If I were a marketing consultant, I would call this Detroit masterpiece "Homebrew aftermarket transformative rebranding." BB mod Antinous quips, "I'm holding out for the Dolce & Gabbana Pacer."
Spotted on the tumblog of photographer Clayton Cubitt, a collection of more than 700 black and white photographs taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 20th century.
Clayton says, "Click on this archive link, and then click to submit on the search button at the archive site without entering any search terms, and it should return 73 pages of amazing."
There are so many powerful portraits in this collection, like the one above.
The 59-year old director died in Manhattan of a heart attack. He brought us such iconic eighties films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. IMDB, Wikipedia, Slashfilm, TMZ, Variety. Above, a montage of scenes from his films, created by a fan to the tune of the Who's "Baba O'Riley." (via Bonnie Burton)
Here's Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi doing a live pitch of his proposed George Liquor Program to folks at Comic Con.
He says the inspiration for one episode came from his father, who grew up during the Depression and was always careful with his money after that. His father, said John, would buy cans without labels from the supermarket, which sold them for five or tens cents a can. Whatever happened to be in the can is what the family would eat.
(This spring, the Hoefer family had their own MAKEcation event, the "Great Chair Challenge")
Gareth Branwyn, Senior editor at MAKE says:
We're excited about the MAKEcation events we're running on Make: Online through the end of the month. Phil Torrone came up with the idea of the MAKEcation last summer, when gas prices were crazy and people were staying home, their "Staycations" becoming fodder for the evening news' econopocalypse coping stories. Phil figured, if people were staying home, they might as well do something productive with their time -- get the family together to learn new things and make stuff. Thus, the MAKEcation was born.
We started off this year's MAKEcations with the Teach Your Family to Solder Challenge. We posted a bunch of pieces with soldering tutorials, tool suggestions, tips for newbies, and ideas for projects. This week, we've added the Cooler Hacking Challenge -- mod any type of portable beverage cooler any crazy way you like and send us the pics/video. These events will run through the end of the month and we'll be adding another, a special family vs. family challenge, next week. We have Camp Counselors, too. Dave Hrynkiw, of Solarbotics, is our soldering counselor, and our latest author to join the site, Matt Mets, is the Cooler Hacking counselor. They're around to answer technical questions, chime in with their expertise, and to help us in choosing our favorite MAKEcation projects.
We're giving away $100 Maker Shed certificates to our three favorite entries in all three challenges, plus books and Maker's Notebooks to the top 15 contestants who submit MAKEcation pictures and videos. Adafruit industries will also be awarding their soldering merit badges.
Errol Morris' multi-part essays for the New York Times are always amazing, and this one, "Seven Lies About Lying" is no exception. Part 1 has an interview with Ricky Jay, the magician, ukulele-player, actor, and historian of sideshows and swindles.
ERROL MORRIS: And it can't be accidental. You can accidentally deceive somebody, but you can't accidentally lie to somebody. If you're lying to somebody, you have to know you're doing it.
RICKY JAY: I've written about verbal deception, for example, the P.T. Barnum sign – "TO THE EGRESS" — to make someone believe something that was other than what was intended. Even though there was nothing wrong with it — it's deceptive. [The sign is intended make people believe that they are about to visit some exotic animal, rather than heading to the exit.] I wrote an article about verbal deception in "Jay's Journal" on the Bonassus.
The Bonassus was presented in 1821 as this extraordinarily exotic creature. I'll read just the opening: "The Bonassus, according to contemporary handbills, has been captured as a six-week-old cub deep in the interiors of America …" —blah, blah, blah… "It was presented to a populous eager for amusement and edification" — this was in London — "whose appetite for curiosities both animal and human was insatiable." The attraction said, "A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud." And underneath the line, " 'Take him for all in all, we ne'er shall look upon his like again.' — Shakespeare."
And I say,
"Using every conceivable method of prevarication, the playbills of the day unabashedly conceal the true identity of the newly discovered Bonassus, this new genus" — that's a quote — "of the African Kingdom had never before been seen in Europe. He was none other than the American Buffalo. As for never seeing his like again, in 1821 the buffalo was the most numerous hoof-footed quadruped on the face of the earth."
I wish more of the conference calls I have to sit through included Jack Black. The guy really knows how to liven up a party line full of reporters. Also lots of fart jokes.
Liveblogging notes after the jump.
* 12:20pm - Jack Black is berating his musical and LOLs partner for calling in on a cellphone speakerphone in a windy location. "Are you in a wind tunnel, dude?" (...) "We're literally phoning it in, this is awesome!" * 12:30pm - OK, now the guys are promising to live-twitter throughout the entire performance, and to blog their setlist. Also, something about Skype grenades and Twitter costumes. * 1236pm - Jack Black loves Taqueria La Cumbre in San Francisco, and specifically, carnitas burritos gordos. *1238pm - Black says they've just recorded a "bomb-ass sci fi doomsday rock song called DETH STARR," which may or may not be debuted at the fest. * 12:40pm - Black is discussing the quantum physics of creating a rip in the space-butt continuum. * 12:44pm - Black and Gass are looking forward to seeing Silversun Pickups, Ween, and Modest Mouse at the fest, among others. Much excitement also about rumors of Dave Grohl's new supergroup, which is not scheduled to appear. * 1245pm - "Bring some yogurt raita people, because our shit's so hot you're gonna get burned."
Here is Ray Charles doing a fantastic cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." It's from The Johnny Cash Show, a variety show that aired from 1969 to 1971. Other guests included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, and Louis Armstrong. "The Best of the Johnny Cash Show" is available as a two-disc DVD. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)
This sounds like a Twilight Zone episode: The village of Kodinki in India is home to more than 200 sets of twins, and the number is increasing. The village's population is only 15,000 people. From Reuters:
"Based on scientific facts, we feel something in the environment is causing this. It could be something in the water," said a local doctor, M.K. Sribiju.
"All the world over the cause of twins is mainly because of drugs. Everywhere in the Western world, people are exposed to fertility drugs, their food habits, they consume more dairy products. Everywhere the age of marriage is increasing. There are late marriages predisposed to occurrence of twins," he said.
However in Kodinji, most marriages are between people aged 18 to 20 years old.
"All the factors leading to the occurrence of twinning world wide, we cannot see it here. There is something unknown that is causing this phenomenon," he said.
The locals also believe it has to do with the water. Kodinji is surrounded by water in the fields and during the monsoon season it becomes inaccessible from heavy rains.
The theme for the upcoming BLAB! art show is "21st-Century Apocalypse."
Copro Gallery and Monte Beauchamp proudly present "THE BLAB! SHOW," the fifth Group Art Exhibition featuring original paintings and illustrations from the forthcoming issue of BLAB! magazine - Monte Beauchamp's periodic anthology of sequential and comic art, illustration, painting, and printmaking.
Artists include: JOE SORREN, ALEX GROSS, MARK RYDEN, SHAG, JEFF SOTO, RYAN HESHKA, FEMKE HEIMSTRA, GARY BASEMAN, GEORGANNE DEEN, KRIS KUKSI, GARY TAXALI, ANDY KEHOE, TRAVIS LAMPE, JEAN-PIERRE ROY, SPAIN, XNO, JOHN POUND, FRED STONEHOUSE, MARC BURCKHARDT, DAVIS SANDLIN, KATHLEEN LOLLY, ANDREW BRANDOU, CALEF BROWN, SOFIA ARNOLD, MARK TODD. DHOLBACHIE-YOKO, KEVIN SCALZO, LARRY DAY, MARK GARRO, MICHAEL NOLAND, ANDREA DEZSO AND TERESA JAMES.
CrappyTaxidermy.com is what its title suggests, but not entirely. The blog features a mix of badly-executed mounts and also just curious stuffed critters. Those shoes at above left are, er, something else. Crappy Taxidermy(via Morbid Anatomy)
Boing Boing Video teamed up with Theo Gray and Popsci.com to produce this video that demonstrates how you can mold steel with electrochemical machining, using a soft, cheap piece of tin -- without any physical contact. Theo is the author of the book Mad Science, in which many other experiments like this are featured. Theo says:
I remember seeing a demonstration of a seemingly magic process at an engineering open house decades ago, in which a soft metal bit carved detailed shapes into far harder metals. It's called electrochemical machining (ECM), and it's so simple in principle that you can do it at home with a drill press, a battery charger and a pump for a garden fountain.
ECM is basically electroplating in reverse. In electroplating, you start with a solution of dissolved metal ions and run an electric current through the liquid between a positive electrode and the object you want to plate (the negative side). The ions deposit themselves as solid metal onto the surface of the object.
Image below: "The tin peace-sign earring acts as an electrode, etching away the metal in the hardened steel washer [left]. The imperfect results are due to the difficulty of manually maintaining an exact thousandths-of-an-inch distance between the two. Commercial electrochemically machined pieces, like this microturbine for a water pump, use sophisticated electronics to monitor the current flow and carve precise pieces [right]. (Courtesy ECM Technologies BV/ ECM Productions BV; Mike Walker)
Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman raves about this fun new Bigfoot watch, aptly called the Sasqwatch. It comes in a variety of colors, but I prefer the realistic "bark" or "charcoal" models over, say, pink. They're $49.99 each. Sasqwatch
In this month's Wired UK, Warren Ellis waxes apocalyptopoetic about tiny transportation systems as a thing of future beauty:
Designing a transport hub for the loading and traffic flow of pharma capsules built to deliver drugs directly into the heart of cancer tumours, using carbon fullerenes and working on the nanoscale, where communication between building and vehicle will have to be conducted via coded protein transfer because you’re below the limit at which radio waves can be transmitted or received.
I’d call it an intron depot, after the book by Masamune Shirow. But an intron, science assures me, is a chunk of DNA within a gene that doesn’t code into protein, so maybe that wouldn’t fit so well. But that could well be a real problem to solve – design me an intron depot so I can manage the traffic flow of nanoscopic drug delivery cars. I’m trying to imagine the nature of the computing required to oversee artificial traffic within the human body, when we can’t yet control traffic in Birmingham.
I almost wish the scene would be like the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces in the 60s film Fantastic Voyage. America’s finest scientists and soldiers being driven around a weird, vast Brutalist underground base in electric golf carts, working to reduce submarines to microscopic size in great disco-floored scientific halls. But that’s a problem of the future: the future isn’t big any more. The future’s small.
The Latvian government is apparently pissed off about Brits heading there for wild stag parties and allegedly stirring up trouble. For example, Nils Usakovs, mayor of the Latvian capitalof Riga, isn't keen on tourists urinating on the city's central monument. It's odd to me that some of the government officials are so open with their anti-British sentiments.
Usakovs said some British visitors were guilty of misbehaving: "Let's not be politically correct - unfortunately, this is their speciality."
He also said if the city had more regular tourists the badly behaving British visitors "would not be as noticeable"...
Last year the country's then interior minister, Mareks Seglins, complained about "English pigs" and said they were a "dirty, hoggish people" after a British tourist was sentenced to five days in prison after being caught urinating on the war memorial.
Earlier this year South Wales Police sent two officers to Riga to advise on how to deal with hen and stag parties from Britain.
We covered Doug Fine's radical off-the-grid lifestyle experiment last year on Boing Boing TV -- embed above -- and he's still going strong out there on the Funky Butte Ranch. When he's not out in the fields turning the compost heap or feeding chickens, he's working on his next book, which I'm looking forward to reading. Doug has a thought-provoking piece out in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, here's a preview:
I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more? In other words, I'm examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.
Now, I'm not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and global resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can email a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people still see globalization as the economic model for the foreseeable future. But when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they'd thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.
Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, has an opinion piece out today which amounts to a response to recent hysterical, illogical, and counterproductive acts on the part of Associated Press management with regard to content-sharing online (and "journalism piracy").
To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn't killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven't been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting "resources" (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.
Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.
A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others' content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours. If you are doing something that you would object to if others did it to you - stop. If you don't want search engines linking to you, insert code to ban them.
I'm absolutely... er... "over the moon" about the new SomaFM Mission Control channel. They've taken the Apollo radio feeds and mixed them on top of space/ambient/electronic music. It's fucking brilliant! It's become the soundtrack to my late night work sessions. Some of this stuff has seriously popped my circuits. Geek ambient!
Scott Westerfeld writes in with the astounding news that his publisher, Simon and Shuster, have agreed to distribute his bestselling novel Uglies as a free, DRM-free PDF. The series has sold more than a million copies, and it's one of my favorite YA series of all time.
Here's my original review of the series:
Uglies is the story of a dystopian world where children are raised by the state and subjected to mandatory cosmetic surgery at 16, wherein they are rendered physically "perfect" on the basis that symmetrical, statistically average people with giant eyes are charismatic, convincing, and are afforded advantages by their peers; in the twisted logic of the Westerfeld's state, imposing this surgery on all creates an egalitarian basis for society. No one is heeded merely because she is beautiful; no idea is disregarded because it originates with someone who is ugly.
The novels tell the story of Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old small-time rebel who becomes embroiled in a scheme to avoid the surgery, leading to her exile and eventual encounters with outsiders, secret police, and the gradual, sinister unravelling of the dark secret of the compassionate society.
The Uglies books are the perfect parables of adolescent life, where adult-imposed milestones, rituals, and divide-and-rule tactics amp children's natural adolescent insecurities into a full-blown, decade-long psychosis. They're the kind of book I loved reading at 15 or 16: damned fine science fiction and damned fine yarns. Having read the first two, I can barely wait for the third, Specials, due out in May 06.
Over at 
I'm absolutely... er... "over the moon" about the new SomaFM Mission Control channel. They've taken the Apollo radio feeds and mixed them on top of space/ambient/electronic music. It's fucking brilliant! It's become the soundtrack to my late night work sessions. Some of this stuff has seriously popped my circuits. Geek ambient!
Uglies is the story of a dystopian world where children are raised by the state and subjected to mandatory cosmetic surgery at 16, wherein they are rendered physically "perfect" on the basis that symmetrical, statistically average people with giant eyes are charismatic, convincing, and are afforded advantages by their peers; in the twisted logic of the Westerfeld's state, imposing this surgery on all creates an egalitarian basis for society. No one is heeded merely because she is beautiful; no idea is disregarded because it originates with someone who is ugly. 
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