The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Coming to New York Public Library this morning at 10AM
- Pinkwater's ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to Neddiad and Yggyssey
- Bombardier beetle: Up close, in action
- A perfect marvel of vacuous malice
- 1938 Graham: the sharknose automobile
- Medical advice for head-bangers
- RIT's Future of Reading Conference, June 9-12, Rochester, NY
- Canada's own PATRIOT Act
- Image: Katamari's Prince, bronz'd
- Travel, before it was awful
- Video of pretty jellyfish
- Facebook of the Dead
- Automotive journalist's son crashes $180,000 test car
- Organized crime museum to open in Vegas in 2011
- Crayons made from delicious foods
- Science fiction lunch boxes
- Chramer, gip die varwe mir! Germans and Colors
- Boy falls off escalator in Turkey
- Did methane hydrates cause Deepwater Horizon explosion?
- Man infected with computer virus
- Gulf oil spill: Be prepared for the worst
- Tom the Dancing Bug: Lucky Ducky in "Slick Deal"
- Airplane! side by side with original 50s flick
- Image: Lost in 8 Bits
- Funny photo-essay on how things are against us
- Zombie meat beef jerkey
- Hot Pocket Ingredients poster in Boing Boing Bazaar
| Coming to New York Public Library this morning at 10AM Posted: 27 May 2010 04:30 AM PDT Hey New Yorkers, aged 12-18! I'm headed to the New York Public Library Grand Central Branch this morning at 10AM for a reading, Q&A and signing -- hope to see you there! Reminder: I'll also be at powerhouse Books tonight at 730PM, and McNally Jackson tomorrow at 7PM. |
| Pinkwater's ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to Neddiad and Yggyssey Posted: 27 May 2010 03:54 AM PDT  Daniel Pinkwater's Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl is the sequel to his Neddiad (a gonzo take on the Iliad starring Neddie, a boy who moves to 1950s Los Angeles, eats in the Brown Derby, attends military school, befriends shamans, eats fried foods, and saves the world from the Elder Gods) and Ygyssey (The Odyssey, starring a tomboyish legacy of a rootin-tootin' silent film cowboy who travels to a parallel dimension, enervates a witch, discovers the secret revels of Los Angeles's ghosts, is put-off by hippie food and fells a corrupt dictatorship). The eponymous Cat-Whiskered Girl is Big Audrey, whom Yggy met in the parallel dimension/underworld where the climax of The Ygyssey takes place. Big Audrey returns to LA with Yggy and the gang, works in a donut store, but finds herself lured away on a vision quest with Marlon Brando, who drives her to Poughkeepsie in a convertible stuffed with health food and chocolate cakes. Once in Poughkeepsie, Audrey ends up working in a UFO-nut bookstore, and befriends many local characters, including the crazy people from the sanatorium who visit on day-passes. It's these crazy people who put Audrey on the trail of the inexplicable Wednesday-night UFOs that land outside the big stone barn where the best apple fritters in the galaxy are prepared by the proprietress, Clarinda Quakenboss. This (naturally) leads them to Chicken Nancy, the local wise-woman, who is so old she remembers when the disappearing house behind the stone barn was occupied by local Dutch aristos, who made their fortune selling the Van Vreemdeling Kwispedoor, a bestselling spittoon (she also remembers when Abe Lincoln invented the idea of putting cream cheese and lox on bagels). Audrey and her crazy pal Molly (who is part Dutch leprechaun) are set on a quest by Chicken Nancy, through which they discover their hidden talents (Molly, for example can summon forth the fierce bloodthirsty demons within every Christmas tree). They are assisted by a Pinkwaterian cast of characters, such as Harold, a tiny, well-spoken giant with a degree in Classical Accountancy from Vassar. Before long, they're dimension-hopping again, beset by corrupt coppers, mysterious cherubs, and a truly awful secret society. Daniel Pinkwater is the best, weirdest, most inspiring writer in the field today. Watching him do bizarro is like watching Fred Astaire dance: jaw-dropping magic that appears effortless and natural. Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl is full of places I want to go, secret societies I want to join, people I want to meet, and fried foods I want to gorge upon. This book will make you a very happy mutant indeed. Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (Previous volumes: The Neddiad, The Yggyssey)
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| Bombardier beetle: Up close, in action Posted: 26 May 2010 08:20 PM PDT This is a great, clear video showing the defense mechanism of a wonderful, little creature. The bombardier beetle is a catch-all name for 500-odd related species of beetle that have a nifty, chemical-warfare defense mechanism built into their rear ends. Basically, the beetles can make their own hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, store it in their abdomens and, when threatened, mix the two chemicals to create a potent, heat-generating reaction that forces a boiling, vile-smelling liquid out of the beetle —and into the face of whatever was bothering it. I was first introduced to the bombardier beetle in high school biology class. See, I went to fundamentalist Baptist high school, and the bombardier beetle is often trotted out as an example of something so complex, that it couldn't have possibly evolved. (I was also given the impression that this was just one, single type of beetle, rather than an array of varying, related beetles that produce and expel chemicals in slightly different ways. But that's not really the worst of the misleading and inaccurate things I learned in that biology class. Textbooks from Bob Jones University Press. I wish now that I still had the thing to scan pages.) Anyway, I was told that "evolutionists" had no answer for how the bombardier beetle could have evolved. Naturally, that turns out to be bunk. As does much of what I was taught about how the beetle works. TalkOrigins explains the reality of both pretty well. With references! More fascinating, to me anyway, is the way the bombardier beetle actually fits with the predictions made by evolutionary theory:
