Use sparingly...

New from Ukrainian steampunk maskmakers: the Lord 3 mask. Who's a handsome devil then? Lord 3 Previously:Bob Basset's latest steampunk mask Cthulhu mask on eBay Steampunk "Raptor Pilot" mask #4 Leather fetish pilot mask Steampunk leather mask with a breathing tube beard...

Police in Huntington Beach, CA are asking for the public's help in trying to identify possible victims in photos belonging to convicted rapist and serial killer Rodney Alcala (the "Dating Game" killer). Above, photo #110, from a series of hundreds taken on of before July, 1979, many believed to have been shot by Mr. Alcala. The prints were found in his Seattle storage locker. Some have been ID'd since the scans were published online. (Random case fact: he is reported to have studied film under and worked for Roman Polanski.)...

Above, a "food indemnity form" for takeaway food at a hotel in Dubai. Tweeted by CNN International correspondent Atia Awabi, who is based in Afghanistan....

"When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out." Bibi Aisha, 19, of Afghanistan, who was punished by the Taliban for "shaming" her in-laws when she ran away to escape torturous domestic abuse. Her father sold her to her abusive husband when she was 10. Atia Awabi, a CNN International correspondent based in Kabul, says "If you are moved by [this] story you can help by donating to womenforafghanwomen.org." CNN interviewed this young woman in January, and ABC News followed recently. Women for Afghan Women has posted an update on her story here (some people may find the full image of her brutally disfigured face disturbing). Her husband "kept her in the stable with the animals until she was 12 (when she got her first menstrual period)." More: Aisha has been recovering these past months from the unimaginable trauma she has suffered. She has brought criminal charges against her father for giving her away in the illegal practice of "baad." She would like to also bring charges against her husband, but since he is a Talib in Uruzgan, he is unreachable. Aisha has decided after weighing all the options before her that she would like to come to the United States for her surgery and post-operative care. Just as important as her surgery, will be the support system we organize for her recuperation. We are currently engaged in setting up that support system for Aisha. You can donate here. (CNN blogs, via Kristie LuStout)...

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, whom I've been a fan of for many years, talks about why he loves riding his bike around the streets of New York in this fun video profile. [He] has been riding a bike in New York City for more than 25 years, long before it was fashionable or we had bike lanes and cycletracks. Musto has never had a driver's license, and he tells us the bicycle is an advantage in his profession. Although he's had his share of bikes stolen (he recommends buying a used, cheap bike), he has nothing but positivity and praise for the velocipede. I love the part at the end, when Michael addresses safety concerns. Bottom line: "You're gonna be fine." I enthusiastically agree with that, but I would respectfully add: consider wearing a helmet! Streetfilms: Michael Musto, Il Ciclista Dolce (Streetsblog)...

British bug-killing company Rentokil recently put out a press release containing made-up numbers about the prevalance of bug infestations on public transport. The missive — "2,000 bugs taking a ride in every train compartment," parsed one quality daily — resulted in widespread condemnation. Especially on Twitter, where Rentokil went from zero to defensive in record time....

In a scorching post on the company's blog, YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine accuses Viacom of going to great lengths to secretly upload videos to YouTube in order to take advantage of its promotional value even as they were suing YouTube, arguing that YouTube should be able to tell the difference between Viacom videos that were uploaded by actual infringers as opposed to Viacom employees and agents being paid to pretend to be infringers. For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube. Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself. Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong. Broadcast Yourself (via /.) (Image: Kara Swisher and Philippe Dauman, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Joi's photostream) Previously:YouTube user data must be turned over to Viacom, judge rules ... Ontario Privacy Commissioner to Google: Fight the Viacom/YouTube ... Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices EFF sues Viacom over YouTube takedown of Colbert parody Viacom: privacy-hating hypocrites YouTube/Google sued by Viacom for a billion bucks Infringing Viacom claims copyright infringement...

