The Latest from Boing Boing

Kick-Ass the graphic novel
Highlights from steampunk bazaar at White Mischief
Flickr attributor bookmarklet
Douglas Adams lecture
Portraits of attendees at London's steampunk White Mischief night
English drunkards of the early 20th century
Battlefield Earth screenwriter apologises
UK government's smoke-filled room legislative process
Mystery rock found in back yard
Deodorant ad from 1935 explains that you smell
Lazyweb: streamline Flickr attribution
UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail
Repeal the __ amendment!
SPIDERCAT

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 04:32 AM PDT

With the film adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.'s graphic novel Kick-Ass about to open in theaters, I picked up the book to see what it was all about. I'd seen the disturbing, high-intensity trailer back in December, and I wanted to read the story before I got to the movies. Having read it -- ploughing through it in a non-stop, intense hour -- I'm pretty psyched to see the flick!

Kick Ass is the story of Dave Lizewski, an average high-school student headed for nothing much in life, who decides that rather than aspiring to being a pop-star or a great athlete, he'll become a super-hero. Why not? So he orders a scuba wet-suit, gets a couple of batons, and sets to work fighting crime.

He doesn't fare so well. Almost immediately, he receives a near-crippling beat-down that hospitalizes him and and nearly bankrupts his hardworking single father. He swears off vigilantism, only to be lured back out of retirement by the appearance of a copycat ("The Red Mist"), another caped "hero" who scores several high-profile criminal empires and attains even greater fame than "Kick-Ass"(Lizewski's super alterego), eclipsing his MySpace page and his Google pagerank.

Quickly, Kick-Ass ends up in a near-terminal situation, only to be rescued by a ten-year-old girl ("Hit-Girl"), who slaughters the bad guys who're about to kill him, dispatching them with a ninja sword and a great deal of bravada. The homicidal pair vanish, leaving Kick-Ass feeling inadequate and worried.

But not for long -- quickly, Kick-Ass finds himself confronting the Red Mist, who turns out to be a megafan of his, and the two of them pair off as a super-duo.

The story rockets along -- it's essentially one long flashback, beginning with Lizewski tied to a chair by bad guys who're electrocuting his testicles -- and comes to an extremely satisfying conclusions. It's a neat and bloody commentary on the mythos of superheroism and vigilantism, and while the contrast between Hit-Girl's innocence and violence is an exploitative trick, it's also a very powerful one, that works to get you thinking about the nature of the "heroes" who fill our four-color dreams.

The end of the book identifies it as the first volume, but even so, it draws to a very neat conclusion that won't leave you feeling cheated.

Kick-Ass

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Highlights from steampunk bazaar at White Mischief

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 04:53 AM PDT

The steampunk maker bazaar at this weekend's White Mischief Great Exposition night at London's Scala boasted a raft of supremely talented vendors and exhibitors. In addition to the publishers of Steampunk Magazine, four of my favourites were:

Brute Force Studios who stole my heart with a brooch made from an ornate, silver-chased telegraph key (alas, not for sale, nor on the website!), and who make this amazing clockwork arm-piece.

The Clockwork Quartet (who performed a number of improbable and wonderful acts through the evening), who were selling their Creative Commons-licensed single in a beautiful, embossed package that features a fold-out map. A fine artifact easily worth the £10 they were charging (and the music's rocking, too -- haunting and sweet). They were also selling delicious hand-made truffles (Earl Grey or paprika) at the absurdly low price of 50p (!).

Herr Doktor, a model-maker and artist in real life, exhibited a fantastic range of steampunk gubbins. As a raygun collector, I was drawn to his firearms, which are not for sale (he only takes commissions -- something I made sure to point out to Alice, given that my birthday's a scant four months away!).

Capt. Shipton Bellinger brought a fine selection of ornate USB keys, bound in oak, with small, functional pistons and light-up gauges. The big problem with beautiful USB sticks is that the capacity grows so quickly that the device is obsolete before it's worn out. I suggested to the Captain that he try selling empty housings with microUSB slots, where users could insert their own memory.

