So, two Jokers walk into a Comic-Con...

More pics of toys and misc. Comic-Con collectibles over at BBG.

This postcard advertising bOING bOING #2 was sent out in 1989 to the 50 or so people who ordered a copy of bOING bOING #1 from the pages of Factsheet Five. I found it today in a box of junk I was cleaning out.

(If anyone still has one of these cards and sends me a scan of what's on the front, I'll send them a Boing Boing T-shirt.)

This video is a couple of years old, but I just read about it on Forgetomori last night. It shows a folded piece of paper, balanced on an upright toothpick, under a glass bowl. The guy in the video shows how he can make the paper spin with his "psychic powers."

Before he starts making it spin though, he first blows a hair dryer around the bowl to show that the apparatus inside can't be affected by moving air, and then he moves a powerful magnet all around the bowl to show that there's no magnetism involved. The he sits down in a meditative pose and makes the paper spin in one direction, and then another.

You can read the video creator's explanation here. Before you read it though, try to think how he might have accomplished this.

PsiWheel Under a Glass Container video

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I was looking at this old video I made with my old comedy group, the Van Gogh-Goghs and thought, "you know who might get a kick out of this? The internet". So I hope you enjoy. Also, it's sorta NSFW, so I'm posting it on Saturday, the Day of No Rules. Thanks!

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

Wild monkeys in India have grown so out of control that the state government is planning to build a school for rogue monkeys.

The problem of rogue monkeys is particularly severe in towns close to India's north-western border with Pakistan. Officials accuse them of a variety of bad behaviour from terrorising children, snatching food from people and destroying property... The proposed new monkey school will take in the "worst offenders" and put them through a crash course in good manners.

Indian school for rogue monkeys (via Monkeywire)
(Photo: Peter Garnham)

Over at Dangerous Minds, Tara McGinley posted this fantastic skateboard series featuring the Miles Davis Quintet, as illustrated by Ian Johnson. "Miles Davis Quintet Skateboards"

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Normally, the sign for a driving school isn't the sort of thing that haunts your mind, drawing you deeper and deeper into its depths, trying to puzzle out a narrative from its teasingly specific set of clues. A muffler shop, maybe, but not a driving school.

Except this one, on Venice Blvd. in Los Angeles. I'm not sure of the name, or really anything about the driving school, except that they have a wonderfully bizzare mural:

An ambitious effort to arrange a financially happy marriage between TV and Hollywood, Phonevision gives TV set owners a chance to order movies by telephone, at $1 each. Once the order is placed, a simple gadget attached to the TV set and connected to the home telephone unscrambles the movie on the TV screen. Hollywood collects its profit and the set owner is charged on his telephone bill. Last fall Hollywood released for the Chicago test more than 90 films made during the past three or four years.

The above was from Time magazine, January 8, 1951.

Viorel Firoiu, 48, of Romania claims that it was constipation that lead him to get two hammerheads stuck in his rectum. (Sure that was the reason.) Doctors had to surgically remove the two items. From Austrian Times:

Dr Cristina Bontescu, spokeswoman for the local hospital where he turned up at the emergency unit, said: "He was a bit drunk and said he had been eating cherries that had left him badly constipated. He said he had a few drinks to dull the pain and then came up with the idea of poking a hammerhead up his backside in the hope of sorting out the constipation. "But the hammerhead got stuck and then he came up with the idea of using a second hammerhead in order to try and get out the first - but then he lost the second one as well."

"Heavy metal cure for constipation"

I sat down with Apple's Final Cut Studio team and some fellow videobloggers and web video editors/producers in a Los Angeles hotel yesterday, and checked out the new version of the popular video editing suite.

Bottom line: normally I wouldn't be so jazzed about an application update, but as someone who's spent the better part of the last two years working on web video production, this struck me and other web video grunts in the room as "workflow-changing" (some said "life-changing!") and a nice big leap forward.

