Here's the current (06:35BST, April 19, 2009) standing in a Guardian poll on the jail-time-and-millions-in-fines sentence handed down to the defendants in the Swedish Pirate Bay case. It's an unscientific poll, of course, but it's also telling: if the objective of the lawsuit was to make the public feel like the Pirate Bay was illegitimate and that downloaders should stick to official services like iTunes, then this suggests pretty abject failure on that score.

A fair sentence for pirates? (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Update:I'm an idiot who can't read graphs, clearly, Teach me to post at 5:30 in the morning.

College Humor made a hillarious (NSFW) music video about the deterioration of comment threads, to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire." As a wise man once said, "It's funny cause it's true." We Didn't Start The Flame War (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

"The MAD Generation" is an art show currently on view at East Atlanta Tattoo's gallery. It features nearly 50 pieces by artists inspired by the usual gang of idiots. Above, Oscar Medina's "Dia de los Locos," and Candy's "Spy Vs. Speed." Most of the show is also viewable online. The MAD Generation (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Why It's Hard to Find Good Gator Wrestling Help These Days
In 2000, members of the Seminole tribe near Hollywood, Florida put an ad in the local paper. They were looking for a new alligator wrestler. Mano-y-gator conflict is nothing new to the Seminole. Hand-caught gators were a traditional food source. But it was only in the 21st century that the tribe had hard luck finding people willing to jump in there (i.e., the swamp) and go for it (i.e., pin several-hundred-pound, sharp-toothed creatures to the ground with only their soft and presumably tasty bodies). This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Wrestling alligators for the benefit of white tourists used to be one of the few Seminole-friendly job markets in Florida. Improved access to higher education--and the fact that, today, Seminole are more likely to actually own the tourist trap, rather than just work there--meant fewer tribe members willing to risk life and limb for a poorly paying job. And thus, the newspaper ad.

Did I Mention it Doesn't Pay Well?
Answering the ad, and ultimately winning the gig, was 32-year-old Greg Long. By November 10, 2000, Long was wrestling alligators for $8 an hour, the going rate for gator-wrestlers.Tips are recommended.

And That You're Gonna Get Bit?
The "wrestling" in alligator wrestling is something of a misnomer. Neither Greco-Roman, nor WWF, alligator wrestlers are actually trying to do something more akin to calf-roping: Catch an alligator from a pool or pit and bind its jaws shut with rope. Easy! Along the way, they perform tricks and explain interesting tidbits about about the animal's behavior and biology. Look at that guy in the photo. Doesn't he look like he loves educating the public?

Despite not being nearly as violent as it sounds, all alligator wrestlers will most likely be bitten at some point. The job requires strength and timing. One wrong move and your arm or leg could end up in the Old Alligator Wrestler's Retirement Villa*. Needless to say, it is not a sport for amateurs. In 2006, an alligator took down real-estate baron Ronald Bergeron after the land developer tried to wrestle a gator during a party. Bergeron was dragged underwater briefly before the other well-heeled (and more sober?) guests could free him. He survived, with a few shattered finger bones.

Again, there's more where this came from.

Image courtesy the delightfully named turtlemom4bacon.

*the alligator's stomach

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

I remember reading Walden in high school. I had this very specific mental image of the whole thing: Thoreau out there in the woods, building his little shack. Nothing but silence and the beauty of nature. "A mile from any neighbor," the man wrote.

I have to admit, it's probably on my own head that I took Thoreau's narration there to be an example of poetic understatement. I'd assumed he really meant "miles". Turns out, he was being quite literal, almost down to the foot. But Earth Day is coming up and if you're feeling burned out on modern society, there's definitely a couple of things you can learn from Thoreau. I've summarized them here (and in Be Amazing) for your benefit.

First: Choose Your "Wilderness" Carefully
You'd hate to end up communing with the Earth someplace...rural. Shudder. That certainly wasn't a problem for Thoreau. Despite what impressions he might have given you, Thoreau's Walden Pond had more in common with Central Park than with Yellowstone. Damn near exactly a mile away from bestie Ralph Waldo Emerson's house, Thoreau was often called to meal times by Mrs. Emerson's dinner bell. From his hand-built cabin, Thoreau could see a major highway and hear the train that ran along the opposite side of the pond. In fact, Concord Village was close enough that he walked down there nearly every day. In a lot of ways, Walden is really similar to that time you "ran away from home" to live in the garage. Of course, you were 5.

Second: Don't Let Yourself Get Bored
Turns out, there's plenty of room in the vast wilds of nature for all your friends and acquaintances to come over. Besides regular weekly visits with his mother and sisters (who brought baked goods and pre-made meals, lest Thoreau be forced to do something drastic, like hunt and gather) and frequent (and also frequently food-related, see a pattern here?) sojourns to the Emersons', Thoreau's idyllic, natural lifestyle also included numerous house parties. He hosted galas for political groups, dinners for luminaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott, and once managed to pack 25 people into his one-room cabin.

Accurate illustrative wood-cut print provided by Mr. Michael Rogalski, esq.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Responding to a request in the naked chimpanzee comments, reader Felix was kind enough to put together this charming photoshop job, which I've been told by the powers that be that I can't not share.

