My friend Eric Hoberman helped develop a new game show that will premiere on NBC on Sunday March 14 from 7-9 p.m. ET/PT. It's called Minute To Win It, and the object is to win a series of 10 easy-to-understand but increasingly-hard-to-win challenges. As the title suggests, the players must successfully complete each of the games in a minute. The award structure is like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire -- the cash amount increases with each game up to a million dollars, you can walk away with what you've won at any point, and you can lose it all if you blow a challenge.

Eric gave me a box of props so I could try out the games myself. The show's contestants are also given props and rules for the games before they come on the show so they can practice. The props are household items -- golf balls, cookies, a deck of cards.

Here are a few of the challenges contestants will have 60 seconds to complete:

• Move two Oreo cookies from your forehead to your mouth using your facial muscles only. (I failed!)

• Stack three golf balls vertically. (I failed!)

• Balance a deck of playing cards on a soda bottle and blow all the cards off but the bottom one, the joker. (I failed!)

• A dollar bill is sandwiched between two bottles, one upright, the other inverted and placed on top of the upright bottle. You have four tries to remove the bill without touching or toppling the bottles. (Success!) I'm interested to know if anyone can successfully complete the tasks I failed at. If you make a YouTube of it, please provide the link so we can watch it!

Minute to Win it site on NBC

"You buy it, you like it!" Bargain Barn was a public access cable show in Shawnee, Oklahoma in the mid-1990s—a sort of QVC for hillbillies, a televised flea market where one might pick up stray drill bits, chickens, or stained and ripped pillows. As WFMU notes, it's a damn crime YouTube shows only one upload of this gem. The host/barker, whose face we seldom see, is selling nothing but absolute crap. He himself admits most of the junk is "broked," "tore up," or "needs to be warshed a few times." I think my favorite moment in the clip above is 8:35, when we get to the Style Studs ("It don't have no Style Studs in it! I'd call that a pig in a poke, m'self.") I could watch this for hours.

(Thanks, Mikael Jorgensen!)

Eric Spiegelman of "Old Jews Telling Jokes" explains this episode: "My cousin Michael recommended that we get Charlotte Bornstein on camera to tell some jokes. He also advised that we 'just keep the camera running.' You'll see why."

Many more new episodes of this stripped-down, oldschool comedy at oldjewstellingjokes.com.

(Technical note: If you have trouble viewing the embedded Flash videos hosted on Blip.tv, as I did, you may have better luck downloading the videos as iTunes podcast episodes.)

In this weird video, a French comedienne transforms herself into Michael Jackson with just some mascara, lipstick, and scotch tape.

As part of Converse's "Music Collection," they've issued a variety of Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers themed around The Clash, Blondie, Metallica, and Kurt Cobain. To be fair, they really should have made Cobain-branded Converse One Stars as those were the shoes he was wearing at his death. Now, I do dig The Clash sneakers seen here. But I am aware that Nike selling sneakers co-branded with the name/art of an iconic punk band is... problematic. That said, somebody from The Clash's camp (and Cobain's) had to approve these.
Converse Music Collection

Raj Panikkar sez, "We're screening a film called 'At Home By Myself... With You' (directed by Kris Booth, starring Kristin Booth - no relation) at The Royal in Toronto this week. The unique thing about the film is how we raised the financing to shoot. Quite literally, we campaigned for people to contribute their loose pocket change. The strategy took off, partly through an active Facebook and Twitter presence and also frequent video blogs detailing the contributions. By the time we shot the film, we had raised $42,000 (admittedly, one person's pocket change is occasionally another's small fortune - but it did really begin with 15 cents, 43 cents, a dollar 12, etc.) One might be led to assume that with a limited budget, there'd be a matching limitation on production quality. But the film looks gorgeous (Telefilm Canada came on board at the very end to help fund a pro finish), and reviews and comments have been great. We were reviewed by all the major papers in Toronto: The Sun, NOW, The Star, The Post, etc. The film plays at The Royal for the rest of the week, and then gets its TV debut right away on TMN and Movie Central, plus a DVD release on April 6th."

Pocket Change Film (Thanks, Raj!)

(Disclosure: Raj's mother, Bev, taught me to read)

After they saved the princess, Mario and Luigi moved to Manchester, UK and went into the restaurant business. Luigi sells pizzas, kebabs, and burgers; Mario owns a bakery and confectionary. Who knew? The Neatorama guys found this using Google Street View.

Alice Tan Ridley, mother of Academy Award-nominated Precious star Gabourey Sidibe, performs music — beautifully — in subway stations. Above, her rendition of "I Will Survive." Many more videos of her amazing street performances here, a pity the sound quality's so bad on all of them: The Subway Song Stylings Of Alice Tan Ridley! (stationstops.com), and a US Magazine story about the R&B singer here. (via Farai Chideya)

Related: Here's the raw audition tape that won Gabourey Sidibe her Precious role.

Amoeba Records is one of the world's greatest independent record stores, with many thousands of square feet of new and used vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and assorted rarities in film and music. They're in SF, Berkeley, and Hollywood. The kinds folks who run the joint invited me in to pick a handful of items I'm excited about, and the video that resulted is embedded above. I chose:

• The incredible Alan Lomax in Haiti box-set (we'll be blogging more about this one on BB soon!)
• Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru (a tip of the chapeau to Susannah Breslin, and to my brother DJ Carlito for turning me on to this one)
• N.A.S.A. "Spirit of Apollo" (we've premiered a number of the music videos from this project on Boing Boing Video)
• Q-Burns Abstract Message and Eighth Dimension Records (we've used snips from his work as theme music for Boing Boing's audio podcast, and for our video project—I'm a longtime fan!)
• Wilco, "Wilco (The Album)" (I loved their latest record, and I believe they're one of the greatest live acts on the planet.)
• Pronto, "All is Golden" (Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen's side project. "The Cheetah," a digital-only download release, was glitchy electronic minimalism, but the release I grabbed from the bins in this video is "All is Golden," a paean to '70s rock. I also mispronounce Mikael's name horribly in this video... sorry Mikael!)
• Die Antwoord!

Amoeba Records: What's in My Bag? / Xeni Jardin

The complete "What's in My Bag" archives are here, with many interesting past guests.

(thanks, Rachael McGovern. Disclosure: I wasn't paid to appear in this video, but the nice folks at Amoeba gave me a $75 store credit which I plan to use on Radiohead vinyl and old Almodóvar movies!)

Balkan Beat Box have a new album coming out on April 27, Blue Eyed Black Boy, recorded in Tel Aviv and Belgrade during anti-Kosovo riots. The first video's out: "War Again," and was directed by award-winning animator Paul Griswold, who worked with Syd Garon on one of the N.A.S.A. Project videos featured previously on Boing Boing Video. Read more about the record at National Geographic (they're the record label!), and here's a YouTube link, and a Vimeo link. Amazon link for the band's previous releases here.

Hurrah! It's time for another issue of Rudy Rucker's absolutely ass-kicking free sf zine, Flurb. The new ish has stories by Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Richard A. Lupoff, Danny Rubin, and Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz (incidentally, I've been reading Koja's new book in manuscript form and I am agog at its brilliance -- watch this space in the months to come for a review of Under the Poppy).

I love reading Rucker's fiction (and essays), but I have even more fun reading these zines he curates -- a kind of "Rudy Rucker presents..." that manages to convey the influences and esthetic that shoots through all of Rucker's work.

I'm especially proud to be presenting the first-ever publication of "Palmetto Man," by Danny Rubin. Rubin is the writer responsible for Groundhog Day, a movie which many people (including me) quite seriously view as one of the very greatest SF films ever made. I happened to email Danny about his work last month, and he came up with this wonderful and previously unknown tale.

The gnarly and subcultural Kek is back for another visit to Flurb. His "Search" takes us on a dreamy, postcyberpunk waltz with the grateful undead. What does it mean to lose a loved one?

Adam Callaway's "The Goddess of Discord" is a kick-ass example of the Seussian street-surrealism that infuses the finest SF. For his hero against the forces of chaos Callaway enlists...an accountant!

Daniel Valdez built this steampunk Professor Xavier wheelchair (complete with bubbling cranberry and vodka tubes on the back). It's powered by an Adafruit Waveshield -- an Arduino-based audio kit -- that gives it a series of awesome SFX. It's built around a 19th century rocker, with pistons from a steelworks.

Steampunk Professor Xavier Wheelchair Project - powered with an Adafruit Waveshield! (Thanks, PT!)

The SF in SF lecture series and the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition Convention are hosting a steampunk film-festival in San Francisco on Mar 10 (this coming Wednesday) -- they're asking attendees to come in costume, and will be screening The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog and Perfect Creature. They're asking $10 at the door, with proceeds to fund the next Nova Albion; bar proceeds go to Variety Children's Charity. Sounds like a kick-ass side-trip from this week's Game Developer Conference in SFO.

Wednesday, March 10
The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., First Floor
Entrance between Quiznos & Citibank
582 Market Street at Montgomery & Second
Seating is limited; numbers will be given upon entrance to ensure that we fairly seat everyone. First come, first seated.

I watched every single video in this guy's YouTube channel of his cockatiel singing themes from various video games, and can't figure out if it's a miracle or a hoax. I have never kept a cockatiel as a pet, but have kept other exotic birds, and I have a hard time buying that it's not faked. But either way, I enjoyed.

Cockatiel sings Theme of Chocobo (Final Fantasy)
(blackwhite810, thanks Joe Sabia)

Update: Most commenters thinks it's real. I am a jaded internetter, but okay, I'll go with the popular vote. Cockatiels are amazing and life is a miracle!

Noah Dziobecki's Goodnight Forest Moon is an absolutely nerdgasmic downloadable book to print and assemble at home that combines Star Wars and Goodnight Moon in a way that it utterly delightful.

Goodnight Forest Moon

PDF mirror

(via Super Punch)

Jesse Thorn says,

I don't know if you've ever seen Style Wars, but it's the definitive documentary about early hip-hop. It focuses on graf writing, but also covers music and dance from the perspective of New York City in the first years of the 1980s. It won the Grand Prize for Documentary at Sundance, and is an amazing document of the roots of one of the most important cultural movements in American history (also one of my favorite films of all time). The director, Tony Silver, was a family friend (he died a couple years ago). His partner Lisa and the other folks behind the film are trying to raise money to do a full restoration of the original print. The website, at stylewars.com, is pretty incredible in and of itself - they're all really committed to sharing this history. Anyway, folks can contribute right on the front page of stylewars.com.

From Joe Sabia — the videographer who made Tupac in Kazakhstan and this morning's Thankful Oscars video — comes this wonderful rendition of Weezer's Can't Stop Partying featuring random people from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima. Sabia took a trip to Japan in November, and over the course of six days, showed the below note to folks he met on the street.

"It basically says hey, how are you, I'm doing a project and I'd really like for you to repeat what I say in English," he tells me. "A United Airlines stewardess translated it for me just before I got off the plane."

Sabia hopes to do this in all the countries he visits from now on, although he doesn't yet know where he's going next.

"Johnny! Got that number rolled?"

When I first saw The Karate Kid, I wasn't yet old enough to understand what was happening in Johnny's toilet stall. But this is one of those movies you can watch over and over and extract some new meaning every time. It's a classic--a classic coming-of-age story, a classic bullied-confronting-bully tale, and a classic story about a boy and his mentor. Maybe that's what inspired a couple of producers to raid the chest of classic 80s films and slap the name The Karate Kid on a completely unnecessary new version. The movie isn't out yet, but the trailers are all over the web and, well, this is about principle.

They are fast. And they will get you.

According to the ChemistryBlog, that's Owen Priest, Ph.D., of Northwestern University, taking down that chicken.

(Thanks, Aaron Rowe!)

Filmmaker Joe Sabia created the awesome little video above, and explains:

It's been a year since the Oscars photohunt on youtube. In an annual attempt to do something with the Oscars, please enjoy everyone thanked in the history of the Oscars, set to under-appreciated rock star Gioachino Rossini.

News broke yesterday that Comedy Central would no longer allow popular video site Hulu to present episodes of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report."

The Hollywood Reporter asked Viacom if the network intends to go after websites or bloggers who post unauthorized clips.

"Yes, we intend to do so," PR rep Tony Fox told THR. "My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem."

What a big steaming pile of epic fail. How 'bout blogs (like, oh, let's say Boing Boing) start suing Viacom for every time a Comedy Central writer lifts an idea, a blog post, a funny turn of phrase, or a story—and fails to credit, namecheck or pay us? Cmon guys, you know you do it. Television suit-people, when will you ever learn: we are the internet. We are your traffic machine. We are your idea machine. We are the engine that propels your shows. Why do you treat us like thieves? (via EFF)

In 1967, music teacher Conrad Johnson saw Otis Redding play and decided to bring that vibe back to Kashmere High School's student band. The result was deep, brilliant, big band funk. Cult favorites of rare groove trainspotters, the Kashmere Stage Band's recordings were reissued a few years ago by Now Again Records. Grab a taste at MySpace. From the Kashmere Stage Band description:

In the mid '60s through the '70s, in Houston's bustling metropolis, Johnson (known by many as "Prof.") made a career of producing leagues of musicians capable of playing competitively with any band in the nation, professional or otherwise. More than simply a product of the big band era (his childhood friends and early musical peers included legends like Illinois Jacquet and Arnette Cobb), Johnson bestowed a living history to his young students. And while many band directors simply tolerated the use of popular rhythms in their stage bands, Johnson embraced the funk movement that enveloped his kids. He encouraged composition - both by writing original funk songs for his band to perform and by allowing the Kashmere Band to play songs written by band members. Never one to succumb to novelty, Johnson didn't simply throw funk beats beneath a jazz song to please his kids. He instructed his band to play funk because he respected the funk idiom in the same way he respected jazz. Nor did he simply borrow charts from progressive big banders such as Herman, as was common amongst high school bandleaders from the era. He arranged nearly every one of his band's songs himself, and those that he didn't arrange he allowed his students to arrange. He worked year-round with his eager charges, constantly pushing the limits as to what their band could accomplish.

Megan sez, "A German gamer-geek couple created and designed this 8-bit video game (a la Mario Bros) to be their wedding invitations. Their guests have to win the game to get the wedding info."

Goddamn, that is an auspicious way to start a marriage.

8-bit video game wedding invitations! (Thanks, Megan!)

Mia Quagliarello of YouTube, who kindly invited me to guest-curate the YouTube home page last month, just sent along this odd find.

"This made me think of Boing Boing," she says, "This guy, Christiaan Van Vuuren, has been stuck in quarantine for TB and he's entertaining himself by making rap videos. IMHO, it's hilarious!"

I agree. He's also kinda cute. Life in Quarantine - Fully Sick Rapper. Mia found the series from a tweet by Shawn Ahmed (of the very interesting and very watchable Uncultured Project).

Stop-motion filmmaker PES, which makes whimsical use of everyday objects as substitutes for other things (bubble wrap for boiling water, popcorn for explosions, Post-It Note pads for pats of butter), made a fun commercial for the Washington State Lottery.

In the upcoming issue of MAKE, we are running an article written by PES producer and manager Sarah Phelps on how she makes these clever videos.

PES videos

Not having seen him in action since the Nickelodeon days back in the 80s, I'd almost forgotten how well Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert did the job of communicating science. A radio actor and documentary producer, Herbert created the first science-experiment centric TV show, "Watch Mr. Wizard", which premiered on Chicago's WNBQ-TV in 1951. Within months, the show had moved to its natural and cosmically-correct time slot—Saturday mornings.

Bonus: The clip above features the first intelligent girl I have ever seen in a 1950s television show. I can only assume she was carted off to the gulag as soon as filming wrapped.

And, yes, I realize that 59 is a weird anniversary to celebrate. But, you know what, it's Mr. Wizard. We'll celebrate this year, and next year, too. Try and stop me.

French video prankster Rémi Gaillard is at it again, with this NSFW video that will delight furries, tickle vegans, and confuse many a macho-man. RABBIT VS HUNTER (REMI GAILLARD)

This installment of the Brads webcomic shows the 22 steps a reader has to take in order to borrow a DRM-crippled audiobook from the public library. A compelling argument for libraries to boycott this stuff.

The Brads - Why DRM Doesn't Work

This, ladies and germs, is how you butch up men's figure skating: Nirvana on Ice! (Erin Polgreen via Chris Baker).

OK Go shot a fantastic Rube Goldberg contraption video for their new song "This Too Shall Pass." The MAKE team race car makes an appearance at around 3:00 minutes into the video.

The contraption was built by Syyn Labs. Adam Sadowsky of Syyn Labs wrote:

The requirements were that it had to be interesting, not "overbuilt" or too technology-heavy, and easy to follow.  The machine also had to be built on a shoestring budget, synchronize with beats and lyrics in the music and end on time over a 3.5 minute song, play a part of the song, and be filmed in one shot.  To make things more challenging still, the space chosen was divided into two floors and the machine would use both.

Look for a "making of" article written by Adam in a forthcoming issue of MAKE magazine.

High resolution version here: OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - RGM version

Embargoes II, Electric Boogaloo. Created by Steve O'Hear.

AKMA sez, "As I was walking to work I started thinking about some of the reasons I got tired of playing World of Warcraft, and this angle occurred to me...."

After millennia in beta, Échecs Games presents the interactive strategy game for the twenty-first century: Shah-mat 64.0!

• More character possibilities -- now any unit can be any colour or gender! Male queens, female bishops, chartreuse rooks!

• New game board maps featuring additional continents and unoccupied areas -- no reason ever to go back to boring original 64 squares!

• No more grinding through tedious opening levels -- move quickly into endgame content!

• New bosses -- more powerful pieces, but they move entirely predictably and unintelligently!

• New special moves: dimensional portal allows King escape to any unoccupied square in the game!

(Image: Chess vortex, a Creative Commons Attribution image from fdecomite's photostream)

The latest Futurismic short-story is an incredibly grim but sweetly smartassed apocalyptic tale called "Tupac Shakur and the End of the World," by Sandra McDonald. Tupac is the story of band of survivors of a plague that paralyses its victims and leaves them to die; as Susan, the narrator, slogs down the Interstate to Orlando, she has plenty of time to ruminate on what makes apocalypse stories so compelling. Neat narrative trick, and carried off well. Great way to cure your early-March-happiness.

The worst part - well, one of the worst parts, disregarding the collapse of modern civilization - is that it was my own stupid choice to leave Florida in the first place, and here I am spending my last days trying to get back there. I don't have the Creep yet but let's not pretend I'm special or mysteriously immune. I'm not the plucky heroine of a summer blockbuster who will find true love (shaggy-haired Brendan Fraser would be nice, or Daniel Craig with his icy blue eyes) and then become matriarch of a community of ragtag survivors. I'm just me - Susan Donoghue, thirty-one, former textbook writer, currently hiking down I-95 in North Carolina armed with a .45 handgun, pepper spray, and a hunting knife. I won't let anyone touch me.

Let's not pretend, either, that I'm on anything but a fool's errand. My sister Marie, her husband Mike, and my baby niece Monica are probably already dead. The best I'll be able to do is bury them. Take their hardened, Creepified bodies and put them in the dirt, then drop down beside them.

With me on this southbound hike are Lazy Lamar, Crazy Chris, Tipsy Tina and Jumping Jack. The alliterative nicknames were Tina's idea - some trick she used to do as an icebreaker when she used to teach equal opportunity seminars in Baltimore. The only one I really trust is Jumping Jack. He and I left Brooklyn eighteen days ago. He's a lot like Brendan Fraser, except gay. He wants to die in Miami.

(Image: The Apocalypse Is a "Once in a Lifetime" Thing! a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Sister72's photostream)

Terrible terrible news. Legendary emcee Guru, one-half of the oldschool hiphop act Gang Starr, suffered a cardiac episode over the weekend and is now in a coma according to multiple sources. More: HipHopDX, allhiphop.com, TMZ, Animal, MTV, Billboard. Details are thin, but we do know that he was hospitalized in New York.

Born Keith Elam, his stage name is an acronym for "Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal." No kidding, man. Embedded above, a classic Gang Starr track: Mass Appeal. Get well, Guru.

(Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Thanks Mark. Very happy to be here. Let's get started...

I've lived in Massachusetts for 24 years, but in the first half of the '90s I spent a lot of time in Nashville. I worked as a reissue producer, compiling box sets of veteran country and blues performers. Some of the projects were fun, some were more challenging, but it was always great being in Music City.

One of the many musicians I met during my trip to Nashville was Bill Lloyd. You may know him as half of the popular country-rock duo Foster and Lloyd, but he's produced, recorded with, or written for dozens of acts you love, from Carl Perkins to Cheap Trick. (Disclosure: He contributed to my Sandinista Project a few years back.)

One of Lloyd's more intriguing ongoing projects is The Long Players. When the spirit moves them, Lloyd and the Long Players, an ever-changing group of Nashville's finest, gallop through a classic rock'n'roll album. They've played through plenty of the usual suspects -- Blonde on Blonde, My Aim Is True, After the Gold Rush -- and they've stayed consistently true to the spirit of the originals but, at their best, just a bit wilder.

Thomas Bruso, known on the internet as "Epic Beard Man," is the subject of a documentary which focuses on the release of a violent viral video that made him famous. Video: Part 1, Part 2.

(Thanks, Sean Bonner, via Blame it On the Voices)

Update: I've swapped out the video embed in this post with a version that doesn't include obnoxious ads. This embed, and more about the incident, at mullen.com.

This simple video is a thing of beauty: Man holding coffee walks into glass door. (via Jesse Dylan)

Illustrator Christopher Niemann's Lego block recreations of famous New York icons are very clever. Abrams just published a board book full of them. See other examples here on the NY Times.

I Lego N.Y.

Before BB guestblogger Mark Dery became the brilliantly biting cultural critic that we know and love, he was a suburban Christian teen waiting for the messiah. Fortunately, Ziggy Stardust showed up sooner rather than later. Over at Religion Dispatches, Mark is serializing his nonfiction novella that he says is about the "religious subtext in Bowie lyrics, the christological symbolism in Ziggy, and my '70s transition from evangelical true believer to devout Bowiephile." From the opening essay, the first in a weekly series:

Proclaiming an astro-hippie gospel of transcendence through free love ("let all the children boogie," unquote), Ziggy seizes on rock stardom as the most effective media pulpit for his message. Not content with mere celebrity, he imagines himself a "leper messiah." But, like too many telegenic holy men, he ends up seduced by his own Cult of Personality: "making love with his ego / Ziggy sucked up into his mind" ("Ziggy Stardust"). In the Ziggy outtake "Sweet Head," he sings, "Your faith in me can last / Besides, I'm known to lay you, one and all," then tosses off a line calculated to outrage: "Till there was rock, you only had God."

In the end, he's murdered by his crazed fans, torn limb from limb onstage. His jealous backing band, The Spiders from Mars--who had "bitched about his fans" and toyed with Golgotha-friendly fantasies of "crush[ing] his sweet hands"--wash their hands, Pontius Pilate-like, of the whole sordid business: "When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band."

Steve Silberman sez, "Holy Terry Gilliam prototype: The original, trippy 1933 film version of Alice in Wonderland by Norman 'Monkey Business' McLeod, starring Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and W.C. Fields, now on DVD with a rave from Alice: 'A revolution in cinema history!'"

But only one can boast the endorsement of the original Alice: the 1933 Paramount "Alice in Wonderland," being released to DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment ($19.98, not rated), the current rights holder. In a Jan. 7, 1934, article in The New York Times, Alice Liddell, quoted under her married name, Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, expressed admiration for the film that Hollywood had wrought from the story Carroll had invented for her some seven decades before.

"I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted," she declared, her words possibly burnished by a Paramount publicist. " 'Alice' is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!"

Alice in Wonderland (1933)

(Thanks, Steve!)