The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For Suckers
- Canadian border guards want to be sure that foreign journalists don't criticise Vancouver Olympics
- Tweets while in furlough land screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) back in regular old jail
- Stylophone synthesizer at Restoration Hardware
- Dr. John's weird New Orleans psych music
- Rumor: will iconic Technics DJ turntables be discontinued?
- Roomba: 1, Deadly Snake: 0
- Laser cut Poe in stainless steel
- Man hires movers to rob home
- Are Fake Academic Conferences the New Nigerian Prince Scam?
- National Day of Listening: A Better Use of a Friday
- Epoch time: Herschel reveals VY Canis Majoris death throes
- Concordia University has a spy-squad that snooped on novelist for "bilingual interests"
- "Inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious"
- Boing Boing Gift Guide 2009: gadgets! (part 3/6)
- A girl at the 1978 comic-con
- Vote early, vote often
| Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For Suckers Posted: 27 Nov 2009 03:00 PM PST Astronaut Don Pettit--inventor of the Zero-G Coffee Cup--plays with free-floating, head-sized water bubbles on the International Space Station. Make sure you stick around for the third experiment, where Pettit sticks an antacid tablet into one of the bubbles. Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user delicate genius, via CC. |
| Canadian border guards want to be sure that foreign journalists don't criticise Vancouver Olympics Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:46 PM PST The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens radio show covers the story of Amy Goodman's recent' border crossing into Canada. Goodman -- host of the US public radio show Democracy Now! -- was coming to Canada to give a speech at a library, and Canadian border guards questioned her intensely about the subject of her talk, even reading her notes for her speech. They were fishing for something, but Goodman couldn't figure out what, until the guards asked her outright whether she was planning on talking about the upcoming Canadian Olympic Games. When she assured them that she hadn't been, they eventually released her (it had been a 75 minute detention) but stamped a control-order in her passport giving her only 24 hours' stay in Canada. (Thanks, Bill!) Previously:
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| Tweets while in furlough land screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) back in regular old jail Posted: 27 Nov 2009 10:07 PM PST The web has been buzzing with the odd discovery that Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary was apparently tweeting while serving his sentence in a work furlough program for a fatal car crash. The LA Times now reports that the furlough deal is off, and that Avary was placed back in a regular old jail on Thanksgiving day, presumably because of his tweets. They included details of cavity searches and drug deals witnessed at the furlough facility. His last tweet claimed the "rollup" to jail was punishment for "exercising First Amendment rights." |
| Stylophone synthesizer at Restoration Hardware Posted: 27 Nov 2009 09:45 PM PST  Invented in 1967, the Dübreq Stylophone is a small synthesizer played by touching a built-in stylus to the metal keyboard. It was famously used on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator." I just spotted it in Restoration Hardware's catalog for $29. I was slightly surprised to see it there, but not too much as Restoration usually has terrific gadgets and toys for sale along with their classic (and costly) American home furnishings. For more Stylophone fun, check out the below video of Brett Domino performing a "1980s Hits Medley" on the device. (UPDATE: They're only $20 at ThinkGeek!) Previously: |
| Dr. John's weird New Orleans psych music Posted: 27 Nov 2009 03:42 PM PST Years ago, I got turned on to the psychedelic New Orleans "voodoo" vibe of Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack, Jr.). His 1968 debut Gris-Gris is a fantastically weird amalgam of R&B, dark psych rock, and NOLA culture. I'd never seen footage of the Night Tripper, as Dr. John is also known, until today. Quite a spectacle. From music critic Richie Unterberger's liner notes for a reissue of Gris-Gris: "Gris-Gris" by Dr. John, The Night Tripper (Amazon) |
| Rumor: will iconic Technics DJ turntables be discontinued? Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:49 PM PST Ssssssh, what's that sound? Why, it's the sound of a million deejays weeping. Rumors abound that Panasonic may kill off the iconic Technics 1200 turntable. One DJ site compared the (unconfirmed) news with "parents talking about where they were when they heard that JFK was shot, or that man had landed on the Moon." Say it ain't so! (via Jay Smooth) |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2009 01:25 PM PST What's that Roomba, you say Timmy is stuck in a well? A Roomba vacuuming robot did more than clean the floor for one family in Israel, killing a venomous Vipera palaestinae by, apparently, running over the snake and wrapping the creature around one of its rotating brushes. The family credits the robot for sparing their children and pets from possible snakebite. Good boy. (Via Engadget) |
| Laser cut Poe in stainless steel Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:43 AM PST  Cheap laser-cutting has come to the world's crafters, and Etsy is awash in lovely, precision-cut tchotchkes of all description. Case in point: Edgar Allan Poe in black stainless steel, $26 from FableAndFury. Edgar A. Poe Memento cameo necklace in black stainless steel (via Wonderland) Previously:
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| Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:41 AM PST A burglar hired a moving company to clean out a three-story home in Nottingham, UK, and arranged for the contents to be sold at a public auction. Police went to the sale and nabbed the perp, who had no prior record according to the article in ThisIsNottingham. |
| Are Fake Academic Conferences the New Nigerian Prince Scam? Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:21 AM PST Tired of snaring your Grandma with sob stories about deposed princes and their locked bank accounts, email scammers are branching out. Their new target: Academia. Researchers get invitations to a hot, new scientific conference and are asked to send their personal information in order to register. But when The Scientist checked up on the conferences, the location hadn't been booked, the named speakers didn't know anything about it and the organizer asking for info fell strangely silent. (Full story is free, but you may need to log in.) |
| National Day of Listening: A Better Use of a Friday Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:26 PM PST  Whether the reasons are ideological, demophobia-based, or a little bit of both, many of us would rather avoid today's mass shopping chaos. As an alternative to Black Friday, Story Corps is promoting today as the National Day of Listening--an opportunity to sit down for an hour with family members and other people you care about, ask them about their lives and preserve their stories for future generations. At the National Day of Listening site, you'll find helpful How To's for recording and preserving family stories and a question generator, to help you get over that "what the heck do I ask Grandma?" hump. Your family stories can also become part of the oral history archives at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. To do that, though, you'll have to get hooked up with a Story Corps professional recording session. They've got semi-permanent booths in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta, and they're traveling the country with a portable system all year. Image courtesy Flickr user Adam Selwood, via CC. |
| Epoch time: Herschel reveals VY Canis Majoris death throes Posted: 27 Nov 2009 10:23 AM PST "It is colossal. If it was sited at the centre of our Solar System, it would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn." And it is ready to go supernova. |
| Concordia University has a spy-squad that snooped on novelist for "bilingual interests" Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:19 PM PST  Rob sez, "Documents recently obtained through access to information legislation show that author David Bernans was being spied upon by investigators at Concordia University in Montreal. "In this first-person narrative, Bernans chronicles his experience dealing with Concordia's security apparatus, and questions the motivations of a university that spies on and censors its students." Christ, a university with its own private eye squad made up of failed Fed cops? What's next, a no-fly list for the campus shuttle-bus? Lookit these Keystone Kop bumblers, chasing people around because they're "interested in bilingualism." Hey, Concordia grads, is this how you want your alumni donations being spent?
Documents show university spied on novelist (Thanks, Rob!) |
| "Inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious" Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:56 AM PST A judge in New York has wiped out a $525k mortgage after OneWest bankers misled the court while trying to secure foreclosure. |
| Boing Boing Gift Guide 2009: gadgets! (part 3/6) Posted: 27 Nov 2009 10:42 AM PST Mark and I have rounded up some of our favorite items from our 2009 Boing Boing reviews for the second-annual Boing Boing gift guide. We'll do one a day for the next six days, covering media (music/games/DVDs), gadgets and stuff, kids' books, novels, nonfiction, and comics/graphic novels/art books. Today, it's gadgets!
Last year's guides:
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| Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:43 AM PST  Comic fandom's rarely held to be a welcoming place for girls. But one correspondent remembers fondly her trip to the 1978 San Diego Comic-Con, when she was a wee 8-year old girl. Other females, however, were few and far between. ROB: How did you find yourself, as a little kid, at the El Cortez Hotel in '78? CANDACE: When I was 8, my father took me to my first Comic-Con. He was not an overt comic junkie although he liked SciFi well enough, but I was, having been captivated by the Pini's ElfQuest comics, introduced to me by a boy of course. Wendy Pini was there. I still have my original Warp Graphics versions, plus two or more of each of the graphic novels that I now share with my 5 year old. I believe it was still called San Diego's West Coast Comic-Con at that time. ROB: Any other well-known comic writers and artists that you recall? CANDACE: There were others there that are now part of the iconic comic lexicon (say that five times fast) - Matt Groening and Boris Vallejo come to mind. Later, I remember Ray Bradbury and Douglas Adams - I think in the downtown San Diego convention center. Maybe 1983 or so.
ROB: It must have been overwhelming! CANDACE: Seeing as how I was only eight I was not old enough to really appreciate what it all really meant. ROB: How many other girls were there? CANDACE: My impressions are of being one of the few girls there either my age or even into the teens. This persisted for the next 8-9 years. There were no scantily clad "models" marketing their wares or even promoting films. That started much later. I am certain that I was missing out on a lot of the after hours screening events, knowing from later experiences that the films tended toward less mainstream and more risqué fare.
ROB: You mention how the event's changed, how bit it's become. The whole vibe of the show must have been completely different in those days. CANDACE: I remember lots of booths with just a couple of guys and their boxes of comic books. Golden and Silver Age comics were star attractions. There were lots of early Star Trek and Superman fans and even some early costume wearers. Some of the big comic retailers that have continued to stick it out over the years were there even then, Mile High and others.
ROB: What was the atmosphere like? Was it easy to just hang out? CANDACE: One thing I loved was that many artists would do custom work at the convention. You could see the work in process. It would then be donated to the convention and auctioned off. Though that tradition still continues to some degree, you had a much greater chance of seeing the work in progress and eventually even winning it at auction than you do today. I loved the flashing gorgeous neon signs of that old hotel and it's Sky Room restaurant. Being able to be see and talk to my heroes, awestruck and tongue-tied, without standing in huge lines - just feeling like part of the gang. I miss it.
ROB: When was the last time you went along? CANDACE: I am still a regular "con" attendee, lucky enough to obtain a free professional pass as my husband is an award-winning Pixar animator. I am responsible for introducing him to the Comic-Con as well in 1993. He used to push me to the front of the crowd to get freebies as women were still a minority at the show. Our then regular attendance started him on a path of taking a fine arts education and turning it into a more lucrative career of video games (Journeyman Project - I even got to voice a space station computer) and included the creation of a true 1998/1999 internet viral video, Alien Song - seen here: http://www.navone.org/HTML/AlienSongDownload.htm. When founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull saw it, he hired Victor. So in some ways, Comic-Con has shaped my life for more than 30 years. Now we go and battle our way through the crowds, hunting down our favorite artists and items. We cannot stand more than a day of the chaos. It is information overload at it's finest. But I'll always love it! |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2009 10:07 PM PST Attention, readers! If you don't vote for Boing Boing in Adweek's "blog of the decade" poll, Perez Hilton may win. Do your duty. |
Gris-Gris was the first record credited to Dr. John, and to most listeners he seemed to have dropped out of nowhere with his mystical R&B psychedelia and Mardi Gras Indian costumes. The album, however, was actually the culmination of about 15 years of professional experience, during which Dr. John -- born Mac Rebennack in New Orleans -- had absorbed the wealth of musical influences for which the Crescent City is famed. Gris-Gris's roots reach back well beyond the dawn of the twentieth century, even as the album took in cutting-edge influences such as 1960s progressive jazz, and pushed into territory that no popular musician had ever explored in quite the same fashion. 
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