Good morning!

Apologies to RedEyedRex, the Flickr user who took the original picture.

Credulous wine-sellers in the UK are encouraging their customers to avoid drinking wine on certain days of the month on the grounds that the lunar cycle will alter the taste of the wine. Horoscopes for wine -- now that's a whole new kind of dumb.

The idea that the taste of wine changes with the lunar calendar is gaining credibility among the UK's major retailers, who believe the day, and even hour, on which wine is drunk alters its taste. Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.

Marks & Spencer has gone a step further and is advising customers to avoid disappointment from the best bottles by making sure not to open them on "root" days...

In other quarters, doubts remain. Waitrose's wine department has investigated the idea and cannot see a correlation. Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement's guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men's passions seep into the Earth's interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.

Tesco and supermarket rivals go for wine tasting by moonlight

In White Fungus, an "architecture fiction" published in the first issue of Beyond magazine, Bruce Sterlng marries the sardonic and the hopeful in a gripping, hilarious story about how every aspect of civic life from schools to tomato-farming will be reformed after ecotastrophe and econopocalypse destroy our present way of life.

Logically, industrial farmers should move into places like White Fungus and industrially farm the lawns. Derelict buildings should be gutted and trans formed into hydroponic racks. White Fungus was, in fact, an old agricultural region: it was ancient farmland with tarmac on top of it. So: rip up the parking lots. Plant them. Naturally, no one in White Fungus wanted this logical solution. Farming was harsh, dull, boring, patient work, and no one was going to pay the locals to farm. So, by the standards of the past, our survival was impossible. The solution was making the defeat of our hunger look like fun. People gardened in five-minute intervals, by meshing webcams with handsets. A tomato vine ready to pick sent someone an SMS. Game-playing gardeners cashed in their points at local market stalls and restaurants. This scheme was an 'architecture of participation'. Since the local restaurants were devoid of health and employee regulations, they were easy to start and maintain.Every thing was visible on the Net. We used ingenious rating systems.

White Fungus (PDF) (Thanks, Patadave!)

Tavish sez, "After a push from the NDP, the Canadian government's put voting records of every Canadian MP online."

It's about time, but what a lame execution: "To view an MP's record, head to the website and click on the Members of Parliament link to find your member of the House of Commons. Your MP's site will will have a tab for votes that takes you to a list showing whether they voted yea, nea, or didn't vote at all on any given bill."

It's time for some civic-minded Canadian hackers to slurp out all that data and reformat in a way that gives you real insight into what your elected representative is up to and how she compares to all the other politicos on the Hill.

MP voting records go online (Thanks, Tavish!)

Here are some of the jokes that flourished (underground) in China during the Cultural Revolution, a period of incredible hardship and human rights abuses. They're collected by Guo Qitao, a professor of Chinese history at UC Irvine.

Wang Hongwen went to see Marshal Zhu De, requesting him to hand over power. "You may take over, but only if you can make this egg stand upright," Zhu said, while handling him an egg.

After trying for several days, Wang was still unable to make it stand, so he went to see Deng Xiaoping for help.

"This is easy," said Deng, and he forcefully smashed the egg down into the table.

"Ai ya, it broke!" Wang exclaimed.

"Chairman Mao has said, 'nothing can stand without destruction,'" said Deng, "look, isn't the egg standing upright now?"

Translator's notes: The phrase "nothing can stand without destruction" was a revolutionary slogan that encouraged destruction of old, feudal things.

Jokes from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (Part One)

Niko Kugler & Georg Heitzmann's concept design for "The Harvester" is a Lorax-terrifying device that can pick up felled trees in a forest and extract them without harming nearby growth.

The HARVESTER (via Dvice)

Jed from HackLab wrote code that tunes the motors on a laser cutter so that it plays music -- here it is playing the Super Mario theme. This is slightly too perfect, leading me to wonder if it's not just some video of a laser cutter with a flanged-out version of the theme cut into the soundtrack. But hell, I want to believe.

lazzor music! (via Geekologie)

Yesterday's Swedish court ruling sentencing the Pirate Bay defendants to a year in prison caused membership in Sweden's Pirate Party to swell, attracting 3,000 members in seven hours. Its membership now sits at around 18,000, which makes it a respectable size in Swedish politics.

- The tough sentence on Pirate Bay clearly shows that Piratpartiet needed, "says Rick Falk Vinge, party for Piratpartiet. We needed to secure the future knowledge society.We needed to protect the free and open society, and we needed to assure that the future of culture in people's hands instead of in the hands of blodtöstiga media companies who want to bring culture lovers in prison.

Internet boil, Piratpartiet now has more members than FP (via /.)

Writing on O'Reilly Radar, preeminent legal scholar Pamela Samuelson cuts through the distractions associated with the Google Book Search/Authors Guild settlement and goes right to the heart of the matter: Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers (who took part in the settlement) totally missed the real risk of Google Book Search: they were worried about some notional income from advertising that they might miss out on. But the real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.

