Bye-bye, Blackberry: "The U.S. federal government's main procurement agency is issuing iPhones and Android-based devices to some of its 17,000 workers."
(Reuters) — Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 12:48 pm Tuesday, Feb 14
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Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic Traveler magazine says, "I thought you might like this sweet story about Alexander Graham Bell, who was a 27-yr-old Scottish speech therapist and part-time inventor when he fell madly in love with 17-yr-old Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, who was deaf, and whose father was the first president of the National Geographic Society."
Mabel Gardiner Hubbard was only five years old when scarlet fever rendered her deaf for life. At the age of 17, she would meet a young Scottish speech therapist who was destined to shape her life. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Mabel’s father and National Geographic’s first president, took a liking to the industrious teacher and part-time inventor. We know him better as Alexander Graham Bell. This is their love story.
The 27-year-old Alexander fell in love with Mabel when she was 17, but it was an unreciprocated fancy. “He was tall and dark with jet-black hair and eyes, but dressed badly and carelessly,” she said. “I could never marry such a man!” Despite her initial disinterest, she began to grow fond of him during his time as her speech teacher and their relationship evolved. After one of her first classes with him, a giddy Mabel wrote to her mother: “Mr. Bell said today my voice is naturally sweet.” In a letter to Mabel on the night of their engagement, Alexander wrote, “I am afraid to fall asleep, lest I should find it all a dream — so I shall lie awake and think of you.”
Read the rest here.
Photo: Mabel Hubbard Bell and Alexander Graham Bell. (National Geographic Society)
By Xeni Jardin at 11:36 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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NME today reports: "Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Order master tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester." Oh, also! They found guns and gold stashed away down there, too. (thanks, Michael Donaldson)
By Xeni Jardin at 11:07 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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This Valentine's Day, enjoy a classic essay by Annalee Newitz about celebrating differently-defined love.
(image: Shutterstock)
By Xeni Jardin at 11:01 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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From the Smithsonian's snapshot series, a special image for Valentine's Day:
Caged crinoline, also known as a hoop skirt, was the most distinctive silhouette of the late 19th century. This photo shows a hoop skirt, named because of its series of concentric hoops of whalebone or cane. It replaced the popular petticoat of the late 1500s to mid 1800s.
Multiple petticoats were sometimes worn to create the full, dome-shape, small-waist silhouette popular in women’s fashion through the mid 1800s. During the late 1800s, hoop skirts like this one lightened the weight of multiple petticoats by creating the same fashionable silhouette but with fewer layers. It only required one or two petticoats worn over the hoop skirt.
Unlike shaping undergarments before the 19th century, hoop skirts were worn by women of every social class.
In 1846, David Hough Jr. introduced the first hoop skirt in the U.S.
The hoop-skirt form, like the bustle and corset, gives insight into the complexities of dress in the 19th century.
This item is one of 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection. It is not on display.
Looks so comfy!
(thanks, Jessica Porter Sadeq)
By Xeni Jardin at 10:48 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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Foster Kamer at Betabeat writes: "Apple
released an announcement today explaining that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting an independent audit that is 'unprecedented in size and scale' in the electronics industry. As part of it, they contend that they’ll be interviewing thousands of Foxconn employees, and that the FLA will be taking the 'unusual' step of identifying the individual factories audited in their report."
By Xeni Jardin at 10:37 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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Video Link.
The recently-launched Women Under Siege website is a new project of the NYC-based Women’s Media Center, and features a number of powerful essays and features by women, about sexual violence against women. There's an account by CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who survived a sexual assault while covering uprisings in the Middle East; another about covering sexualized war in Congo by Lynsey Addario, who survived the same.
In this post, I'd like to draw special attention to a feature on the site about a subject with which I have personal familiarity: violence against indigenous women in Guatemala. Though the country's long civil war is over, the femicidio is not. Snip:
More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36 years of the Guatemalan genocide in which at least 200,000 people died.
In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors and document the ongoing forensic and legal investigation that has just indicted former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt.
There are so many powerful stories on the Women Under Siege website. Below, a photo by Ms. Addario, from Congo: "Lwange, 51, with her daughter, Florida, who had been raped the week before this photo was taken in 2008. The child had screamed at the time, then bled. With her vagina and her young psyche damaged, Florida would no longer speak."
