(Image: "Over the Crisis," from laverrue's Flickr stream )

The folks at Wikileaks have just published the audio of what is described as a "secret hour-long telephone recording between US heads of industry discussing efforts to prevent the emancipation of unions under an Obama administration." Snip from Wikileaks alert about the audio file:

Yesterday the Huffington Post ran a story by Sam Stein titled "Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill". The story included around five minutes of an hour long recording between federal bailout funds recipiets. Wikileaks has released the full hour long recording. The call shows the firms to be involved in lobbying, effectively with public money.

And here's a snip from the aforementioned HuffPo piece by Sam Stein:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

Here's the Wikileaks post with audio: Anti-union call between Bank of America, Bernie Marcus, et al. and Rick Berman, 17 Oct 2008
Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill (Huffington Post)

(Thanks, Jacob Appelbaum!)

Earlier this week I mentioned that I had watched You're Gonna Miss Me, an excellent documentary about musician Roky Erickson. I forgot to mention that my friends at Process Media recently published a book about Erickson, called Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound.

The trailblazing 13th Floor Elevators released the first “psychedelic” rock album in America, transforming culture throughout the 1960s and beyond. The Elevators followed their own spiritual cosmic agenda — to change society by finding a new path to enlightenment. Their battles with repressive authorities are legendary.

Lead singer Roky Erickson was put away in a maximum security unit for the criminally insane for years. Tommy Hall, their Svengali lyricist, lived in a cave. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was imprisoned. The drummer was involuntarily subjected to electric shock treatments.

This fascinating biography breaks decades of silence of band members and features dozens of never-before-printed photos. “One of the most exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll stories ever told.” — Julian Cope

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound

Joshuah Bearman alerted me to David Dixon's amazing audio archive website, which has links to audio files that people recorded at home and unwittingly sent to Napster.

This was right around the time that Napster was just beginning to penetrate into the average computer user's lives. At the same time, an audio utility program called MusicMatch Jukebox was also being widely used, since it was often pre-installed on off-the-shelf PC's. MMJ allowed you, among other things, to make recordings using the cheap microphone included with the PC, and save the file in mp3 format. If you didn't give the audio file a name, it assigned a default name "mic in track" followed by a number. Now if you were also running Napster, and you were careless enough to be sharing everything on your computer (which *many* were), then anyone also running Napster could just do a search for "mic in track" and find and download these personal recordings, usually without your knowledge.

I am that guy. I've amassed many, many hours of these recordings, which provide endless voyeuristic entertainment. Typical recordings were of people singing, rapping, or playing along with the radio (often badly), kids practicing their school book reports, audio love letters, kids being silly, and so forth. One of my finds was a 14-minute-long recording of a guy praying very fervently and emotionally, even lapsing into glossolalia. I've posted many of my favorites on my webpage, for free.

Audio Voyeurism

Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

The two most common--and frustrating--complaints I hear about the web and the blogosphere are 1) that they're filled with mean-spirited snark; and 2) that they've been divided up into predictable, Daily Me filters where you're only told stuff you already know. I've been hearing this for years, and every time I hear it I respond by pointing people to the success of boingboing, which I think most of us would agree is as true to the core values of the web as anything out here. First, our hosts are so generous and open--and largely snark-free--in just about everything they post. The default tone is here is always: "Hey, check out this amazing thing I found." And those things are far more eclectic and diverse than anything you would have encountered in the heyday of big media. Only at boingboing could a guy post about Candy Land, aviation safety, Lost, and the Obama IT plan in one week and feel like he's the boring, predictable one. If this turns out to be what the DailyMe looks like, I think we're all going to be just fine.

So it was an honor and a complete blast to hang out here for the past two weeks. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured by any of my posts. I hope you'll get a chance to check out The Invention of Air, but either way I look forward to continuing the conversation here and elsewhere.

PictureBox, publisher of gorgeous art books, is having a monster sale that lasts until February 8. For instance, you can get this giant Gary Panter book for $30 dollars, marked down from $95.

