(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

This week, I had reason to visit the San Francisco headquarters of The Gap. The company's founder, Donald Fisher, is a huge art lover and has a jaw-dropping collection of contemporary art. I really respect that he and his wife spend so much of their wealth on art, and want to share it with the public. The company lobby itself is like a Lichtenstein gallery. For example, the fantastic portrait of Swee'Pea seen above, titled "Reflections on the Scream," is hanging right in the entryway. And there are a slew of great pieces by Warhol, Calder, Oldenburg, and other modern Western artists throughout the building. For the last two years, the Fisher family had been aiming to build a public museum for their full collection in San Francisco's historic Presidio, a former military facility that's now a national park. Apparently though, historic preservationists and conservationists were upset with the Fishers' plans. Now it's not clear where their collection will go, and it may very well leave the city. From the Los Angeles Times:

"It would be an absolute crime if it left San Francisco," said Dede Wilsey, president of the board that oversees the De Young and Legion of Honor, two of the city's major art museums. "No one could amass that collection now. They couldn't afford it, even in a recession."

The collection, housed in a warehouse and at Gap headquarters in San Francisco, is open to scholars, and Fisher routinely loans pieces to museums. But until an agreement is reached, most of it will stay behind closed doors.

"You could very easily teach the history of art over the past 50 years with this collection," said Hilarie Faberman, a curator at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Faberman said nearly every piece deserves to be displayed.

"S.F. art community fears loss of Gap founder's massive collection"

Former French President Jaques Chirac says that in 2003, President Bush asked him to send troops to Iraq to stop Gog and Magog, the "Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse."

From James A. Haught's piece in the Council for Secular Humanism:

It's awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who "got saved." He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.

For six years, Americans really haven't known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn't in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq's oil--or to protect Israel--or to complete Bush's father's vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.

Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller sure looks happy!

Heidi MacDonald says:

I have a post you may enjoy, from the ever wonderful Life Mag/Google Archives. It's from 1950 and it shows the artists of Nancy, Smokey Stover and so on drawing on scantily clad young models. It's kinda creepy but sort of endearing in that old time girdle fetish way, too.

It reminds me of an event Craig Yoe would produce.

A bunch of old school strip cartoonists draw on the bathing suits of comely young models

Florida law enforcement agents have charged 48-year-old Keith R. Griffin (shown at left) with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after a detective found over a thousand such images on his computer.

In his defense, Mr. Griffin told detectives "he would leave his computer on and his cat would jump on the keyboard. And when he returned there will be strange material downloaded."

He is jail, with bail set at a quarter million dollars. His cat roams free.

(tcpalm.com and nbcmiami.com via Danny Sullivan)

Above, Bling Teeth, which sell for 75 cents a pop in vending machines. This image has nothing to do with what follows in this blog post, other than humor and a tangential association to the cultural trappings of hip-hop.

Alrighty then. "Snacks and Shit" is a blog dedicated to the appreciation of "rap and hip-hop lyrics that are absolutely absurd, ludicrous, nonsensical, ridiculous, basic, basically stupid, basically bad, basically basic, or preposterous." The authors "take some lines and examine them literally." Critics call them "willfully obtuse," I call them "funny."

"No room service just snacks and shit." - Jay-Z, Hey Papi

This is the line that started our whole obsession with rap and hip-hop lyrics. Honestly, this sounds more like something my dad would say. "Remember, no ordering room service. It's too expensive. Plus, I brought snacks."

Snacks and Shit (via John Moe)

60,020 people submitted doomsday picks in Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature (Here's my post about it). "Loose Nukes" was the top pick, with 10.5 percent of readers choosing it.

While "Israel-Arab War" (picked by 7.6 percent of users) represents another worry that's generations old, the "Peak Oil" (9.3 percent) and "China Unloads U.S. Treasurys" (8.2 percent) scenarios are new apocalyptic visions. Peak Oil—"Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle"—is the hobbyhorse of widely read collapsists James Howard Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. It's the scenario of choice for the modern doomsayer who thinks Western civilization has industrialized its way to destruction. Fears of an economic collapse triggered by China pulling out from the American economy are a symptom of both our worries over the current economic crisis and anxiety over America's place in the world.

How Is America Going To End? The apocalypse you chose.