By Xeni Jardin at 10:24 am Tuesday, Feb 14
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Katie Metcalfe from the video publishing/sharing community at
Vimeo says,
I'm reaching out from Vimeo where we are currently working on the Vimeo Festival + Awards, which is happening in June in New York. The festival is a series of workshops, panels, conversations, screenings and parties to celebrate the dynamic and exciting work that is being created by filmmakers, and also to educate and inspire beginners to get out and make incredible films. Categories include Motion Graphics, Captured, Lyrical, Narrative and many more.
We are under a week away from closing our submissions (deadline is 20th Feb) so shouting out to ensure filmmakers are aware of the awards. All the information we've released so far is up at at www.vimeo.com/awards and you can follow our news via Twitter @Vimeo and @VimeoFestAwards.
We recently announced new judges which include James Franco, Nick Knight and Colin Greenwood (Radiohead bassist) with more to come, so it's worth keeping an eye on that too!
There's a $25,000 grand prize, and $5,000 category prizes.
By Xeni Jardin at 11:06 pm Monday, Feb 13
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There's a whole tumblr of stuff like this.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report that Verizon Wireless and AT&T will offer the next edition of Apple's iPad to run on their newest 4G wireless networks.
— Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 10:52 pm Monday, Feb 13
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Dr. Jen Gunter, who is an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, writes a harrowing account of receiving a patient who has undergone an unsafe abortion, and is bleeding to death:
On the gurney lay a young woman the color of white marble. The red pool between her legs, ominously free of clots, offered a silent explanation.
“She arrived a few minutes ago. Not even a note.” My resident was breathless with anger, adrenaline, and panic.
I had an idea who she went to. The same one the others did. The same one many more would visit. A doctor, but considering what I had seen he could’t have any formal gynecology training. The only thing he offered that the well-trained provers didn’t was a cut-rate price. If you don’t know to ask, well, a doctor is a doctor. That’s assuming you are empowered enough to have such a discussion. I was also pretty sure his office didn’t offer interpreters.
I needed equipment not available in an emergency room. I looked at the emergency room attending. “Call the OR and tell them we need a room. Now.” And then I turned to my resident. I was going to tell him to physically make sure a room, any room, was ready when we arrived, but he had already sprinted towards the stairs. He knew.
Read the entire account here: Anatomy of an unsafe abortion.
Required reading in this year of presidential elections in America, in which so many candidates would have us return to the dark era in which abortion was illegal. Outlawing abortion doesn't end abortion, it just makes scenes like this more common.
And here's a follow-up post worth reading, by Dr. Gunter.
(thanks, @Scanman / image: Shutterstock)
By Xeni Jardin at 10:39 pm Monday, Feb 13
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The Guardian's Asia correspondent Jonathan Watts sneaks into Aba, a remote town on the Tibetan plateau, and captures this video report of how Chinese authorities are trying to stamp out dissent among ethnic Tibetans through military security, propaganda and forced 're-education.'
More context and links at the NYT Lede blog. A BBC News crew attempted to make the same trek, and were repeatedly harassed by Chinese forces. Video here, includes graphic shots of self-immolations.
Today, the latest in an ongoing string of Tibetan self-immolation protests against Chinese policies: a 19-year-old Tibetan monk set himself on fire in the same Sichuan province town where the Guardian video was captured.
Read the rest
By Xeni Jardin at 9:48 pm Monday, Feb 13
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Video Link. YouTuber Adam Forgie of Utah, the person behind the camera, shoots these lovely videos with some regularity. "I take care of my legally-blind, near-deaf grandmother," he explains. "She may be blind, but she can still dance! She likes the attention." You can follow her on Twitter here.
Update: Boing Boing readers in various spots around the world report that the video is blocked in certain countries outside the US. This is dumb. Sorry.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:41 pm Monday, Feb 13
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Amazon Link. I can't tell what's funniest here, the user reviews, or the pricing and seller details:
Read the rest
By Xeni Jardin at 9:31 pm Monday, Feb 13
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The head of an inflatable sex doll is pictured in a box at Ningbo Yamei plastic toy factory, on the outskirts of Fenghua, Zhejiang province, February 13, 2012. The company started producing sex dolls three years ago, and now owns a total of 13 types of dolls at the average price of 100 RMB (16 USD). More than 50,000 sex dolls were sold last year, about fifteen percent of which were exported to Japan, Korea and Turkey, according to the company. (REUTERS/Jason Lee)
NYT: "
PrivacyChoice, a company that has analyzed and indexed the data in hundreds of privacy policies across the Web, has developed a system to score Web sites on a scale of 0 to 100 based on how a site collects and uses personal data."
— Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 11:10 am Monday, Feb 13
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Well look what just spilled onto the internet. An unreleased Die Antwoord track, performed live on the current tour, but not included on TEN$ION. The leaked track, "Money and Da Power," features a sample that will be familiar to fans of the movie The Godfather.
Download MP3, or listen on Soundcloud. Uploaded by a user named Lemmiwinks.
Photo: An iPhone snap I took in LA this January of Die Antwoord's Ninja and Yo-Landi goofing around on the trampoline of David Choe, whose life recently changed.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:03 pm Sunday, Feb 12
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A gasoline bomb explodes at riot police during a huge anti-austerity demonstration in Athens' Syntagma (Constitution) square February 12, 2012. Historic cinemas, cafes and shops went up in flames in central Athens on Sunday as black-masked protesters fought Greek police outside parliament, while inside lawmakers looked set to defy the public rage by endorsing a new EU/IMF austerity deal. Below, a protester hurls rocks at riot police; another flees.
(photos: REUTERS)
Read the rest
By Xeni Jardin at 8:44 pm Sunday, Feb 12
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Xi Jinping, the man expected to take Hu Jintao's post as general secretary of China's Communist Party later this year, came from humble beginnings. According to a Los Angeles Times profile this weekend, he lived in a cave for 7 years, after being sent to a rural village to do hard labor during the Cultural Revolution.
"A thin quilt spread on bricks was his bed, a bucket was his toilet. Dinners were a porridge of millet and raw grain."
He visits the United States this week.
By Xeni Jardin at 8:07 pm Sunday, Feb 12
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Saudi Arabia is reported to have used Interpol's "red notice" system to locate and arrest journalist Hamza Kashgari, 23, (image at left) over tweets perceived as an insult to the Prophet Muhammad.
The international police organization denies involvement.
On the day observed as the Prophet's birthday, Kashgari published three tweets that described an imaginary meeting with the Prophet.
The one that caused all the hysteria (including "arrest him!" campaigns on Facebook and Twitter):
"I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you … I will not pray for you."
[translation via AFP].
Kashgari later apologized, removed the tweets, then fled the country as calls for his arrest grew.
More from the Guardian:
Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport "following a request made to us by Interpol" the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities. Interpol later denied that its notice system had been involved in
the arrest of Kashgari.
A spokesperson said: "The assertion that Saudi
Arabia used Interpol's system in this case is wholly misleading and
erroneous."
Kashgari's tweets are said to be blasphemy, and blasphemy is punishable by execution in Saudi Arabia. Read the rest
CIA.gov is down. Any number of entities might like to claim credit, but Anonymous seems to be first (via various accounts on Twitter). No hard reporting available yet, however, and given the target in question, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to confirm.
— Xeni
Andy Baio, in
an opinion piece for Wired News: "Since Gmail added oAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox. I’m concerned oAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown."
— Xeni
“There is significant
evidence out there that suggests that not only did John Wayne Gacy not operate alone, he may not have been involved in some of the murders, and the fact that he was largely a copycat killer.”
— Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 11:24 am Friday, Feb 10
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Wood burns in a stove as Pascal Prokop drives his totally baller 1990 Volvo 240 station wagon during cold winter weather on a road near the town of Mettmenstetten, some 25 kilometres south of Zurich, on February 9, 2012. Prokob built in the stove by himself and got an operating permit by the Swiss technical inspection authority. As I publish this blog post, it is 15ºF in the town where he lives and drives.
Pros: S'mores while driving are possible. Cons: the stove occupies the spot where one's significant other might be seated. Oh, and, you know: fire?
(REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann)
A judge has
granted requests from defendants in the BP oil disaster case to exclude various emails from trial. The details of the emails are an interesting read. For instance: At Halliburton's request, the court will not include an email from a BP geologist to a colleague in February 2010 which offered "thanks for the shitty cement job."
(Reuters) — Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 10:56 am Friday, Feb 10
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The hard-hitting investigative journalism team at Accuweather is trying to figure out why this squirrel is purple. Currently, there is "No Explanation for Pennsylvania's Purple Squirrel." What do you think? Suggestions in the comments, please. (via @ProducerMatthew)
Moms, priests, and peace-minded activists in a small North Carolina town haven't forgotten that
a local aviation contractor was a key player in the CIA's “torture taxi” business. “I don’t want to live in a country that acts this way,” said Julia Elsee, 87, protesting at the Johnston County Airport.
— Xeni
By Xeni Jardin at 10:33 am Friday, Feb 10
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At Hacker News, a user named "Sara70" posts:
I'm writing this to report the serious troubles we have regarding accessing Internet in Iran at the moment. Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible. Almost all websites that reply on Google APIs (like wolfram alpha) won't work. Accessing to any website that replies on https (just imaging how many websites use this protocol, from Arch Wiki to bank websites). Also accessing many proxies is also impossible. There are almost no official reports on this and with many websites and my email accounts restricted I can just confirm this based on my own and friends experience. I have just found one report here. The reason for this horrible shutdown is that the Iranian regime celebrates 1979 Islamic revolution tomorrow.
Jake Appelbaum and the Tor Project folks confirm that Iran is partially blocking encrypted network traffic, and they are trying to help ensure free and safe access for activists (and everyone else inside the country).
More at Washington Post, at CNET, and The Next Web.
(via @jadi)
PHOTO: Iranian schoolgirls chat online at an internet cafe which is exclusively for females, near the city of Karaj, 60km (38 miles) west of Tehran, May 24, 2007. REUTERS.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:10 am Friday, Feb 10
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This goofy video by Total Ghost first made the internet rounds some months back, but I was recently reminded of it when SpaceX founder Elon Musk shouted it out on Twitter. He's absolutely right, it's the perfect theme song for SpaceX (and, all space entrepreneurs).
Watch: Total Ghost - Space Station - YouTube.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:45 am Friday, Feb 10
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Nice to see some recognition from high places for Joe Sabia, the talented director who also collaborates with Boing Boing Video on our in-flight Virgin America television channel. Here's the first of his videos for the Barack Obama 2012 campaign. In Joe's signature style, it's an ADD-friendly cavalcade of presidential memes. The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today.
Of course, the president himself is a fan of Boing Boing, as he mentioned in a 2011 speech: "Most days I barely skim through the comment section of Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Firedoglake, The Daily Dish, BoingBoing.net."
By Xeni Jardin at 1:16 am Friday, Feb 10
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Photographer David Jay's SCAR Project is described as "a series of large-scale portraits of young breast cancer survivors," intended to raise awareness about early onset breast cancer while "paying tribute to the courage and spirit of so many brave young women."
Dedicated to the more than 10,000 women under the age of 40 who will be diagnosed this year alone, The SCAR Project is an exercise in awareness, hope, reflection and healing. The mission is three-fold: raise public consciousness of early-onset breast cancer, raise funds for breast cancer research/outreach programs and help young survivors see their scars, faces, figures and experiences through a new, honest and ultimately empowering lens.
Read the rest
By Xeni Jardin at 12:53 am Friday, Feb 10
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Here lies the late Robert Sanders, 58, at the Robert L. Adams drive-through funeral parlor in the Los Angeles area city of Compton. The funeral parlor has been in business since 1974, and is believed to be the only drive-through funeral home in southern California, according to office manager Denise Knowles-Bragg. She says the parlor offers a convenient alternative to older people who find it hard to walk, those who want to make a quick stop during the lunch hour, and the families of well-known deceased people who expect many visitors.
Here are more photographs.
The Los Angeles Times profiled this establishment in an article last year. Snip:
"You can come by after work, you don't need to deal with parking, you can sign the book outside and the family knows that you paid your respects," said [owner Peggy Scott Adams]. "It's a convenience thing."
The venue provides a speedy way for well-known community folk to be viewed en masse. Seniors don't have to leave their cars. Those who can't stomach stepping inside a funeral home don't have to. Families can avoid the complications of hosting a formal indoor viewing. And the disabled can roll through in their own wheelchairs — as one woman recently did.