An intimate look at the work and life of a legendary artist. Gary Panter has been one of the most influential figures in visual culture sincethe mid-1970s. From his era-defining punk graphics to his cartoon icon Jimbo to his visionary design for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, he has left his mark on every medium he’s touched. Working in close collaboration with the artist, PictureBox has assembled the definitive volume on Panter’s work from the early 1970s to the present. This monumental, slipcased set is split into two 350-page volumes. The first is a comprehensive monograph featuring over 700 images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters and comics, alongside essays by Robert Storr, Mike Kelley, Richard Klein, Richard Gehr, Karrie Jacobs and Byron Coley, as well a substantial commentary by the artist himself. The second volume features a selection from Panter’s sketchbooks–the site of some of his most audacious work–most of which has never been published in any form.

PictureBox book sale

From the classic 1960s BBC TV comedy series 'Not Only But Also'. At about 1:19 in, after the caveman sketch, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sing a 'ballad' about Robin Hood's fabled sidekick Alan A Dale. This episode was shot in 1965. Video Link (Thanks, Drew Carey!)

At Davos, Russian prime minister Putin told Michael Dell CEO, of Dell Computer: "We don't need help. We are not invalids."

CNN's Peter Gumbel, Europe editor, reports:

At the official opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Putin, now Russian Prime Minister, delivered a 40-minute speech touching on everything from why the dollar should not be the sole reserve currency to how the world needed to enter into a smart energy partnership with Russia. Then it was time for questions. First up: Dell. He praised Russia's technical and scientific prowess, and then asked: "How can we help" you to expand IT in Russia.

...

Putin's withering reply to Dell: "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity." ... And, in a final dig at Dell, he talked about how Russian scientists were rightly respected not for their hardware, but for their software. The implication: Any old fool can build a PC outfit.

Putin slaps down Michael Dell at Davos

Sir David Attenborough gets a lot of hate mail because he doesn't give credit to God in his documentaries.

In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Attenborough's response to creationists' hate mail

If a barfing unicorn needs a unicorn chaser, will the barfing unicorn serve as its own chaser?

MAKE editor and publisher Dale Dougherty has more on the well-intentioned-but-actually-awful Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA).

Years ago, Jason Gold was looking for a rattle for his new baby. He wanted something safe and made of natural materials. "I was trying to find a rattle that wasn't coated in paint or made of plastic," said Gold. Not finding any, he made a rattle out of wood. Thinking that other parents might be looking for alternatives to mass-produced items of questionable materials, he started Camden Rose, a manufacturer of wooden and fabric toys in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Today, the Camden Rattle sells for $15 through a network alternative retail stores and places like Whole Foods.

This year, Jason Gold thought the economy would be his biggest worry this holiday season. However, it turned out that the 2008 holiday season was the busiest ever for Camden Rose. The bigger worry for Gold has been figuring out if the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) will put him and many others like him out of business in 2009.

The CPSIA on the surface seems like a good idea, coming as a response to the recall of toys made in China and sold in the US that had potentially harmful levels of lead, phthalates or other toxins. The law's intentions are good but its side effects are not. Lost in the details were provisions that may deal a serious blow to America's cottage industries and individuals who make things by hand. This comes at a time when the unemployed and underemployed are seeking creative ways to make a living from home.

There are three parts to the CPSIA. The first requires independent testing and certification. "We've gone from no certification to the strictest form of certification in the world," says Gold. "It might cost me $4,000 to test my rattle." It's not just the cost of testing. The tests must be done for each component, and for each item, not for the manufacturing process itself.

The $4000 handmade rattle

I wish there were more information about this tasty-looking giant squid cake!

See also: my Flickr set of bizarre cakes.

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Alcor Foundation, the larger of two companies that maintain people in cryopreservation, stores cryopreserved bodies, heads, and pets in beautifully made stainless-steel cylinders known as dewars. These are vacuum-insulated (like giant thermos flasks) to minimize the boiloff of liquid nitrogen. Each whole body is packed in a separate aluminum pod, four pods to a dewar. The upper ends of the pods are visible in the picture on the right, which I took looking down into the mouth of a dewar through the liquid nitrogen, which is colorless. A winch and chain are used to lower pods into storage.

For more information check www.alcor.org

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

This man is Curtis Henderson, one of a handful of people who took the concept of cryonics seriously enough to devote his life to it forty years ago, when it seemed even more frivolous than it does today. Henderson had inherited a modest trust fund, most of which he spent on The Cryonics Society of New York, which he ran from his home in Sayville, Long Island. The rusting cylinder behind him was a very early one-person cryonics capsule. I found it (containing no human remains, I hasten to add) in his back yard when I photographed him around 1990.

Currently Henderson lives in Florida. The Cryonics Society of New York was disbanded long ago. I don’t know what happened to the capsule.

John Young and his friend are making a line of nerd merit badges. "Attach to your jacket, your backpack, or the lid of your overclocked, battle-scarred laptop. Start a nerd sash!"

Open Source Contributor

Nerd Merit Badge 01

Open Source

Requirements: Make an accepted commit to any open source project.

$3.99 plus $1.00 S&H in the USA

Alex Steffen sent me this link to a gallery of cemeteries in parking lots.

Tullahassee Creek Indian Cemetery – Sand Springs, Oklahoma

Situated right between an ATM and a postal drop box, this Indian cemetery comprises about 1/4 acre of isolated turf in a parking lot outside Tulsa.

It was founded in 1883 and took less than a century to become the inadvertent centerpiece of a strip mall.

Outdoor Life magazine recently featured the fishing lures from the CRANKbait! art exhibition my friend Steve Lodefink curated. (I painted the blue bumbleswine at the top.)

Brion Gysin is one of my favorite artists, and his thinking and interests influenced me in myriad ways. Gysin is perhaps best known as the "discoverer" of the cut-up technique popularized by his best friend William S. Burroughs, and the co-inventor of the trance-inducing Dreamachine. Gysin was also a pioneer of sound poetry and multimedia collage that, in my mind, underpins remix culture, quick-cut video editing, and nonlinear Web experiences. Above is a video of the artist at work on his calligraphic and roller paintings.

Here's a sneak peak at Amy Crehore's hand painted ukuleles, which will be on display at her upcoming "Dreamgirls and Ukes" exhibition.

Paintings and ukes for my show at Thinkspace gallery, Los Angeles (Feb 13-March 6).The paintings just need to be framed and the ukes are 90% done in these photos. These hand-painted, restored, antique ukes will all be set up by a luthier, but they are also fine art objects that will hang in the gallery setting next to the paintings. Most are from the 1920's and 30's, so they are pretty rare.

Amy Crehore's Dreamgirls and Ukes

Ape Lad sez, "This year is the 40th anniversary of the Haunted Mansion. These lovely purple shoes, featuring the spooky wallpaper design, are being sold as part of the upcoming festivities." Man there's some good stuff in that merch preview and also a lot of junk. I'd love these shoes, and the dessert plates, the candelabra and the chess set (oh, the chess set!). But does the world really need yet another set of crummy pins?

Haunted Mansion 40th Anniversary Event (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video. An "un-bleeped" version of this video, profanity preserved, is here.

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Last week, we aired two Boing Boing Video episodes shot during a visit to Shepard Fairey's gallery in LA as the work of legendary punk / hiphop / skate culture photographer Glen E. Friedman was going up on the gallery walls, for his first ever career retrospective "Idealist Propaganda."

The first episode focused on Fairey's famous Obama poster, the second episode on a collaboration between Shepard and Glen involving the hardcore group Bad Brains.

TODAY: we bring you part 3 of this conversation. This episode's all about Glen's early work documenting skateboarder culture, and the beginnings of American hardcore. Below, an image from the very first roll of color 35mm film Friedman ever shot, which he discusses in this video. Also in today's episode: Glen shares the story behind the Circle Jerks "Golden Shower of Hits" album cover, which he also shot. His work was so much a part of these subcultures, which were in turn so much a part of my own formative years -- so this episode means a lot to me. I hope you dig it.

We have one more planned in this series, focusing more on his Hip-Hop work, so stay tuned.

A very special thanks to the great Ian MacKaye, and to Fugazi, and the Dischord records family for generously allowing us to Fugazi's music in this series. Mr. MacKaye was the subject of some of Glen's early photos of the D.C. hardcore scene, and in this episode we dive into some of those images of MacKaye's seminal hardcore band Minor Threat. I was there, too, and Minor Threat changed my life. Glen captured the spirit of this time like no one else.