These edible QR Code cupcakes from Montreal's clevercupcakes are actually scannable, and will direct you to the Montreal Science Centre website. Kuriositas: QR Code Cupcakes That Work (Thanks, RJ!) (Image: QR Code Cupcakes, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from clevercupcakes' photostream) Previously:Cupcake Cutthroats: muffin-shaped electric art cars gone wild ... Cupcake waltz HOWTO make a glowing punk cupcake Cupcake Cars now available at... Neiman Marcus. HOWTO Make melted snowman cupcakes HOWTO Bake vampire cupcakes that bleed Game-themed cupcake quiz Butch cupcakes for men...

After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it "piracy" instead of "unauthorised downloading," key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that "piracy" actually sounds kind of cool. So now they're lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term "theft," which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks. This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don't like "terrorism" (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it's like rebranding jaywalking as "road rape"). "Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders (Image: Pirate Cory, taken by Gordon Doctorow, Hallowe'en 1974) Previously:I Pirate Music t-shirt Giant pirate ship wall-decal for kids' rooms Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator The Pirate Google: making the point that Google's as guilty of ... Pirate's Dilemma slideshow video -- pirates will save the world ......

In my latest Guardian column, "Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?", I look at the last two weeks' events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can't answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don't care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don't imagine that there will be a backlash? [T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party's new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems' spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you'd expect from the "party of liberty". In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who'd done the BPI's dirty work for them. By all accounts, the "debate" following Fox's proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much - and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI's agenda into the party's official policy. Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill? Previously:Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking ... Add your name to "Save the Net" FB page, help the LibDems do the ... Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to ... LibDem rank-and-file make emergency motion for net freedom - Boing ... LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK ... Brits: ask your MP to demand a debate on new copyright law before ......

When that crazy Hot Chip video went live a few days ago—the video with the dude shooting death-lasers out of his mouth?—I blogged here on Boing Boing. At the moment of release, the only version available was on MySpace. No more! Feast your eyballs, a YouTube version in high definition technicolor. Directed by Peter Serafinowicz....

What pageviews may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? A beautiful piece of experimental prose by our former colleague Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets and now of Gizmodo, about ghosts in the cloud: mortality and connectivity, and how internet permanence might change memory of those who pass, after they're gone. Snip: Chances are we'll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters. But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won't be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they'll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we've entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed. We won't matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++. Raiding Eternity (Gizmodo)...

Mark Dery has another wonderful essay on True/Slant, called "Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?" The zombie is a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery's horrors; white alienation from the darker Other; Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths; the post-traumatic fallout of the AIDS pandemic; and free-floating anxieties about viral plagues and bioengineered outbreaks (as in 28 Days Later and Left 4 Dead, troubled dreams for an age of Avian flu and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight. Which may be why the Infected, as they're called in both the film and the game, move at terrifying, jump-cut speed, unlike their lumbering, stuporous predecessors.) On his blog, Mark provides Attention-Conservation Highlights: "Karl Marx's goth-iness; cultural historian of horror David J. Skal's take on zombies as poster children for the econopocalypse; Haitian zombies and post-colonial trauma; white supremacists' Turner Diaries dreams of circling the wagons and holding off the "golden horde" of multiculti urbanites with "boomsticks"; Nazi zombies. Oh, and braaains." Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?...

Bioacoustician Bernie Krause has recorded the amazingly rhythmic vascular systems of thirsty trees:  alt : http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/18/guestblog/tree2%20copy.mp3 He discovered that the cells in the xylem and phloem of the tree fill with air to try to maintain the osmotic pressure that's usually produced by the sucking of water up through the roots.  At a certain point the cells burst. Krause adds "When they pop, they make a noise: we can't hear it, but insects can. And when insects hear multiple cells popping, they're drawn to the tree because certain ones are programmed to expect sap. And when the insects are drawn to the tree, the birds are drawn to the tree to eat. it's all a microhabitat formed by sound: The sound of popping cells."  (Incidentally, when the xylem cells pop, they die and form the rings of the tree).  Recordings are made at their natural high frequency (about 47 kHz!) with a hydrophone and then slowed down by about a factor of seven.  Bernie's done some fascinating work in the field of "biophony", which is based around the idea that every animal in an eco-system has its own acoustic territory, or bandwidth of sound that it vocalizes in. If something comes in and takes over a certain bandwidth (like the regular route of a noisy airplane) entire populations can suffer, or be forced to adapt. You can find more of his recordings here...

Jessi Buchanan is a Georgia artist who takes all the normal obsessions of an average American boy -- lawn ornaments, corn dogs, giant mutant koalas with laser-beam eyes -- and gives them back to the world in colorful, cartoony canvases. Other than his work, not much is known about Buchanan. Some say he doesn't really exist. Some say he's never been spotted in the company of the much more successful Jeff Cohen; others say nothing at all. Most mysteriously, Buchanan seems to have abandoned an ambitious cycle of paintings called The Jessi Buchanan Alphabet at the letter "M" (for "mullet"), sometime in 2006. Will he ever re-surface?...

I haven't paid much attention to Lego kits for the last 20 years or so. But a new book, Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection, was a fun way for me to appreciate the cleverness, artistry, and humor of the little characters that people the kits. This DK book has over 1000 "reusable" stickers of characters ranging from Plankton (the little one-eyed jackass in SpongeBob SquarePants) to Slave Leia from Star Wars. I'm not much of a collector of anything, so this book was an excellent way to admire these fun figurines with the expense and clutter of buying and keeping them. I just gave the book to my six-year-old daughter and she is enraptured. Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection...

If you've never seen anyone handle their instrument like Charlie Patton might have, this musician from Botswana is incredible--I think I can safely say I've never really seen anyone play a guitar before: Youtube user Bokete7, (who shot the video), told me he is: "Ronnie Moipolai from Kopong village in the Kweneng district 50 km west of the capitol Gaborone. He is 29 years old and goes around the shebeens selling and playing his songs for 5Pula each (80dollarcents). He learned guitar from his now late father, has 3 brothers that also play guitar (KB is one of them), has also a big sister and plenty of kids in the yard. Nobody has a formal job and his mother sells Chibuku beer and firewood they get from the bush trying to make ends meet."...

How about discovering a temperate planet outside our solar system that will actually be relatively easy to study? Spanish researchers have done just that, according to Science News. The newly spotted planet, COROT-9b, is 1,500 light years away. It isn't, itself, Earth-like—think something more akin to Jupiter or Saturn—but its atmosphere might contain water vapor, and, if it turns out to have any moons, those could be habitable. Most important, though, is the fact that researchers can actually study the thing. Although a number of extrasolar planets with moderate temperatures have been discovered, only a planet that passes in front of -- or transits -- its star can be studied in depth. The starlight that filters through the atmosphere of the planet during each passage reveals the orb's composition, while the amount of starlight that is blocked outright indicates the planet's size. All the other transiting planets seen so far have been "weird -- inflated and hot" because they orbit so close to their stars, notes study collaborator Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland. Deeg, Queloz, and their colleagues report their findings in the March 18 Nature. Deeg, H.J. 2010A transiting giant planet with a temperature between 250K and 430K. Nature 464:384. doi:10.1038/nature08856 (Via Ecospheric blog)...

A British soldier blinded by a grenade can now "see" using his tongue. A prototype system called the BrainPort converts images to electrical signals which are sent to a plastic "lolly pop" that the user puts in their mouth. The learning curve—users have to be taught to translate an electric "pins and needles" sensation into meaningful information—sounds a bit rough, and you can't use the BrainPort while eating or talking. But the soldier can now locate and pick up objects without help or fumbling....

Ecological issues like soil erosion and deforestation play a major role in keeping Haiti locked in a cycle of poverty. The Haiti Regeneration Initiative is working to help Haitians improve their environment and, with it, their lives. I LOVE seeing science in action like this! (Via Jorge Salazar)...

Artist Nina Maria Kleivan dressed her baby daughter Faustina up in outfits of infamous dictators and took photos. She says the photos are a reminder of how ?we all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil.? Nina Maria Kleivan?s "Potency," Exploring The Meaning Of Evil (Thanks, Dollyhead Books!)...

Dollyhead Books says, "A musician has spoken today of his shock at being removed from a train for 'behaving suspiciously' by writing a list of songs which included the band name The Killers." Tom Shaw was travelling on a South West Trains when he began writing a list of song titles which his band The Magic Mushrooms would play at a forthcoming gig. But the 25-year-old was approached by two security staff employed by the train company and asked to leave the train at Fareham railway station. Mr Shaw, who works with young people with learning difficulties, said that they told him he had been behaving suspiciously and asked him to explain the list he had been writing. Independent: Man thrown off train over Killers gig list...

Brian McGacken of Farmingdale, New Jersey was sentenced to ten years in prison because police discovered he was growing marijuana while on a call to investigate loud sex. Daniel Tencer of AlterNet writes: Appealing the conviction, McGacken argued that, once police knew the noise was consensual sex, they no longer had reason to search his home. But the appellate panel at the Superior Court of New Jersey disagreed. On Monday, they dismissed McGacken's appeal, stating that "the potential for harm was too severe for the police to accept an explanation for loud screaming that could have been a cover-up of its true source." The ruling stated in part: The police are not required to accept the explanation that a person answering the door gives for a distress call. While loud sex may have been a plausible source of screaming, that explanation was not so reliable that the police acted unreasonably in investigating further.... Moreover, by first questioning defendant and his girlfriend, the troopers discounted the possibility that someone may have made a false report of screaming. Defendant did not deny that screaming had occurred in his residence. His admission made it unnecessary for the police to seek corroboration to establish the reliability of the anonymous 911 call. AlterNet: Loud Sex Enough for Cops to Search Your Home, Court Rules (Thanks, Sean!)...

Chop Chop Store set up chop, er. shop, at the Boing Boing Bazaar in our Makers Market! Chop Chop Store are the makers of terrific "collection" t-shirts featuring icons of nerd celebrity, from robots to aliens to ghosts and zombies. How many characters can you identify? Collection Tees in the Makers Market/BB Bazaar...

Penguin* was kind enough to send me a copy of Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine yesterday, and I've just finished it, having stuffed it up my eyeballs as fast as I could. Lewis is a gifted chronicler and debunker and demystifier of the world of finance. Twenty-odd years ago, in Liar's Poker, he revealed the crucial story behind the junk bond debacle, turning it into something human-scale for those of us who don't live and die by the pink sheets. Now he's done it again, with The Big Short, looking at the econopocalypse with its unimaginable sums and (literally) incomprehensible financial instruments, and unravelling it into a story that, for the first time, really made sense to me. The Big Short follows a handful of prescient contrarian investors who doubted the subprime bubble and sought out ways to bet against it (called "going short" on Wall Street). Contrarian investment is an old institution, but these people aren't just contrarian in their views on the market -- they're genuinely a little odd. Most of them are proudly obnoxious, one realizes halfway through that he has Asperger's, all are tough as nails, some still manage to be sweet, and all are, ultimately, likeable (if only slightly, in the case of the bond salesman who set out to find people willing to bet against the bubble that his employer had created). In Lewis's book, these individual investors -- many of whom never come into contact with one another -- are financial detectives, each with his own specialization. One is convinced that it's all a fraud because he knows the people involved, personally, and thinks that they're crooks. Another has read the impenetrable prospectuses that accompany the exotic derivatives and realized that people are investing in garbage. Others are investigating the bond-rating agencies and coming to understand the institutional failures that lead them to be criminally negligent when it comes to rating these investments. As each detective investigates his corner of the puzzle, Lewis pulls together the whole story, explaining how a combination of genuine fraud, negligence and dereliction (of the firms and their regulators), greed and groupthink turned the economy into a socialized casino where profits always ended up in the hands of a few institutions and their cronies, and the losses were absorbed by the rest of us. Lewis is an extraordinary writer, and the people and stories he brings to life here had me as engrossed as I would be by a top-notch novel (I shocked someone on the plane this morning by doubling over with laughter at one particularly wild scene). But he's also a great explainer, and the story that he spins here turns the opaque markets into something that make a certain twisted sense -- something that's helped by his clear delineation of the parts that simply didn't make sense, the parts that were just bullshit, and designed to make you feel stupid. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine * Published in the US by WW Norton Previously:Liar's Poker: a timely moment to revisit 20-year-old memoir of the ... NYT Op-Eds: End of the Financial World As We Know It / How to ... What the hell is a Credit Default Swap? Max Keiser's curmudgeonly TV economics show: the Oracle Predictably Irrational: subjecting the "rational consumer ... Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor Depression 2.0: Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times ... Underground economics in the USA Free: a great book, but it's missing the truly free Life Inc: a book against corporatism, published by a corporation ......

Joann Bruso, author of Baby Bites - Transforming A Picky Eater Into A Healthy Eater Book, a book on getting kids to overcome picky eating habits, has been blogging the half-life of a McDonald's Happy Meal that she bought a year ago. In the intervening year, the box of delight, plastic toys and food-like substances has experienced virtually no decay. NOPE, no worries at all. My Happy Meal is one year old today and it looks pretty good. It NEVER smelled bad. The food did NOT decompose. It did NOT get moldy, at all. This morning, I took it off my shelf to take a birthday photo. The first year is always a milestone. I gave it one of my world famous nonna hugs as we've been office mates for a year now! (Okay, maybe my sanity is in question.) Happy Birthday to My Happy Meal (via Consumerist) Previously:Bad science fact on a Happy Meal bag Happy Meal anime McDonald's adult Happy Meal HOWTO trick McDonald's into serving you "breakfast" at lunchtime ... Twisted game simulates running McDonald's Florida school board approves McDonald's report-cards and school ... McDonald's Gitmo is hiring! Creepy McDonald's ad from India Devo sues McDonalds...

Ben Greenman remembers singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, who died tonight at age 59. Alex Chilton, who died, wrote songs. He recorded songs. He made songs. He unmade them. In the end, the life was largely in song, and the songs all had life, and that's all there is to say, and there isn't anything that can be done. Once he covered "Let Me Get Close to You," which was Goffin-King via Skeeter Davis: How long I'll never know I've waited to tell you that I love you so Now I have finally said it Come on baby don't make me regret it "It's Your Funeral" is an instrumental. There are no words. RIP, Alex Chilton...

A government official in North Korea blamed for the nation's currency devaluation has been executed by the state. "Pak Nam-gi, who was reportedly sacked in January as chief of the planning and finance department of the ruling Workers' Party, was executed at a shooting range in Pyongyang."...

Yelp is Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg's new short film that provides a glimpse at their work-in-progress, a feature documentary called Connected about "what it means to be human in the 21st century."...

In part two of our Q&A series with Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein, we'll answer some basic questions about the yakuza: why people join, how they operate, and how much influence they have on mainstream Japanese culture. You will also find out why some parents might voluntarily send their kids to mobsters and how landing an innocent-seeming IT job could accidentally spiral you into a lifetime of crime. If you haven't read part one, which is a more intimate look at Adelstein's own experience as a crime beat reporter in Japan, it's here. Why do people join the yakuza? They're usually misfits from Japanese society. The word yakuza itself comes from a losing hand in gambling. 893 (ya-ku-za). It's the worst hand you can have. So when they refer to themselves as yakuza, they're referring to themselves as losers. It's a very self-deprecating term....

From the title of this Victorian science book it's not out of line to assume that there might be at least a few diy methods for accidentally electrocuting yourself, but that's just the beginning. The tome in its entirety is supposed to be available for free as a hi-res e-book sometime this month, but for now you can see a full list of some actually really beautiful sounding demonstrations, (like how to make phosphorescent displays using oyster shells), and some other cool heirloom science excerpts at Lateral Science. Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link....

Northern California artists Savanna Snow, who I've previously featured on BB, and Michael Eli have a magickal show opening Friday evening at Oakland's Art At The Oakbrook gallery. Titled "A Golden Dawn," the show runs until April 19, with an artists' discussion on April 10. (Click the lovely invite below to see it larger.) A preview of the show is also viewable on Flickr. Savanna writes: This show of paintings & installation of a Hermetic Lodge seeks to place the viewer at the dawn of a New Romantic era. These two artists offer up a meditation on the Magical Order & past Utopian movements of late 19th century California. All the exhibited pieces were created via collaboration utilizing only found materials, these elements wrought from nature directly correlate to the history they evoke. Key figures such as Joaquin Miller, William Merrit Chase, Bernard Maybeck, John Muir & Ordonez De Montalvo are some of the Esoterics represented by the artists. "A Golden Dawn" preview (Flickr, thanks Korin Faught!) Savanna Snow (artist site) Previously:Savanna Snow's "Charming Cobras" paintings Los Angeles: Faught, Ramos, Fabia, Snow, and others in Valentine's ......

A sane, hype-free guide to natural food certifications. Which labels can you trust? Which are marketing hooey? And how much do we really know about "Certified Organic"?...

Downhill skiing is a team sport in the Paralympics. Visually impaired skiers hurtle down the mountain at highway speeds, guided by another skier, who goes a few seconds ahead and calls back changes in direction and terrain via radio headset. Visually impaired ski racer Danelle D'Aquanni Umstead says: It is a "visually impaired team," not an athlete and their guide. Guiding is not something just anyone can do. As a guide you have to be just as committed, ski faster and also be able to turn around at any given moment to look behind you at the other athlete when at high speeds. This is not an easy task, and takes a lot of training as a team. Finding the right guide is definitely the hardest part for a visually impaired skier. To be able to trust in that person one hundred percent, and find a guide who has the same goals as you....

Watch above in delight as a Wilford Brimleyesque feline named Cooper demonstrates the fine art of BANG DEAD. It's the fisheye lens what makes it magic. MOAR at sweetfurr.blogspot.com. (thanks, Susannah!) Previously:Wilford Brimley and the five cats who resemble him...

"Says one person who's worked with [photographer Terry] Richardson: 'It's just impossible for me to see him as a sexual predator. What he does is completely out in the open.'...

I've been a huge fan of Robbie Conal ever since Mark asked me to profile him for The Happy Mutant Handbook back in 1995. Conal is the Los Angeles-based artist who creates unflattering portraits of (mostly white, male, right-leaning) political and other public figures -- think Reagan, Bush I and II, and their cronies -- and prints them on 2-by-3-foot posters. Then in the dead of night, he and his posse paste 'em up, guerrilla-style, in U.S. cities, in bus shelters and construction sites where, in the morning, folks on their way to work get an eyeful of funny, gritty, cheeky political satire.  I first went "postering" with Robbie in San Francisco, and can testify it's some of the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I've done it several times since, and still have a gloop of dried wheat paste in the trunk of my Honda. ...

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now. Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics. Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.   I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation. And now you can see the whole talk online here. It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song. The first chunk is above. Bob Harris' Keynote Talk on the Web, Global Culture, and Monumental Screw-ups...

From Washington Post: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt is "teaming up with Columbia University lecturer David Eisenbach to write "One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents and First Ladies Shaped America," due in 2011 from Palgrave."...

Most countries have national colors, but many are shared. As a result, Britain chose a deep, rich shade of green to distinguish itself in competitive endeavors from rivals who had already claimed red, white and blue. The association is now so close (especially in motorsports) that the shade is often called British Racing Green. But did you know it was originally selected as a mark of respect for the Irish?...

The world's shortest walking man, 21-year old He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, died this past weekend from heart complications. Sadly, we do not know much about his life aside from the fact that he was a 27-inch tall chain smoker who spent much of the last few years traveling to Japan, the US, and Italy after being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. I wish people focused more on what kind of person he was and how he coped with the constant stares and media attention instead of just displaying him as a freak show. He's pictured here with the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is also from Inner Mongolia....

Parallel Lines is a project by from Ridley Scott Associates that will be released April 8. It's a neat premise! Five directors were each challenged to create short films in different genres using the same dialogue. The five 5 beautifully diverse films are by Greg Fay, Jake Scott, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch and animators Hi-Sim and their genres range from drama, animation, action, to sci-fi and thriller. Trailer for Parallel Lines...

John Buckman from the excellent CC-friendly label Magnatune has great news: "The good-to-artists, DRM-free, Creative-Commons friendly music service said that their 'no-limits membership' offering now accounts for 3/4rds of their revenue, and so they are switching to that as their main business. As part of the move, Magnatune stops selling CDs, stops offering a streaming music membership, in favor of a simple $15/month membership which offers unlimited downloads and online listening. Magnatune is known as a pioneer music service, coining the term 'open music' and thumbing their nose at the industry with their strapline: 'We are not evil'."...

In a Twitter exchange, Anil Dash just reminded me that the word "avatar" comes from from the Sanskrit word Avatãra. The word means, more or less, "descent." More, from a related blog post at Heritage Key: But while the modern day meaning implies gaming and interaction, the original definition has a very different meaning. In Hinduism, avatars act as manifestations of deities. This occurs when a god has decided to come to our world by taking a human or animal form. The most well-known avatars were associated with the god Vishnu, who often appeared in our world to restore good in the world when evil threatened to corrupt it. The deity would do so by fighting off demons as a fish or a boar. At other times, Vishnu would lead armies to victory as an eventual king (Sounds a little similar to the plot of the movie Avatar?). What is an Avatar? Creators Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer Trace the Ancient Roots of the Latest Buzzword (Heritage Key, thanks, @xlent1 / Image: "Vishnu Dreaming," a Creative Commons licensed image from the Flickr stream of Vaticanus) Previously:What storytelling risks could Avatar have taken? Avatar earns $232.2m in opening weekend Avatar is srs bizness: Self-help thread for depressed Na'vi Boing ... Avatar hits $1bn Avatar for Atari 2600 Avatar makeup tutorial for men Pocohontar Font fussbudgets fume over use of Papyrus in Avatar subtitles ......

The opening night reception for the BLAB! art retrospective in NYC is Friday, March 26th, 6-9 PM. There will be 100 pieces in the show! The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators presents ?BLAB!: A Retrospective,? a periodic anthology of works from leading contemporary illustrators, painters, sequential artists and printmakers worldwide. Founded by acclaimed Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986, BLAB! invites more than twenty-five visual artists each year from the fields of sequential art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking to contribute to BLAB!, a selection informed by Beauchamp?s distinctive vision and aesthetic. The anthology will be on display March 24-May 1, 2010 in the museum?s galleries in New York City?s Upper East Side. From its roots as an exposition of comic illustration, the original BLAB! anthology format has evolved and diversified, with recent editions incorporating the work and vision of renowned illustrators and artists including Chris Ware, Gary Baseman, Sue Coe, Camille Rose Garcia, The Clayton Brothers, Owen Smith, SHAG!, Joe Sorren, Ron English, and Mark Ryden. BLAB! also features selections of vintage "found" graphics, such as Depression-era matchbook covers, obscure Valmor cosmetic labels and pre-1920 European Krampus postcards. BLAB!: A Retrospective...

"Perez Hilton may have violated a federal obscenity law when he posted an explicit adult video clip to his widely-read site earlier this week," writes Susannah Breslin at True/Slant. The perezhilton.com post included what was believed to be a hardcore porn video clip featuring Chuy Bravo, a man with dwarfism whose day job is performing as Chelsea Handler's sidekick on her late-night E! talk show, Chelsea Lately. "In doing so, Hilton may have run afoul of obscenity laws that strictly dictate the terms under which pornographic content can appear online."...

via Yanko Design...

A wonderful blog post from David Byrne on the process of creative collaboration (which he's doing a lot of these days). Includes photos of his gloriously untidy home studio....

IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip through its pages. Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see" events too fast for the eye. Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner. The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster. Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages...