(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

Flickr user scrumptiousdelight created this Sarlaac monster in pillow form for Stitch Wars, a Star Wars crafting show. Note all the little details, like the Boba Fett helmet on one of the tentacles.

saarlac pitlow monster (via Wonderland)

Harry sez, "Computers weren't portable in 1968 (they tended to fill entire rooms), but even then, the yen for portable computing was there. In 1968, Computerworld reported on a carrying case that turned a Teletype machine into a 75-pound mobile terminal--wheels were optional." The Laptop, Circa 1968 (Thanks, Harry!)

The Weather Channel will no longer have a "smooth jazz" soundtrack behind its "Local On the 8s" segments. Instead, they will play rock. Fortunately, you can still turn down the TV volume and crank your CD of "The Weather Channel Presents Smooth Jazz," which actually hit #1 on the Billboard's Current Contemporary Jazz Album Chart. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“I think we’ve been doing an injustice to our viewers playing, for the lack of a better word, elevator music on the segments for all these years,” said Geoffrey Darby, the cable network’s new executive vice president of programming, Thursday.

“People would have it on but they wouldn’t be watching and they wouldn’t be listening,” said Darby, who pushed for the change after joining the network in February. “We wanted music that would get their attention —- and this has.”

Weather Channel turns to rock

Drew Friedman continues his new series of portraits depicting legendary circus and carnie sideshow freaks. The paintings are for a private collector, who I wish was me. Fortunately, Drew says they'll eventually be collected in a book. Seen here is Julia Pastrana Percilla Lauther aka "Percilla The Monkey Girl." Her story is strange, tragic, and also quite touching. From J. Tithonus Pednaud's fantastic site, The Human Marvels:

In the late 1930’s, while performing with the Johnny J. Jones Exposition, Percilla met fellow marvel Emmitt Bejano, the Alligator-Skinned Man. Despite her heavy beard and his ichthyosis a sweet romance blossomed between the unique couple. The pair saw past their physical differences. Emmitt was a man with calloused skin who spent performance intermissions submerged in vats of ice water because he could not sweat. Emmitt was quite literally ‘thick skinned’ and he had a ‘hard shell to crack’ but beneath he was a compassionate, gentle, charming and passionate man. Percilla, despite looking more beast than beauty, was elegant, eloquent and possessed and enchanting singing voice. Before long Percilla realized that the gentle Emmitt was the love of her life and the two eloped in 1938.

Percilla The Monkey Girl (Human Marvels)
Drew Friedman's The Monkey Girl (Drawger)

On Tuesday, Sean Stanley Smith, 19, ran around Lake Tahoe's casino arcade naked until police subdued him with a taser. They arrested him for indecent exposure. According to the Record Courier, "He reportedly told officers he had ingested marijuana and LSD, and was running naked because he thought he was 'the Terminator.'" He'll be back. "Naked 'Terminator' arrested at casino" (via Dose Nation)

Out of the Blue's "Dead Gnome" line features garden gnomes with pistols in their mouths, or holding up the dripping heads of decapitated brethren, industriously sawing their own hands off, hanging from a gibbet, grinning glassily at the arrow that's pierced their heads, and so on. It's the wet, happy grins that get me.

Dead Gnome (Thanks, Alice!)

A new Turkish game-show asks clerics to convert atheists and awards prizes for the most conversions; I think the atheists should get points for resisting the pitch, too -- it's only fair (and the atheists should win supreme if the cleric loses faith altogether!).

A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.

In each episode of Penitents Compete, to be broadcast by Turkey's Kanal T television station in September, the four faith guides will try to persuade 10 atheists of the merits and truth of their creeds...

An eight-member team of theologians will vet contestants to ensure they really are atheists before deciding who will participate in the show.

Faiths compete on Turkish game show (via Derren Brown)

Marilyn sez, "Pretty cool photos from July National Geographic. These manta rays in the Maldives have a 12-ft-wingspan, and the photographer Thomas Peschak was right in among them during feeding frenzies to get these shots. I especially like the last one in this gallery, which shows them lining up one behind the other in chain feeding behavior before swirling into a spiral formation for cyclone feeding, a behavior rarely seen outside the Maldives."

Feeding Frenzy (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Bruce Schneier points out that keypad wear is a form of "information leakage": "There are 10,000 possible four-digit codes, but you only have to try 24 on these keypads. The first is most likely 1986 or 1968. The second is almost certainly 1234."

Information Leakage from Keypads

Video. Adolf Hitler is pretty pissed off to learn that Michael Jackson has died and won't be able to perform at his birthday party. Evidences the true marks of a great internet meme: infinite expandability, extremely bad taste in multiple respects, and an unfairly long lifespan. (via @andrewbaron)

djBC, consistently my favorite mashup producer/creator (he's the guy behind the Beasties/Beatles remix "The Beastles"), has released an entire album of remixes of Muppet music! He sez, "In honor of my daughter's first birthday- and one month late- I'm rolling out 'Muppet Mashup.' Ten mashups, remixes, and covers of music from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. With the legendary McSleazy (of MTV Mash and GYBO), Dunproofin, ATOM, Martinn, Uncanny Valley and yours truly, dj BC. I'm particularly proud of my 'I'm Happy' track, which is built on Edwinn Starr loops, Muppet Show samples, and a fun, funky playground acapella from some little girls on Sesame Street."

I've just listened to this straight through, with the baby, and we were both captivated. Bravo!

Mashups, remixes, and covers of music from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street.

Coral Cache mirror of the entire album

This first-hand account of the construction of a clandestine shortwave radio by British POWs in a Japanese camp in Singapore really reminds me of James Clavell's magnificent novel King Rat, my all-time favorite war-novel, which revolves grippingly around the construction, discovery and consequences of a hidden shortwave in the Changi camp (both Clavell and Ronald "St Trinian's" Searle were interned in this camp).

BJ: Can I just ask you - the components for the low voltage battery cells that you produced, where did you get all the components from?

RGW: Well, zinc wasn't hard, there was some sheet zinc lying on the aerodrome and we pinched quite a bit of that because that would be eaten away during the use of the cells for the low voltage. I don't know what would have happened if that ran out. I think someone produced two lantern cells which did for a while, but it was mainly on this home-made cell system, which wasn't efficient but nowhere near as inefficient as the rectifier was. We must have been consuming... Ah Ping said he had to turn up a lot of power to keep the lights what they wanted. We were dispersing such an amount of power in this four test tube rectifier for the high tension.

A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible. We had to take two plates off the one we had to get a high enough frequency. Yes, I can't remember why we didn't go up a bit in inductance; it was largely a trial and error business really. Except that in a regenerative receiver you had some idea when you were near a station because the receiver was so sensitive as all regenerative receivers are.

It had a piece of meat skewer type wood which I had a hole drilled in by a pen-knife, and we glued this in with some of our glue or something, into the capacitor shaft so that we could tune it by holding a little stick across it, fixing it at about six inches because one couldn't get one's hands any closer to the set because it was in a state of very near oscillation where the maximum sensitivity is, just before it bursts into oscillation. With a fairly clear HF band, it wasn't long before we knew roughly, by putting a couple of marks on the stick, where it was. We knew that the Voice of America was due for a transmission and I don't think we ever knew the frequencies because the BBC didn't announce frequencies, they just came on the air and broadcast.

Construction of Radio Equipment in a Japanese POW Camp (via Make)

Etsy seller Plastique's got laser-cut acrylic rings boasting pointy world monuments. As knuckledusters, they create the possibility of growling, "Right, mate, you're geography," before you bust your opponent in the chops.

world landmarks acrylic ring set (white) (via Neatorama)

"Homeopathic A&E," a sketch from the British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look invites us to imagine an emergency room (A&E is British for Accidents and Emergencies, the UK equivalent of ER), as run by newage woo woos.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E (via White Coat Underground)

After 30 years, Compuserve is finally, totally, mostly dead (the email addresses still work). I was always a local BBS and GEnie guy, but there's no doubting the power and influence of Compuserve in introducing the idea of networked communications to a generation, and proving the business-case for commercial online activity:

The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL. The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 73402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years. At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s.

CompuServe users will be able to use their existing CompuServe Classic (as the service was renamed) addresses at no charge via a new e-mail system, but the software that the service was built on, along with all the features supported by that software, from forums for virtually every topic and profession known to man to members' Ourworld Web pages, has been shut down. Indeed, the current version of the service's client software, CompuServe for Windows NT 4.0.2, dates back to 1999.

CompuServe Requiem (via Beyond the Beyond)

The chairman of the virtual bank in EVE Online, a space-trading/piracy game, absconded with billions of virtual credits, swapping them for $5,000 in cash to make a house payment. The embezzlement caused a run on the bank and has rocked the economy of EVE.

The run on the bank has come to about 600 billion ISK, which has been withdrawn. However, we have a very big group of excellent supporters, who have deposited about 105 billion ISK sitting in Sweep to keep us liquid. We are extremely grateful for this. Currently the run seems to be mostly over with only a slightly higher withdrawal rate still, than deposit rate. That's to be expected, and in-line with EBANK's strategy to shrink to a more managable level.

EBANK has always been extremely sound, due to our massive reserves. Our checks and balances have proven themselves to work as a mitigation device and by having the reserves spread out over several directors, the embezzlement was kept to a minimum. However, the run on the bank had the potential to do great damage to EBANK as people frantically made withdrawals to ensure they would not be caught if the bank ran short.

We have also had several offers from very large entities, regarding big loans, should we need to cover any insolvency. Frankly, this has yet to be needed. But we are grateful for the support.

Billions stolen in online robbery

New perspective on EVE Online's latest bank embezzlement (via /.)

Stephen Worth says:

When I was very small, I had one of those horses on springs. I would jump on it and bounce around furiously while my Dad would urge me on, calling out to me to "Ride that horse down the bumpy road to Bodie!"

Before I was born, my family had taken a trip to the High Sierras and my Dad and Mom never forgot the potholes they had to navigate their 56 Chevy station wagon over. It was a memory they spoke of often. When I got a little older, I got a chance to visit Bodie with them, navigating a slightly more modern Chevy station wagon over those same potholes. Bodie became a lasting part of my consciousness as well.

On my personal blog, Late Night Coffee Shops, I just posted a documentary on Bodie (and its nine inhabitants) from the mid-1950s. If you love the otherworldly feeling of stillness in places like this as much as I do, this video will make your day and fill your dreams with the beautiful sound of wind blowing through sun bleached boards.

Ghost Town: The Bumpy Road To Bodie

Richard Metzger pointed me to the Don Martin Dictionary. Martin was one of my favorite Mad cartoonists. His sophisticated absurdism was the opposite of Dave Berg's middlebrow sitcom humor (but I liked him, too). The Don Martin Dictionary

Higher Mammals made a song and video to accompany Radiolab's recent show about stochasticity. If you don't already know about Radiolab, it's a terrific science podcast produced for WYNC public radio.

Radiolab Stochasticity Bonus Video!

This week, Cory posted a Talking Heads video and I followed up with a Laurie Anderson clip. For the trifecta of posts related to NYC's downtown scene in the 1980s, here is a video of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer at a Commodore press event in 1985.

While BB Gadgets' Rob is fond of Bughouse's Album Side Table made from old LP jackets, I prefer the Hypolux Chandelier, constructed from plexiglass plates, commercial syringes, and a ballchain suspension.

Make: Online has published a number of cool projects recently.

Sew a cute Morse code key leg strap

Diana Eng's frilly and fashion-forward Morse code key. Diana Eng (best known from Project Runway and her book Fashion Geek) is our current guest author. Besides being a geek-chic fashion maven, Diana is also a ham operator and on a mission to introduce a new generation of hobbyists (especially women) to ham radio. In this project, she makes a sexy garter strap to hold her new Morse key.

Shrinky Dink gaming minis

Sean Ragan shows you how to make some sweet home-baked gaming components using Shrinky Dink plastic and binder clips.

More on making Light Bricks

As a follow-up piece to Alden Hart's LED Light Brick project in MAKE, Volume 18, the atuhor shares more ideas for molding and casting the acrylic bricks to house your LED board, including using machinable wax to create a life-mask face to house your array. Disco face, baby!

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first photos of the moon. The photo above was taken near the moon's Mare Nubium region. The man in the moon is just outside the frame. From NASA:

Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. (The image) shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. The bottom (faces) lunar north.

LRO's First Moon Images

SEE UPDATE BELOW

These may be one of the oldest pairs of basketball sneakers in the world. The shoes were manufactured by the Colchester Rubber Company which shut down in 1893. Vintage clothing dealer Gary Pifer paid 50 cents for them at an estate sale in Vista, California. From CafeTerra:

"In a instant, I knew this discovery would be re-writing basketball and sneaker history, as these sneakers are 25 years older than the 1917 Converse All-Stars", added Pifer. The Colchester Rubber Co. was located in Colchester, Connecticut and was in business from 1888 to 1893.

"World's first basketball sneakers 116 years old found at an estate sale"

UPDATE: Hey, looks like this story was a marketing ploy! (Thanks, William Gibson!)

Roy Christopher has assembled his annual summer reading list, which includes book recommendations from several of our friends and former guest bloggers.

Gareth Branwyn:

A trend I’m noticing in books recently is that there are an increasing number that trade in danger – anti-Nanny State books. No, not those Dangerous Book for Boys and Girls. Those are rubbish. I’m talking about books like Theo Gray’s tremendously awesome Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home – But Probably Shouldn’t (Black Dog & Leventhal) and Bill Gurstelle’s Absinthe and Flamethrowers (Chicago Review Press). Gray’s book has a bunch of enticing experiments that are so well-documented and gorgeously photographed, you don’t have to do them yourself, but if you decide you want to, Gray tells you the real dangers involved and what you have to find out on your own to do them safely and successfully. Treating us like adults. What a concept.

My friend Bill Gurstelle’s book first looks at reasons for living dangerously, mapping what he calls the Golden Third, those people who take risks, who aren’t afraid to live a certain degree of risk,… but not too much risk. Be too risk-taking and you might not survive, not reproduce, don’t take any risks, and you won’t move the culture, innovation, etc. forward. All the action is in that Golden Third. After these ruminations on the why of living dangerously, he gets into some projects and activities, the “art” of living dangerously, from “thrill eating” (stuff like fugu that can theoretically kill you) to Bill’s main bailiwick, teaching you how to spectacularly blow shit up (hence “flamethrower” in the title).

Richard Metzger:

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff (Random House, 2009): Ever get the feeling that you’re trapped on a hamster wheel of predatory “Corporatism”? An unwitting participant in a system that you didn’t sign up for in the first place? What happens when the operating system of the corporate Moloch runs amok.

Never Trust a Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson (Duck Editions, UK, 2001): Great macabre short story collection from the silent member of The League of Gentlemen. “Never trust a rabbit. They may look like a child’s toy, but they will eat your crops.” Hungarian proverb.

Summer Reading List by Roy Christopher

"The choppers call him 'Torch.'"

Many thanks to the The Isotope Guerrilla Cult Theatre for uploading this 1961 movie about a gang of kids who steal and strip down cars to turn into hotrods.

If you cool cats like classic hotrod cars, bad boys from the other side of the tracks, sexy blondes in tight shirts, insipidly catchy songs, goofy teen idol good looks, and the world's biggest cell phone... this one is for you!

Hot rods, hot rock, and hot hair are the jewels in the juvenile delinquency crown of THE CHOPPERS. This classic drive-in exploitation flick features the debut of sixteen year-old Arch Hall Jr. as Cruiser, the spoiled rich kid with a taste for crime and his band of troubled teens who call themselves cool names like Torch, Flip and Snoop, and specialize in stripping cars in record time. This is the movie that made you mom weak in the knees and your daddy worried about the crowd you run with.

Featuring the some exceptional less-than-hit songs from the awesome Arch Hall Jr, including non-classics like "Konga Joe" and "Monkey In A Hatband".

(Thanks, Brian!)

(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

Behold, gentlemen! Ript, "the revolutionary torso-enhancing undershirt." The designer of this undergarment is described as "the creative force behind P. Diddy's Sean John clothing line, where she mastered her understanding of what appeals to the most sophisticated and discriminating men." Ah, so we can blame Diddy.

"Ript" is so technologically advanced, it comes with a HOWTO, bitches:

Ript, via Book of Joe.

A new specimen from Ethan Persoff's "Comics with Problems" archives: Early NAACP Comic Book History - Your Future Rests In Your Hands and The Street Where You Live (1960 and 1964)

Cross-Stitch Ninja's Flickr stream is a bottomless well of pixellated delights. Shown here, the CCTV cameras worked into the border of the "You Are Not Alone" sampler, and there's plenty of other lovelies, like the Super Mario maps, grammar puns, religio-vegetarian humor and loads more.

Cross-stitch ninja's photostream (via Craft, thanks, Alice!)

The Obamabot 3000 is ready to be unveiled at Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents, along with the Mark II George Washingtron ("Now with real talking action!") and a Gettysburg-complete Lincolnbot.

No word on whether the Obamabot will allow release of the photos of the waterbotting on Pleasure Island, a no-go zone for civilians for several years now.

We're just sorting out our Christmas at Disney World plans -- our first WDW trip with the baby -- and I'm looking forward to this. There is something eerily cool and compelling about all those hyper-detailed robots nodding and twitching at you from out of the uncanny valley while Maya Angelou tells you about the War Between the States.

A remarkably lifelike Audio-Animatronics figure of President Barack Obama enters the spotlight in a revised and refreshed Hall of Presidents show when it reopens July 4 in Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort. The addition of the countrys 44th chief executive is just part of the most significant update to this classic attraction since its 1971 debut in the parks Liberty Square.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin helped develop the show with Disney Imagineers. In this video they talk about the Hall of Presidents: A Celebration of Libertys Leaders.

Barack Obama Joins Hall of Presidents at Disney's Magic Kingdom (Thanks, Patricio!)

This prototype handbag detects camera flashes and emits a powerful, obscuring strobe that is meant to confound paparazzi. Of course, if there were four paps shooting at once (as there usually seem to be!), it would just ruin one of the four shots.

Last year on July 4, we were walking down the beach in Santa Monica and we saw a pap stop his car in traffic, jump out, run up to the passenger window of a car and start shooting. It turned out Courtney Love and a friend were in the car, enjoying a drive.

We chased the pap back to his car and paced him in the snail-traffic with our cameras, snapping pictures of him as he crawled to the next traffic light.

Anti-Paparazzi Clutch Bag

The Times of India is calling it "India's Gay Day." A ruling on Thursday overturned a colonial law nearly 150 years old that describes sex acts between two persons of the same gender in India's capital city as an "unnatural offense."

Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. Many people in India regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate. Rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.

A clarification from an earlier iteration of this blog post: The ruling only applies to India's capital city of Delhi. Sex acts between two men or two women is, if I'm reading this right, still a crime in the rest of India.

India media hails gay sex ruling (BBC). See also: Mumbai gays' long fight for recognition (BBC). Below: image from WAtoday: "A eunuch kisses another member of the transgender, gay and lesbian communities as they celebrate the Indian court decision." (thanks, Antinous!)

Tony sez, "Recently, a group of paleontologists were in town for the North American Paleontological Convention at the University of Cincinnati, and decided to take a field trip to the Creation Museum just across the river, in Kentucky. My aunt went to cover it for AFP, and I had the doubly good fortune of living just a stone's throw away, so I tagged along to see what these guys were up to. It was an eyeful, to say the least. Gorgeous facilities with amazingly engaging displays and animatronics, and at least a few hundred cubic cubits of bad science and misinformation. One young lady stood, furious, and grumbled, 'It's bullshit. Bullshit pretending to be science.' Anyone who finds themselves in the Cincinnati area with a few bucks, hours, and brain cells to burn should check it out, and see what the scientific community is up against in terms of informing the public."

Arnie Miller, a palentologist at the University of Cincinnati who was chairman of the convention, said he hoped the tour would introduce the scientists to "the lay of the land" and show them firsthand what's being put forth in a place that has elicited vehement criticism from the scientific community...

"And there was a feeling of unhappiness, too, about the extent to which mainstream scientists and evolutionists are demonized -- that if you don't accept the Answers in Genesis vision of the history of Earth and life, you're contributing to the ills of society and of the church."

Daryl Domning, professor of anatomy at Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several points during the tour. "This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," he said.

(Thanks, Tony!)

(Image: (AFP/File/Jeff Haynes)

A tombstone for the famed German sex-worker and advocate Domenica Niehoff has been turned down as too sexual by the cemetery where she was buried.

The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...

Ungerer and Niehoff were friends for decades, and even shared a flat for a while in 1984. He published drawings of Niehoff and her colleagues in a book entitled "Guardian Angels of Hell" at the time...

Niehoff, who gained fame for advocating the rights of sex workers in the 70s and 80s, died at age 63 in February 2009.

Famous prostitute's gravestone deemed too 'slutty' (Thanks, Rosa!)

Inspired by this European Digital Rights Initiative article on "The Silence of the Chips" (a proposal to redesign your radio-enabled ID cards so that you can control when they work and when they're switched off), Oneillkza created this CC-BY logo for the idea, and made a CafePress tee in case you wanted to add it to your sartorial repertoire.

One of the most important action point is the launch of "a debate on the technical and legal aspects of the 'right to silence of the chips', which has been referred to under different names by different authors and expresses the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time."

This is one of the main actions of the plan in order to allow the usage of the RFID while respecting privacy and the protection of personal data, two fundamental rights of the EU.

Silence of the Chips (Flickr)

Silence of the Chips (CafePress)

(via Beyond the Beyond)

The photoshoppers at Worth1000 have found some remarkably fertile territory in today's contest, to remix the Statue of Liberty -- see, for example, Lady Liberty on the Launching Pad, BFF with Jesus of Rio, Yee-HAW!, Window Washer and Evil Monster.

Cliche Hell 18 - Statue of Liberty

Raul Gutierrez is one of my favorite photographers. I particularly love his images of Tibetan life, like the Kham logging camp above. I've traveled to some of the same places, and Raul's work captures these scenes in a different way than my eyes remember. He says:

For the past fifteen years, I have been making pilgrimages to the deserts and mountains of China's western borders, focusing on Tibetan and Uyghur communities. These remote frontier regions are laced with contested geographies where religious and cultural legacies confront powerful economic and political transformations.

In these far away places, I look for way stations between cultures where one can see the past and future simultaneously. Seeing these changes over such a short time is a perspective that is at once disorienting and tragic. I try to make images that show these things, or at least some of the emotional truths behind them, because I know each time I return everything will be almost unrecognizable.

20x200 just released a collection of four 11x14 prints from his "Travels Without Maps" project. You can buy them as a set, or individually. Truly beautiful work. (thanks, Sara Distin)

Ever the happy prankster, Paul Krassner "met" with Larry King for an interview.

This video was made to promote Paul's new book: Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture & Comedy in America Today.

A mock interview between Paul Krassner and Larry King by Andy Thomas. (Thanks, Doug Rushkoff!)

Direct link to video. There is no part of this trailer that is not made of awesome. A robot geisha transforms into a tank. Two robot geishas (I guess) spew poison milk (don't ask) out of their titties at an opponent. A girl gets stabbed to death in the butt with a giant sword. Robot girls make giant swords pop out of their butts, presumably with which to stab other people in their butts. "Bust Machine Gun." And a dude is blinded with tempura shrimp.

All this and more in the trailer for Noboru Iguchi's new film RoboGeisha - you may recall his work on similarly-themed films Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police. According to the website, the film will be "in theatre fall 2009." (thanks, bobby ciraldo, via geektyrant)

BB pal Tara McGinley spotted these delightful planter kits, called Honbachi, from Japan, containing the plant, soil, and a hollowed-out book. Looks like it would be fun and easy to DIY too! Book planters

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube / View large at boingboingvideo.com)

Joel Johnson writes over at Boing Boing Gadgets,

Should you buy the Sigma DP2? Only if you're in love with the sensor. While it's definitely a better choice than its predecessor and is not without its manual charms, its high price puts it in range of DSLRs and other cameras that come without as many limitations.

Looking through a glass viewfinder is such a treat, though—too bad it doesn't seem to actually line up very well with the actual pictures.

Join the discussion on this video over at Boing Boing Gadgets, where Joel has also uploaded a slideshow of unretouched images from the DP2!

(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

Cory's post about the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, one of my fave concert films too, reminded me of Laurie Anderson's fantastic Home Of The Brave movie. I distinctly remember seeing it for the first time when I was 14 at a midnight showing in my town's art house cinema and feeling very... avant garde. That was my first exposure to William S. Burroughs, whose quote "Languags is a virus from outer space" inspired the song performed in the clip above. Unfortunately, Home of the Brave never saw an official DVD release, just VHS and laserdisc. But according to Anderson's site, a DVD film/video box set collection of her work is on the horizon.

Home of the Brave (MP3 soundtrack)
Home of the Brave (VHS)

Christopher Ryan wrote a short profile of Alan Watts for Psychology Today. He included this quote from Watts' about the self-importance of humans:

“The point is that rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter.”

Alan Watts: priest, scholar, monk, author, trickster guru

My pal and IFTF colleague Alex Pang just turned me on to NCBI ROFL, a hilarious blog written by two molecular and cell biology grad students at UC Berkeley in which they point out funny, bizarre, and questionable biomedical research articles. NCBI stands for the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a national research organization that also houses databases of published scientific papers. Alex says, "The case studies on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are all must-reads. However, I think the article title 'Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths' may be the best thing ever written." From a post today excerpting a paper on "the nature of navel fluff:"

Hard facts on a soft matter! ... The hypothesis presented herein says that abdominal hair is mainly responsible for the accumulation of navel lint, which, therefore, this is a typically male phenomenon. The abdominal hair collects fibers from cotton shirts and directs them into the navel where they are compacted to a felt-like matter. The most abundant individual mass of a piece of lint was found to be between 1.20 and 1.29 mg (n=503). However, due to several much larger pieces, the average mass was 1.82 mg in this three year study. When the abdominal hair is shaved, no more lint is collected. "

From the materials and methods: "The author first observed the accumulation of navel fluff in his early 20s. Despite thorough body hygiene including a daily morning shower, the navel filled with lint over the day. The author collected 503 pieces of navel fluff since approximately March 2005 with a total weight of almost 1 g... ...In order to investigate the role of the abdominal hair, the author also shaved his belly for this study."

NCBI ROFL

Trumpet player Kermit Ruffins is an icon of New Orleans jazz. His sensational Rebirth Brass Band is a jazz/funk musical extravaganza that must be experienced live for full effect. Ruffins is also the founder of the jazz quintet Barbecue Swingers and is famous for firing up his grill at their shows in NOLA. In celebration of the July 4 tradition of grilling out, Putumayo World Music Blog interviewed Ruffins about his passion for the BBQ pit. Ruffins is featured on Putumayo's New Orleans compilation and also Putumayo Kids' New Orleans Playground CD, which I heartily recommend. From Putumayo (photo by dsb nola):

Where did the name “Barbecue Swingers” come from?
Kermit Ruffins: From tailgating. I started tailgating at Vaughn’s during break-time so the guys could have something to eat. So one morning I woke up and said “Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Kings,” but by the middle of the evening I had changed it to “Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers.” I was having so much fun barbecuing during the show that it just hit me: “Barbecue Swingers”.

So you originally were barbecuing to have some hot food at the shows, then the idea just caught on?
Kermit Ruffins: Yep, the tailgating started [it] all. I would cook hot sausage for the guys during break time, and whatever was left over, we would give it to the fans. Then I bought a big grill and started cooking for everyone, still up [to] today!

BK: Do you have any recipes or tips you would like to share with us?
Kermit Ruffins: I like to use a pan. I cook a lot of things in the pan - shrimp, fish, chicken, anything. Just a little olive oil, Tony Chanceries’, granulated garlic, thyme, and a little beer. Wrap it tight for an hour and a half; it’s like cooking in the oven. After, if you want, you can put them on the grill so they get that pecan wood taste.

"July 4th BBQ Essentials from New Orleans Legend Kermit Ruffins"

Funny coincidence: The SEC's Eric Swanson, who told his underling lawyer to stop looking into Bernie Madoff's questionable activities in 2004, married Bernie's niece Shana Madoff in 2007.

By the way, in April Shana contacted Wall Street Prison Consultants, a firm that "gives advice to future inmates on how to survive prison time and win an early release." According the the firm's website, Shana can "learn the ropes of federal prison" including: "Prevent Being RAPED, Prison Living Conditions, The Daily Prison Grind, Your 1st Day What To Bring With, Inmate Personal Property, Inmate Etiquette & Politics, Dealing With Other Inmates, Avoiding and Spotting Informants, Dealing With Gang Members, Defusing A Confrontation, Prison Slang & Lingo,   Avoiding Bad Prison Jobs, Getting A Lower Bunk Pass, Getting A Soft Shoe Permit."

Staffer at SEC Had Warned Of Madoff