Glen's books are available here. Below, here is a short film based on his latest artistic treatise and book "Recognize. The video includes every image in the book, which is available in limited edition through his website.

Special thanks to Boing Boing pal Sean Bonner, who coordinated this series of conversations.

Previously on Boing Boing:

* BB VIDEO: Glen E. Friedman in conversation and collaboration with Shepard Fairey
* Glen E. Friedman's photo show at Shepard Fairey's gallery
* BB VIDEO: Shepard Fairey and the Obama Poster, on Inauguration Day

This gorgeous video was made by improvising a camera-stabilizer on an empty plane seat and shooting timelapse of the squiggles made by the cities the plane flew over. The creator, Flickr user Ettubrute, sez, "On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal - it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city! ...We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge." Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky (via Kottke)

These heels, shown at left, were made for a dude. Speaking selfishly and subjectively, I am not entirely sure how I would personally feel about the idea of high heels on a dude who was the potential object of my own affection. But I suppose it depends on the dude. If it were, say, Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh, i would not flinch or reach for the emergency pair of Converse, stashed by the door for just such a crisis -- no, I would swoon ever more swoonfully. Anyway, Susannah Breslin points us to these kickers by Stuart Weitzman, crafted for a certain glam-rock star, and here is a blog post about them.

The Crooked Timber politics blog is holding a literary salon on the works of Charlie Stross, with commentary from a variety of writers and specialists in different disciplines, including Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman and sf writer Ken Macleod.

But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.

I may have a better sense of this than most, because I’m an economist of a certain age. When I went to grad school in the mid-70s, I thought about doing development economics – but decided not to, because it was too depressing. Basically, circa 1975 there weren’t any success stories: poor countries remained obstinately poor, despite their access to 20th-century technology.

Since then the success stories have multiplied, with China and India finally emerging as the economic superpowers they ought to be – though if truth be told, we really don’t know why development economics started working better around 1980. Even now, however, there are lots of places that have access to modern technology, and use it – but remain, in the ways that matter most, firmly stuck in the poverty trap. Feudalism with cell phones is still feudalism.

Charles Stross book event (Thanks, Austin!)

MCM, author of the fabulous anti-DRM kids' book "The Pig and the Box," sez,

Two years and a lot of learning later, I'm finally re-releasing my anti-DRM book "The Pig and the Box" in a snazzy Second Edition. The new version is more kid-friendly (at the suggestion of some teachers and librarians) as well as having a shinier cover. And even better, I finally figured out the whole "distribution" angle, so you can buy it practically anywhere in the world (even Japan!)

This is part of my "12 Books in 12 Months" project, where I'm launching a slate of Creative Commons-licensed titles throughout 2009. Next up is the third book in the SteamDuck series, and then the start of an "open source" action series called "TorrentBoy".

Oh, and as always, the books are all downloadable as free PDFs, so collect and trade 'em with your friends!

The Pig Book Returns (Thanks, MCM!)

I know there is no shortage of "man on the street" photos from last week's historic presidential inauguration, and I'm a little late getting to this -- but I was particularly fond of these portraits. And of all the images in photographer and producer/director Rene Lego's lovely Flickr set here, I liked the moment captured above the best.

Obama Inauguration (Rene Lego/Flickr)

The BBC has struck a deal to put all of Britain's publicly owned paintings online -- presently, 80 percent of the 200,000 publicly owned paintings are not on display. This is ferociously awesome, at least on the face of it, though one can imagine all kinds of ways they could screw this up (crappy EULA, stupid Flash-based DRM, low-rez only, wasting license-fee money trying to keep non-British IP addresses out of the collection, etc). But, assuming they do this the way you'd expect something built by and for the Internet would work, this is the best news for free culture that I've heard since the BBC announced that they were going to put all their archives online for free remixing. Let's just hope that this promise is an easier one to keep -- it's an embarrassment to see this once-great beacon of public service reinvent itself as a DRM platform (iPlayer) and a glorified video retailer for Americans (Worldwide).

The BBC is to put every one of the 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK on the internet as well as opening up the Arts Council's vast film archive online as part of a range of initiatives that it has pledged will give it a "deeper commitment to arts and music".

Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, unveiled the ambitious plans today at a London event showcasing the corporation's music, arts and culture output for 2009 and beyond.

The move may help the BBC get back on the front foot after almost a week of negative headlines over its refusal to broadcast the Gaza humanitarian aid appeal.

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK's publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

BBC to put nation's oil paintings online

Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

I've been so busy posting about Lost and Candy Land, that I haven't had a chance to say anything about what we're working on at outside.in, which in many ways has been the most exciting project of all for me over the past few years.

When John Geraci and I first started tossing around ideas for the site, our common passion and interest had been this notion that geographic space--and particularly urban space--had an invisible layer of data flowing through it that was tantalizingly close to you as you explored a neighborhood, but that was generally inaccessible other than through the chains of face-to-face, word-of-mouth conversation. Not only were there a million stories in the big city, there were a million in every neighborhood, and a thousand on every block: the overpriced condo that sold last week; the new bar that just got denied a liquor license; the mugging that took place a few months ago; the school principal that everyone's thrilled with. (This is what Dan Hill wonderfully describes in The Street As Platform.) All this data was out there in people's heads -- and increasingly in local placeblogger sites -- but there was no easy way to discover it geographically. There was no easy way to say: I'm standing on this corner in this town -- what are the locals talking about right now?

So we started outside.in as an attempt to answer that question. The Radar service we launched last year was our first interface that really tried to give you that micro-local perspective. But one of the things that's become clear to us is that question--what's happening around me right now--is even more compelling and fascinating when you're asking it via a mobile device standing on a street corner. And so I'm just incredibly excited about the application we've just released for the iPhone, Outside.in Radar. You load it up, let it geo-locate you, and then you'll see all the blog posts, news stories, Tweets, and discussion threads that involve places within 1,000 feet of where you're standing. If one of those places sounds interesting, you can go check out a dedicated place that shows you all the stories we've tracked that are associated with that place. You can also zoom out to see all the stories in the neighborhood you're currently occupying, or the wider city.

There are a hundred iPhone apps that let you find a nearby Italian restaurant. And that's great -- finding a nearby restaurant is a useful function. But I think a lot of us want something more out of the geo-web; we want the grain and the serendipity of human conversations and gossip to help us explore physical space. I think this app is a big first step in that direction. A couple of caveats, though. For now, it's U.S. only. And while it will sometimes find content outside of the top 100 or so urban areas in the U.S., there's much more data in the mid-sized to big cities. We're also actively working to speed up the load times--this first version is a little slow to fill up with data. (There will be a free upgrade that's faster shortly.) But if you walk around a few neighborhoods with it for a couple days, I think you'll find there's something genuinely new about the experience--it's like exploring a community with a neighborhood maven one tap away on your phone. And I know you'll immediately start thinking of other ways of using the data we've assembled over the past two years; the possibilities for new geo-interfaces are really extraordinary right now, and I'd love to hear any thoughts for v2 and beyond.

Outside.in Radar for the iPhone

This weekend, game-lovers will gather in cities around the world to participate in Global Game Jam, in which participants have exactly two days to build a game. Here's a snip from the press release:

From 5:00pm Friday January 30th through 5:00 pm Sunday, February 1, over a thousand college students, faculty and industry members will join together for a 48 hour game building marathon popularly known as a Game Jam. Participants will be given the details of the game design theme, constraints and mechanics allowed when the clock hits 5:00 p.m. in their local time zone. As the time zones change, so will those constraints, to mitigate any advantage global location might give one team over the other. While individual and regional Game Jams have been held wherever gamers congregate in the last few years, never has there been one of such size and scope as the Global Game Jam (GGJ).


[Keynote Speaker] 
Kyle Gabler (...) indie Developer of the popular game “World of Goo,” said, “The next big transformation in gaming won't come from a large game studio with million dollar teams and marketing budgets, it will come from some kid in their bedroom with a few pieces of free software and a never ending supply of caffeine and motivation. I can't wait to see the scraggly, brilliantly hacked together beginnings of some of the next great games crawl out of these 48 hours.”

A number of us from Boing Boing, Offworld, Gadgets and Boing Boing Video plan to be present in various locations, and we'll be producing Boing Boing Video episodes from the madness. Are you attending? We'd love to hear from you in the comments if so!