I like Google. I worry about the privacy implications of some of their technology, and I wish they had more spine when it came to censoring search results in China, but I think they make incredibly awesome search tools and every person I know who works at Google is a class-A mensch and a certified smart person (a rare combination).

But no one, not Google, not Santa Claus, should have this kind of leverage over the entire world of literature. It's abominable. No one benefits when markets consolidate into a single monopoly gatekeeper -- not even the gatekeeper, who is apt to lose its edge without competition to keep it sharp.

The publishers I spoke to about this were incredibly smug about it. Because the settlement gives them the power to keep new releases out of Google, they feel like they can use this to keep the company honest.

This is wrong.

New releases are the majority of the publishers' business, but they're not the majority of the market for books -- and they're only successful because of all the context created by the entire history of literature. If the publishers offer a sweetheart deal on searching new results to Yahoo, but can't give Yahoo access to the orphan works and other catalog items to which Google alone has easy legal access, Yahoo's search tool will never compete with Google's. To understand why, imagine if Yahoo tried to compete with Google by offering a search engine that only indexed the last 30 days' worth of web-pages: it's true that most of the stuff I read on the web was written in the past 30 days, but the 40-50% of stuff I that wasn't is often enormously important to me. In that world, I would have to flick constantly between searching Yahoo and Google to make sure I wasn't missing stuff -- and very quickly, I'd just default to Google.

By design or by accident, Google got the most reactionary elements in publishing to anoint Google the Eternal God-Emperor of Literature. Thanks a lot, Authors Guild -- with friends like you, who needs piracy?

The proposed settlement agreement would give Google a monopoly on the largest digital library of books in the world. It and BRR, which will also be a monopoly, will have considerable freedom to set prices and terms and conditions for Book Search's commercial services. BRR is unlikely to complain that the price is too high, the digital rights management technology is too restrictive, or the terms are too onerous.

Google will also be the only service lawfully able to sell orphan books and monetize them through subscriptions. BRR will get 63 per cent of these revenues which it will pay out to authors and publishers registered with it, even as to books in which they hold no rights. (Some unclaimed orphan book funds may go to charities that promote literacy.) No author whose books are in the corpus can get paid by the BRR unless he/she has registered with it.

Virtually the only way that Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or the Open Content Alliance could get a comparably broad license as the settlement would give Google would be by starting its own project to scan books. The scanner might then be sued for copyright infringement, as Google was. It would be very costly and very risky to litigate a fair use claim to final judgment given how high copyright damages can be (up to $150,000 per infringed work). Chances are also slim that the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit would be willing or able to settle on equivalent or even similar terms.

Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement

Wired's Kevin Poulsen has pried loose details about the FBI's homebrew spyware, used in criminal investigations. The document is redacted almost to the point of uselessness, but there are some interesting nuggets. Paul Ohm, who used to work in the FBI department responsible for the spyware, notes,

Page one may be the most interesting page. Someone at CCIPS, my old unit, cautions that "While the technique is of indisputable value in certain kinds of cases, we are seeing indications that it is being used needlessly by some agencies, unnecessarily raising difficult legal questions (and a risk of suppression) without any countervailing benefit,"

...

On page 152, the FBI's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU) "advised Pittsburgh that they could assist with a wireless hack to obtain a file tree, but not the hard drive content." This is fascinating on several levels. First, what wireless hack? The spyware techniques described in Poulsen's reporting are deployed when a target is unlocatable, and the FBI tricks him or her into clicking a link. How does wireless enter the picture? Don't you need to be physically proximate to your target to hack them wirelessly? Second, why could CEAU "assist . . . to obtain a file tree, but not the hard drive content." That smells like a legal constraint, not a technical one. Maybe some lawyer was making distinctions based on probable cause?

Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years

Get Your FBI Spyware Documents Here

The Rotterdam Zoo is giving away cardboard glasses that make it appear that you're looking off to one side; these are gorilla-viewing glasses, meant to avoid incidents in which gorillas attack visitors for making eye contact with them. The glasses' introduction follows an attack on a woman by an escaped gorilla; the specs are sponsored by a local health-insurance company.

No Eye-Contact Glasses (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Here is a 1972 photo of industrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge wearing "Copyright Breeches," made for him by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Both P-Orridge and Tutti are members of the highly-influential art damage music group Throbbing Gristle, who have just begun their first United States tour since 1981.

Watch The Addams Family's Lurch on Shivaree perform "The Lurch." I've never heard of the song until today, and for good reason, I suppose -- the song stinks! But dig that crazy Shivaree logo!

Machine Project, my favorite gallery/workshop in Los Angeles, is holding a pancake breakfast in the beautiful forest it created in its front room.

Pancake breakfast!

Sunday, April 19th, 2009
11am - 2pm

Please join us in the Forest for $3 short stacks from the Kwong Dynasty Pancake Cart, maple syrup, and nature films about bears.

RSVP not required, this event is open to the public.