One of the editor/producer/shooters in the room said he could see these improvements shaving "a total of three months" off of every work-year, in saved man-hours. That's one way to look at it, and another, from a somewhat more workaholic person in the room: "We'll be able to get so much more video produced."

A quick recap of significant feature changes, after the jump.

Irwin Chusid called this promo video for fans of Insane Clown Posse and other bands of its ilk, "14 minutes of the world's worst fonts."

Keni Lee Burgess plays Furry Lewis' "Judge Harsh Blues" on his 3-string cigar box guitar.

Japanese scientist have shown how the human body glows with visible light. The quantity of light emitted is 1000 times too dim for our eyes to see, but the researchers imaged the glow with special cameras. The light is tied to metabolism, suggesting that measuring it could have medical applications, says Tohoku Institute of Technology scientist Masaki Kobayashi. Meanwhile, New Age aura-seers everywhere scream with "vindication." From LiveScience:

In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

(This visible light differs from the infrared radiation -- an invisible form of light -- that comes from body heat.)

To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

"Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.



Some of you may have seen the amazing Soviet Arcade Machines Museum; this is up that same socialist alley: I started out trying to import a Polski Fiat from Poland, and somehow ended up with this: an old, beaten Ulak-Tartysh video game.

Ulak-Tartysh, for those of you not familiar with carcass-based sports, is essentially polo played with the headless body of a dead goat. It's popular in Central Asia, and especially in Kyrgyzstan, which is where this fascinating game hails from. This one appears to have been built in 1983, at some state-run electronics factory in the city of Mailuu-Suu. The coin slots say "15 Kopeks," but I think at that time all the USSR satellite states used that denomination.

Sad news: Ellie Frazetta, the wife, muse, and model for Frank Frazetta, recently passed away.

The following comment at Golden Age Comic Book Stories is amazing:

On Saturday the 18th, me, my wife and my mother-in-law were in East Stroudsburg, PA, on vacation from San Diego, CA for the purpose of visiting the Frazetta Museum. When we got there, we met another couple also there for that purpose, who broke the terrible news to us. While standing there talking, Frank Frazetta himself came out of his house, and insisted on showing us the museum, while waving away our condolences. However, he could not find the key, so he then invited us into his home! We were in Frazetta's livingroom/studio, talking to The Master, and to his son, for more than an hour or so. It is a very good thing to know that someone who's been your hero for all your life is truly a gracious, down to earth, humble and generous person in real life. Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to him, his family and friends. Thanks also to you for the posting of so much of his work, and this post in particular, of his beloved and beautiful wife, Ellie.

Ellie Frazetta, R.I.P.

Jake spotted this bit of silly fun at a pizzeria in New York.

Tom Hanks trash can

"Amateur" Professor Solomon, a "findologist" and author of the fantastic book How To Find Lost Objects, has a new free e-booklet available and it's a hoot. Unless, of course, you take it seriously, in which case it might be incredibly useful. "Flying Saucer Travel Tips: How To Optimize Your Ride In A UFO" is 27 pages, illustrated, and available as a PDF from the delightful Professor's site. Also free: "Can I Smoke Aboard A Flying Saucer? Questions and Answers about UFOs." From Flying Saucer Travel Tips:

5. The Space People can help you develop your psychic powers. If you’re serious about it, and willing to make the effort, you can learn ESP, clairvoyance, or spoon-bending. Just let them know you’re interested. *

6. Ask for a jumpsuit—there’s usually a spare one aboard—and wear it about the ship. You’ll feel less like an outsider. †

* Uri Geller, the noted spoon-bender, tells (inMy Story[Praeger Publishers, 1975]) of having acquired his powers from extrater- restrial entities.

† The jumpsuit will be useful, too, back on Earth—so hang onto it. You can wear it to parties, as a conversation piece. And it will enhance your stage appearance, should you go on tour as a spoon-bender.