Kill Or Cure explores the UK Daily Mail's obsession with hysterical headlines about what causes and/or cures cancer, with a link index to stories on the subject:

affluence both causes and prevents cancer
* Wealthy background can raise the risk of cancer for teenagers
* Middle classes 'face twice the risk of skin cancer'
* Is your lifestyle giving you breast cancer?
* Well-off children 'more at risk of cancer'
* Why affluent women in the South are more likely to die from breast cancer
* Gap between rich and poor women who survive breast cancer grows as disease progresses

Kill or cure? (Thanks, Alice!)

UCLA urban planning teacher Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking makes the case that urban parking has a high, hidden cost:

The free parking that Americans love isn't really 'free' at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces - that's more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space - not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion).

Who pays for this? Everyone. The cost of building all that parking is reflected in higher rents, more expensive shopping and dining, and higher costs of home-ownership. Those who don't drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.

Free parking can become a drain on city coffers. According to a study (PDF) by Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner of planning and sustainability at the NYC Department of Transportation, the city was losing more than $45 million in parking meter revenue annually as a result of the free parking privileges commonly offered to city employees. But the costs are more than economic: free parking also changes behavior, encouraging us to take more trips and drive alone more often. According to the same study, without that free parking, 19,200 fewer vehicles would enter Manhattan every day, easing congestion.

Free Parking Isn't Free (via Kottke)

There's been much media attention this month around Manson family: August, 2009 marks 40 years since the Tate/La Bianca murders. One former Manson Family member, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, is scheduled to soon be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas. She has served 34 years for attempting to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975, and did not participate in the murders for which Manson and others were imprisoned in 1971.

Paul Krassner was investigating the story of those murders back in 1971. Over at the Huffington Post today, he retells the tale of how he came to drop acid with Ms. Fromme at a house in Los Angeles before she tried to bump off the president, and before she went to jail for that act. It's a fascinating read. Snip:

Manson had stepped on Sandy's eyeglasses, thrown away her birth control pills, and inculcated her with racist insensibility. Although she had once been a civil rights activist, she was now asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and stay with "his own kind."

"But," I said, "they really love each other."

"If Yoko really loved the Japanese people," Sandy replied, "she would not want to mix their blood."

The four of us ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.

Squeaky's basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn't know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.

My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme (HuffPo)

Image: Dick Schmidt, Sacramento Bee. "Sacramento Police and Secret Service men handcuff Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme under a Capitol Park tree after she tried to shoot President Gerald Ford Sept. 5, 1975."

In what appears to be a beauty pageant held at a prison in Russia, scores of women gather around a makeshift runway in the courtyard as their fellow inmates strut their stuff. I don't read Russian, but the photographs alone tell a great story.

More photos here [via Zaeega (Japanese)]

BB readers may remember the amazing Golden Mean snail car and Boiler Bar, created by blacksmith and oilpunk artist Jon Sarriugarte. For years, Jon has also built beautiful fire pits, flaming zen gardens, and patio heaters. Sometimes he sells them, but he's always encouraged folks to make their own. Finding the right fittings, regulators, and tubes can be a hassle though, so now Jon is offering fire pit kits. They start at $95. From Jon's Form and Reform site:

(For a fire pit,) in addition to these kits you will need a container that is able to handle high temperatures and be fully sealed underneath (leaks or drain holes will also allow gas out). A 55 gal drum works good. The weldable coupler provided will need to be welded though the bottom, legs added, then simply attach the fittings, ring, hose, propane BBQ tank and add sand. Sand should be 3-4″ above the ring. This is a match light system and I like those plumbing torches to light mine. Light the torch, then turn on the gas with the flame above the sand. It will take several seconds for the sand to fill with gas and rise to the top. Once lit it’s time to play in the sand with simple tools. This works best after dark when you can turn the flame down very low tell you only see a blue flame.

Fire is hot! DO NOT TOUCH the sand.

Fire Pit Kits for Sale

In 1979, Robert Crumb created "A Short History of America," depicting the rise of the urban landscape from the wilderness. The art first ran in the Whole Earth Catalog's offspring CoEvolution Quarterly. The animation of the original black and white artwork seen above is from the movie Crumb. Several years later, Crumb added three new panels showing possible future scenarios: The Fun Future (above), Ecological Disaster (above), and The Ecotopian Solution. You can purchase a color poster of the full 15 panel version from Steve Krupp's Curio Shoppe. (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

This Egyptian bust has become a popular attraction at Chicago's Field Museum because it's a spitting image of Michael Jackson, complete with a tweaked nose. It was carved between 1550-1050 BCE and depicts a woman. "Statue's a Dead Ringer for Jacko" (NBC Chicago)

This gentleman is George Vera, 25, who managed to smuggle a 9mm handgun and 2 clips with him into a Houston area jail. The 600 pound fellow allegedly hid the contraband between layers of his body fat. From Click2Houston.com:

Houston police said... Vera was arrested Aug. 2 and taken to the city jail. He spent a day there before being transferred to the Harris County Jail. After being there for 14 hours, going through intake procedures, he was taken to the showers, the final step before going to his cell. There, Vera told police he had a 9mm handgun on him, along with 2 clips.

(Former Harris Counter Detention Major Mark) Kellar said Vera should have been searched at least three times before getting to the jail.

Houston Police Officers Union President Gary Blankinship said cadets are trained how to search morbidly obese people.

"We teach officers to lift up and look under," Blankinship said. "The officer may not have arrested anyone this big before."

"Inmate Hides Gun In Fat Layers" (Thanks, Jess Hemerly)

Mario Cacciottolo came to Los Angeles and took my photo for his "Someone Once Told Me," photography project. He has taken 700 photos of people holding hand-lettered signs quoting something someone once told the subject.

My quote was something my grandmother told me when I was very young. Her parents were killed in Russia during the revolution and she had to forage in the forest for a while. She developed a fear of snakes there, probably Vipera berus.

The photos and signs are a lot of fun to browse through.

Someone Once Told Me

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

On a recent flight to Rome, I found my sleep-deprived thoughts turning to the question that has launched a thousand doctoral dissertations: Why is Hannibal Lecter an Italophile?

He wasn't always. When we first meet the debonair, serial-murdering doctor, in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, he's curled up with a copy of Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. We can see from the class signifiers he flashes---waspish wit, feline grace, courtly manners, and refined, Old Money tastes---that he's a highbrow degenerate (in the evolutionary, Max Nordau sense of the word), struck from the mythic mold that gave us real-life archetypes such as Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as their fictional kin (most notably, Count Dracula (with whom Lecter shares many supernatural traits). His unabashed Eurocentrism would gladden George Will's wizened heart, but he hasn't yet outed himself as a flaming Italophile.

Well this is bad news. I had a hunch the stuff was evil, even though I've been slathering it on like skin cream when I travel to malaria-infested places. Some 200 million people a year use the stuff, and apparently it's bad news for the brain and nervous system, particularly when combined with other repellents that have similar toxic effects. Snip from a Science Daily article:

The active ingredient in many insect repellents, deet, has been found to be toxic to the central nervous system. Researchers say that more investigations are urgently needed to confirm or dismiss any potential neurotoxicity to humans, especially when deet-based repellents are used in combination with other neurotoxic insecticides.

Vincent Corbel from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, and Bruno Lapied from the University of Angers, France, led a team of researchers who investigated the mode of action and toxicity of deet (N,N-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide). Corbel said, "We've found that deet is not simply a behavior-modifying chemical but also inhibits the activity of a key central nervous system enzyme, acetycholinesterase, in both insects and mammals".

Popular Insect Repellent Deet Is Neurotoxic

Here's the source report: Deet inhibits cholinesterase: Evidence for inhibition of cholinesterases in insect and mammalian nervous systems by the insect repellent deet (BioMed Central)

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Terry Pratchett, who has early-onset Alzheimer's (and whose mental acuity is still fine) has written a stirring editorial on the need to legalize suicide in the UK. He avows his intention to commit suicide, to "jump before I am pushed," and explains why.

More than 100 Britons have travelled to assisted suicide clinics in Switzerland, and their loved ones face prosecution for accompanying them.

I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without.

I know enough to realise there will not be a cure within my lifetime and I know the later stages of the disease can be very unpleasant. Indeed, it's the most feared disease among the over-65s.

Naturally, I turn my attention to the future. There used to be a term known as 'mercy killing'. I cannot believe it ever had any force in law but it did, and still does, persist in the public consciousness, and in general the public consciousness gets it right.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn't get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive...

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?

I'll die before the endgame, says Terry Pratchett in call for law to allow assisted suicides in UK

(via Forbidden Planet)

(Image: Terry Pratchett, Powell's, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Firepile's Flickr stream)

(Note: it takes something damned important to get me to link to the vile Daily Mail. This qualifies.)

This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo's Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does:

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work...

Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response...

The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information...

The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity...

Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths)....

The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) (via Beyond the Beyond)

Danah boyd has a sober second look at some widely cited research from Nielsen (reported on Mashable) that states that "teens don't tweet." Bottom line: teens tweet.

We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG OMG old farts are just as likely to be using Twitter as young folks! Like OMG."

We have a presentation problem. Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. Unless Sockington counts. (And she's probably older than 2 anyhow.) Regardless, the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don't know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size...

There's more, be sure to read it. File under lies, damned lies and statistics.

Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?

Marilyn sez, "Naples has developed an innovative ex-offender program that sends former convicts back out on the streets-- with maps and tourist brochures."

But what's most innovative is that they've also given 80 former convicts gigs offering tourists advice on staying safe in the city. The (mostly) men, clad in yellow vests, can now be found escorting tourists attempting to maneuver through dodgy neighborhoods, helping with heavy luggage, and offering suggestions to avoid becoming a target of a petty crime (you really shouldn't be wearing that flashy watch, now should you?). Their services are all free, and tipping is discouraged (let's not even talk about bribes).

Ex-Cons as Tour Guides? (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Tim sez, "I made these goggles for the dust in the desert at Burning Man. I am posting these images as instructions for those who might want to try making some of their own. Good goggles for the desert are hard to find and they are very expensive if you do. These are made from an old leather jacket, and from two pieces of tempered and UV resistant glass that I got from the halogen 'puck style' lights. I popped the glass out of the plastic ring. They also sell tinted circles that can be used for torch brazing which would be great. I wanted these for night also, so I'm leaving them clear. The whole process took about 3 hours. If you have any questions please email me. You can get the address from our website."

How to make Dust Goggles (Thanks, Tim!)

If I were a marketing consultant, I would call this Detroit masterpiece "Homebrew aftermarket transformative rebranding." BB mod Antinous quips, "I'm holding out for the Dolce & Gabbana Pacer."

1986 custom cutlass supreme!! - $4500 (detroit.craigslist.org via The Frisky, thanks Susannah Breslin)

From Ice-Tea Man (thanks, Steve Woolf)

Spotted on the tumblog of photographer Clayton Cubitt, a collection of more than 700 black and white photographs taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 20th century.

Clayton says, "Click on this archive link, and then click to submit on the search button at the archive site without entering any search terms, and it should return 73 pages of amazing."

There are so many powerful portraits in this collection, like the one above. I've been reading a lot about the current, ongoing violence in the Congo (here is one recent story about sexual atrocities committed against men). Clicking through this archive, I found myself thinking about the legacy of violence and colonialism, and how one generation of brutalities begets another. There are many images here that document horrible acts committed more than a century ago, such as the cutting off of hands of rubber plantation workers who failed to meet their quotas, or whipping people to death with hippo-skin chicottes.

Image at the top of this post: Herbert Lang, 'SENSE, A MANGBETU CHIEF. PORTRAIT 3/4 VIEW. PLASTER CAST OF FACE TAKEN' Belgian Congo 1909-1915.

The 59-year old director died in Manhattan of a heart attack. He brought us such iconic eighties films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. IMDB, Wikipedia, Slashfilm, TMZ, Variety. Above, a montage of scenes from his films, created by a fan to the tune of the Who's "Baba O'Riley." (via Bonnie Burton)

Here's Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi doing a live pitch of his proposed George Liquor Program to folks at Comic Con.

He says the inspiration for one episode came from his father, who grew up during the Depression and was always careful with his money after that. His father, said John, would buy cans without labels from the supermarket, which sold them for five or tens cents a can. Whatever happened to be in the can is what the family would eat.

Here's part 2.

Here's are a lot of photos and illustrations of John and George Liquor.

(This spring, the Hoefer family had their own MAKEcation event, the "Great Chair Challenge")

Gareth Branwyn, Senior editor at MAKE says:

We're excited about the MAKEcation events we're running on Make: Online through the end of the month. Phil Torrone came up with the idea of the MAKEcation last summer, when gas prices were crazy and people were staying home, their "Staycations" becoming fodder for the evening news' econopocalypse coping stories. Phil figured, if people were staying home, they might as well do something productive with their time -- get the family together to learn new things and make stuff. Thus, the MAKEcation was born.

We started off this year's MAKEcations with the Teach Your Family to Solder Challenge. We posted a bunch of pieces with soldering tutorials, tool suggestions, tips for newbies, and ideas for projects. This week, we've added the Cooler Hacking Challenge -- mod any type of portable beverage cooler any crazy way you like and send us the pics/video. These events will run through the end of the month and we'll be adding another, a special family vs. family challenge, next week. We have Camp Counselors, too. Dave Hrynkiw, of Solarbotics, is our soldering counselor, and our latest author to join the site, Matt Mets, is the Cooler Hacking counselor. They're around to answer technical questions, chime in with their expertise, and to help us in choosing our favorite MAKEcation projects.

We're giving away $100 Maker Shed certificates to our three favorite entries in all three challenges, plus books and Maker's Notebooks to the top 15 contestants who submit MAKEcation pictures and videos. Adafruit industries will also be awarding their soldering merit badges.

Let's take a Summer MAKEcation! | Teach your family to solder| MAKEcation Cooler Hacking Challenge

Errol Morris' multi-part essays for the New York Times are always amazing, and this one, "Seven Lies About Lying" is no exception. Part 1 has an interview with Ricky Jay, the magician, ukulele-player, actor, and historian of sideshows and swindles.

ERROL MORRIS: And it can’t be accidental. You can accidentally deceive somebody, but you can’t accidentally lie to somebody. If you’re lying to somebody, you have to know you’re doing it.

RICKY JAY: I’ve written about verbal deception, for example, the P.T. Barnum sign – “TO THE EGRESS” — to make someone believe something that was other than what was intended. Even though there was nothing wrong with it — it’s deceptive. [The sign is intended make people believe that they are about to visit some exotic animal, rather than heading to the exit.] I wrote an article about verbal deception in “Jay’s Journal” on the Bonassus.

The Bonassus was presented in 1821 as this extraordinarily exotic creature. I’ll read just the opening: “The Bonassus, according to contemporary handbills, has been captured as a six-week-old cub deep in the interiors of America …” —blah, blah, blah… “It was presented to a populous eager for amusement and edification” — this was in London — “whose appetite for curiosities both animal and human was insatiable.” The attraction said, “A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud.” And underneath the line, “ ‘Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall look upon his like again.’ — Shakespeare.”

And I say,

“Using every conceivable method of prevarication, the playbills of the day unabashedly conceal the true identity of the newly discovered Bonassus, this new genus” — that’s a quote — “of the African Kingdom had never before been seen in Europe. He was none other than the American Buffalo. As for never seeing his like again, in 1821 the buffalo was the most numerous hoof-footed quadruped on the face of the earth.”

Errol Morris: Seven Lies About Lying (Part 1)

The annual Outside Lands Music and Arts festival is coming up August 28-30. Many who planned to attend were bummed to hear that the Beastie Boys, Sunday night's headlining act, had to cancel due to health problems with Adam "MCA" Yauch (read: Yauch Recovering at Home after Cancer Surgery). I'm on a conference call right now with Jack Black and Kyle Gass and a bunch of bewildered journalists, and the replacement act is now official: Tenacious D! (Wikipedia).

I wish more of the conference calls I have to sit through included Jack Black. The guy really knows how to liven up a party line full of reporters. Also lots of fart jokes.

Liveblogging notes after the jump.

Here is Ray Charles doing a fantastic cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." It's from The Johnny Cash Show, a variety show that aired from 1969 to 1971. Other guests included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, and Louis Armstrong. "The Best of the Johnny Cash Show" is available as a two-disc DVD. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Yesterday, Mister Jalopy reported a swarm of bees under the seat of one of his bikes for sale at Coco's Variety in Los Angeles. Upon hearing the news, neighbor Amy Seidenwurm headed over to the store, donned her bee suit, and bravely herded the bees to a cardboard box, transferring them to "greener pastures where the flowers are dripping with nectar and hives are clean and commodious."

2 Wheels, 2000 Bees

This sounds like a Twilight Zone episode: The village of Kodinki in India is home to more than 200 sets of twins, and the number is increasing. The village's population is only 15,000 people. From Reuters:

"Based on scientific facts, we feel something in the environment is causing this. It could be something in the water," said a local doctor, M.K. Sribiju.

"All the world over the cause of twins is mainly because of drugs. Everywhere in the Western world, people are exposed to fertility drugs, their food habits, they consume more dairy products. Everywhere the age of marriage is increasing. There are late marriages predisposed to occurrence of twins," he said.

However in Kodinji, most marriages are between people aged 18 to 20 years old.

"All the factors leading to the occurrence of twinning world wide, we cannot see it here. There is something unknown that is causing this phenomenon," he said.

The locals also believe it has to do with the water. Kodinji is surrounded by water in the fields and during the monsoon season it becomes inaccessible from heavy rains.

"Doctors baffled by Indian village of over 200 sets of twins"

(Flaming End, by Ryan Heshka)

The theme for the upcoming BLAB! art show is "21st-Century Apocalypse."

Copro Gallery and Monte Beauchamp proudly present "THE BLAB! SHOW," the fifth Group Art Exhibition featuring original paintings and illustrations from the forthcoming issue of BLAB! magazine - Monte Beauchamp's periodic anthology of sequential and comic art, illustration, painting, and printmaking.

Artists include: JOE SORREN, ALEX GROSS, MARK RYDEN, SHAG, JEFF SOTO, RYAN HESHKA, FEMKE HEIMSTRA, GARY BASEMAN, GEORGANNE DEEN, KRIS KUKSI, GARY TAXALI, ANDY KEHOE, TRAVIS LAMPE, JEAN-PIERRE ROY, SPAIN, XNO, JOHN POUND, FRED STONEHOUSE, MARC BURCKHARDT, DAVIS SANDLIN, KATHLEEN LOLLY, ANDREW BRANDOU, CALEF BROWN, SOFIA ARNOLD, MARK TODD. DHOLBACHIE-YOKO, KEVIN SCALZO, LARRY DAY, MARK GARRO, MICHAEL NOLAND, ANDREA DEZSO AND TERESA JAMES.

BLAB! Show: 21st-Century Apocalypse

CrappyTaxidermy.com is what its title suggests, but not entirely. The blog features a mix of badly-executed mounts and also just curious stuffed critters. Those shoes at above left are, er, something else. Crappy Taxidermy (via Morbid Anatomy)

(Download / Watch on YouTube)

Boing Boing Video teamed up with Theo Gray and Popsci.com to produce this video that demonstrates how you can mold steel with electrochemical machining, using a soft, cheap piece of tin -- without any physical contact. Theo is the author of the book Mad Science, in which many other experiments like this are featured. Theo says:

I remember seeing a demonstration of a seemingly magic process at an engineering open house decades ago, in which a soft metal bit carved detailed shapes into far harder metals. It's called electrochemical machining (ECM), and it's so simple in principle that you can do it at home with a drill press, a battery charger and a pump for a garden fountain.

ECM is basically electroplating in reverse. In electroplating, you start with a solution of dissolved metal ions and run an electric current through the liquid between a positive electrode and the object you want to plate (the negative side). The ions deposit themselves as solid metal onto the surface of the object.

Read the whole HOWTO over at popsci.com: Carve Steel with Saltwater, Electricity and a Tin Earring

Image below: "The tin peace-sign earring acts as an electrode, etching away the metal in the hardened steel washer [left]. The imperfect results are due to the difficulty of manually maintaining an exact thousandths-of-an-inch distance between the two. Commercial electrochemically machined pieces, like this microturbine for a water pump, use sophisticated electronics to monitor the current flow and carve precise pieces [right]. (Courtesy ECM Technologies BV/ ECM Productions BV; Mike Walker)

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman raves about this fun new Bigfoot watch, aptly called the Sasqwatch. It comes in a variety of colors, but I prefer the realistic "bark" or "charcoal" models over, say, pink. They're $49.99 each.
Sasqwatch

In this month's Wired UK, Warren Ellis waxes apocalyptopoetic about tiny transportation systems as a thing of future beauty:

Designing a transport hub for the loading and traffic flow of pharma capsules built to deliver drugs directly into the heart of cancer tumours, using carbon fullerenes and working on the nanoscale, where communication between building and vehicle will have to be conducted via coded protein transfer because you’re below the limit at which radio waves can be transmitted or received.

I’d call it an intron depot, after the book by Masamune Shirow. But an intron, science assures me, is a chunk of DNA within a gene that doesn’t code into protein, so maybe that wouldn’t fit so well. But that could well be a real problem to solve – design me an intron depot so I can manage the traffic flow of nanoscopic drug delivery cars. I’m trying to imagine the nature of the computing required to oversee artificial traffic within the human body, when we can’t yet control traffic in Birmingham.

I almost wish the scene would be like the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces in the 60s film Fantastic Voyage. America’s finest scientists and soldiers being driven around a weird, vast Brutalist underground base in electric golf carts, working to reduce submarines to microscopic size in great disco-floored scientific halls. But that’s a problem of the future: the future isn’t big any more. The future’s small.

"The future isn't big anymore. The future is small" (wired.co.uk, via @warrenellis)

We covered Doug Fine's radical off-the-grid lifestyle experiment last year on Boing Boing TV -- embed above. He is the author of Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living, and he's still going strong out there on the Funky Butte Ranch. When he's not out in the fields turning the compost heap or feeding chickens, he's working on his next book, which I'm looking forward to reading. Doug has a thought-provoking piece out in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, here's a preview:

I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more? In other words, I'm examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.

Now, I'm not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and global resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can email a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people still see globalization as the economic model for the foreseeable future. But when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they'd thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.

On My Ranch, Ready for the Great American Meltdown (Washington Post)

The Latvian government is apparently pissed off about Brits heading there for wild stag parties and allegedly stirring up trouble. For example, Nils Usakovs, mayor of the Latvian capitalof Riga, isn't keen on tourists urinating on the city's central monument. It's odd to me that some of the government officials are so open with their anti-British sentiments.

Usakovs said some British visitors were guilty of misbehaving: "Let's not be politically correct - unfortunately, this is their speciality."

He also said if the city had more regular tourists the badly behaving British visitors "would not be as noticeable"...

Last year the country's then interior minister, Mareks Seglins, complained about "English pigs" and said they were a "dirty, hoggish people" after a British tourist was sentenced to five days in prison after being caught urinating on the war memorial.

Earlier this year South Wales Police sent two officers to Riga to advise on how to deal with hen and stag parties from Britain.

"Latvian warning for British stags" (Thanks, Antinous!)

Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, has an opinion piece out today which amounts to a response to recent hysterical, illogical, and counterproductive acts on the part of Associated Press management with regard to content-sharing online (and "journalism piracy").

To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn't killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven't been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting "resources" (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others' content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours. If you are doing something that you would object to if others did it to you - stop. If you don't want search engines linking to you, insert code to ban them.

Why I believe in the Link Economy (reuters.com). We have a linking policy here at Boing Boing, by the way.

BB pal Gareth Branwyn says:

I'm absolutely... er... "over the moon" about the new SomaFM Mission Control channel. They've taken the Apollo radio feeds and mixed them on top of space/ambient/electronic music. It's fucking brilliant! It's become the soundtrack to my late night work sessions. Some of this stuff has seriously popped my circuits. Geek ambient!

Mission Control: Celebrating NASA and Space Explorers everywhere

Recently on Offworld, our Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol takes us through an illustrated history of one of videogames' best mechanical conceits: the jetpack. From The Stamper Brothers' original JetPac, to Exile, to Tribes, Jetpack Brontosaurus (above) and beyond, he looks at how the 'pack has let us "explore strange new worlds where the sky is not the limit, and where the vertical axis is as just as essential as the horizons that lay all around us."

Elsewhere we marveled at the intricate rusted ironworks designs in the latest video of Amanita's upcoming adventure game Machinarium, saw Minotaur China Shop (and Jetpack Brontosaurus, coincidentally) creators Flashbang poke gentle fun at Braid creator Jon Blow, and found a wonderful series of T-shirts based on the glitched-out boot-up sequences of arcade games.

And for our 'one shot's of the day, two more fantastic pieces from artists appearing in the upcoming Autumn Society games/art gallery show: Zelda's Link aims for the eye, and the Swarovski crystal-studded queen Tetrisina.

Scott Westerfeld writes in with the astounding news that his publisher, Simon and Shuster, have agreed to distribute his bestselling novel Uglies as a free, DRM-free PDF. The series has sold more than a million copies, and it's one of my favorite YA series of all time.

Here's my original review of the series:

Uglies is the story of a dystopian world where children are raised by the state and subjected to mandatory cosmetic surgery at 16, wherein they are rendered physically "perfect" on the basis that symmetrical, statistically average people with giant eyes are charismatic, convincing, and are afforded advantages by their peers; in the twisted logic of the Westerfeld's state, imposing this surgery on all creates an egalitarian basis for society. No one is heeded merely because she is beautiful; no idea is disregarded because it originates with someone who is ugly.

The novels tell the story of Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old small-time rebel who becomes embroiled in a scheme to avoid the surgery, leading to her exile and eventual encounters with outsiders, secret police, and the gradual, sinister unravelling of the dark secret of the compassionate society.

The Uglies books are the perfect parables of adolescent life, where adult-imposed milestones, rituals, and divide-and-rule tactics amp children's natural adolescent insecurities into a full-blown, decade-long psychosis. They're the kind of book I loved reading at 15 or 16: damned fine science fiction and damned fine yarns. Having read the first two, I can barely wait for the third, Specials, due out in May 06.

Uglies Download (Thanks, Scott!)

Spotted via Andrew Baron's tweetstream, this fascinating -- no, really! -- snopes article on why Van Halen had that line in their concert rider about ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&Ms EVER.

Punch line: the true reason behind this had to do with technology, engineering, and safety issues. But I can kind of hear David Lee Roth delivering the lines in his over-the-top screamy-voice when I read his quotes. Actually, I can hear David Lee Roth's voice when I read the rider.

Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms. The actual 1982 rider was first published online at smokinggun.com in 2008.

Video below: "Jamie's Cryin," from David Lee Roth's bluegrass cover album of VH hits, remixed by a fan in a homebrew video with (why not?) a Popeye cartoon. You can buy the record here if you are so inclined: Strummin' With The Devil: Bluegrass Tribute to Van Halen.

Update: JKD says,

Also, a recent episode of "This American Life" also had a segment on the brown M&M clause, and the general dynamics of touring and contracts, with John Flansburgh from TMBG:

Pat Race of Alaska Robotics, whose "Buy Back Alaska" video was featured here a couple years ago, has created a new video about crushing absurdity of national economics. It's embedded above, and I think it's sweet and funny in a homey, dorky, "I made this!" way.

From the land of Sarah Palin, meth shacks, and aerial elk-massacres, he emails Boing Boing:

Alaska Robotics is Pat Race, Aaron Suring, Lou Logan, Sarah Asper-Smith, and whoever else falls into our cast of friends and family. We live in Juneau where we make short films, draw comics, and eat halibut. We organize screenings of locally made short films twice a year and also work to bring filmmakers, animators and writers north to teach workshops.

If you're interested, there are a bunch of other films on our site, I like these ones: Socks, The Big Joke, Butterfly Kisses, Town vs. Valley, Nipple Fire, High Five.

War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings"--Harry Patch

Richard Metzger writes,

Beautiful, somber new Radiohead single available for download on their website.

Titled Harry Patch (In Memory Of), the song is a tribute to the oldest surviving Tommy who fought in World War I. Harry Patch was 111 years old when he died on July 25th, 2009. He fought in one of the grimmest battles of the war, the Battle of Passchendaele, where over 325,000 Allied casualties occurred and over, 260,000 Germans. The 99 day battle from July 31st 1917 to November 6th 1917, saw an average of 3,000 British troops killed, wounded, or captured daily. (By contrast, in Iraq, 3,650 US troops have died and approximately 26,000 have been wounded).

More over at Metzger's blog, including a statement by Thom Yorke. Beautiful.

Above, embedded, one of the last (if not the last) interviews with Mr. Patch before he died last month. All proceeds from the track will be donated to the Royal British Legion.

Matti Laakso tells Boing Boing,

The Acid Symphony Orchestra just published their first video on Vimeo. In a nutshell: 10 early 80's synths (Roland TB-303s - the defining sound of early techno and acid) played manually by Finlands top techno performers, orchestrated by the granddaddy of Nordic techno scene, Jori Hulkkonen.

The hardware required some serious hacking (this is pre-MIDI gear), courtesy of the Society for Experimental Electronics - a Finnish hacker/maker group.

Their first performance was at UMF (Uuden Musiikin Festivaali, or Festival for New Music) in Turku, Finland in 2007, and they toured Europe over the next two years. A festival documentary is on YouTube (in 3 parts).

Video here.