Pancake breakfast in Machine Project's indoor forest

This used Raptor from Battlestar Galactica could be yours for the right price. And that's more than the $28,000 highest bid on eBay, which still didn't meet the reserve price. Now, NBC/Universal is going to sell it in a "live" auction along with a slew of other props from the show. And yes, a Viper is also available. Mode details over at h +. "Buy a Raptor Fighter Ship used in Battlestar Galactica!"

Meet the friends of the LA Phil on MySpace -- 702 people named Phil, Phyl, and Phill.

(Great music stream, too! Every time I hear Night on Bald Mountain I think of my Shown'N Tell and the When Giants Walked the Earth Picturesound Program. I would play it over and over again when I was six years old.)

Our friend Nemo Gould has several new sculptures on display, including this menacing Boogeyman.

Over at BB Gadgets, Joel has the details on these delightful 12 Gauge Shot Glasses.

For those who needed to cleanse their palates of fir tree needles and penis tips.

Here is a TV news story about Artyom Sidorkin, the Russian gentleman who recently had a two-inch live Fir tree removed from his lung where it had taken root. For more on his story, see "The diagnosis? Fir on the lung" in The Guardian. (via Morbid Anatomy)

"Tin-Can" Curt Degerman, a well-know aluminum can scavenger in the Swedish town of Skellefteå, was apparently a multi-millionaire when he died last year. He was apparently very thrift and also a shrewd investor. From Sweden's The Local:

“He went to the library every day because he didn’t buy newspapers. There he read [Swedish business daily] Dagens Industri,” a cousin (of Degerman told the Expressen newspaper).

“He knew stocks inside and out.”

And Tin-Can Curt used that investing know-how to turn the modest deposits he collected from returning empty cans into mutual funds worth more than 8 million kronor.

In addition, he had purchased 124 gold bars currently valued at 2.6 million kronor and had nearly 47,000 kronor in the bank.

Tin-Can Curt also owned his own home, which was found to have 3,000 kronor in loose change, bringing the total value of his estate to 12,005,877 kronor.

"Eccentric Swede turned empty cans into gold" (via Fortean Times!)

Damiene Iriarte, 26, was picked up naked behind a building in Brooklyn with a bleeding penis. Apparently he had bit off the tip of his own member. Iriarte is a convicted pedophile. "How he did it? Limber, I guess. Not the work of a sane mind," a police source told the New York Daily News. "Sex offender found nude, self-mutilated; bit tip of own penis off: cops"

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Hi, my name is Maggie, and I am a gigantic dork about subways.

I didn't realize this until I was 21, when I lived in NYC for three months on a summer internship and quickly found myself doing things like reading the collected works of subway historian Stan Fischler and spending my whole commute with my nose pressed up against the door windows at the front of the train. (Which is awesome fun, by the way. If you've never done this, you are missing out on a free adventure AND a great opportunity to look ridiculous in public.)

For some reason, above-ground trains don't seem to do it for me. I tried joining Minneapolis' historic streetcar club (Demographics: Over 60, mostly men. The couple meetings I went to featured some great discussions on urological health), but couldn't get as excited about it.

But streetcar preservation's loss is your gain. Today, I present to you the three things you must know about the New York City subway system.

1. The Place to Visit
The New York City Transit Museum is far more fascinating than its name suggests. Descend into this abandoned subway platform in Brooklyn Heights for some first-class history lessons: Like the fabulous tale of the workers who were caught in a cave-in during construction of a tunnel under the East River; sucked up through the river bed by the resulting vacuum; thrown high into the air on a geyser of water---and lived to tell about it!

2. The Man to Know
Alfred Ely Beach is my imaginary boyfriend and a legendary badass. In the late 1860s, Beach put together the first proposal for a subway system in New York City, based on pneumatic train cars. He pitched his idea to the City as was promptly denied, either because famously corrupt mayor "Boss" Tweed reportedly had a financial stake in the trolley, streetcar and elevated railway industry, or because some politically connected landowners didn't want anyone digging under their property.

Either way, Beach decided to fight city hall--in secret. He rented out a basement, hired some discrete labor and dug out a block-long tunnel under Broadway, using the cover of darkness to keep things on the down-low. Word did get out eventually that something was going on, but the details didn't come out until shortly before Beach unveiled his swank underground digs to the public.

Opened in February 1870, Beach's Broadway Underground Railway featured gurgling fountains, a velvet-seated train car, and (by some accounts) a fish tank. Rides were .25 cents a head (about $3.60 or so today). It was spectacular, but the success didn't last. Beach never convinced the state legislature to let him build a full-scale system. By the time he died in 1896, the BUR had been sealed up and forgotten. That is, until the early years of the 20th century, when subway construction workers basically tunneled right into it. According to legend, they found the opulent platform largely intact, but the wooden car was rotting. Most likely, Beach's BUR tunnel ended up becoming part of the old City Hall subway station....which leads me to....

3. The Secret to Enjoy

I picked this tip up from Stan Fischler's books. So the original City Hall station has been closed since the 1940s. There are some good pictures online that will give you an idea of what an amazing piece of architecture this station was. We're talking chandeliers, beautiful arched ceilings, intricate tile work...the whole nine yards.

Most of the time, this is closed to the public. But there is supposedly a way you can sneak a peek. Following Fischler's instructions, you take the Lexington Ave. #6 local southbound to the end of the line and (if the conductor will let you) stay on the train as it does a loop past the old City Hall station to turn itself around. During the loop, you can see the City Hall station out the train windows.

I should note that I never managed to successfully pull this off. I was in New York in the summer of 2002, and (unsurprisingly) convincing subway workers to let you have a little leeway wasn't so easy at the time. But there seem to be people who've done it recently, so you should try it. And, if it works, let me know. I would love to be jealous of you.

BTW, there's more on Alfred Ely Beach in Be Amazing.

Photo is courtesy Brett Day

Robyn Miller uncovered this intriguing photo and asked his readers to imagine what it might be: "the secret lair of Jame Bond's nemesis? Better yet... evidence of a crashed spaceship!"

But actually, it's a $239 million dome that covers the radiocative waste from nuclear explosion tests in the Bikini and Rongelap atolls. "The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crater created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test." Cactus Dome

Forgetomori posted this video of the George Foreman and Muhammad Ali fight from 1974. He notes that during one second of the video (between 5:45 and 5:46) something that looks like the head of Michael Jackson, circa 2000, appears.

It could be a hoax, a bizarre face added digitally and recently to the scene, as what we assume would be the black hair around the face is actually transparent.

On the other hand, there are some things that interact with the image – passing both in front and behind the “face” – which suggest that it was not such a bad editing job. And also suggest that perhaps it’s not a hoax, but pareidolia. Even if I have no idea of what could have looked like a face with glowing eyes. Certainly the height of that face is not right, it’s at the height of everyone else’s waists. Perhaps a bag? I don’t know.

If you don't want to wait for the video to load, visit Forgetomori's blog, where he has an animated GIF of the relevant section. Michael Jackson face appears in Muhammed Ali video: hoax or pareidolia?

Kevin Kelly linked to a paper "co-authored by mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, [who] argues that you can't explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left."

From the paper (The Strong Free Will Theorem):

Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.

Particles Have Free Will

There's been a lot of talk of "teabagging" lately. Conservative anti-tax advocates in the United States have been organizing "tea party" protests, fashioned after the colonial-era protests of British rule. In doing so, they and the right-wing TV punditards who cheer these spectacles on for ratings have ranted about "teabagging," and the desire to "teabag Barack Obama" and such, without apparent knowledge of the word's more common street use.

More recently, news anchors and bloggers have giggled knowingly over that sexual reference, but nobody has acknowledged how the word first entered popular American slang.

I'll tell you how. John Waters.

Here is the email exchange:

XENI: Dear Mister John Waters: We at Boing Boing are devoted fans of your work, and we consider you one of the greatest heroes of the "happy mutant" culture we celebrate. Where does the term "teabagging" come from? Is it true that the term was first popularized, or originated, in one of your films? Also, what is the deal with right wing nutbags (if you'll pardon that term, too) appropriating a perfectly good term for a sex act in such an offensive manner? Your humble devotée, -- Xeni.

JOHN WATERS: "Teabagging" is by my definition the act of dragging your testicles across your partner's forehead. In the UK it is dipping your testicles in your partner's mouth. I didn't invent the term or the act but DID introduce it to film in my movie "Pecker." "Teabagging" was a popular dance step that male go-go boys did to their customers for tips at The Atlantis, a now defunct bar in Baltimore. Hope this helps. -- John Waters

* Yes, this is an actual transcription of an email exchange between Boing Boing and John Waters.

Below, the clip from his movie "Pecker" that started it all. (YouTube Link).

Mr. Waters' work in sculpture and photography is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles: REAR PROJECTION. Snip from show description.

"Rear projection" is a movie term for the process whereby a foreground action is combined with a background scene filmed earlier to give the impression the actors are on location when they are, in fact, working inside a studio. In Waters' latest work, this artificial and outdated visual effect is embraced, attacked and taken to extremes.

Glorifying the struggle, humiliation, and wild excitement of a life in show business, Waters uses an insider's bag of film tricks and trade lingo to celebrate the excess of the movie industry. Rewriting and redirecting existing film imagery snapped off the TV screen, he assaults, elevates, subtitles, and startlingly alters these one time classic, respected, even honored movies to attain a new kind of equality: a cult film that only needs one viewer - John Waters himself.

And finally: below, a rare John Waters short praising the merits of smoking in movie theaters.

(Special thanks to Mr. Johnny Knoxville and the incredible Richard Metzger, who you really ought to be following on Twitter instead of Ashton Kutcher or CNNBRK.)

Jake at Zoomdoggle (above) invites you to make a silly face and submit the photo for his Gurn-a-Thon.

Welcome to the first annual Zoomdoggle Gurn-a-Thon.

What’s a gurn? I hear you cry. A gurn, or gurning is the ancient English art of pulling very silly faces. Usually through a giant horse shoe. I’m not making this up. From Wikipedia: “Gurning contests are a rural English tradition. They are thought to have originated in 1297 at the Egremont Crab Fair”

I don’t have a horseshoe but I do have a face and a digital camera - and so, dear reader, do you.

QUICK: Make a Face (the Zoomdoggle Gurn-a-Thon)

Maker Shed is having a huge clearance sale right now on kits. For instance, the Blubberbot, an inflatable autonomous robot kit (shown here), is selling for $49.95 (regular price is $99.99). The cool telekinetic pen magic trick, regularly $14.99, is $5. And the Bare Bones Arduino Board Kit (a full-featured Arduino clone), regularly $19.99, is selling for $12.50.

(Disclosure: I am editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine.)

Maker Shed April Blowout Clearance Sale

Download MP4 here. YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

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Today we present another animated short from the PSST! 3 Film series -- OMAR / HOT PURSUIT / SEARCH. Like the previous shorts we've featured from PSST! project, this one's the result of a collaboration between three teams of animators. Those teams worked together to express a single story with a uniquely animated and separately produced beginning, middle, and end.

OMAR: A Victorian-sepia-dream in which a child fishes for kite-creatures in the sky, and is lifted on an incredible aerial adventure.

HOT PURSUIT: A Google Maps bad guy car chase drama interlude, with cops and robbers.

SEARCH: A child creates the magical superflat universe of which he dreams.

The first segment in today's episode was directed by Doug Purver, the second part by Honest, the third by Cole Gorst, Brian Smith, and Vincent Aricco.

About the PSST! 3 project, curator Bran Dougherty-Johnson tells Boing Boing,

The main creative challenge is really self-initiated. It's to create original and inspired work on no budget and in collaboration with other teams. That in itself is a challenge, but the reward is unfettered creativity and self-expression with no restraints. You can see in the films that the artists involved took this idea to heart.

Art is a form of reality creation. With PSST! we are opening a space for Motion Graphic Design and Animation to do something other than commercials and endtags, to build community and to create our own work.

Previously:

• Gödel ????? Film School," excerpt from the PSST! 3 Animation Project
• "Legends of Exos," Excerpt from PSST! Animation Project
• BB Video: David O'Reilly, "Please Say Something" preview (animation)
• BBtv: David O'Reilly Vectorpunk Animation (featuring Xeni)

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

More about his work and his life here.

Shawn's hearty career as a photojournalist and artist took him around the world several times over, unselfishly spreading his endless supply of good vibes as he went. Particularly renowned for his portraits of musicians, artists, and entertainers, Shawn photographed a stunning array of pop culture demigods in his 20+ year career including Keith Haring, Tupac, Henry Rollins, James Brown, The Notorious BIG, Bjork, Jun Takahashi, Leo Fitzpatrick, Christopher Wool, Mark Gonzales, Ed Ruscha, Vivienne Westwood, The Bad Brains, Dash Snow, Grandmaster Flash, Neil Young, MIA, John Lee Hooker, Nigo, Sofia Coppola, Agnes B., Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys, Keith Richards, Chloe Sevigny, The Foo Fighters, Everlast, Kraftwerk, Wu Tang Clan, and The Sex Pistols, to name but a few.

(Thanks, Richard Metzger)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Like many great tomes of history, Be Amazing is largely meant to be read as allegory. You (hopefully) can't inject the gooey center of yourself into your neighbor and take over his brain, but you can take the story of the sacculina as a parable showing you how mooching should be done.There are, however, a few entries that offer more immediate, real-world-useful information. This is one of them.

How to Crawl out of Quicksand

Bad Idea: Trust the Movies
Do this, and you're liable to end up thinking that quicksand is something that only happens in the jungle or the desert, and that the average patch has no discernible bottom. But quicksand, as it turns out, isn't some Lovecraftian entity come to devour human souls. It's really just your average run-of-the-mill sand and clay that's been saturated with water, usually from an underground spring. Technically, you don't even need sand--any old find-grained soil will do. According to the United States Geological Survey, quicksand can pop up just about anywhere. It could be waiting for you, right now, out in the backyard. On the plus side, though, that stuff about it being bottomless is also bunk. Most patches of quicksand would barely reach reach up to your waist, let alone be deep enough to cover your head. So before you start screaming for help, it might be a good idea to just try standing up. Unless, you know, you like being made fun of by emergency response crews.

Good Idea: Know Your Physics
Getting unstuck from quicksand is really a Vulcan-esque endeavor, requiring rationality, intelligence and emotional distance. Unfortunately, the most common response to sinking thigh-deep into what previously appeared to be solid ground is to freak out like Captain Kirk at an intergalactic bikini contest. You must stay cool. This information should help. In 2005, researchers from the University of Amsterdam announced the results of their research on quicksand. According to their report in Nature, the human body is actually much less dense than quicksand. Meaning that, under normal circumstances, a person in quicksand should really just bob around like buoy on the ocean. No heroic effort required. Problems only set in when you struggle, which stirs up the sand and water mixture, making it more liquid and you more likely to sink. But, while surviving the pit is easy, getting out is another story. Because quicksand is so viscous, it's difficult for air to penetrate it. Thus, when you move your arm or leg, air can't fill the spot where you once were and a partial vacuum forms. This makes it extremely difficult to pull yourself out of quicksand, even if you are moving slowly and deliberately. In fact, one of the true dangers of quicksand is exhaustion. Even removing one leg from the muck might make a lone hiker too tired to get back to camp and could open them up to attacks from wild animals or the perils of bad weather. Quicksand: It's a good reason to do things with friends.