Flying Saucer Travel Tips

Urban Screen's mesmerizing building facade video: "How it would be, if a house was dreaming." (Via Dangerous Minds)

UC Berkeley researchers have built a cell phone microscope capable of imaging malaria parasites, tuberculosis bacteria, and other bugs. The CellScope consists of compact microscope lenses attached to the phone's camera. Most impressive is the device's ability to do fluorescent microscopy.

The researchers showed that the TB bacteria could be automatically counted using image analysis software.

"The images can either be analyzed on site or wirelessly transmitted to clinical centers for remote diagnosis," said David Breslauer, co-lead author of the study and a graduate student in the UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley Bioengineering Graduate Group. "The system could be used to help provide early warning of outbreaks by shortening the time needed to screen, diagnose and treat infectious diseases."

The engineers had previously shown that a portable microscope mounted on a mobile phone could be used for bright field microscopy, which uses simple white light — such as from a bulb or sunlight — to illuminate samples. The latest development adds to the repertoire fluorescent microscopy, in which a special dye emits a specific fluorescent wavelength to tag a target - such as a parasite, bacteria or cell - in the sample.

"Fluorescence microscopy requires more equipment — such as filters and special lighting — than a standard light microscope, which makes them more expensive," said Fletcher. "In this paper we've shown that the whole fluorescence system can be constructed on a cell phone using the existing camera and relatively inexpensive components."

"UC Berkeley researchers bring fluorescent imaging to mobile phones for low-cost screening in the field"

Pink Tentacle posted this video of a robotic baseball pitcher and batter.

The robot pitcher consists of a high-speed, three-fingered hand (developed by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa and his team from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology) mounted on a mechanical arm (developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). With superb control of nimble fingers that can open and close at a rate of up to 10 times per second, the robot can release the ball with perfect timing. Precise coordination between the fingers, hand and arm allow the robot pitcher to hit the strike zone 90% of the time.

Video: Robot baseball

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

My friend Skip, who runs the AV Geeks sections at Archive.org, has collected a ton of vintage educational films. The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables is a thoughtful, fascinating look at how social workers in the 1970s taught the mentally handicapped about sex.

Skip's DVD collections--focused on everything from venereal disease to ecology to nutrition and propaganda--are very much worth your while.

Recently on Offworld we saw a bit more news trickle out of the ongoing Comic-Con, most notably new media and information on Left 4 Dead 2, with a gallery of new screenshots, on-the-floor video of its bayou-terror in action, and a new boss monster, whose get-up serves as a strict warning to everyone: when you dress yourself in the morning, please take note that this outfit could possibly be the one in which you spend eternity as a reanimated corpse. (Note: new star Rochelle understands this, as she shows up in style donning the electroclash Depeche Mode T-shirt above.)

We also saw newly revealed features coming to Q-Games' decidedly old-school inspired PixelJunk Shooter, and a demonstration of its fluid- and thermo-dynamics, and discovered that -- finally! -- an official version of gold star board game Settlers of Catan is being developed for the iPhone.

Finally, we saw Plants Vs. Zombies confirmed for the Xbox 360, Katamari Damacy's King of All Cosmos bringing his aloof and royally pluralized inanity to Twitter (and with it, a fantastic repurpose-able desktop background), and watched what happens when you try to play all four instruments at once as a One Man Rock Band.

And our 'one shot's for the day: gorgeously illustrated Mario deaths, and retro-future Pac-Man/Space Invaders in automotive form.

Artist Heidi Cody makes all kinds of crazy work using corporate mascots and scenes of nature as portrayed on grocery store packaging. With collaborator Pete Beeman, she currently has this large kinetic sculpture (below) showing at the LAB Gallery in New York (47th & Lexington) through July 31.

In Ad Nauseam, I wrote about how her work illustrates the extent to which consumer culture has become our natural environment. We can identify corporate logos by the tiniest fragment, but can barely name a single plant or tree native to our neighborhoods.

