The Latest from Boing Boing

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 06:32 AM CST

ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG. Nipper, a Counterstrike map-hacker, has devised an incredibly detailed reproduction of the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, a ride so fine I wrote a novel about it. Nipper's packed a jaw-dropping amount of detail into the map, even down to various behind-the-scenes sections, and has creatively improved some of the slacker moments in the ride, such as a set of Eschereqsue staircases to one side of the otherwise boring stair-climb. The only thing that could make this better would be modelling ALL the backstage areas, so you could tear through the break rooms and maintenance areas with your giant guns, hunting your fellow players.

YouTube: A ride-through of NIPPER's de_haunts (a "The Haunted Mansion" Counter-Strike: Source map), Download the map (Thanks, David, Nick, Jeremy, Dreambank, Waxy, and Justin!)

Train-set in a pocket watch

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 06:18 AM CST

Boing Boing Gadgets celebrates the bottomless creativity of the Pearl River Delta with this pocket-watch that's also a miniature train set. Chugga chugga chugga chugga choo choo!

Miniature train set hardly a Lionel, but it fits in your pocket, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Papercraft turkey

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 06:15 AM CST

Here's something for the less culinarily-inclined this Thanksgiving: a beautiful, glistening perfect papercraft turkey for you to print and fold.

Fun Stuff: Papercraft Turkey Dinner (via Make)

Survival Research Labs (SRL) turns 30 today

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 11:38 PM CST

Survival Research Laboratories, the legendary machine performance project that started it all, turns 30 today. Founder Mark Pauline has a blog post up about this milestone, with a copy of SRL's first-ever ad, above. Mark says,

Id like to thank all those who have helped me make SRL what it is, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Im still having a blast. Even moving all 160 tons of my stuff to the new shop in Petaluma has been kind of fun. In a few more weeks, Ill be totally out of here and SRL will lurch into the next 30 year chapter. 2038 here we come!

A huge congrats and deepest respect to Mark, the SRL team, and their respective family members -- the meat-based kind, but also the magical metal machines who are the real stars of SRL. On behalf of all Boingdom, we wish all of you another 30 years of happy mutancy.

For BoingBoing readers not familiar with SRL, here's how they describe what they do:

Survival Research Laboratories was conceived of and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

Below, an early photograph featuring Mark Pauline with one of his first creations. Performance artist Karen Finley and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications are among the bemused onlookers. (thanks, K0re!)

Magic Lantern Castle Museum

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 09:43 PM CST

Many collectors are makers, restoring the items they collect to working condition. Jack Judson created his own private museum, the Magic Lantern Castle Museum in San Antonio, TX. The magic lantern is the first projection technology, directing a light source through a lens to project images, which were initially painted on glass slides. Building this extensive collection of magic lanterns became Jack's obsession after he retired.

I interviewed Jack for Make:16 and I took the photo of him, below, in his workshop where he repairs magic lanterns and keeps them working. My excerpt below contains some parts of the conversation that didn't make it into the article.

DD: There's a wonderful collection here, and it's a beautiful thing. You started in 1986 after you retired. What was the first thing that you bought?

JJ: I worked for a large, international organization. I was visiting our London office, and I asked the the manager of the office, "What's to do here in London?" I hadn't been there before. He said, "Well, go to a street market. We have them all the time here." I went to one. I bought what was purported to be a magic lantern, and I brought it back -- when airlines would let you bring things back in your luggage. After doing a lot of research, I found out what I bought was not a magic lantern but a lantern enlarger. That was my first comeuppance.

DD: The museum has a collection of magic lanterns made as toys (above).

JJ: There was a huge industry. Everything that Daddy has, the kid gets too. While it's never quite as much as Daddy's, still it's pretty cool. Most toys were made in Nuremburg, Germany. There were at least five makers that we know of there, and they made hundreds-of-thousands of various sizes and shapes.

DD: Mostly running off small oil lamps?

JJ: Yes. They didn't really project very well, but the kid in his little room could set one up, and project three of four feet onto a wall, and see what was not a very good image from a decal that had been stuck onto a piece of glass. They were lithograph-printed images. They were a little fuzzy, probably.

DD: From being a toy or a plaything, the magic lantern comes up to be part of the early film industry starting in the late 1800s. Then we see Edison's home kinetoscope.

JJ: You had the home kinetoscope, and, of course, then the projecting kinetoscope, which was the one that was used by more professional people. You could project films but you could not buy them; you had to rent them. Netflix of the day, I guess you might say. There's nothing new.

DD: Right.

JJ: You could buy, for 50 cents apiece, the slides that had little, tiny images that you could project -- pictures in France, or England, or the holy land.

DD: Those early films, though, were not very long were they?

JJ: No, they were very, very short. The earliest ones were 50 feet, which is basically the length of the table that George Eastman could lay out the film -- it was liquid -- and let it solidify, and then roll-cut strips that were 35 millimeter long, and so at 16-frames per second, it doesn't last very long. At some point, I recall in an autobiography where this old man talked to Edison about how to show these films, and he said, "Well, just run them through three times so that they get their money's worth." There was no story. They had no message -- no nothing. They were just images of people moving, and, in fact, they were not moving. They were really sequential stills.

Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart make mashed potatoes

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 09:13 PM CST

Martha Stewart made mashed potatoes with Fatherhood star Snoop Dogg on her television show recently. About the very funny video clip above, she blogs:

[He] taught me some of his very own language called Snoop-guistics. He and his posse add 'izzles' onto the ends of words. It's kind of a code, or a way of communicating so that others won't know what they're talking about. Example: fo shizzle is how they say, for sure. Snoop Dogg also shared –
* Crack-a-lackin – means get something poppin
* Chuuuch – means take God everywhere you go and everything will be all right
* All hood – means good
* Ball til ya fall – get as much money as you can before you die

Snoop makes Mashed Potatoes (Thanks, Shawn Connally!)

Wikiscanner Creator Profiled in NYT

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 08:16 PM CST

Here's a snip from Virginia Heffernan's New York Times profile of Virgil Griffith, the creator of Wikiscanner, whom Pesco and I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago at the Webby Connect conference. BTW, when we met, there were no hot girls clinging to him. But that was at lunchtime, surrounded by sandwiches, and the day was young. Also that is not actually his laptop case, above. Anyhoo:

Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to "make the Internet a better and more interesting place." The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where "complex systems" are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes.
WikiScanner, which Griffith created last year, makes it possible to figure out which organization made which edits to a Wikipedia entry by cross-referencing IP addresses with a database of IP address owners. You can imagine how much fun this tool is to deploy — to see how someone with a senate.gov address tinkers with the Jeremiah Wright entry, or how Diebold apparently protects its reputation by deleting criticism of its voting machines and political connections. The promise of WikiScanner is to help free Wikipedia from both propaganda and sabotage. But Griffith says he also aspires "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike."

He's a troublemaker, then. A twerp. And a magnet for tech-world groupies. At the WebbyConnect conference in Southern California last month, I saw it with my own eyes: Griffith, enjoying a White Russian that I first mistook for chocolate milk, reveled in the attention of his female fans. He smiled broadly. He seemed like a young Henry Kissinger, but sweet, or Arthur Fonzarelli, but not a dropout.

Internet Man of Mystery (Image: Kevin Van Aelst / NYT; Thanks, Richard Metzger)

True Blood Featurette (video)

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 08:00 PM CST

My friend Clayton Cubitt describes this spectacular little featurette by Digital Kitchen in four words: "Southern gothic art boner." Link to QuickTime file (contains blurry, fleeting art-nudity). UPDATE: sorry, looks like that direct "Link to QuickTime file" won't work as a clickthrough from BoingBoing, but if you copy and paste the url into your browser, it does.

Found on the excellent artofthetitle.com, in a post linking the opening sequence for Alan Ball's killer (heh) new HBO series with the cultural roots of the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Inside a Cuddle Party (video)

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 05:58 PM CST

Current's Tania Rashid bravely ventures into the world of cuddle parties, a phenomenon that ranks very high on the most-ridiculed-subcultures list -- say, right below furries and filk. The resulting piece does not poke unkind fun. But I will not lie: the promo frame they chose absolutely creeps me out, and I want to go wash my eyes out with bleach right about now. First Time Cuddle Party (Current, thanks Brent Marcus)

Today on Offworld

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 06:32 PM CST

Today on Offworld we woke up to a new profile on Jason Rohrer, the auteur behind low-res memento mori game Passage, and news he was acting as a consultant for EA's other Steven Spielberg produced game, the still-low-profile LMNO. We also saw two custom toy showcases (one significantly more grotesque than the other), looked at new footage of Infinite Line, the Nintendo DS space opera that promises to reaffirm your humanity for all of the vast emptiness of the universe, and thought about the very-near-future of gamers in all corners of public office. Elsewhere we got a new look at what could be the iPhone's first game to truly rival traditional DS and PSP offerings, Hand Circus's highly anticipated Rolando (pictured), played Doom in our browsers and Counter-Strike inside a Van Gogh painting, prepared to help space invaders 'get even' after 30 years of abuse, and filled our rage gauges in anticipation of being the proverbial bul-- well, minotaur, in the china shop. Oh, and somewhere in the middle there we showed up live on Air America Radio to try and explain as best we could just what it means to have a level 70 Tauren shaman on Obama's FCC transition team.

War Vegetable Gardening book from WWI

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 04:30 PM CST

Daniel Bowman Simon of The Who Farm sent me a link to this scanned book: War Vegetable Gardening and the Home Storage of Vegetables by The National War Garden Commission from 1918. I skimmed it and it looks like it has a lot of useful information for today's frontyard gardener.

Compost is also used as a top dressing during the growing season for hastening growth. In the cities and towns tons of leaves are burned every fall. This is a loss which ought to be prevented. These leaves properly composted with other vegetable waste and earth would be worth hundreds of dollars to the gardens next spring. In planning a permanent garden, a space should be reserved near the hot bed or seed bed, and in this space should be piled, as soon as pulled, all plants which are free from diseases and insects. This applies to all vegetables and especially to peas and beans, as these belong to a group of plants which take nitrogen from the air, during growth, and store it in their roots. When these plants are decayed they will return to to the soil not only much of the plant food taken from it during their growth but additional nitrogen as well. Nitrogen in the soil is necessary for satisfactory leaf growth. The material so composted should be allowed to decay throughout the winter, and when needed should be used according to. the instructions given for using compost. The sweepings of pigeon lofts or chicken coops make valuable fertilizer. Prepared sheep manure, where procurable at a reasonable price, is possibly the safest concentrated fertilizer. It should be used in small quantities rather than spread broadcast. Scatter it along the row before seed is sown or apply by mixing it with water in a pail, stirring the mixture to the consistency of thin mush, and pouring it around the roots of the plants.

War Vegetable Gardening and the Home Storage of Vegetables

Plant an organic garden on the White House Lawn

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 04:22 PM CST

I met a couple of young guys who are traveling the country in the Topsy Turvy bus to promote the idea of an organic garden on the White House Lawn.

This video chronicles a day-in-the-life of The White House Organic Farm Project's (aka TheWhoFarm) cross-country tour with Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow, two guys who met in The Philippines as Peace Corps Volunteers.
Their tour promotes a petition to our next president, respectfully requesting that an organic farm be planted on The White House grounds. While Obama is busy with plans to fix everything else in the world, TheWhoFarmers are spending this transition period working to build a coalition of the willing in Washington, DC. This coalition includes local farmers who can help the green-thumbed White House grounds crew get up to speed on organic farming, and a hunger relief organization that will offer to pick up the excess bounty from The White House once the first family is fed.
TheWhoFarm bus was previously known as the Topsy Turvy bus, built by Burning Man art car legend Tom Kennedy. TheWhoFarm purchased the bus second-hand, and converted the roof into a mobile organic vegetable garden, believed to be the first ever garden on top of a school bus.
The bus might be up for sale soon, so if you're in the market for a one-of-a-kind, attention grabbing, food producing vehicle, give the boys a shout. And by all means, sign their petition!

The White House Organic Farm Project

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Campaign to grow vegetable garden on White House lawn
• Redesign the U.S. White House

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 04:23 PM CST

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we met Baron Impossible, QuickPwned our 2.2 iPhones, and rocked with the Gibson Dark Fire sound-shifter guitar. John found wedding rings with soundwave-embedded messages, an early demo of the Mellotron musical computer, and a prototype foldable OLED cell phone screen from Samsung. He drinketh Windows XP coffee. Rob found a knitted lightsaber (a wag in the comments declared it a "dildo cosy"), a way to get 3G running on the HP Mini 1000, and square traffic lights. He issued complaints about the price of posh MAME cabinets and found a scary CES booth ad. Joel finds a $50 frying pan with a built-in electronic thermometer, a beer bladder for Guidos, intrigue over hardware differences between iPod Touches, and a David Cross AOL video from the mid-1990s, made of antifunny. There was a firewire to USB converter, a $100 32GB flash drive for Dell's Mininspiron, risilights , and multi-touch iMac displays from LG... maybe. Lionel is selling its first-ever subway train set. The inevitable Kello Kitty netbook is summoning you.

In 2007, pundits scoffing accurate predictions about the economy

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 03:10 PM CST

I wonder what the other blowhard pundits seen here have to say about making fun of Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff's accurate predictions in 2006 and 2007 about the economic meltdown and its causes? (Ben Stein should probably stick to his subject of expertise, which is claiming that "science leads you to killing people")

This video sequence offers a compendium of appearances (covering the 2006-2007 period) by Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff, who is a frequent -- and frequently disrespected -- talking head on cable news shows. What astonishes is not just the accuracy of his dour predictions about the economy but the sheer arrogance of every other person appearing on these programs.
I don't know who comes off as worse -- the supremely snotty Ben Stein, or the well-named Arthur Laffer. I just wonder how Ben Stein feels about the financial markets as an investment now.
This is an astonishing compilation of clips. It just keeps getting more outrageous as it goes along. Every time Schiff says something sensible, the pundits surrounding him snort and howl. They treat him with undisguised contempt and hatred, as though he had just called for ending the laws against homicide or reducing the age of consent to three.

Peter Schiff was right

Donate Your Used Digital Camera to LA's Skid Row Photo Club

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 02:35 PM CST

Los Angeles-based photographer and blogger Dave Bullock says:

The Skid Row Photography Club's first show, The Beauty of the Street, premiered last Thursday during the Downtown Art Walk. The participants were ecstatic to see their beautiful work on the walls and the hundreds of people who came into the gallery loved what they saw.
The SPRC started as an idea I "borrowed" from the movie Born Into Brothels . I wrote a proposal to the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council to buy digital cameras which we then gave to people living in Skid Row. I gave the participants brief lessons in composition and turned them loose. For the last six months we've met every Tuesday at UCEPP in Skid Row.

During that time they shot over 20,000 photos between them. An amazing body of work ranging from flowers to architecture to a man defecating in the middle of the street.

Dave asks if any Boing Boing readers might want to donate digital cameras to folks living in Skid Row, so they might extend the project. "The cameras we've been using are about $200 each," he explains. "We're just a club, not a non-profit as of yet."

More info here on how you can participate. The short version: if you would like to donate digital cameras please email Dave directly at eecue@eecue.com.

Skid Row, in case you don't know, is a massive, permanent homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles -- the largest such community in the United States. About 8-9,000 homeless people live there. This "heat map animation" provides a compelling visualization of the site, though data hasn't been updated in a while.

Inside a Boy: music video by Rafa Toro for My Brightest Diamond

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 02:19 PM CST

My Brightest Diamond - "Inside a Boy" from their album A Thousand Shark's Teeth , on Asthmatic Kitty Records. Director, animation, & design: Rafa Toro.

(Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Japanese man lives in Mexico City airport

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 02:15 PM CST

Japanese citizen Hiroshi Nohara flew to Mexico City airport three months ago, and has stayed in the airport ever since. He survives on handouts and sleeps in a chair. He is said to be "foul-smelling."

The Tokyo native flew into Mexico with a tourist visa and a return ticket home, but he never left the airport. In an interview Thursday alongside the airport McDonald's, he said he had no motive for his extended stay and doesn't know how much longer he'll remain.
"I don't understand why I'm here," he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. "I don't have a reason."
The embassy can't force him to leave, and since Nohara's visa is valid all Mexican officials can do it wait for it to expire in early March.
During his stay, Nohara's wiry goatee has grown into a scraggly mass. His red-tinted hair is speckled with dust and dandruff, and his cream-colored jacket and fleece blanket are dingy with overuse. He smells like he hasn't had a shower in months.
"He's a calm person, a nice man," said Silvia Navarrete del Toro, an airport janitor. "He just sits here and eats all day."

Japanese man makes Mexico airport home (Via Arbroath)

Woman may lose house for sex while she was a high school student 12 years ago

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 02:38 PM CST

Twelve years ago, when Wendy Whitaker was barely 17, she performed oral sex on a high school classmate who was about to turn 16. The state of Georgia convicted her of a sex crime and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

As a registered sex offender, Whitaker's freedom is severely restricted. She and her husband bought a house within 1000 feet of an unadvertised church daycare service, and a judge has decreed that she has to vacate by Thanksgiving.

In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia’s sex offender law at the time. That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate. Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in. They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.
That law was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court last year, giving Whitaker a brief reprieve. But Georgia’s legislature then passed a revised law earlier this year, one lawmakers apparently believed is in compliance with the state supreme court’s decision, but that still manages to rope in Whitaker. Last week, she was told she has to move out of her home by Thanksgiving. If that happens, she’ll likely have to foreclose.

Women may lose house for sex while she was a high school student 12 years ago

Black Swan author says present economy worse than Depression

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:41 PM CST

Here's a video interview with The Black Swan author Nasim Nicholas Taleb and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who say the current economic situation could be worse than the great depression.

"The banking system, the way we have it, is a monstrous giant built on feet of clay. And if that topples, we're gone."

Maybe that's why the US Gov't has pledged $7.7 Trillion (half of America's annual GDP to fix this). I wonder if it'll work?

(Via Homegrown Evolution)

HOWTO Drink Coffee in Space (video demo)

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:34 PM CST

Robert Pearlman, editor of the space history and artifact website collectSPACE, says:

Here's a really neat video recorded tonight from NASA TV that shows Dr. Don Pettit demonstrating his zero-g coffee cup. Not only is it cool space food, but its a science lesson, too!

Sunday Morning Science with Dr. Don Pettit (Collectspace Forum) Astronaut demos drinking coffee in space (YouTube)

* NYT writer drinks NASA water distilled from the finest astronaut pee and sweat.
* NASA astronauts answer questions from on board the Space Station via YouTube

American YouTube manga girl making waves in Japan

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:22 PM CST

Tokyomango posted a funny "stare down" video by a 22-year-old former supermarket cashier from Florida who "now spends a bulk of her time making YouTube videos of herself staring blankly into the camera, babbling elementary Japanese, and striking cutesy poses. Her popularity in Japan catapulted when Japanese online publication JCast wrote an article about her in January of this year." American YouTube manga girl making waves in Japan

Make's guide to chemistry sets

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:14 PM CST

Over on the Make blog, Phil Torrone posted a wonderful guide to chemistry sets and books from the past and present. The Chemistry gift guide - Celebrating chemistry and inspiring the next generation of chemists!

Obama's "Change" Inspires Controversy in Arab Online Media

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:29 PM CST

Palestinian journalist and blogger Daoud Kuttab has an interesting essay up today about cultural ripples from Obama's election throughout the Arab world.

It seems like an appropriate enough cartoon. The depiction of the president elect Barack Obama with the US flag behind him and the bubble quoting Obama as saying the change has come to Washington. Looking up to the Obama depiction was an excited Egyptian woman congratulating the African American senator, reminding him not to forget that people around the world have been hoping and praying for his success. This was followed by the Arabic phrase uqbal inna, meaning "may the same [change] happen to us."
According to the opposition weekly Sawt al Umma, the cartoon appearing the leading Egyptian daily Al Ahram, caused a sense of an emergency among the Egyptian leadership. The independent weekly stated that 150,000 copies of the paper's first edition were quickly removed from the streets and destroyed and the "troublesome" phrase disappeared from future prints that day. The before and after cartoon depiction appeared in Sawt al Umma.

This is certainly not the first time that a political cartoon has caused powers in our region to be worried about losing their powers. But the paranoia of the Mubarak regime is a reflection of the concern by many Arab autocrats about the Obama euphoria empowering those calling for change. Obama's victory on the change mantra was not lost to people around the world yearning for political reform. Jordan's leading blogger Mohammad Omar says that the victory of the son of a Kenyan immigrant gives minorities, immigrants and unrepresented groups hope. Imagine a Palestinian who was born in Jordan fifty or sixty years ago and has tried very hard to be part of the political scene looking at the son of an immigrant in America being elected to the top executive position. The winds of hope don't stop at the American shores, Omar insists.

Undemocratic Arab regimes afraid of Obama's change (Daoud Kuttab)

China: Blogger Zhou Shuguang a.k.a. "Zola" barred from leaving country, "potential threat to state security"

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 01:32 PM CST

Rebecca McKinnon reports on 27 year-old blogger Zhou Shuguang, aka "Zola," whom the Chinese government have banned from leaving the country as a "potential threat to state security." Snip:

The tagline of [Zola's] blog says in English: "You never know what you can do till you try." He seems to be hitting up against the limits of what the Chinese authorities will let him do.
Zola has stirred up controversy by turning himself into a commercial brand while at the same time committing citizen journalism. He has been called many things by many people: The "nailhouse blogger." "Enfant terrible of the Chinese blogosphere." A Chinese journalist-blogger friend of mine calls him "post-modern."

Now Chinese authorities say he is "a potential threat to state security." For that reason, they barred his exit from China to Hong Kong on Sunday. He was on his way to Germany to serve as a judge for Deutsche Welle's Best of the Blogs awards.

I first learned of Zola's detention on Twitter, where he posted live updates about what was happening - which other people in his Twitter network quickly relayed across the Internet. He posted an update on his blog about the situation on Saturday afternoon, telling his readers to follow his Twitter stream for the latest developments. (A Google News search at 4pm Hong Kong time today turned up no mainstream media reports on his situation, which shows how slow the MSM has been to take advantage of the Chinese twittersphere...or they don't consider this news...)

"Zola" barred from leaving China: "potential threat to state security" (RConversation)

The Right to Bear Pocket Knives

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 12:31 PM CST

The following is a special message from American Security Theatre (AST), a group that seeks a dramatic reversal of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policies.

We hereby petition the incoming Obama administration for a modest change, an immediate change that would signal a new direction for air travelers, a new freedom for frequent fliers. Here it is: recognize the need of Americans in the friendly skies to bear tools that fit in their pocket, by which we mean the ever-so useful pocket knife, also known by its brand names, the Swiss Army Knife and the Leatherman Multi-tool.

Ever since 9/11, pocket knives and their owners have been separated at airport security checkpoints everywhere, never to be reunited. According to the TSA, knives are prohibited, except "for plastic or round bladed butter knives." Who carries a butter knife in his or her pocket or purse? The TSA's unhelpful "Summer Travel Tips" says: "Pocket knives, self-defense sprays and other potential weapons are also prohibited." What a huge misunderstanding! Pocket knives are tools. If you consider them to be weapons, certainly they are Weapons of minimal Destruction (WmD).

Talk about sweating the small stuff, missing the forest for the trees, looking for love in all the wrong places. If pocket knifes are prohibited, why are nail clippers and corkscrews allowed? Why not allow an all-in-one pocket knife, which best prepares a person for any emergency? Especially, what with emergencies on the rise!

We can bring screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers under seven inches on planes but not 3-inch pocket knives. Hammers and saws are not allowed, nor are cattle prods but none of these fit in your pocket. We don't seek permission to bring an entire toolchest but we need to go places with all the tools that a good pocket knife provides. Scissors and knitting needles were once confiscated but they are now permitted. The TSA could re-classify any of these humble items as potential weapons or as useful, personal tools.

So, on behalf of readers of Make magazine, I submit this petition with high hopes that the new administration will hear our plea. Many of us have been carrying Make's imposing Warranty Voider, a branded Leatherman Squirt, and we're losing them to the TSA. The prohibition seems absurd. We should be well-equipped when we travel.

On a recent trip, I had to buy safety razor blades and batteries, and back in my hotel room I found myself in a struggle with clamshell packaging that would not submit to fingernails and teeth. I regretted not having my pocket knife handy. No, I was mad that my pocket knife was unable to join me on my trip. Then, I had a flashback to when I went through airport security, where an elderly man was pulled aside by the TSA because attached to his keychain was a small pocket knife. Obviously, he had not reviewed the list of prohibited items. The poor man was upset at first; he did not understand that he had to remove the pocket knife from his keychain. This was hard enough for him to do but he couldn't believe that he also had to turn the pocket knife over to the TSA -- for keeps -- when he finished the task. He asked the TSA why they needed his pocket knife and the uninformed officer was unable to give him a satisfying answer. I thought to myself, pitifully, that I was glad I had not accidently brought along my pitiful pocket knife. In my hotel room, I felt bad that I had not responded with more empathy to my fellow travelers plight. Maybe I should spoken up then and there.

All I could think of was that another confiscated penknife was destined for Ebay, an abundance of utility without a home. How sad! You'd think the TSA would have the good sense to re-distribute the pocket knives to the truly needy.

The TSA prides itself on trapping innocent people. Here's a story found on the TSA site from April of this year.

On the morning of April 16, security officers in Wisconsin discovered a 4.5-inch knife hidden inside a Barbie doll box in a passenger's carry-on bag. When the passenger was questioned, he said that he forgot which Barbie doll box he put the knife in and thought the box with the knife was in his checked luggage.
The passenger surrendered the knife, but had to re=book on another flight.

Should we be proud of the TSA for exposing a Wisconsin man's Barbie doll fetish and making him "surrender" his knife? I mean, the guy's from Wisconsin and he's surrendering. President-elect Obama should be sensitive to the idea that Americans shouldn't be surrendering to other Americans. We are not our own enemy.

It's too bad Inauguration Day doesn't come earlier so that we could get this change in place for the busy holiday travel season. There's also another item on the list of prohibited items that's going to bring huge disappointment for the holidays: would you believe, Santa, that the TSA won't allow Americans to travel with snow globes in their carry-ons?

Another point to be made, although not as sharp as the others, is that many people have successfully carried pocket knifes through security without detection. Most of the time it is unintentional but they are surprised to find that the TSA didn't notice. A lot of prohibited items are not caught. I hear people bragging that water bottles go through just fine in the pockets of cargo pants. I now know that I can forget pulling out my personal toiletries, even those over 3 oz., because they go through in my carry-on without detection. I've come to rely on it. The TSA doesn't seem to notice. It's only when you're honest and declare that -- oops -- you've discovered a pocket knife on your person or in your carry-on, only then do you lose it. That's not a way to keep people honest.

So, if this tiny change is too much to ask, if we haven't made the case that pocket knives are safe and essential everyday personal items, indeed tools just like combs and toothbrushes, or like cellphones, consider quietly crafting a compromise whereby the TSA agrees that when a pocket knife passes through, the uninformed officers intentionally ignore it. Let's apply a "don't tell, don't ask" policy. I won't tell a TSA officer that I have brought my pocket knife with me and an officer won't ask me if I have one.

The new president won't even have to make this policy public but he can let us know. President Obama can give us a "wink-wink" when he names the new head of the TSA and we'll know that old policy is on its way out with Michael Chertoff and Kip Hawley. The AST thanks you in advance.

Poetry goes Boing!

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 09:36 AM CST

The poetry competition announced in We can has games has been a huge success. We must have more of these, and soon.

The game this time was to write verse poetry about one or more recurrent Boing Boing obsessions, with the winner to receive a Gears of War 2 Special Edition Zune 120 GB. Readers responded with a thread over two hundred messages long that's full of charming, surprising, and even impressive poetry. And if you don't read the whole thing, you have only yourself to blame.

Picking the winner was tough. At great effort and expense, I brought in the head of the science fiction line at the world's largest English-language science fiction publishing house to help me judge it, but it was still hard to narrow the choice down to a single poem. Nevertheless … (picks up envelope) … the winner is:

SpatulaLilacs @41, "Sestina of a Reluctant Copyfighter." Which, O my word, is a rigidly formal sestina that maintains both natural language and perfect iambic pentameter while developing a coherent argument about copyright issues.

That's something you don't see every day.

Sestina of a Reluctant Copyfighter
I download stuff. Not all of it is "free" --
Or meant to be, at least. But people share.
It's all right if you take what I create.
I'd never copy-shackle my own art.
I have a hankering for the obscure,
And I will stay obscure as well, by rights.
I know, of course, i haven't got the right:
no "information-wanting-to-be-free"
or any other jargon can obscure
the fact that when we, as we put it, "share,"
we replicate another person's art.
Are copies something I should not create?
But in the past, we couldn't just create;
the learnéd men who scribbled out our rights
did not foresee this replicable art,
which makes another of itself for free.
And if they did, why tell us not to share?
Conspiracy? Some purpose more obscure?
I know, the artist's needs are not "obscure."
But I don't see the people who create
receiving, from the middle-man, their share --
they've all too often signed away their rights,
and found themselves endeavoring for free
to do a deed that's less and less an art.
But certainly this isn't all of art;
just most of art that isn't so obscure.
The margins (blesséd margins!) leave you free,
uncensored and unhindered, to create.
But on the margin, who protects your rights?
Forget your rights. Embrace your fanbase. Share.
If just a thousand, seeing that you share,
decide they love you and they love your art,
then you won't need to sweat about your rights.
You can be happy, healthy, and obscure,
as long as you remember to create
at least a couple things that aren't free.
So free your mind before you grab your share.
Don't litigate, just go create some art!
And let the lawyers sort obscurer rights.

The top ten other poems from the thread, not in order of merit:

JustKristin @28, "We heard a crunch before it died." Emily Dickinson does tech support. (You should get a look at Kristin's other pastiches. She has a fine ear.)

Olof @29: Boing Boing does Jabberwock, or possibly Jabberwock does Boing Boing.

Cloudform @74, "Annabel LED." A popular favorite, and definitely one of the poems that made it hard to pick a single winner.

Madeley @80, "Web Zen." A small but very cute pantoum. (Note: Be impressed. Pantoums are hard, like villanelles only more so.)

Rachelboing @84: a sonnet on feet.

Lumi the Valiant @85, "The Charge of the Boing Boingers," with muttered apologies to Tennyson.

ELloyd74 @114 had the sleekest rhymes.

TDawwg @113 argued with me, elegantly, in "A Poetickall Epistle Direckted at Our Moderator By Way of Metrickall Clarification."

HKDailo @130 rapped, inventively.

Jfaehnle @168, "Sex-Bot Villanelle; or, VW5yZXF1aXRlZCBMb3Zl.".

Other notables achievements:

Props to David Carroll @43, for constructing a crossword puzzle (and later, posting the solution).

Props also to Shutz, at various points in the thread, for doing some real thinking about future games.

As was only appropriate for a competition that started on 11/11, we got three notable pastiches of famous war poems: Mel Rodriguez @50 did Wilfred Owens' "Dulce et Decorum Est"; Jazzbo @134 did John Gillespie Magee's "High Flier"; and TaoArt @150 did John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields."

Some of the best poems in the thread were written by first-time commenters. I don't yet have a complete list of them, so I'll put that in the comment thread.

Kieran O'Neill @142, "Your country's gender disjunction," was the best poem written as a comment in a current thread. Second place in that category goes to MXJohnson @132 for From "Your shoe is jacked into my eye" and "Call to makers: woman wants webcam to replace lost eye".

Oskar @33 is to be commended for his presentation, and his attitude. Entertaining your readers by showing off really well is at the heart of the game.

Triscuit @72 wrote the best haiku.

Foetusnail @187 wins for Most Improved. Second place for Most Improved: JanusNode @151, "Ode to Boing Boing."

Frazbin @202, for the tidiest poem on the least hygienic subject.

MinTphresh @91 and @183, for spiritual truth.

Other poems that a different judge might have scored higher:

TangoBrain @152, "Encryptus." :: Chriziem @141, Chriziem @141, "Steampunk Elegy." :: Jmanooch @167, "Carousel: On a Reading of Boing Boing." :: Aila @158, "Guerrilla Gardener." :: MFGG @48, a panegyric sonnet. :: CK @87, who is funny and accurate. :: Mr. Orion @104, who is also fun to read, and would undoubtedly have scored higher if he'd labeled his work as a haiku sequence rather than a series of one-offs. :: Deviant @107's heroic quatrains about a boy and his sexbot making a stand against the zombie apocalypse. :: Boba Fett Diop @111 doing Lucas via Homer via Richmond Lattimore. :: WillAlex @173, a zombie sonnet. :: Met Ower @131, "Lurker Lament."

Allan Sherman's "My Son, The Box" -- the complete works of the Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah guy

Posted: 23 Nov 2008 01:16 AM CST

I got my first Allan Sherman LP when I was five: My Son, the Nut. It had been my mother's, and soon we both knew all the lyrics to all the songs. Not just the canonical "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," but also "RATTFINK," "Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue" ("Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue"), "You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louis" ("You Came a Long Way From St Louis") and many others.

I can tell you why I loved them: they were subversive, they had wonky, comic rhymes, they were sung in a broad, nasal borscht-belt comedy voice, and they reminded me of the MAD Magazine parody songs that were my favorite part of every issue. I sang those songs everywhere I went. When I heard the originals, it was another revelation, the original lyrics revealing even more clevernesses in Sherman's lampoons.

Over the years, I've picked up a few more CDs as they were issued, and discovered more of his great material (the medley that contains "Do not build a stingy sandwich/pile the coldcuts high/customers should see salami/coming through the rye," and "When you go to the delicatessen store/Don't buy the liverwurst," is a major favorite around our household). But it wasn't until last week, when I finally got my hands on a copy of "My Son, the Box," that I got to hear every damned thing Sherman ever recorded.

Cross "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" with MAD Magazine, throw in the Smothers Brothers and Dr Demento (Weird Al clearly owes a debt to Sherman) and you've got this remarkable box-set. Listening to these discs prompted me to do some digging on Sherman, which led to the revelation that Sherman was a prude who thought that the sexual revolution had destroyed America, which is just weird enough to be the icing on the cake.

When you go to the delicatessen store
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst
I repeat what I just said before
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst

Oh, buy the corned beef if you must
The pickled herring you can trust
And the lox puts you in orbit A-OK
But that big hunk of liverwurst
Has been there since October first
And today is the 23rd of May

My Son, The Box

Glass molecule reproductions from Erowid.org

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 06:57 AM CST

Above is a picture of the hand-blown recreation of the LSD molecule that I received for making a donation to the Erowid Center, the non-profit 501(c)(3) organization behind Erowid.org. Erowid has been a measured, sane repository for chemical and counterculture information online for twelve years and relies on donations to continue its operation. Nearly anyone who has looked up drug and entheogenic plant information online has stumbled across — and subsequently been edified by — Erowid. For a subject as politically and personally charged as ingesting chemicals, Erowid remains one of the few rational sources of real-world experience reports, safety warnings, and advocacy of safe but individually accountable drug use available online or elsewhere. If you're like me, your recreational and experimental drug use has tailed off over the years, but even so, I still use the site as a reference and source of entertainment. (I probably shouldn't laugh, but some of the negative experience reports can be hilarious. Hang on, lil' cowboy!) Moreover, "check out Erowid" is the first advice I offer to a young head. Kids are going to experiment — better they get unbiased information about the risks and rewards of their drug use than rely exclusively on well-meaning but often ignorant peers. I am proud to give Erowid my money. Throw 'em a buck! Art Glass Molecules incentives [Erowid.org]

Boing Boing

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

0 comments:

Blog Archive

About Me