Flickr attributor bookmarklet

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 02:38 AM PDT

In response to this morning's lazyweb request, BB reader Cory (no relation) was kind enough to whip up this bookmarklet that makes it easy to attribute Creative Commons-licensed images from Flickr. Drag the bookmarklet to your browserbar, then click it when you're on a Flickr CC image page, and it'll create an alert with the attribution text, like this:

(Image: A Hoot, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from doug88888's photostream)

This is going to save me a buttload of typing. Thanks a million, Cory!

Douglas Adams lecture

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 11:50 PM PDT

Her's an 80-minute Douglas Adams lecture entitled "Parrots, the universe and everything from the University of California in 2001.

Douglas Adams: Parrots, the universe and everything (Thanks, Arkizzle!)

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Portraits of attendees at London's steampunk White Mischief night

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 11:45 PM PDT

If you missed the White Mischief Great Exposition at the Scala in King's Cross, London, on Saturday, you missed a hell of a steampunk party -- live music and variety acts, a bazaar selling all manner of homebrew steampunkinalia, and a crowd of thousands dressed to the nines in steampunk finery.

Photographer NK Guy was on-hand shooting portraits of the attendees, and he's already uploaded his best shots. The costumes were stupendous, and here's the proof.

White Mischief

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English drunkards of the early 20th century

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 11:35 PM PDT

Here's a set of mugshots of "habitual drunkards" scooped up in Birmingham's enforcement of the 1902 Licensing Act. Their images were distributed to pub owners along with the instruction not to sell them alcohol. The accompanying bust-cards enumerate their professions and crimes -- "woodchopper/prostitute," "polisher/prostitute," "tube drawer" and "grease merchant" all feature.

Bizarrely, Ancestry.co.uk asserts a copyright over these public domain images taken by the police over a hundred years ago.

Binge Britain 1904: The rogues' gallery that shows war on booze is nothing new

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Battlefield Earth screenwriter apologises

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 11:20 PM PDT

On the occasion of his Razzie prize for worst screenplay ever, Battlefield Earth screenwriter JD Shapiro, explains how he came to write one of cinema's great and foetid turds.

Then I got another batch of notes. I thought it was a joke. They changed the entire tone. I knew these notes would kill the movie. The notes wanted me to lose key scenes, add ridiculous scenes, take out some of the key characters. I asked Mike where they came from. He said, "From us." But when I pressed him, he said, "From John [Travolta]'s camp, but we agree with them."
I refused to incorporate the notes into the script and was fired.
I HAVE no idea why they wanted to go in this new direction, but here's what I heard from someone in John's camp: Out of all the books L. Ron wrote, this was the one the church founder wanted most to become a movie. He wrote extensive notes on how the movie should be made.
Many people called it a Scientology movie. It wasn't when I wrote it, and I don't feel it was in the final product. Yes, writers put their beliefs into a story. Sometimes it's subtle (I guess L. Ron had something against the color purple, I have no idea why), sometimes not so subtle (L. Ron hated psychiatry and psychologists, thus the reason, and I'm just guessing here, that the bad aliens were called "Psychlos").
The only time I saw the movie was at the premiere, which was one too many times.

I penned the suckiest movie ever - sorry! (via /.)

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UK government's smoke-filled room legislative process

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:45 PM PDT

With an election looming in the UK, the Labour government is making ready to abuse the obscure "wash-up" procedure to ram through great whacks of legislation without democratic scrutiny. In "wash-up," government is able to pass legislation without full parliamentary debate, moving the discussion to a smoke-filled room where party whips, business managers, and government officials hammer out the law. The proceedings are kept secret and are especially vulnerable to being manipulated by lobbyists (like the British Phonographic Institute, which is hoping to get the power to choose who is allowed to use the Internet, and which wrote a web-censorship law that it got inserted by the Lords).

