American Public Media's Marketplace has a piece about Los Angeles tamale vendors. Devin Browne interviewed Antonio, who has been hawking his tamales in MacArthur Park for the past 14 years. He used an adult tricycle with a wooden box mounted on it. He makes $30 a day and it is his full-time job.
The police constantly watch all the goods and services that are sold illegally here: drugs, sex, fake IDs, even street food. Health inspectors have to dispose of all food that isn't to code and that might be unsafe. Sometimes they dump full carts of tamales into the gutter. And the gangs in the area, they charge rent to any vendors who sell goods on the streets that they've marked as their territory. Here's Antonio.
ANTONIO: It's dangerous. It's very, very dangerous. You have to be careful with the gangs, you have to be careful with the police, you have to be careful with the cars. There are a lot of dangers in the street.
The tamaleros play a game, sort-of like a high-stakes version of hide-and-go seek. And there are rules that all the street vendors have to follow.
ANTONIO: Don't throw trash in the street. Second of all, if you see the police, don't make eye contact. And the gangs have asked me to pay rent, but no I have refused to do that.
I've been editing this blog post for the past couple of hours, and was going to start off with the fact that today, the third season of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! came out on DVD, and that you should go pick up a copy because I think the show is wonderful, but then I had to add the thing about the recent Vanity Fair interview which does a fine job of illuminating their particular brand of creepyfunny, and then all of a sudden, LOL and behold, I saw this: a new music video for Major Lazer's track "Pon De Floor," directed by Eric Wareheim. I think it may just be the greatest music video ever. It's hella NSFW, just like Dance Floor Dale. The Village Voice called it "ToeJam & Earl + Donnie Darko + The Sims + a Japanese game show + straight-up pornography." Fader calls the performers it features "malfunctioned, horny and frightened Sims." I follow Tim and Eric on Twitter, you should too: @timheidecker @ericwareheim. Okay, I think that's about it, I'm going to publish this post now.
Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."
So, what is this thing, the Pathological Sublime? Many, if not most, Boing Boing readers who have done the grad-school death march will be familiar with the sublime, a durable philosophical meme that, arguably, dates back to the Greeks but is more typically associated, in academic circles, with Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The invaluable Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism helpfully defines the sublime as:
a sense of wonder or awe (colored by fear, according to English theorists), which is created by the experience of grandness or 'vastness'; and in some cases writing on the sublime comes close to being nothing more than a list of objects said to produce the effect in question: mountains, oceans, Milton, an angry deity, etc. At its most sophisticated, however, 18th-century reflection on the sublime shows a new interest in aesthetic psychology, with attention shifting away from the sublime object and onto the response of the reading or perceiving subject.
The Dictionary goes on to note that this tactical interest in the psychological reverberations of the sublime was in some ways a reaction against neo-classical virtues such as order, symmetry, and The Beautiful, with which it (the sublime) is often counterpoised.
(This cultural dynamic replayed itself in the postmodern era, when critics such as Jean-Francois Lyotard rebooted the sublime as a corrective to the instrumental rationalism of modernism. Personally, when I need to destabilize "repressive totalities," I reach for a Bombay martini, the reliable culprit behind many of "Poppy" Bush's snarling rants to the startled press corps on Air Force One, according to several Bush family bios.)
In time, the sublime came to be associated with Romanticism, especially German Romanticism. The 19th century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich is the poster boy for brooding, fog-haunted sublimity. His "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818) is a textbook example of the human psyche overwhelmed by the illimitable vastness and awful grandeur of nature, whose monumental scale and mysterious workings and, more to the point, utterly alien lack of purpose (teleologically speaking, at least) or meaning (in any human sense, anyway) combined to make the viewer's sense of self dwindle suddenly to a guttering spark, alone in the cosmos. (Paul Bowles anatomizes this phenomenon with his usual surgical skill in a marvelous little reverie called "The Baptism of Solitude".)
But the go-to guy for the sublime, as we know think of it, was the 18th century conservative politician and philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke drove a wedge between the accepted definition of the sublime and prevailing notions of beauty, arguing that, in our psychological experience of sublime nature, delight and terror---a sort of epistemic vertigo, in which our sense of our place in the order of things is unsettled---commingle disconcertingly. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is astonishment," wrote Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry. "And astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."
Pardon my grad-school seminar. But I had to tell you these things, by way of background, to make sense of the Pathological Sublime. Back in the late '90s, while researching an essay on "Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque" for my book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I was thinking about the fervent cult following that had sprung up, like toadstools in the cultural unconscious, around the morbid photos of Joel-Peter Witkin. I was thinking, too, about the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and its growing status as a must-destination for medical-goth tourists---Hannibal Lecter's idea of family fun. Felicitously, the Mütter's beloved (and now late and much-lamented) curator Gretchen Word faxed me what I would come to regard as the skeleton key to the deeper meanings of these subcultural phenomena, in the form of a brief, unsigned essay from the May 21, 1845 issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
Worden was emphatic in her believe that the author of the anonymous essay was none other than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a thought leader in the medical community of his day as well as a celebrated wit, poet, popular essayist for Harper's, and author of the best-selling collection of squibs and vignettes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). The evidence seems to be on her side: certainly, the droll style is vintage Holmes. It's a deliciously bizarre little bon-bon, well worth searching out. (Lawrence Weschler reproduces the "marvelous unsigned item," virtually in its entirety, in the endnotes to his book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, about the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)
Titled "Illustrations of Tumors among the Chinese," the item in question is a droll, tongue-in-cheek (?) review, by a doctor addressing the medical men who made up the journal's readership, of an exhibition of oil paintings of Chinese patients with skin diseases, many of them characterized by grotesque tumors. The author exhorts "worshippers of morbid anatomy" to savor the perverse pleasures of these startling images. The fact that "these monstrous diseased growths are very serious things to our poor fellow-creatures of the Celestial empire" doesn't inhibit the writer's artistic appreciation of another man's afflictions. (Edward Said, White Courtesy Phone: cringing at the author's genteel colonialism, the contemporary reader reminds himself that Holmes---granting that Holmes is the author---was writing in the Victorian age, when the Great White Male's self-satisfied perch atop the Social Darwinian ladder was plain for all to see, received anthropological wisdom well-supported by craniometric fact and cultural achievement.) Transposing the Burkean sublime into the key of pathological anatomy, the author writes, "The truth is, the practiced eye kindles at the sight of any very remarkable excrescence, as the traveler's does at that of lofty mountains or colossal edifices."
Holmes has done a fascinating thing, here, shifting the philosophical gaze from wild nature (storm-tossed seas, vertiginous chasms, Olympian mountains) to the human, specifically the human body (and by implication its mysterious interior, a lead pursued by the photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg in The Sacred Heart, a gasp-inducing book of images from operating rooms, such as Hellweg's photo of a ribcage jimmied open to expose a heart beating in a slurry of gore, the body exhaling its heat from the newly opened crevice like the corporeal equivalent of a hydrothermal vent). Holmes pushes the envelope of Burke's horror into what for Burke would have been regions of unimaginable strangeness: the abject flesh of the pathological (and, by extension, teratological) body. A transport of aesthetic rapture that is equal parts horror and wonder, the Pathological Sublime is inspired by dark matter that holds beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. Refusing the moral gaze, the Pathological Sublime surrenders to the spell, at once aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical, of the fascinating (a word whose etymological roots are instructive: from the Latin fascinatus, "bewitch, enchant"), no matter the moral or ethical cost.
Holmes's insights have proven invaluable in my thinking about what makes "worshippers of morbid anatomy" tick---why so many of us fall prey to the uncanny seductions of La Specola's obstetric Venuses and the wax moulages of pathological conditions on display at museums such as the Mütter. It's also helping me wrestle with questions like: When do we avert our eyes in horror, and when do we reserve the right to stare, in a world where any morning's forwarded e-mail can bring us face-to-face with terrorist trailers for real-life beheadings or worse, images that once seen will replay themselves forever in the multiplex of the mind, scarring us in ways we don't yet understand? Where does aesthetics end and ethics begin? (Sontag had some thoughts on this in Regarding the Pain of Others, but her moral ponderousness, her ever-present sense of her own gravitas, crushes flat the subversive glee in Thinking Bad Thoughts and Looking at Forbidden Things that I believe is essential to free thought.) What are the long-term affects, in individual as well as societal terms, of gawking at the atrocity exhibition?
Recently, while rolling these ideas around in my head, I decided, on a whim, to try to track down the paintings in Holmes's review. Incredibly, I believe I've located the very images whose virtues he extolled; I believe, as well, that I'm the first scholar to have done so. Tucked away in the basement of Yale University's Historical Medical Library are the archives of the Reverend Dr. Peter Parker, a Yale graduate and the first American surgeon to practice in China. A medical missionary, Parker established the first American hospital in Guangzhou and, while there, commissioned the Chinese artist Lam Qua to paint a series of before-and-after portraits of patients suffering from tumors, which Parker surgically removed. We know, from Stephen Rachman's illuminating essay, "Curiosity and Cure: Peter Parker's patients, Lam Qua's portraits," that Parker was in Boston in 1841, lecturing to "an enthusiastic audience gathered at a special meeting of the Boston Medical Association"---a presentation Parker illustrated with the Victorian equivalent of PowerPoint: a series of photorealistically accurate paintings of patients with unspeakable tumors, and of those same sufferers delivered from their agonies by Parker's deft scalpel. I believe Holmes was in the audience at one of Parker's lectures, and that the brief, untitled review in the Journal is his response to Lam Qua's astonishing images, "hand-painted dream photographs" (Dali) of pathologist's nightmares.
Rachman argues that the Parker paintings drew crowds of medical men---for purely professional reasons, ostensibly, although Holmes's little essay debunks that notion neatly---at "a time when Americans began to participate on a mass scale in the business of curiosity" through P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City, dime museums in other metropolises, and carnival midways in small towns. Even now, he argues, the paintings "remain 'curiosities,' uncontrolled growths like the tumors they present, artifacts that startle tact and science rather than promote scientific and cultural order." He cites, in support of his argument, a telling "bit of undated doggerel" found inside one of the cabinets containing the rarely exhibited paintings:
Peter Parker's pickled paintings Cause of nausea, chills & faintings; Peter Parker's putrid portraits, Cause of ladies' loosened corsets; Peter Parker's purple patients, Causing some to upchuck rations. Peter Parker's priceless pictures: Goiters, fractures, strains and strictures. Peter Parker's pics prepare you For the ills that flesh is heir to.
IMAGE CREDITS: Top: Peter Parker Collection, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University. All rights reserved; reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.
Second: "The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818), Caspar David Friedrich. Collection: Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of copyright law.
Third: From Morbid Anatomy.com. Reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.
I recently cleaned out my office and came to the realization that I have no need for "office supplies." I had bins filled with Post-it Notes, notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpeners, glue sticks, paperclips, scissors, rulers, and other OfficeMax detritus that I just never use. Never. But I also realized that I have a mild fetish for staples. In my worldview, papers that belong together should stay together, for all eternity. I have a good desktop stapler, but lately I've been moving around a lot between home and several remote offices. I've bought mini staplers for my laptop bag before, but they universally tend to suck. Mini staples are no good, and the machines themselves often collapse at the mere sight of a a stack papers greater than three high. Fortunately, I recently discovered the PaperPro 1820 Nano Mini Stapler. First of all, the Nano is very compact but uses standard staples. The real magic though is in the powerful stapling itself. The all-metal spring-powered mechanism gives it the satisfying ker-chunk of an industrial stapler. The product packaging claims "12 sheet push button stapling power," but I've given it 15 sheets before and it hasn't winced. The PaperPro Nano Miniature Stapler comes in five crazy colors and sells for less than $10 each from Amazon. I think I'm going to buy a 5 pack for $27, especially since my wife already snatched my first one. PaperPro Nano Miniature Stapler
The Smoking Gun today published the results of a seven-week investigative probe into Pranknet, an anonymous, web-organized group of meanies who pulled a bunch of particularly sadistic phone pranks on businesses and residents throughout the US.
A number of American television news networks have been breathlessly covering Pranknet's hijinks of late. These are the jerks who thought it was funny to call low-budget hotel rooms and convince occupants that they had to break open windows to escape imminent deadly gas leaks, or smash televisions to evade impending doom. As one Fark commenter put it, "I'm not sure who sucks more, the prank callers or the idiots that listen to them and destroy their hotel rooms."
Photo inset at left: 25-year old Tariq Malik, Pranknet's founding bully, pictured in a webcam still taken in his Windsor, Ontario bedroom. I think it's fair to debate whether or not calling Malik a "telephone terrorist" (as TSG does in the headline) is inflammatory and over the top, but I will say this: what he and his anonymous coward buds did was cruel, lame, and could have caused physical injury or loss of life, in addition to the substantial property damage reported.
You can hear a female victim panicking and crying on the recording below.
Malik and his fellow Pranknet anons refer to her as a "crazy bitch," then they whine about how many idle logins are in the chat room with only a few participating in the prank. Other recordings reflect the stronger sort of racist and homophobic language one might find in the dregs of chan. I hope Malik and the perps who helped him get the absolute maximum possible sentences, to be accompanied in prison by cellmates who lack a sense of humor.
But guess what? Like so many anonymous internet bullies, tough-guy Tarik "Dex" Malik lives with his mommy. Snip from TSG:
On July 22, a pair of TSG reporters approached "Dex"'s building at 1637 Assumption Street in Windsor, where he lives in the ground-floor 'B' apartment. Calling to his mother, who was standing near an open living room window, a reporter asked her to summon her son. The woman disappeared into "Dex"'s adjoining bedroom, where the pair could be heard whispering. Despite repeated requests to come out and speak with TSG, "Dex" hid with his mother in his bedroom, the windows of which were covered with plastic shopping bags, a towel, and one black trash bag.
As the sun set and his room darkened, "Dex" did not reach to turn on a light. The notorious Internet Tough Guy, who has gleefully used the telephone to cause all kinds of havoc, was now himself panicking. He had been found. And, as a result, was barricaded in Pranknet World Headquarters with his mom, while two reporters loitered outside his window and curious neighbors wondered what was up. That's when the online outlaw came up with a plan. Tariq Malik, the 25-year-old founder and leader of Pranknet, decided to call the police.
Design Observer has posted Part 1 of a fascinating email exchange between two of my favorite writers and thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff and Kurt Andersen. They each have new books out about the economy in America. Rushkoff's book is called Life Inc., and Andersen's is called Reset. Julie Lasky was the moderator.
Douglas Rushkoff: All I wanted to do [in writing Life Inc.] was show how we got here, how this way of life was sold to us in the 20th century by the very same folks who originally saw fascism as a great idea, and why I believed it to be economically unsustainable. Remember, now, every chief economist of every major investment firm or bank I spoke with insisted that the economy was sound, and that it was bound for increasing expansion. And none of them knew what I was talking about when I asked them about the biases of the money we use. "There were other kinds of money?" they all asked, amazed.
Kurt Andersen: Actually, the ideas in Reset germinated six or seven years ago, when I was deep into historical research for Heyday, my most recent novel, which is set in the mid-19th century. Through that research and writing, I acquired a new gut understanding of what I take to be the cyclical course of American economic and political history, and of the concomitant bipolar nature of the American character — that is, how America has always swung back and forth between Yankee prudence and manic magical thinking, between free-market worship and communitarian public-spiritedness, between financially driven busts and bubbly booms. Sometimes the cyclical swings are swift and extreme, and those violent swings can result in progressive political and economic rejiggerings of the system. So when the crash came last fall, followed by (and probably causing) the election of Barack Obama, I was inclined to take a longer view, and see it as a rare and potentially positive convergence of cyclical economic and political swings. And that led me to write Reset.
BB pal Erik Davis, author of such terrific books as Techgnosis and Visionary State, has a new weekly online radio show. Expanding Mind, about the "culture of consciousness," including drugs, neuroscience, mythology, and spirituality, streams live every Thursday at 11am PT. This week's guest is ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna, brother of psychedelic visionary ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. Past shows are archived at the Progressive Radio Network site. (Also, for those in Seattle, Erik is lecturing next Thursday evening about Aleister Crowley and the movies at the Northwest Film Forum!) Here's the description of Expanding Mind:
This weekly hour-long radio show hosted by author and San Francisco native Erik Davis explores the many dimensions of mind and consciousness. From meditation to parapsychology, from the effects of art and technology on our souls to the abiding mysteries of religion and spirituality, the show's discussions are designed to expand our understanding and experience of ourselves while casting a critical and often humorous eye on the twists and turns that consciousness takes as it tries to make sense of itself and the world. Each episode will begin with a sparkling stream-of-consciousness riff by Davis, followed by a back-and-forth with his charming co-host Maja D'Aoust—a hip and sassy esoteric teacher based in Los Angeles. These will be followed with an interview with a scholar, writer, or practitioner, a "spirit song" of the day (a selection from Davis' vast collection of religious and spiritual music), and finally a no-doubt lively back-and-forth with callers.
We've posted previously about Dinosaur Adventure Land, the creationist theme park in Pensacola, Florida. Now, it looks like the government may be seizing the properties in lieu of nearly half a million dollars owed to the IRS by the theme park's founder/minister Kent Hovind. He's in jail for tax fraud. Maybe they'll auction off the exhibits! From the Pensacola News Journal:
(Hovind) was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.
The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.
Collin Cunningham of MAKE produced this fun video about cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration. As he shows, you can have a lot of fun with cornstarch, water, tone generator software, a guitar amp, and a speaker.
This is a still from surveillance video of a fellow who robbed two Albington, Pennsylvania homes on Friday. From CBS News:
One witness said she saw a naked man fleeing from the (first) apartment just after it had been robbed.
Surveillance video also shows the suspect wearing dark colored shorts and a white sleeveless tank top, apparently before he decided to "dress down."
The same naked thief is wanted in a second burglary the same day, according to police. A homeowner told CBS 3 Philadelphia the suspect went through her 14-year-old daughter's undergarments. Women's clothing was reportedly stolen from the dresser drawers, and obscenities had been written on the mirrors.
Atelier WM designed a variety of candles cast from real hands flipping the bird and giving the sign of the horns. But this Vulcan salute wins, er, hands down. They're $61 from A+R Store. Hand Candles(Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)
...satirist, counter culture icon and all around iconoclast, Paul Krassner, author of the new collection, Who's to Say What's Obscene?: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today. Topics include the definition of obscenity in today's America, the Obama presidency and what it means for political satire, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show's influence on younger people, the state of the "underground press" today and a lot more.
A group of technology researchers in Washington state are attempting to construct a three-dimensional model of Rome from photographs found on Flickr -- in one day.
Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.
In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez,
I've just came home from a great EFF panel/audience discussion on the interaction of the Internet and social networks with the Iranian protests in SF. The speakers on the panel were Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, and Iranian commentator Cyrus Farivar.
There was a lot here, even for those who've been following the Iran election. Cyrus gave a historical context to Iran's use of the Internet (it was one of the first countries to have net connectivity in the region), Jake had some new stats and info on Iraq's censorship system, and we had audience contributions from bloggers and activists from Iran, Pakistan, and Brazil.
Last night I saw David Byrne's "Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno" tour at London's Barbican Centre and was absolutely blown off my feet, through the seat, out the door, and six miles into the sky.
I've been a Talking Heads fan since I was 13, and I've seen Byrne perform four times before, but nothing to top last night's show, which featured a huge number of performers -- three backup singers, three dancers, two percussionists, various guitar players, a keyboard, a bass -- and the sweetest, goofiest, most lovely choreography since Stop Making Sense.
Byrne and co performed a mix of tracks from the fantastic new disc Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, made in collaboration with Brian Eno, along with an eclectic mix of earlier Eno collaborations, including songs from My Life in a Bush of Ghosts, and a ton of old Talking Heads songs (including some non-Eno tracks like Burning Down the House).
One of my least favorite interview questions is, "What's your favorite __________?" (book, blog, movie). I always reply, "If I was the sort of person who had one favorite, I'd have written a single blog post about it and stopped -- but instead, I've written 40,000 posts."
But there is one unequivocal favorite in my pantheon: my all-time favorite performer and musician is David Byrne. From Talking Heads to his remarkable solo career, I have never heard a Byrne project I didn't like (for a real treat, go hunting in the treasurehouse of Luaka Bop, the world music label he curated, through which I first discovered Tom Ze, Gilberto Gil, Fifi, Tete Y Popo, Gal Costa and many the other musicians whose work never fails to move me).
So last night's show was a fabulous treat. From the opening -- Byrne giving his benediction to photographers, despite the dire warnings on the programs -- to the closing -- three encores, each sweeter, more fun, and more wonderful than the last -- it was nearly two hours' worth of absolute musical joy. I got up and danced -- along with the entire audience -- despite the fact that I never dance. I wasn't the only non-dancer moving in the crowd. It was a proper nerdstock, full of people proving out the aphorism that the best dancer is the one who's having the most fun (I recently re-watched Stop Making Sense and realized that virtually all of the ridiculous things I do when I dance come straight from that movie).
Speaking of dance, the dancers on-stage were stupendous. The choreogr aphy, like that in Stop Making Sense, was at once graceful, playful, beautiful and informal, accessible even to philistines like me. After a year on tour, the entire ensemble meshed perfectly, and the dancers, singers and musicians traded off vocals, movement and instruments with ease.
The old Byrne and Talking Heads standards are as familiar to me as daydreams, songs that have worn grooves in my brain through repetition, but nevertheless, each performance brought out some nuance, some new interpretation I'd missed until now. And, of course, "Heaven" made me tear up as it never fails to do.
Byrne and co have just a few dates left here in the UK. I have no idea if they're sold out or not, but if you can get a ticket, go. Last night was the highlight of a year full of highlights.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is running for re-election governor, but her website has suffered Google and Yahoo's death penalty and has been removed from the search index. The reason: Hutchison's webmaster embedded thousands of invisible search-terms in the site in a bid to game search-engines; among them was the phrase "rick perry gay" (Rick Perry is Hutchison's Democrat Republican opponent). The campaign claims the terms were generated automatically by "search engine optimization" software (SEO is a form of Google-Kremlinology in which firms attempt to figure out how to game search engines' ranking algorithms, rather than trying to create the best, most interesting website they can and assuming that the engines will figure out how to highly rank their material).
Hutchison's campaign initially told the Austin American-Statesman that "a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms 'Rick Perry,' 'Kay Bailey Hutchison' and 'Texas'"--and plenty of people search for "rick perry gay."
The tool was allegedly used to help make banner ad buying decision, said the campaign, a claim that makes little sense on its face. Why would such a list be inserted in the website's source code unless the goal was to draw search traffic to the site?
Here's some comprehensive and entertaining advice for people contemplating giving a poster session at a scientific meeting; much of this applies to any situation in which you hope to catch and hold the attention of passers-by:
The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the "wine and beer" mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It's not a pretty sight.
And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.
(See 
I recently cleaned out my office and came to the realization that I have no need for "office supplies." I had bins filled with Post-it Notes, notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpeners, glue sticks, paperclips, scissors, rulers, and other OfficeMax detritus that I just never use. Never. But I also realized that I have a mild fetish for staples. In my worldview, papers that belong together should stay together, for all eternity. I have a good desktop stapler, but lately I've been moving around a lot between home and several remote offices. I've bought mini staplers for my laptop bag before, but they universally tend to suck. Mini staples are no good, and the machines themselves often collapse at the mere sight of a a stack papers greater than three high. Fortunately, I recently discovered the PaperPro 1820 Nano Mini Stapler. First of all, the Nano is very compact but uses standard staples. The real magic though is in the powerful stapling itself. The all-metal spring-powered mechanism gives it the satisfying ker-chunk of an industrial stapler. The product packaging claims "12 sheet push button stapling power," but I've given it 15 sheets before and it hasn't winced. The PaperPro Nano Miniature Stapler comes in five crazy colors and sells for less than $10 each from Amazon. I think I'm going to buy a 5 pack for $27, especially since my wife already snatched my first one.
This is an artist's mock-up of a new Bangkok highrise with a bit of a pixelated feel to its structure. Lisa has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets.
This weekly hour-long radio show hosted by author and San Francisco native Erik Davis explores the many dimensions of mind and consciousness. From meditation to parapsychology, from the effects of art and technology on our souls to the abiding mysteries of religion and spirituality, the show's discussions are designed to expand our understanding and experience of ourselves while casting a critical and often humorous eye on the twists and turns that consciousness takes as it tries to make sense of itself and the world. Each episode will begin with a sparkling stream-of-consciousness riff by Davis, followed by a back-and-forth with his charming co-host Maja D'Aoust—a hip and sassy esoteric teacher based in Los Angeles. These will be followed with an interview with a scholar, writer, or practitioner, a "spirit song" of the day (a selection from Davis' vast collection of religious and spiritual music), and finally a no-doubt lively back-and-forth with callers.
(Hovind) was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators. 
One witness said she saw a naked man fleeing from the (first) apartment just after it had been robbed. 
Atelier WM designed a variety of candles cast from real hands flipping the bird and giving the sign of the horns. But this Vulcan salute wins, er, hands down. They're $61 from A+R Store.
Speaking of dance, the dancers on-stage were stupendous. The choreogr aphy, like that in Stop Making Sense, was at once graceful, playful, beautiful and informal, accessible even to philistines like me. After a year on tour, the entire ensemble meshed perfectly, and the dancers, singers and musicians traded off vocals, movement and instruments with ease. 
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