... I got the envelope from her
* I observed the subject fleeing on foot from the location... I saw him running away
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The Game Boy Advance classic Mother 3 is apparently filled with musical references, appropriations, and allusions galore. You'll hear Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, and, er, Batman. Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon links to a Dan Bruno multimedia essay revealing the roots of the chiptunes. "Mother 3 musical toe-dip"
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
These pages are from the Macclesfield Alphabet Book, essentially a 16th century design studio's marketing portfolio. The British Library is hoping to buy the book from its current owner, at a price of £600,000. From the CR Blog:
Produced c1500, the book is filled with designs for different styles of script, letters, initials and decorative borders. All are believed to have come from one workshop, where the book would have been used not just in ye olde pitche meetinge but also to teach assistants how to reproduce the house styles.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
I hadn't known that painter Mark Ryden had collaborated with the late Japanese fashion designer/director/artist Nagi Noda on a line of clothing called "Broken Label." According to Creativity Online, Noda, who was only 35 when she died late last year, was wearing her Ryden dress when she passed away.
More images of the collection at the LA Weekly and Arrested Motion. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Above left is an image of healthy brain tissue. Above right is brain tissue of a middle-aged football player. It reveals the intense damage from repeated concussions received on the field. According to Dr. Ann McKee, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), the damage looks similar to that of an 80-year-old with dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease. The CSTE have found the condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), in the donated brains of dead NFL players John Grimsley, Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Justin Strzelczyk and Terry Long. From CNN:
"What's been surprising is that (the damage is) so extensive," said Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, and co-director of the CSTE. "It's throughout the brain, not just on the superficial aspects of the brain, but it's deep inside."
The damage affects the parts of the brain that control emotion, rage, hypersexuality, even breathing, and recent studies find that CTE is a progressive disease that eventually kills brain cells.
The Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles is presenting "An Evening With The Prelinger Archives" on January 31, 2009 at 7:30 pm. The Prelingers are very cool archivists of industrial films and "invisible literature."
Beginning in the 1980s, archivist Rick Prelinger traveled around the U.S. in a van, visiting local schools, public libraries and private collectors, and accumulated perhaps the country’s largest collection of “ephemeral” works – industrial and sponsored films, home movies, educational films and commercials, and more. Over the years his Prelinger Archives has amassed a cult following, part of which is due to the magnetic personality of Prelinger himself, who finds ways to contextualize the films in his collection that are evocative and inspiring. Tonight we offer one such evocative presentation from Prelinger, who will discuss the life and work of Jamison “Jam” Handy, who produced almost 7,000 sponsored industrial and commercial films during his lifetime, including the “Roads to Romance” series promoting tourism by car, the “American Look” series on 1950s design and architecture, and many more. Select Jam Handy films from the archive will be screened after the presentation.
This pachinko parlor in Aomori raises typically unanswerable questions about choices of packaging and vocabulary. Why the big "X" at front-center? Why pictures of big cats? And then there's this strange poetic text superimposed on the pictures:
It is new century arrival to an amusement
RISING reverses common sense.
Please spend the pleasant time of a thrill and excitement.
The first and last lines manage to convey a message, but the middle line remains wonderfully mysterious—to me, at least.
Inside the building, it was a hellish environment of second-hand cigarette smoke, noise from machines, and badly amplified music, loud enough to induce hearing damage. Really the interior looked a bit—tawdry.
After we noticed the Voice Box FX pedal from Electro-Harmonix, I noticed that they were based in Long Island City, just a short train ride away from my place in Brooklyn. Since I'm getting ready to move to Oregon--Hello, Eugene!--I figured I ought to get up there and check out one of the last family-owned music gear companies in America.
Turns out that EHX also manufacturers a huge percentage of the world's vacuum tubes in its factory in Russia, which are then sent back to New York for testing and pairing before being sold to vintage and high-end audio fans, as well as manufacturers like McIntosh.
I had a really good time checking out the factory floor to see the hand-made vacuum tube testing machines, as well as talking to the engineers that sit around all day and try to figure out how to get the ideas for new FX processors out of their crazy boss's head and into working hardware.
And thankfully for you, [Wes and Derek on the Boing Boing Video crew] edited out all the footage where I was wanking around with FX boxes, looking mournfully at the camera and whining that "Hey, this box doesn't make me sound as good as it does when people with talent use it. What gives?"
During 2008, I found this pharmacy while visiting the town of Aomori at the northern end of Honshu. In the United States, of course, such a name would be condemned for conveying the “wrong message,” especially to “the nation's youth.” But the Japanese are generally unencumbered with Protestant prohibitions and moral probity, freeing them to display a very practical attitude toward social issues. It seems to me, the name Happy Drug is quite accurate, because that's the whole point of drugs, whether they are pain relievers, blood thinners, or laxatives. Their ultimate purpose is to make our lives less miserable and, therefore, happier. The interesting question is why we in the west find this so difficult to acknowledge.
The televisions in 6.5 million American households will stop working when stations are forced to switch to the digital format–and I don’t care.
Although it’s been pushed back time and again (yesterday Congress postponed the transition deadline once more, from February 17th to June 12th), the switch from analog to digital television will happen eventually. When it does, valuable radio spectrum will be freed up for new uses, like “white space” wireless networking. (Think Super Wi-Fi.)
The Obama administration was behind the latest delay. It asked Congress to postpone the transition again, fearing that the 5.7 percent of American households without the proper digital-to-analog conversion boxes–boxes that can be had for free simply by requesting a voucher from the FCC–would wake up on the 17th, find themselves greeted by only static, and march in the streets.
As previously mentioned, today is "Down the Rabbit Hole" day, when bloggers are encouraged to post in a different style from their accustomed one. I don't think I can manage a whole day of that, but I'm willing to kick in one post, anyway.
I don't normally write much about my personal life here, partly because I'm pretty jealous of my privacy and partly because it's just not the kind of thing we do here (but that's the point of Rabbit Hole day, of course!).
Last November, Alice and I had our big, grand wedding in Toronto, and invited all my friends. Now, I haven't lived in Toronto for nearly ten years, but for most of that time, I've had a storage locker there, filled with the memories of the three decades I spent in the town of my birth before I left, first for California, then for the UK, then for California, then for the UK again. I've delved into the locker on three occasions, attempting to figure out what I had in it and what I was going to do with it all. The first time, I confronted the incredible, jammed-together mountain of junk and boxes, opened a few, and gave up (it didn't help that the rest of my family had filled all the remaining spaces with their unloved junk). The second time, I showed up with more resolve: I was going to sort through everygoddamnedthing and figure out what I was shipping to London, what I was giving away, what was headed for the dumpster and what needed to be shredded.
Dirk McQuigley of Daily Kos has an enraging editorial about the practice of flight crews punishing unruly passengers by having them put on terrorist watch-list. I had this happen to me once, on the way to my wedding in Toronto in October. My wife made to put the baby on the floor in front of our seat for a while so she could play, and a flight attendant told her it was absolute iron-clad British Airways policy that babies had to be in reach of the ceiling oxygen masks at all time. My wife pointed out that we'd let the baby play on the floor of many BA planes in the past 10 months, and it probably wasn't practical to expect the kid to go 10 hours without a little floor-time. The flight attendant was insistent, and my wife, in exasperation, said, "OK, but it's bullshit."
A minute later, the purser steamed around the bulkhead, in full dudgeon -- "You've violated our zero-tolerance policy for 'abusive language' and I can have you arrested and taken off the plane when we land if you don't stop it." It went downhill from there, with him vowing to have our "BA flier records" changed to note that we were "abusive passengers" so that every flight we took from now on would involve increased scrutiny and strictness. Needless to say, when I called BA later, they apologized and swore that there was no such record, and needless to say, we weren't arrested when we landed.
So I'd assumed that he was just a little puffed-up martinet making idle threats, but it appears we got off lucky. According to this, plenty of passengers who disagreed with a flight crew are now classed as "terrorists" in international databases and subject to incredible hassle and are even at risk of being detained when they fly.
Not a bad business to be in: for most companies, all they can do when a customer has an argument with a rep is ask them to leave. Airlines get to punish their customers by having them arrested as terrorists. I guess we're lucky the record industry doesn't have the same ability.
Take the case of Tamera Jo Freeman. Traveling from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City in 2007. Freeman gave each of her children three whacks on the backside when they spilled her airplane Bloody Mary in her lap.
A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.
The incident aboard the Frontier flight ultimately led to Freeman's arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act, the controversial federal law enacted after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
"I had no idea I was breaking the law," said Freeman, 40, who spent three months in jail before pleading guilty.
Worse than that, Freeman lost custody of her children as a result of the conviction. Moreover, she was barred from flying and her probation required her to stay within Oklahoma which effectively prevented her from traveling to Hawaii for a custody hearing.
The severity of the incident was disputed by a witness that happened to also be a defense attorney. The attorney said that initially there was a loud exchange but Freeman calmed down BEFORE she became unruly. The attorney said that he sympathized with Freeman.
Jason sez, "DePauw University presents a series of videos on how to program the PDP-11. They present all of the steps: toggling a loader, reading and punching paper tape and running an assembler. A must-see for retrocomputing neophytes!
Just one Jon-Lovitz-warning: ACTING!"
Artist Rachel Bernstein made this soft anatomical sculpture of foot out of felt, embroidery floss, plaster armature and polyfil. Something especially nice about a plush anatomical tchotchke.
A million congrats to Neil Gaiman for winning the prestigious and much-deserved Newbery Award for his young adult novel 
Phone is tapped and I don't care (2x)
Beginning in the 1980s, archivist Rick Prelinger traveled around the U.S. in a van, visiting local schools, public libraries and private collectors, and accumulated perhaps the country’s largest collection of “ephemeral” works – industrial and sponsored films, home movies, educational films and commercials, and more. Over the years his Prelinger Archives has amassed a cult following, part of which is due to the magnetic personality of Prelinger himself, who finds ways to contextualize the films in his collection that are evocative and inspiring. Tonight we offer one such evocative presentation from Prelinger, who will discuss the life and work of Jamison “Jam” Handy, who produced almost 7,000 sponsored industrial and commercial films during his lifetime, including the “Roads to Romance” series promoting tourism by car, the “American Look” series on 1950s design and architecture, and many more. Select Jam Handy films from the archive will be screened after the presentation.
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Jason sez, "DePauw University presents a series of videos on how to program the PDP-11. They present all of the steps: toggling a loader, reading and punching paper tape and running an assembler. A must-see for retrocomputing neophytes!
Just one Jon-Lovitz-warning: ACTING!"