I would rescue Michael Rogalski, provider of images, from quicksand anytime.

Ian Tomlinson, the man shortly after an unprovoked attack by a police officer during London's G20 demonstration, did not die of a heart-attack, as was previously thought. A new postmortem shows that Tomlinson died of abdominal bleeding after the attack by the police-officer. Tomlinson was not a demonstrator -- he was a passer-by on the way home.

The Coroner's statement said the second post-mortem's conclusions were provisional.

In its statement, the Coroner's Court said that the inquest had looked at the first post-mortem carried out after Mr Tomlinson collapsed and died on the evening of 1 April.

That examination, carried out by Dr Freddy Patel, concluded that Mr Tomlinson had diseased heart and liver and a substantial amount of blood in the abdominal cavity.

"His provisional interpretation of his findings was that the cause of death was coronary artery disease," said the statement.

"A subsequent post-mortem examination was conducted by another consultant forensic pathologist, Dr Nat Cary, instructed by the IPCC and by solicitors acting for the family of the late Mr Tomlinson.

G20 death was not heart attack

Sales are booming for lo-jack style devices designed to remotely kill cars when their owners fall behind on payments. These cars are sold to people whose credit has been downchecked to "B," on lots where cars cost more, loan terms are worse, and they contain GPS units that make the car's location continuously available to the dealer, credit-company (and others) so that they can more easily repossess the cars.

Companies such as OnStar are beginning to make use of their remote controls for purposes other than theft prevention: for example, the company promises to throttle the engine of any car that they're told is involved in a police chase.

Presumably these remote-kill devices are no better or worse secured than, say, the tax-records of every British parent (repeatedly lost by the tax authority), or the computer systems of giant credit-reporting bureaus, or the networks of the 100+ embassies and foreign service offices penetrated by the GhostNet espionage ring.

Designing devices that are intended to be remotely disabled, against the owner's wishes, is like designing one of those science-fiction-movie spaceships with the inconveniently placed "self-destruct" button. I always wondered about those: wouldn't starship engineers turn out a better product if they designed it from the ground up never to explode?

And wouldn't these cars be more secure if they were designed never to be remotely controlled against the owner's wishes?

The devices, which are required by a growing number of subprime loan contracts, are the product of a revolution in telematics -- the blending of telecommunications and wireless technology.

The devices are usually controlled remotely by the dealer or lender and are linked to the vehicle's powertrain. They usually cut out the power several days after the payment is due. Before the deadline, the driver is treated to a concert of tones and flashing indicators signaling that the deadline is approaching. There are also warnings after the deadline has passed.

Their proponents call the devices a win-win for consumers and finance companies. They make it possible for dealers to sell cars to people who would have a hard time getting a loan otherwise. The buyers end up paying a somewhat lower interest rate because the risk to the lender is less.

The products also include global positioning, or GPS, to speed up the repossession of the vehicle, if necessary.

CNN article

KaliMama sez, "Digital artist Atom X designed this awesome music pirate flag at half-mast for my blog, and then he CC licensed it for all to use. I figured other Boing Boing readers might like it!"

Calling all beggars and blighters and ne'er-do-well cads

The four defendants in the Swedish trial of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and $3.6m fine. I don't know much about Swedish copyright law -- and the defense rested on the technical boundaries what constitutes an infringement -- so I have no idea if this is the kind of judgment that is likely to survive the inevitable appeal.

A more interesting question is whether The Pirate Bay will disappear now. After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it's certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course -- just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more "moderate" services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).

It's a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that's dedicated to their destruction.

Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.

Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.

They were forced to drop the charge of "assisting copyright infringement" and focus on the lesser charge of "assisting making available copyrighted content". They had been seeking SKr115m (£101m) in compensation for loss of earnings due to the millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.

The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdict

Most excitingly today on Offworld, area/code's iPhone puzzler Drop7 -- still one of the platform's absolute best, and one of the very few that (four months later) I'm still playing on a daily basis -- got a social update with worldwide leaderboard and Facebook Connect support that finally legitimizes its 'sequence' mode, and saw the release of a short EP of its fantastic Steve Reich-ian soundtrack. If you haven't played the game yet, do so as soon as possible.

Elsewhere we found a fantastic "brief history" of chiptunes (that actually is considerably more exhaustive than they give themselves credit for) in an academic journal, saw vinyl toy/comic star Whaleboy get a trademark for games, and watched the best machinima of the week with Seakitten Collective's LittleBigRevenge.

We also played Cosmic Nitro, the latest iPhone game from Galcon creator that's best summed up as "survival mode Missile Command x insanity", downloaded a number of songs from the soundtrack of our highly anticipated Stalin Vs. Martians, scratched our heads over the curiously un-tetramino shapes of Diego Silvério's Tetris furniture, and saw the former real-life Mario Kart prankster do Pac Man in real life.