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

As Google expands its Google Book Search service, adding millions of titles, it will dramatically increase the public's access to books. More and more people will soon be browsing, reading and purchasing books online. But Google may be leaving out the privacy we have come to expect, with systems that monitor the digital books you search, the pages you read, how long you spend on various pages, and even what you write down in the margins.

To ensure that our privacy remains at least as strong online as it is in the physical world, Google needs to do more. With the ACLU of Northern California and the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley, EFF has written a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, demanding that Google take specific steps to protect your freedom to read privately. We've asked that Google only respond to legitimate warrants when the government comes calling, for example, and we've asked that they not share your private reading data with third parties without your permission, among other things.

Now, we need you to join us in the fight to defend reader privacy -- take action and tell Eric Schmidt that you demand the same privacy for your online reading habits that you enjoy when reading paper.

I have some misgivings about the Google Book Search settlement, mostly to do with the fact that a settlement means that Google won't litigate the fair use question of whether making a copy of a work in order to create a search engine infringes copyright. Those misgivings don't trump my delight at the idea of guaranteeing public access to all these books, and the restoration of orphan books to public hands.

But the issue of privacy is much more grave. I want Google to create a binding, written agreement to hold readers' information private, so that the future of reading doesn't include the possibility of warrantless spying on your book-reading activity. For complex legal reasons, it's unlikely that anyone will ever be in a position to give Google a settlement permitting this again, so this is it. The status quo Google sets will be the one that we end up living with for the foreseeable future.

Don't Let Google Close the Book on Reader Privacy

This video documents the creation of a fabulous homemade Star Wars AT-AT walker loft bed, built by a father for his son. It's made from everyday, easy-to-source materials and includes a hide-hole loft (in the AT-AT's body) with trap-door access. This fills me with feelings of fatherly inadequacy and makes me start plotting something equally elaborate for Poesy once she's big enough to enjoy a trap door.

Star Wars Imperial Walker Loft Bed (Thanks, Stagueve!

Richard Kadrey's new novel Sandman Slim is the most hard-boiled piece of supernatural fiction I've ever had the pleasure of reading. William Gibson says it's a "deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece" and that's just right.

Eleven years ago, James Stark was banished to hell by his circle of magic buddies, betrayed by his supposed friends for the crime of being a better magician than them. For eleven years, he's suffered hell's torments as Azazel's mortal slave, first made to fight in the pits and then turned into an assassin. And now he's escaped hell by stabbing himself in the heart with a key that opens every lock, and he's returned to Los Angeles to seek his vengeance on the magicians who betrayed him. He hunts them across a demon-infested Los Angeles, dishing out and receiving relentless, graphic violence, determined to take his revenge and then die and leave the Earth behind forever.

In another writer's hands, this might be just another of those gonzo-funny books about demons and magic and so forth, an over-the-top, ironic novel that eschews horror for yuks.

But Kadrey's Stark is hard-boiled -- not just self-conscious and wise-cracking, but bereft of hope, burning with anger, without any of that self-reflexive, cutesy stuff that writers put in when they're worried about sounding like a poseur. Kadrey's not worried. In the way that Lovecraft's best work is totally unapologetic about the horrors of hell, in the way that Chandler is totally unapologetic about his antiheroes who inhabit a world without redemption or light, Kadrey's Stark is in a living hell, and he hurts, and he will make other people hurt, and he will not stop.

That's not to say that there's no wit in Sandman Slim -- there's plenty of that, but it's the gritty, whiskey-fuelled Tom Waits kind of wit that laughs like it has throat cancer and then spits something wet on the floor after it's done.

This is a tightly plotted revenge story that grabbed me by the throat and didn't let go. The characters are fascinating and even likable, and the gun-stuff and the magic-stuff and the demonology-stuff all feel like they're from someone who knows what he's talking about, all confident and energetic and fresh and angry. I loved this book and all its screwed-up people.

Sandman Slim: A Novel

This Hello Kitty Stormtrooper fig-mod was spotted at this year's ComicCon. Huzzah! I want to see an entire platoon of life-sized cosplayers in this getup.

Hello Kitty Pink Stormtrooper (Thanks, David!)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

On my way to my neighborhood auto parts store one morning, I saw a diminutive, shabby, bearded man standing by the side of the road with an armload of papers. As I approached, I saw a sign: "$1 Stories." Excited, I fished a dollar out from my pants somewhere and handed it to him out the window; I think he fanned out his stack of stories to let me pick, but he may have just handed me one at random. I can't really remember, and it doesn't matter, since so far everything I've read of his has been great in its own odd way.



UPDATE! I've reduced the posted story to just an excerpt; I was going back and forth about it, but enough well-meaning killjoys in the comments pointed out that as a copyrighted story, there were issues in posting it all online, especially since the donation I suggested went to the homeless shelter as opposed to the author directly, who is still unreachable. I'll keep trying to find him, and if I can hunt him down and get his ok, I'll put the whole thing back up, and possibly some more. Still, I encourage everyone to read the excerpt and donate to the LA Midnight mission, and I promise to reflect on what a monster I am. Thanks!

Martin sez, "During a recent stay at our cottage in norther Wisconsin, I awoke to find this balloon hovering above a futon in the corner of the room. It was eerie. I didn't know what was going on for a second or two. There was no air movement, even though all the windows to the cottage were open. Perfect neutral buoyancy!"

The video is awesomely David Lynchian -- something about the cottage decor.

Hovering Balloon (Thanks, Martin!)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Yet again I've dragged out some little ad from a 1977 Popular Science; I just can't help myself. This one is especially good:


So, here we have President Malcom J. Roebuck telling me, with a look of dead-eyed seriousness, that I can make $25 to $100 per hour by making and selling "metal pin-back badges" made with his $35 button crimper doohickey. Let's use his own figures here and break down exactly what it would take in the "profitable badge and button business" to make this $25 to $100/hour.

So, to even hit his low end, I need to sell 10 of these an hour, every hour. That's assuming I'm only selling the expensive "photo" buttons and have zero expenses-- say, I stole the machine and am just punching images from discarded newspapers and ATM receipts. Roebuck, please. I can't even imagine the convoluted chain of events that would have to happen for you to hit the $100/hour number, but I bet it would involve a stadium full of people, and you and your button-making machine being the only source for an antidote for something.

So, $100/hr in 1977 dollars, selling cheap-ass pins you make on the crappy little crimper you bought from this crook. I'd really love to see the "fully illustrated money making plans" he offers as well. I bet they have tips like "Make sure everyone you know buys several buttons, every day, forever! It's THAT EASY!"

The CSS IS AWESOME mug is awesome -- until it makes you snarf coffee out your nostrils all over your keyboard.

CSS IS AWESOME Mug by stevenfrank (via Global Nerdy)

On the IDSA Materials and Processes blog, a fascinating look at a one-piece plastic latch designed to close large cardboard boxes, like the ones giant TVs come in.

It's passed though a hole that goes through two walls of corrugated (the top and the bottom) and then the two locking surfaces are pushed inward, hooking onto the backside of the inside of the carton. The latch is locked in place with a snap, which can be opened by squeezing...

Okay, now for a few points of interest: This part takes advantage of polypropylene's flexibility - particularly for snaps and living hinges. The image below shows the part in the position it's molded in. Part of the mold comes from underneath and part from the top, but they meet in the middle at a "bypass" to create a break between the two moving parts. Except they leave a little bit of flash to connect they (and probably to improve the flow of the material in the mold). That flash is broken with the latch is used for the first time...

What's That?: Plastic Cardboard Box Latch

As Mark posted yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has extended a really heartfelt apology for Amazon's ham-fisted remote deletion of Orwell's 1984 from Kindles last week. The company offering the book for sale through Amazon didn't have the US rights (but US copyright law doesn't say anything about Amazon chasing down customers and taking unlicensed books back from them if it makes a mistake like this). I believe Jeff is sincere. I think he's a good guy, and I think that Amazon, is, generally, the best etailer around, with incredibly customer-friendly terms of sale and service for physical goods. Amazon is my first choice for everything from hard drives to CDs to electronics to small furniture items.

But when it comes to digital delivery, the picture is very different. Amazon won't even tell publishers, writers, or readers what kinds of mischief the Kindle can do -- in the months since its release, we've learned that Amazon will shut off your Kindle account for returning physical purchases if it doesn't think you're sincere; we've learned that Amazon can remotely delete files from your Kindle; we've learned that Amazon has a secret deal with some publishers to limit the number of times you can download Kindle books; we've learned that Amazon can selectively switch off features on books after you buy them, such as the text-to-speech feature.

And what's more, we've learned this all the hard way, because it bit customers on the ass.

Further, Amazon won't say what else is lurking in the Kindle. Specifically, they won't say:

* Whether the Kindle EULA or other terms forbid moving Kindle's "DRM-free" books to competing devices

* Whether there is a patent or other encumbrance that would make it illegal to build a competing device that can read or convert the "DRM-free" files

* What after-purchase control Amazon can exercise on "DRM-free" files: can they be remotely deleted? Can they have features revoked?

This is basic stuff: if you're going to sell a product, you should tell the purchaser what she's getting. It's not a radical proposition, and the fact that Amazon, with its stellar, customer-oriented real-goods business won't disclose these basic facts shocks me silly.

I want to love the Kindle. It's my kind of gizmo. If Amazon comes clean about what it can and can't do, and offers a way to sell and buy books without any of this control stuff, I'll be their biggest cheerleader. In the last year, my Boing Boing book reviews sold 25,000 (real) books through Amazon -- given half a chance, I'd start reviewing DRM-free ebooks here, too.

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

An Apology from Amazon (via Make)

Roger Griffiths, a successful artist is Mapua, New Zealand, lost it when Westpac, the bank he'd been with for 25 years, declined to give him a NZ$80,000 (7,466,385.08 North Korean Won)mortgage because, as an artist, he doesn't have a regular income. He does, however, have a ton of property, a gallery show in NYC, and NZ$190,000 (301.471664g of platinum or 81,051.56 Burmese Khat) on deposit with Westpac. Which he promptly withdrew. In twenties. And then he deposited it with his local, community-oriented credit union, the Nelson Building Society. As Griffiths points out, Westpac is happy to lend to cigar-chomping loony industrialists like Lane Walker Rudkin Industries, who took Westpac for NZ$110,000,000 (10,860,852,632.40 Nigerian Nairas) in bad loans.

"They can lose $110 million with LWR but turn down a normal customer who has never missed a loan payment," he said. "If they don't have the trust in me after 25 years, there's a problem for Westpac."

Having decided to withdraw his money, he then decided to make it hard for the bank by requesting payment in $20 bills.

He said the Nelson branch told him it did not have that amount and he would have to also go to other branches at Stoke, Richmond and Motueka. However, he insisted the bank have the money ready to collect at 9am today. He then took it to the Nelson Building Society, saying he would rather deal with NBS because it was part of the community.

His message to Westpac: "If you don't support the community, the community won't support you."

$190,000 withdrawn in $20 bills (via Consumerist)

(Image: MARTIN DE RUYTER/ The Nelson Mail)

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Our pal Doug Rushkoff was a guest on the Colbert Report last week. Doug was talking about his new book Life Inc., the story of how corporatism has spread into all aspects of our life. The producers also made a terrific green room comedy sketch with Doug too. I LOL'd.

So much for the much-vaunted Swedish progressivism: the IKEA store in Redhook, New York, sent Sarah Miller to the toilets to breastfeed her baby, then, when she gave up on waiting for the toilets to be free and tried to leave the store, the same security guards who'd banished her to the shitter held her up again to check her receipts.

On Wednesday I was in Ikea Redhook in the middle of breastfeeding, fully covered, when I was told I had to stop doing "that" and go to the nearby family bathroom. The Ikea employee and security guards were extremely rude to us. I was hustled off to the bathroom and then had to wait because someone else was using it. I was humiliated, my daughter was upset from being interrupted in the middle of her feed. When eventually I gave up and headed for the car to finish feeding, the security guards who had seen the entire event insisted on checking my receipts. I'm putting together a formal complaint to IKEA. I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else?

IKEA Redhook breastfeeding incident (via Consumerist)

Update: Victory! Justine's publisher has replaced its whites-only cover with a gloriously brown one.

YA author Justine Larbalestier has gone public with her disappointment over her US publisher Bloomsbury's cover art for her forthcoming novel Liar. Specifically, Justine is upset that the cover shows a white girl, and the book is about a black girl. She took this up strenuously with her publisher but was overruled.

It's a rare author who gets final say in her cover, many don't get any say at all. I'm generally OK with this, since I figure the point of the cover is to convey to the reader, "this is this sort of book, and if you like this sort, you'll like this." And I figure that cover designers and art-directors who do hundreds of covers a year know, in a much more fine-grained way, what the psychology of covers is. It helps that Irene Gallo, Tor's art director who oversaw the covers of all my Tor books, is terrific, loves my work, and always does a good job, and that HarperCollins in the UK have also been kicking all kinds of ass on this score.

But Justine's right about this one, because, as she says,

This cover did not happen in isolation.

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA--they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section--and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

The notion that "black books" don't sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them4 Until that happens more often we can't know if it's true that white people won't buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with "black covers" don't sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with "white covers."

Ain't That a Shame (from Justine's blog)

Justine Larbalestier's Cover Girl

Kevin sends in this video of Michel "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and son at ComicCon, rapping about the Green Hornet, noting, "Probably the weirdest thing I've ever seen in covering Comic-Con."

SDCC: Michel Gondry Raps About The Green Hornet

Darren sez, "Often the best blogs give you access into a world you otherwise would never see, or even think about. This blog is written by somebody who escorts women into an abortion clinic, through a gauntlet of tens or hundreds of protesters. This photo shows how they surround the women to protect them."

I used to do this at the Morgentaler Clinic in Toronto some weekends -- my mother Roz was an early and prominent pro-Choice activist, and we were involved in the movement as a family from my early childhood. The hateful, violent protests at the clinic (which culminated with its bombing in 1992) were some of the most intimidating scenes I've ever been in.

We do this because clients of the clinic are often met at their cars by protesters. Between 2 and 5 protesters will follow/chase a client from their car parked in the public lot across the street to the private property line; talking at them, handing out literature, attempting to steer clients into the fake clinic down the block, shouting misinformation, slowing their pace, blocking the door and impeding clients any way they can.

Everysaturdaymorning's Blog (Thanks, Darren!)

Brando's new spy-lighter looks like a disposable cigarette lighter and shoots 4G worth of 640x480 video. When I was in China last year, I saw a ton of variations on this, including video cameras hidden in fat ball-point pens, etc. Stuff like this just makes you realize how pointless those bans on photography in stores are.

A Fake Generic Lighter Spy Camera Camcorder (via Red Ferret)

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

A monkey is the prime suspect in a garden store burglary that recently took place in Richardson, Texas. The monkey was caught on surveillance video maneuvering through the shop, Plants and Planters. Owners of said shop have deduced that the monkey was trained by a human (since monkeys in the wild don't steal flower pots) to collect the goods and hand them over the fence. As of this writing, the monkey--and his or her owner--remains on the loose.

Link (via Monkeys in the News)

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, is an enjoyable reflection on young adult books from the 1960s-1980s, written by Jezebel columnist Lizzie Skurnick (who is a young adult novelist herself, having written several Sweet Valley High novels).

Skurnik (and her friends) re-read a bunch of the books they cherished as adolescents and wrote funny and touching essays about them. I read quite a few of the books in here myself (I Am the Cheese, Go Ask Alice, My Darling, My Hamburger, The Clan of the Cave Bear) and the essays brought back a flood of forgotten memories. And now I'm interested in reading a bunch of the books I missed out on the first time around, like The Great Brain and A Day No Pigs Would Die

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

Posted today on the Kindle Community page at Amazon.com:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Sounds sincere. Of course, now Amazon needs to walk the walk.

An Apology from Amazon

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I'm not sure what I like more, that you can get a miniature Bible or a set of Rosaries for 50¢, or that this is owned by a company called "Impulse Amusements". You know, for when you find it impulsively amusing to have the blood of Christ wash away your sins.

Plus, my ichthyologist's brother's friend's horse's roomate's cousin swears he once got a piece of the True Cross in one of these.

Suicide Girls, who were among the first advertisers ever on Boing Boing way back in the day, have released a Comic-Con themed photoset of bangin' babes in cosplay getup. Yes, yes, it's blatant booth-bait and link-bait, but these really are fun photos (vampy but work-safe, no bewbs).

What the look at left says, according to a Comic-Con facial analysis essay at trueslant.com: "How am I going to get from the Burn Notice panel discussion, which ends at 3:30 p.m. and features my man Bruce Campbell, to the can't-miss Q+A with James Cameron about Avatar, which starts at 3 p.m.? Without a time machine, I mean? Sheer force of will, that's how. But hell, it would be pretty cool if I had a time machine." (thanks, coates)

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

Several years ago, when I put together the Illegal Art Exhibit, Craig Baldwin turned me on to "Uso Justo," a short film by Coleman Miller, and it was always one of my favorites in the show. Miller took a vintage Mexican melodrama and, by writing his own subtitles, turned it into an experimental film that it itself a sort of meta-commentary on experimental film. A terribly funny one at that.

Vimeo and Blip TV have the full thing. As far as I know, a higher res version is available only via Mr. Miller himself.

According to Bizarre magazine, this two-year-old from China is said to smoke a pack a day.

His father first gave him fags at the age of 18 months to help cope with pain from a hernia.

Two-year-old has a pack a day habit (Via Dangerous Minds)

Diana Eng, our all-time favorite contestant on Project Runway, is writing a series of how-to articles for Make Online about HAM radio, which is one of her passions.

My favorite ham activity is making contacts via satellites. Not only is there the romantic notion of sending messages into outer space, but you have to trace the orbit of the satellite with your antenna while tuning the radio, to compensate for the Doppler effect.

The satellites AO-51, SO-50, and AO-27 orbit the Earth acting as repeaters. Repeaters are automated relay stations that allow hams to send signals over a greater distance using low-power hand held transceivers. The satellites allow hams to relay messages from Earth to space and back to other hams somewhere on the planet. The International Space Station (ISS) also has a repeater, but occasionally, if you're lucky, the astronauts turn on their radios to make contact directly with hams on the ground.

The following instructions will get you started listening to birds (satellites) on FM, which can be done with a simple VHF/UHF FM radio with a whip antenna, without the need of a ham license. For better coverage, you can use a Yagi antenna (like the one pictured above) connected to a mutli-mode radio and a license (if you want to transmit). A Yagi antenna can also be used to improve the signal of your hand held radio.

Catching satellites on ham radio

This St Paul, MN wedding party had way too much fun choreographing a massive dance-number entrance. Be sure to watch until the bride appears, at least!

JK Wedding Entrance Dance (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)