Here is an overview on how it works. Snip:

The theme and constraints for participants in the Global Game Jam will be announced at 5:00PM on Friday, January 30, 2009 in your time zone. Each local jam is allowed to manage things the way the see fit, but we hope that everyone will follow our recommendations so we share a common experience and everyone is working from a level playing field. Please show up to the jam on time. Below is a typical set-up for a game jam, each jam will vary, please check with each jam to see their schedule. Do not come to the Jam with a team. Everyone will have some time to think and pitch an idea. Collaborate with new friends or peers you admire.

* Here's information about all the locations.
* Here's legalese, like who owns the resulting games. Bottom line: whoever develops 'em, as in, you.

(Thanks, Jolon and Global Game Jam Costa Rica crew!)

Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets:

• We hung Jeeves and Wooster top hats from the ceiling and called them lampshades.

• Rob slathered the walls of his house with anti-WIFI paint.

• Panasonic's new Lumix digicams went both waterproof and metallically chromatic.

• We discovered an acceleration pedal that does nothing but make vroom vroom noises. Finally! I can stop using my mouth!

• Beer tab corsets sparked commentary debate about whether it was possible to get good beer in a can. Answer: yes, duh.

• This new Korean MP3 player has a really cool pixelart UI.

• Kim Jong Il intends on launching five rockets to drag the moon back to North Korea.

• Joel saw a plot to sneak product ads into Windows 7 context menus.

• We waxed eloquently for a recumbent Big Wheel for adults.

• We hung out in the cockpit of NASA's space shuttle in high-def.

• Brownlee secretly photographed an avatar of breathtaking physical violence using a netbook, and wondered who Asus' Marlboro Man would be.

• Rob started a PhotoShop contest: what will this liquidated Circuit City become?

And more besides! Come read!

Link

Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.

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I may be one of the few people who came to the Eels through Hugh Everett III, father of principle Eel, Mark Oliver Everett, aka "E." Mark's father is the originator of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. The many-worlds interpretation figures heavily in the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and so it was one of my Discordian brethren (Hail, Eris!) who said: "Hey, did you know that Hugh Everett has a son in some alt.rock band called Eels?"

As soon as I heard 'em, I was gill-hooked, but good. 2005's "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" was certainly a revelation to me -- a two-CD set of 34 songs without a stinker in the bunch. E has said it's about "God and all the questions related to the subject of God. It's also about hanging on to my remaining shreds of sanity and the blue sky that comes the day after a terrible storm, and it's a love letter to life itself, in all its beautiful, horrible glory." For me, it also served as something of the soundtrack to the loss of my wife. I still can't listen to "The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight" without completely losing my shit.

Mr E knows from loss. His father, who barely interacted with him as a child, died when Mark was 19. His schizophrenic sister committed suicide in 1996, and two years later, his mother died of cancer. So much of E's music seems to encode all of this loss, along with a deep, dysfunctional social disconnect, and a visceral sense of confusion over who he is and what he should make out of all that's happened to him. But like all artists who resonate, Mark Everett seems to have an alchemical ability to transmute all of this sordid business into transcendent bits of sound poetry, music that, even when it's sad, the melodies, the musicality, the poetics, and all of its "beautiful, horrible glory" are so strong, it lifts up, rather than drags you down (at least, in this case, it does for me).

Last year, the BBC released a wonderful documentary called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," which followed Mark Everett as he retraced the steps of his father, trying to learn more about the dad he never really knew and the physics theories he could never really understand. All in all, it's a rather quiet piece (not bad or boring, just quiet and small), but there are some truly potent moments, like when he hears his father's voice on tape for the first time, or when he finally figures out (basically) what the many-worlds interpretation really means, and when he hears himself on tape, in the background as a child, playing the drums and then bragging about how great he is. The scene where he describes finding, at 19, his dead father on the bed is one of the most heartrending things I've ever seen. That one scene explains at least half of the hit you get whenever partaking of an Eels' song.

The entire BBC documentary used to be on YouTube, in four parts. Alas, it's been taken down. While links last, you can see it in two parts, on Veoh, here and here.