Adam sez, "Time Warner will no longer be implementing download caps in all markets. I can't thank you enough. As you know, BB is read by a lot of mass-media outlets and other national organizations. I have it on good authority that Senator Chuck Schumer's office was notified of the impending protest through the Boing Boing post, and it spurred them to take the issue seriously."

Time Warner's climbdown on this one is hilarious -- they say that they have to abandon caps until they can "educate" their customers (presumably it takes a lot of education to convince people to let your ISP clobber your participation in digital life to turn a buck).

We Won! (For Now) Time Warner Killing Usage Caps "In All Markets" - But TW Press Statements Suggest They Are Still Out Of Touch (Thanks, Adam!)

The excellent SF in SF free science fiction reading series will host Peter S Beagle and Richard Lupoff at their next event, tomorrow (Saturday):

Our April reading takes place on Saturday, April 18. Doors and cash bar open at 6:00 PM. Readings begin at 7:00 PM.

The guests will be Richard Lupoff and Peter S. Beagle. Each author will read a selection from their works, followed by Q & A with the audience moderated by author Terry Bisson. Books will be available for sale courtesy of Borderlands Books.

The Variety Preview Theatre, The Hobart Bldg., 582 Market St. @ 2nd/Montgomery, San Francisco. Take MUNI/BART! The Montgomery St. stop is steps from our front door.

April Reading - Richard Lupoff & Peter S. Beagle (Thanks, Rina!)

H1kar1 sez, "We're throwing the first US hacker camp in a decommissioned Titan-1 Missile Silo. A bunch of awesome pictures of the site have just been posted from our visits over the past couple weeks. CFP and campsite organizer sign up form still open and looking for people to participate!"

Toorcamp (Thanks, Hikari!)

Submissions are still open for Viable Paradise, the intensive science-fiction writers' boot-camp held on Martha's Vineyard every autumn. I've taught VP several times and always been impressed with the format, the setting, and the caliber of the students and the instructors. Viable Paradise lasts for a single week, and involves a dawn-to-dinner relentless set of tutorials, personal meetings, critiques, and exercises that aim to impart a career's worth of wisdom in a single week. You can become a successful science fiction writer without attending a workshop like this, and attending is no guarantee of success, but for the right writer, this can be the event that gets you from promising to published.

Viable Paradise (via Making Light)

An update from Shepard Fairey, following this recently-Boinged update on the acclaimed artist's legal battle with the AP:

My lawyers filed my response to The AP’s claims against me on Tuesday (CLICK HERE FOR SHEPARD’S RESPONSE). It includes a dozen examples of AP photographs that consist almost entirely of copyrighted artwork from me and other artists. Today, The AP issued a statement accusing me of “making attacks” on them. I don’t feel the need to respond to that in detail, because my lawyer already has (CLICK HERE FOR LAWYER’S RESPONSE).

As I have stated before I am fighting the AP to protect the rights of all artists but I do want to emphasize one other important point. I’m not accusing the AP of infringing anybody’s rights. I’m saying everyone should have the same broad rights of fair use and free expression, and that includes The AP. I’m not questioning The AP’s legal right to do what it does. But I am saying they have to be consistent. They can’t have it both ways. If AP photographs that do nothing but depict other artists’ work are protected by fair use, then my work has to be, too, because it’s at least as transformative, creative and expressive as The AP photos we identify in my response, if not much more so. If the AP has the right to do what it’s done, then so do I.

UPDATE: Shepard Fairey vs The AP (obeygiant)

Previously: Shepard Fairey Counterfiles in Associated Press Obama Poster Conflict

Muji has opened a US mail-order store. Muji is a Japanese chain that makes extremely high-quality stationery, clothes, furnishings, and other stuff, all with a very clean line and none of it with any sort of label. I use tons of Muji stationery, our DVDs are organized in Muji DVD boxes, and three of my favorite shirts are Muji shirts. The baby's room has a Muji CD player in it. Our house is filled with useful Muji tools. It's all long-wearing, reasonably priced, and extremely polished.

That said, my experience with their UK web-store has been pretty awful. Slow delivery, awkward packaging, and a decidedly second-rate website all make me more apt to walk down to Covent Garden and shop in person at my nearest Muji than to go online. But if the web-store were all that there were, I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at it. Unfortunately, the US range seems pretty limited -- again, it's better than nothing!

Muji USA

Bart sends us this Instructable for a Legway: "A self balancing, human powered, steampunk styled, Segway. All you need is a brave self balancing human. This is the ultimate green vehicle for all you eco conscious steampunkers."

Steampunk Segway ( Legway ) (Thanks, Bart!)

In this episode of Make: Talk, we'll be joined by Jeri Ellsworth, a pinball fanatic and hardware hacker. You might remember her as the chip designer who Easter egged a Commodore 64 emulator in a video game joystick. We'll also present some news from the world of making, and our favorite tricks, tips, and tools of the week. Be sure to call in for prizes that we'll award during the program! The number is (646) 915-8698.

Below is the show player, where you can listen to the live program on Friday, and to past episodes.

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio