Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

The Magicians: a fantasy novel of wonder without sentimentality

Posted: 20 Oct 2009 05:12 AM PDT

Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy, depressed, high-achieving Brooklyn kid who finds himself hijacked from his Princeton interview and whisked away to Brakebills Academy, a school of magic upstate on the Hudson. He passes the entrance exam and begins his education as a wizard.

This is a familiar-sounding setup, but Grossman's extremely clever hack on the fantasy novel is in his complete lack of sentimentality about magic. Quentin has lived his whole life waiting to be taken to an imaginary magic kingdom ("Fillory," a thinly veiled version of Narnia) but he quickly discovers that real magic -- like stage magic -- is about an endless grind of numbing practice in the hopes of impressing someone -- anyone. All of Brakebills, from the faculty to the student body, is broken in some important way, and Quentin is no exception. In a place of scintillating minds and bottomless commitment to craft, Quentin's life is not substantially better than it is in Brooklyn. Brakebills isn't Hogwarts (at one point, the narrator notes that magic wands aren't used at Brakebills, being regarded as a kind of embarrassing prosthesis -- like a sex toy for magic).

Quentin's cycle -- mundane, magic student, magician in the world, questing adventurer -- serves as a scalpel that slices open the soft, sentimental belly of the fantasy canon, from Tolkien to Lewis to Baum, but still (and this is the fantastic part), it manages to be full of wonder. Wonder without sentimentality. Wonder without awe.

Grossman is a hell of a pacer, and the book rips along, whole seasons tossed out in a single sentence, all the boring mortar ground off the bricks, so that the book comes across as a sheer, seamless face that you can't stop yourself from tumbling down once you launch yourself off the first page. This isn't just an exercise in exploring what we love about fantasy and the lies we tell ourselves about it -- it's a shit-kicking, gripping, tightly plotted novel that makes you want to take the afternoon off work to finish it.

It must run in the family; Lev is the identical twin brother of Austin " I read the paper edition of The Magicians, but I'm delighted to see that there's an unabridged audio edition on DRM-free CDs. This is the kind of fairy story I could seriously dig having read aloud to me the second time around (and I don't think I'll be able to read this one just once).

The Magicians: A Novel

Jonathan Worth tries out a copy-friendly photography business-experiment

Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:22 AM PDT

Jonathan Worth is a talented commercial photographer (he shot me for a feature in Popular Science a few years back) who was recently asked for his shots by National Portrait Gallery in London, and asked if he could come and take my pic for it, offering to give me the right to use the resulting print for publicity, book jackets and so on.

The National Portrait Gallery's crazy copyright stance sparked an interesting conversation about copyright with Jonathan (who also shot some killer photos!) and in the end, he agreed to license the photos he took of me for the exhibition under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, one of the most liberal licenses, allowing for both commercial uses and remixes.


One of Jonathan's pictures showed me in my office, and I went a little Flickr-crazy marking up the photo with notes explaining what everything was. I tweeted the photo, and lots of people came by to see it -- several thousand, some of whom ended up offering Jonathan paying work. It was a win all around.

This got us to talking about how producers of images and other works that are well-known digitally can use that familiarity to sell physical objects (I give away my books as ebooks to sell the print books), and Jonathan decided to try an experiment, producing 111 prints of the iconic image (without the Flickr notes!). I kicked in the 111-page initial manuscript printing of my forthcoming (April 2010) young adult novel For the Win, which I had just finished a week before. I had printed ten copies of the manuscript to pass around, and I had one copy left, and so I signed every page and handed it off to Jonathan.


Jonathan is selling his prints on a sliding scale depending on which manuscript page you get with it -- high numbers are cheaper -- and the one-of-a-kind super-premium offering is page one accompanied by a 100cm x 140cm special edition print that include the contact-sheets from the shoot (proceeds from this go to a local school raising money for new buildings).

I think that this is just too cool for words. Jonathan's a professional shooter who's also an artist, and the portrait shots are fantastic enough. But he's also experimenting with new business-models for photography that leverage, rather than fight, the Internet. I don't receive any of the money from this -- Jonathan did the work and sank in the capital, so it's his reward to reap.

Etsy: Photographs by Jonathan Worth

Blog: Giving things away Pt II

My DIY publishing experiment, WITH A LITTLE HELP

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:52 PM PDT

Publisher's Weekly just announced (on the cover, no less!) my forthcoming DIY short-story collection, With a Little Help, a print-on-demand book that explores pretty much every "freemium" model for turning a free, well-known digital object into a bunch of highly sought and profitable physical objects. There's four different covers on the print book, a hand-bound limited hardcover whose end-papers come from the paper ephemera of various writer-friends; a free audiobook read aloud by voice actor/writers and a for-pay CD-on-demand of the same thing; a donation campaign, and even a one-of-a-kind super-premium chance to commission a new story for the book for $10,000. All the financials for the book will be disclosed online and bound into the books on a monthly basis.
Here's the pitch: the book is called With a Little Help. It's a short story collection, and like my last two collections, it's a book of reprints from various magazines and other places (with one exception, more about which later). Like my other collections, it will be available for free on the day it is released. And like my last collection, Overclocked, it won't have a traditional publisher.

Let me explain that last part: Overclocked was published in January 2007, just weeks after Advanced Marketing Services, the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed Thunder's Mouth, the publisher for Overclocked--went bankrupt. You remember Advanced Marketing Services. What a mess. First, a senior executive was arrested and convicted of fraud for falsifying the company's earnings, then the company tanked, and the resulting whirlpool threatened to suck half of New York publishing down with it. As a result, Thunder's Mouth went though a series of mergers and acquisitions. My editor and then his replacement both left or were let go (I never found out which). By spring, no one was communicating with me.

Later that year, I did a kind of self-financed minitour, piggybacking on speaking gigs, and every time I went into a bookstore it seemed like I was seeing another edition of the book with a different publisher's name on the spine. The book's currently listed in Perseus's catalogue, for which I am glad. The royalty checks keep coming, and the book continues to do well, but I could no longer be said to have any particular relationship with this publisher. As far as I can tell, it is listing the book in its catalogue and filling orders, but not much else.

This makes Overclocked into a fine control for my little experiment. It is a good book. It sold well and was critically acclaimed. But it is solidly a midlist title, a short story collection published by a house turned upside down by bankruptcy. It will be the baseline against which I compare the earnings from With a Little Help. And those earnings will be diverse--like the musicians who've successfully self-produced albums in a variety of packages at a variety of price points (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jonathan Coulton), I have set out to produce a book that can be had in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000.

Doctorow's Project: With a Little Help

XKCD v airport security

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:45 PM PDT

Psychedelic Alice in Wonderland calendar

Posted: 20 Oct 2009 12:45 AM PDT


Book-design legend John Coulthart has a superb new psychedelic Alice in Wonderland calendar: "Everyone is familiar with Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit but, as I've noted before, themes from, and allusions to, the Alice books run through British psychedelia to an even greater degree. The Beatles put Lewis Carroll in their pantheon of influences on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, and Wonderland's atmosphere of Victorian surrealism chimed perfectly with a resurgence of interest in Victorian art and design. So at the end of September, mulling over ideas, I picked up one of my Lewis Carroll volumes and looked at the chapter list: 12 chapters...12 months...I could do a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland!"

Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar (Thanks, Jeff!)

Previously:


EFF fundraiser/Pioneer Awards Ceremony Oct 22 , San Francisco

Posted: 20 Oct 2009 12:06 AM PDT

Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday October 22nd at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in a fundraiser honoring the 2009 Pioneer Award winners. Awarded every year since 1992, the Pioneer Awards recognize leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. This year's winners include hardware hacker Limor 'Ladyada' Fried, e-voting security researcher Harri Hursti, and public domain advocate Carl Malamud. EFF will also present a 2009 Cooperative Computing Award to Mersenne Research, Inc., Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, for finding a record breaking prime number. Tickets are $60."

I am a previous Pioneer Award recipient and was doubly honored this year to be a Pioneer Judge. Congrats to all the winners on their much-deserved honor!

Join EFF for the 2009 Pioneer Awards fundraiser honoring: Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud

Previously:


Mercedes Lackey embraces fanfic and Creative Commons

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:33 PM PDT

Chris sez, "Mercedes Lackey's agent, who also represents a 'persuasive little gnome' named Cory Doctorow, has been talked around to the Creative Commons point of view. Hence, Misty has announced she is going to permit fanfic as long as it is released under a Creative Commons license (presumably a noncommercial one, though she does not explicitly spell this out on the site)."

Misty Lackey's work is well-loved by fanfic writers; this allows them to come in from the cold and produce their work (which celebrates her work) without fear of legal reprisals. Good move all around (and my agent, Russ Galen, is a smart cookie!).

What this means is: NO, you cannot make money on it. NO, you cannot self-publish a fanfiction novel of Valdemar (or any of my other stuff) and try and sell it on Amazon. And NO, I still am not going to read it, because I am already so far behind on my research reading I barely have time to read that.

But YES, you may write and post away, folks, so long as you license it as derivative and under Creative Commons. If it is anything other than PG-13, please take all the proper precautions to stick it somewhere that innocent souls won't be corrupted. Do not scare the children or the horses. Have fun!

News: Concerning Fanfiction: (Thanks, Chris!)

FCC study: open access and competition produce better broadband

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:30 PM PDT

David Weinberger sez, "The Berkman Center, under the guidance of Yochai Benkler, has produced for the FCC a 200-page report on broadband around the world. The report is now open for public comment. In an interview on the Berkman site, Benkler gives the "take-away":
I think there are two pieces of news that will be most salient for people as they look at this report. The first is a response to the question: 'how are we [the U.S.] doing?', and the answer is that we're overall middle-of-the-pack, no better. The second responds to the question: 'What policies and practices worked for countries that have done well?', and the answer to that is: there is good evidence to support the proposition that a family of policies called 'open access,' that encourage competition, played an important role.
PDF: Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world (Thanks, David!)

Spiral staircase built around a 75' tree

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:27 PM PDT

A reader writes, "A man on Hornby Island, BC built a spiral staircase around a 75-foot cedar tree. He put a platform on the top to get a view of the ocean. This video shows what it's like to climb up and then down the staircase."

My Dad's Treehouse

Wild Mook: Japanese '80s fanzine devoted to American cops

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 07:36 PM PDT

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(click for larger image). Sweet baby Jesus and biscuits, I can't hardly believe my eyes. Above, the truly awesome cover of a 1980 issue of Wild Mook, one of many fanzines produced in the early 1980s by the late Haruo Mizuno. "Mook" refers to a type of publication that's kind of halfway between a magazine and a book. Matt Alt (who I reached out to for comment in this BB post today) says

[Mizuno was] so obsessed with American cops that he actually managed to talk the NYPD and LAPD into letting him ride along with officers. This amazing book is but one of dozens he authored on the topic. None sum up the Japanese fascination with the American power aesthetic as much as this fetish-like pastiche of uniform, hamburgers, weapons, and mountains of french fries, though.
More on Matt's blog. Man, if anyone out there has a copy of Wild Mook, please scan it and share online. I want a hard copy so bad!

Such art direction, too! I mean, just look at the pile of fast food surrounding the cop (or model) on the cover, above. I count six Big Macs, a couple Filet-o-Fishes, 5 metric craploads of fries, and at least one jumbo gordito taco supremo with guacamole.

He is RESTING HIS BILLY CLUB ON THE FRIES. The billy club may actually be PROTECTING THE FRIES. And there's that steely gaze in his eyes... as if to say, "You touch my hamburger, punk, and it'll be your last."

Below, scanned covers from two other issues.