And the losers? For those of us who believe that we cannot have a real democracy without electoral reform, the alarm bells are sounding far beyond Westminster. A possible casualty of the wash-up is the proposal to hold a referendum on the alternative vote - a system that allows the voters to list the candidates in order of preference, and reflects their choices much more fairly than first past the post. The amended constitutional renewal and governance bill, having received substantial support in both the Lords and the Commons, may yet be scuppered by the Conservatives in the smoke-filled room. Why the Tories favour a voting system that disadvantages them, especially in Scotland, is one of the abiding mysteries of politics. But they do. And AV is looking vulnerable.
Something that politicians tend to lose sight of is the old-fashioned notion that they are servants of the people. They enjoy their privileges but too easily forget that it isn't their parliament, it's ours. So we, their employers, have a right to know what they are up to, not only when jousting with each other in public, but in the deals that they make behind closed doors. We take for granted the presence of TV in the main debates and the select committees. We are sometimes appalled by what we see, but at least we see it. And we can draw our own conclusions from the empty benches which are such a conspicuous feature of the place, for most of the day, on the BBC's Parliament channel. In most of my time as an MP I rarely spoke to an audience of more than a dozen of the honourable members.

Parliament's wash-up's a stitch-up (Thanks, Ian!)

(Image: His Station and Four Aces, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge/Wikimedia)

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LibDem MPs won't fight for debate on Digital Economy Bill - Boing ...

Mystery rock found in back yard

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:42 PM PDT

Alan Graham says:

I was digging holes in the yard to plant bamboo when I hit something very hard and big. My two foot wide hole became four feet just to get it out. About the size of a basketball, but was almost impossible to lift. I sprayed it down with water and found some rust colors and assumed it had some iron in it. Magnet proved that assumption, but I was curious as to what type of rock this might be as it has all sorts of interesting markings as well.
BTW...I found another rock [shown above], I'm assuming a part of this one, next to it and included photos of it as well.

Mystery rock found in back yard

Deodorant ad from 1935 explains that you smell

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:31 PM PDT

From the dawn of deorodant in 1935, this informative ad explaining that U STINK (click link below for the whole thing). Note the gleeful touting of technology to "gently close the pores" and the need to define the term "deodorant."

9 out of 10 girls should make this 'Armhole Odor' test

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Lazyweb: streamline Flickr attribution

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 02:39 AM PDT

Hey, Lazyweb! Here's a request for you: a bookmarklet for Firefox that I can click when I'm on a Flickr page bearing a Creative Commons image, which then dumps this text to my clipboard:

(<i>Image: <a href="$LINK_TO_FLICKR_PAGE">$TITLE</a>, a Creative Commons $LICENSE_NAME image from $FLICKR_USER_NAME's photostream</i>)

Update: Solved! -- thanks, Cory!

UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:20 PM PDT

As Britain heads for the next general election, the Labour government is rushing through a new surveillance law that gives the customs office the right to open your mail without you present, replacing the old system that only allowed the government to read your mail after notifying you, giving you a chance to appeal, and only then could they open it, with you present.

Currently postal workers have the right to intercept suspicious letters and packages and pass them to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and then at an agreed moment the item is opened in front of the addressee. The change in the law will mean that HMRC will be able to open whatever it likes without the addressee being present or being made aware of the interception.
As usual, the government and HMRC public relations people underplay the wide-ranging and dangerous nature of this proposal by insisting that the new measure is simply designed to deal with the problem of tobacco smuggling. But the change, disclosed in a document published with the budget, means that HMRC will be able to trawl through private mail pretty much at will.

Intercepting mail is worthy of the Stasi

(Image: Royal Mail, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Morgaine's photostream)

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Repeal the __ amendment!

Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:11 PM PDT

Michi put together this handy chart showing the relative prevalence on the web of the phrase "repeal the __ amendment" for all amendments to 27. Note that this doesn't necessarily represent popular sentiment against the amendments (for example, "Senator Dingleberry wants to repeal the second amendment, and that's why we've gotta fight to elect Senator Yosemite Sam!").

Repeal the nth amendment (via Making Light)

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