In the 1980s, cemetery shootouts made gang members reluctant to gather for graveside services. The drive-thru's glass partition is bulletproof, Scott Adams said, and so for a while the mortuary became a popular location for gang funerals.
(REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson, photo taken February 8, 2012)
By Xeni Jardin at 12:09 am Friday, Feb 10
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Radio Free Asia reports that a 40-year-old Tibetan monk and his 38-year-old brother in Sichuan province were shot by authorities today, after participating protests against Chinese rule and calling for the return of the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
"The two brothers had been on the run for more than two weeks, and had been hiding in the hills in a nomad region when they were surrounded and fired upon."
In related news, yet another Tibetan monk is reported to have set himself on fire on Wednesday. Phayul identifies the monk here; it is not known whether he survived. A source who knows him describes him as “a kind and humble person who used to enjoy looking after pigeons."
Read the rest
By Xeni Jardin at 11:43 pm Thursday, Feb 9
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Among the recent projects of London/Tokyo-based photojournalist Satoru Niwa is this stunning series of images captured near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, just days after the March 11, 2011 quake, tsunami, and ensuing nuclear disaster.
Above: a policeman wearing protective gear to guard against radiation, 15 miles from the plant, on March 25, 2011. Below, a family's photograph found in the tsunami mud, 5km from the plant in the now-abandoned town of Futaba.
Link to photo gallery: SILENCE/Fukushima.
Related works on his site include this equally powerful series of moonlit photos taken in the tsunami-devastated town of Miyagi, just two weeks after the disaster.
You can follow him on Twitter.
(via Miles O'Brien)
By Xeni Jardin at 11:12 pm Thursday, Feb 9
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In 1991, the FBI began interviewing Steve Jobs and people he worked with, as the CEO of Next Inc. "began to be considered as a candidate for sensitive, presidential appointments."
Here is Steve Jobs' FBI file, released under the Freedom of Information Act.
"Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs' honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals," reads the FBI summary.
Other elements of note: as a student, he had a 2.65 GPA. There was a bomb threat against him in 1985. There's a passing reference to a "hippie friend" on whose apple orchard the man who would later co-found Apple worked. And there's an excellent specimen of early 1990s FBI fax art, page 129.
You'll be shocked, shocked I say, to learn that Apple has declined to comment on the file's release. More context: WaPo, Wired, LA Times, SF Chron.
(Photo: Jobs beneath a photograph of him and Apple-co founder Steve Wozniak from the early days of Apple during the launch of the iPad in San Francisco, January 27, 2010. REUTERS.)
By Xeni Jardin at 10:42 pm Thursday, Feb 9
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The Breaded Cats (or Breading Cats, or Cat Breading) website has been making the rounds for some weeks now. Like a fine wine, or a cat, but not a loaf of bread, it seems to improve with age.
Cat Breading How To:
1) Take a piece of bread
2) Cut a hole approximately 1 inch larger than your cat's head. This trips some people up. Remember: the bread has to fit around not just the cat's head, but it's ears, too.
3) Gently place the bread around your cat's head.
Warning: NSFGF (Not safe for the gluten-free).
(via Sean Bonner and many others)
By Xeni Jardin at 10:38 pm Thursday, Feb 9
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Here is the most wonderful photograph you'll ever see of a Buddhist monk sharing food with a tiger. Shot by photographer Wojtek Kalka at the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.
Worth noting: animal rights advocates do not think the temple itself is wonderful, as the afore-linked Wikipedia entry explains, because the big cats there are kept in abusive conditions. (via Bill Gross)
The crisis among ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan Province continues: "three livestock herders set themselves on fire to protest what they saw as political and religious repression at the hands of the Chinese authorities,"
reports the New York Times, bringing the total number of such self-immolations over the past year to 19, "an unprecedented wave of self-inflicted violence among the tiny ethnic minority in China."
— Xeni
"That September, Tyler Clementi and Ravi were freshman roommates at Rutgers University, in a dormitory three miles from the courtroom. A few weeks into the semester, Ravi and another new student, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi in an embrace with a young man. Ravi gossiped about him on Twitter: 'I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.' Two days later, Ravi tried to set up another viewing. The day after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge." From
The Story of a Suicide, in the New Yorker. — Xeni