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The Demons' Night-Parade: Splendid Japanese yokai (mythic monster) scroll found on eBay

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 06:45 PM PDT

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A spectacular specimen of traditional Japanese yokai (mythic "monster") art has popped up on eBay. Wow, talk about where the wild things are! From what I can tell, this scroll may be a vintage copy of a centuries-old original, and really ought to be in a museum.

I hope the auction stays up for a while, and someone takes some time to copy the images elsewhere -- each one of these detail shots is so full of personality and mischief! The "Buy it now" price? $15,000.

I asked Yokai Attack author Matt Alt to tell us what we're seeing in this monstrous tableau, and he kindly obliged. His analysis below (with more after the jump).

scroll01.jpg The Haykki Yako (百鬼夜行), literally "the night parade of a hundred demons," is one of the most famous tales in Japanese folklore. It first appeared in a Buddhist text in the 13th century, and is the story of a nightmarish evening during which legions of yokai, oni, and other fearsome creatures erupted from their usual hiding places to openly terrorize the world of the living. According to one version, they paraded down Kyoto's Ichijo-dori avenue in the late 1100s. The Hyakki Yako (also spelled "Yagyo") inspired countless generations of Japanese artists, including Toriyama Sekien, who penned an influential series of yokai guides in the 1770s; woodblock artists of the 1800s; and manga masters such as Mizuki Shigeru in the 20th century.

A handful of illustrated scrolls depicting the event are known to exist, mainly from the early Edo period (1603 - 1868). They weren't created as fine art but rather as entertainment, passed around and scrolled through together with friends, just as people enjoy comic books, television shows, or video games with friends today.

And now, somewhat incredibly, one has appeared on eBay -- tattered, worm-eaten, but its yokai and creatures marching along the page clear as the day they were painted. The opening bid? A cool $15,000.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of seeing the original, authenticated Hyakki Yako scrolls when they were briefly displayed at the National Museum of Japanese History. (We covered the event for a special Yokai and Yurei episode of NHK's Tokyo Eye show: video part 1, part 2, part 3.)

This eBay specimen is very much in keeping with their style. The depiction of "tsukumo-gami," or "artifact-spirits" -- everyday objects and tools taken haunted, sentient form -- is a hallmark of the genre. And that is precisely why I have such mixed feelings about seeing it put up on the auction block.

Who painted this scroll? When did they paint it? Is it even real? If it really is a vintage scroll -- something we won't truly know until a real expert authenticates it -- it is a part of Japan's cultural heritage. To quote a certain archaeologist-adventurer, "it belongs in a museum!"

But that said, anyone have $15K they just have lying around and want to buy this for me, I promise I will get it authenticated and put it somewhere where the world will enjoy it instead of locking it away in my closet.

"Japanese Antique Rare Scroll : "HYAKKI-YAKO" @b666" (eBay, Thanks for the heads up, Darren Garrison!)

Investment banks borrow money from gov't at 0%, lend it back to them at 3%

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 03:23 PM PDT

Philip Greenspun explains how Wall Street makes billions -- by bilking taxpayers.
Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they're making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they've already bought as collateral on additional bonds.
How Wall Street is making its billions (Via Dan Gillmor)

Legal battle over Shepard Fairey Obama poster takes an unexpected turn.

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:27 PM PDT

We've been following artist Shepard Fairey's work here on Boing Boing for some time now. A disclaimer, first: I love his work, we have mutual friends, he strikes me as a stand-up guy.

Last year, Pesco was among the first to blog the Obama "Hope" poster which quickly grew far more popular than anyone anticipated. The iconic artwork spawned street cottage industries worldwide, and became an official element in the presidential campaign.

Then, the Associated Press (the same DRM-happy copyright bullies who threaten their own affiliates and try to shake down bloggers over 5-word excerpts) threatened Fairey over claims the poster was based on an AP photo, and violated their copyright. Fairey and his supporters fought back. They argued the poster was permitted under the concept of fair use because the artwork was significantly changed from the reference photo. Additionally, they added, the poster was not based on the specific photo the AP claimed -- but on a different image that required more cropping and alteration, further supporting the fair use argument.

On Friday, that high-profile case took a turn nobody expected that I did not anticipate. Fairey confessed to having made false statements to a federal judge about exactly which AP photo he used. He also admitted having fabricated evidence. Snip from his statement:

The new filings state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.
The attorneys representing Fairey will soon step down. Nobody knows what will happen in the case. The question of which photo was used was a minor, tangential issue before -- but Friday's revelation is not minor. As David Kravetz says in his account at Wired News, "Everybody agrees the case is now tainted and that Fairey's courthouse actions could undermine his case, even if he did not commit copyright infringement." But for those who believe in the merits of the original fair use argument, there is still hope.

Read Kravets' story (some interesting links between this case and that of the BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy), and check out Marquette University professor Bruce Boyden's blog post here. Here's Shepard's mea culpa. Here's the AP's statement - and a note on that: I found it odd that many news organizations were sourcing that statement and a subsequent report from the AP as if they were regular wire service items, without regard for the fact that the AP is also a plaintiff in the case, and therefore inherently biased.

Previously:



Odd photos from Mostly Forbidden Zone

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:48 PM PDT

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I subscribe to a number of random photography blogs, and Mostly Forbidden Zone has just become one of my favorites. I like this photo of Michael Jackson getting his makeup applied for his role as the Scarecrow in 1978's The Wiz. Mostly Forbidden Zone. (Via Eye of the Goof)

Road kill toy

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:33 PM PDT

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I'm not sure if this delightful toy is real or a work of art. I don't really care.

Toy Teaches Children About Life And Death

Adaptive ride experiment

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:26 PM PDT



The Bucking Bronco: Adaptive Ride Experiment No. 1 is an art/tech/performance installation where visitors are invited to control a mechanical bucking bronco ride while observing physiological data, including brainwave information, streaming from the rider. The controllers are asked to "please, scare, and then excite" the rider by tweaking the controls. However, the controller isn't permitted to see the rider's face. Professor Milgram, your meme is ready! Bucking Bronco Adaptive Ride Experiment No.1, 2009 (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)

Yes Men pwn Chamber of Commerce over climate change legislation

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:10 PM PDT

The Yes Men strike again. Posing as members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they held a press conference today to announce that the chamber would abandon its opposition to climate-change legislation now in Congress. Well, that would explain the sneaky spam press release I received this morning which pointed to "chamber-of-commerce.us" instead of the actual website for the US Chamber of Commerce, at "uschamber.com." Wonder if any bloggers or reporters were done in by the emailed version of the Yes Men prank?

Here's a snip from Washington Post article about the meatspace hijinks today:

yesmen.jpg The event, complete with fake handouts on chamber letterhead, at least a couple of fake reporters, and a podium adorned with the chamber logo, broke up when a spokesman from the real chamber burst in. What followed was a spectacle not usually seen in the John Peter Zenger Room at the National Press Club: two men in business suits shouting at one another, each calling the other an impostor and demanding to see business cards.

"This guy is a fake! He's lying! This is a stunt that I've never seen before," said Eric Wohlschlegel, an official at the actual Chamber of Commerce, who said he'd heard about the hoax event from a reporter who'd mistakenly shown up at the chamber's headquarters.

The fake Chamber of Commerce official, who called himself "Hingo Sembra," did not give his real name to reporters, saying only that he represented a coalition of climate activists.

Pranksters stage Chamber of Commerce climate change event (Washington Post, via @tomzellerjr). Related coverage: GOOD, Roll Call, Talking Points Memo.

Previously:


Photos of remote birds killed by our trash

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 01:25 PM PDT

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Photographer Chris Jordan has published a series of images identified as dead albatross on Midway Atoll whose bodies are filled with bits of plastic they ingested.

Midway Island is an anemic little line of sand and coral reefs, way out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, I don't know Mr. Jordan personally, and haven't fact-checked the story behind the photos -- but presuming it's all as presented, this really is a horrifying set of images. Birds that live as far away from civilization as you can imagine, their innards packed with petroleum flotsam? Wow.

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
Midway (chrisjordan.com, Thanks, Susannah Breslin and Sean Bonner!)

CIA branch invests in tech firm that monitors blogs, Twitter, social media.

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 12:50 PM PDT

Huh, turns out the tinfoil-beanie crowd was right all along: the CIA *does* want to read your blog posts, follow your Twitter updates, and muck around in your Amazon book review history. Snip from Wired Danger Room exclusive:
cia_floor_seal.jpg In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" -- information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

"That's kind of the basic step -- get in and monitor," says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets (Wired Danger Room, thanks Noah)

From Death Row convicts' advocate to Middle School mentor

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 12:36 PM PDT

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In today's New York Times, a terrific piece by John Schwartz about an attorney who traded 20 years of struggling to keep death row prisoners "from the executioner's needle" for a new job at a middle school populated by poor, at-risk, mostly black kids.

The turmoil of middle school turns many teachers away, said the school's principal, Danielle S. Battle. Students' bodies and minds are changing, and disparities in learning abilities are playing out.

"A lot of people will say, 'I'll do anything but middle school,' " she said.

But this is precisely where Mr. Dunn chose to be, having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Once Convicts' Last Hope, Now a Students' Advocate (Image: David Walter Banks for The New York Times / thanks John Schwartz!)

What You Still Don't Know About You

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:41 AM PDT

After however many years of living, do you still have things about yourself, who you are and how your brain works that you don't entirely understand? To celebrate their 150th issue, the email version of The British Psychological Society's Research Digest asked 23 top psychologists to write 150 words on their nagging questions about themselves. From human consciousness, to death and forgiveness, to the dark Dalek-y corners of the mind, the answers are a great read--and an excellent place to jump into asking similar questions about ourselves.

I know. I know. That's awfully heavy for a Monday. So, for the excerpt here, we'll go with Richard Wiseman's answer, about the nature of humor:

I have no idea why I occasionally think funny things. For example, the other day I was watching the film "District 9", which is about an alien race known as "prawns", and thought "I wonder if the alien in charge is called a king prawn?". I would be the first to admit that it was not the world's greatest joke, but still, where did that moderately amusing idea come from? And why are some people so skilled at creating funny stuff, whilst others wouldn't recognise a proverbial custard pie, even if it hit them in the face? My guess is that the creation of comedy will remain a mystery for centuries, although at some point in the not too distant future, I suspect someone will carry out functional MRI scans of comedians creating jokes, and claim to have identified the part of the brain responsible for producing humour. Now, that will be funny.

Previously:


Murakami's short film, "Akihabara Majokko Princess" with Kirsten Dunst

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 12:32 PM PDT

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Arrested Motion reports on a short film by Takashi Murakami called "Akihabara Majokko Princess."

Starring Kirsten Dunst singing a cover to the Vapors' "Turning Japanese", the video includes footage of Dunst dancing through the streets of the Akihabara district in Tokyo dressed as a colorful princess. If you look carefully at the front image of our "Pop Life" article, you can see Murakami next to a painting paying tribute to this experience entitled "Kirsten Dunst & McG & Me".

Does anyone know if the video is available for viewing online?

Murakami x McG x Dunst - "Akihabara Majokko Princess" in "Pop Life" @ the Tate Modern

Previously:


Quiz: Donald Judd, Or Cheap Furniture?

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:52 AM PDT

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Here is a fun quiz where you must identify whether the furniture in the photos are works by minimalist artist Donald Judd, or cheap flat pack furniture from a big box store! Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture?

"Sleeping" mannequins in public by Mark Jenkins

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:31 AM PDT

Map shows US marriage and divorce rates

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:12 AM PDT

divorce rate map.png The Pew Research Center has an interactive map that shows marriage and divorce rates in the United States. The adjacent report, released this weekend, has some interesting statistics for trivia-hounds; for example, the District of Columbia has the highest percentage of single men (72%) as well as the highest median age of women at the time of their first marriage (30). Interactive map — the state of marriage and divorce

Sculptures look like human body parts

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:10 AM PDT

dzn_Furniture-II-by-Atelier-Van-Lieshout-at-Carpenters-Workshop-Gallery-Squ.jpg Atelier Van Lieshout of Rotterdam is best known for its sculptures that look like human bodies or body parts. Here are a few of my favorites — even the one of the spilled guts looks artistically beautiful to me. If you like them, and you happen to be in London, you can check out some of his furniture at the Carpenter Workshop Gallery this week. dzn_Furniture-II-by-Atelier-Van-Lieshout-at-Carpenters-Workshop-Gallery-01.jpg Cradle to Cradle 01.jpg Les Mammiferes.jpg Atelier Van Lieshout via Dezeen

Pedestrian nearly drops briefcase

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:24 PM PDT


Imagine how upset he would have been if his briefcase had been run over. (Via A Welsh View)

UPDATE: In the comments, igpajo linked to the Google Translate version of the story (which was in Russian). I think all news stories should be written in Russian, and run through Google Translate, don't you?

"Mad" bus rammed 20 cars and in the center of Perm

PERM. On the morning of October 19, 2009 unguided bus rioted in the center of Perm. This affected about 20 cars, several people were injured.

According to "UralInformByuro" traffic police officer on the Perm edge Gaynanov Arthur, a 67 passenger bus route brakes failed. Multi-ton vehicle rolled down the hill, and having traveled 5 blocks the Komsomol prospectus, inhibited only the stage near the Cathedral Square.

On the way to the bus "collected" nearly 2 dozen "cars and". The exact number of victims is established. According to preliminary data, injuring 4 people who were in the bus torpedoed foreign car, all of them hospitalized. It is noted that the number of injured could rise.

According to unofficial information, "went berserk" assembled from various parts of the "Mercedes" 80 years of manufacture. At the time of failure of the brakes he was moving with a sufficiently high velocity, which explains its long-term uncontrolled "journey".



Prize winning sketch from Dr. Sketchy's in Los Angeles

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:27 AM PDT

Glenn Arthur Dr Sketchys

My friend Barry and I went to Dr. Sketchy's figure drawing session last night, held at e3rd Steakhouse & Lounge in downtown Los Angeles and produced by Bob Self of Baby Tattoo Books. About 30 other artists came to sketch figure model Ruby Champagne ("the Mexican Spitfire of Burlesque") who posed and smiled in a way that reminded me of Gil Elvgren's work.

Above is a sketch of Ruby by Glenn Arthur. He won one of the prize giveaways last night for drawing the best Halloween themed illustration of the evening. His prize was a pad of nifty Whitelines graph paper, which uses white grid lines instead of gray or green lines. (Glenn's work is going to be featured in the upcoming Animal Instinct show in Costa Mesa on November 7th).

This morning Binary Slim, one of the other artists there last night, sent me a funny sketch of me that he did without my knowing it. I laughed out loud when I saw it.

Zombie-themed wedding

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:23 AM PDT

zombiecake.jpg A Seattle couple celebrated their wedding recently with this stylish Zombie Wedding cake, complete with a chainsaw-toting bride and bloody guests modeled after real attendees. It seems that the pair are really into zombies — earlier, the groom proposed by making a zombie movie featuring blood-spewing teddy bears in a graveyard. noblerobinette's Flickr via Neatorama

How Safe is the HPV Vaccine?

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:00 AM PDT

I was about to say that I'm just one of those people who understands things more fully once I see them in visual form, but I think that, when it comes to statistics, "one of those people" really just means "most of us".

Case in point, this great visualization of the facts about HPV vaccine safety and cervical cancer risk put together by the Information is Beautiful blog. For me, this really bridged the gap between knowing the facts and intuitively understanding them. Follow the link to check it out.
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