Bombardier beetles on Wikipedia |
| A perfect marvel of vacuous malice Posted: 26 May 2010 07:34 PM PDT  More scenes from a book-tour. Today I had the extreme pleasure and honor of being one of three authors who presented at the Book Expo America Children's Book and Author Breakfast, along with Mitali Perkins and Richard Peck. The session was chaired by Sarah Ferguson, the British Royal who, in addition to writing kids' books, was also recently the center of a pay-for-influence scandal broken by a British tabloid. Afterwards, we all went over to the trade-show floor to sign books, and, as you might expect, Ferguson was mobbed by aggressive paparazzi. From my vantage point, it looked like they were being incredibly obnoxious, and the enterprising gentleman pictured here actually came over, barged into the queue for my signing, and stuck his telephoto lens between me and the person whose book I was signing so he could get pics of Fergie. When I told him that this was obnoxious, he was affronted and argumentative. I know that being jerky and shameless go with the territory when we're talking about paps, but just look at the shit-eating grin on display here. It is truly a marvel of perfect vacuous malice. Or, as they say in the New Yorker: "Christ, what an asshole." Luckily, that was the only sour note in an otherwise brilliant day, during which I met vast numbers of Boing Boing readers. Many thanks to all of you who came up and introduced yourselves! I hope to see more of you at my remaining NYC stops: powerhouse Books, (May 27, 7:30PM) and McNally Jackson (May 28, 7PM). Next up: Toronto, where I'll be at the Merril Collection on June 4. |
| 1938 Graham: the sharknose automobile Posted: 26 May 2010 07:24 PM PDT  I'm at a loss to explain why every car made doesn't look exactly like this. |
| Medical advice for head-bangers Posted: 26 May 2010 07:23 PM PDT The British Medical Journal investigates the health risks from head-banging and recommends protective gear and "adult-oriented rock": Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass (via JWZ) (Image: Headbanging without the face, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jessebikman's photostream) |
| RIT's Future of Reading Conference, June 9-12, Rochester, NY Posted: 26 May 2010 07:19 PM PDT Liz Lawley writes to tell us about the Future of Reading Conference at RIT: "This three-day symposium at RIT June 9-12, 2010 will be organized around a central question: How will reading change in the next decade? With a target audience of 300-500 participants, the conference will feature provocative and challenging presentations by experts in writing systems, content creation, vision and cognition, typography, visual media, and display technology. Speakers at this conference include Margaret Atwood, Chris Anderson, and Massimo Vignelli. Should be a very cool event, with lots of discussion surrounding the technologies of books and reading." RIT Future of Reading Conference (Thanks, Liz! |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 07:18 PM PDT Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian government quietly introduced its own Patriot Act yesterday, with privacy law reforms that are marketed as improving the current law but represent a major step backward. The bill would block organizations for disclosing disclosures to law enforcement to the affected individuals and it would give businesses broad new rights over workplace privacy. "In return, there is a new security breach disclosure provision, but the requirements are very weak when compared with similar laws found elsewhere. In fact, with no penalties for failure to notify security breaches, the provisions may do more harm than good since Canadians will expect to receive notifications in the event of a breach, but companies may err on the side of not notifying (given the very high threshold discussed below) safe in the knowledge that there are no financial penalties for failing to do so." C-29: The Anti-Privacy Privacy Bill
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| Image: Katamari's Prince, bronz'd Posted: 26 May 2010 01:23 PM PDT  Nine pounds and eight inches of an amazing, everlasting version of Katamari Damacy's Prince carrying the weight of his world, created as Mark 'everfalling' Ellis's Academy of Art University Sculpture 1 class project. See more pictures of the process here. |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 01:14 PM PDT  The biggest airlines are imposing "peak travel surcharges" this summer. In other words, they're going to raise fees without admitting they're raising fees: Hey, it's not a $30 price hike. It's a surcharge! This comes on the heels of checked-baggage fees, blanket fees, extra fees for window and aisle seats, and "snack packs" priced at exorbitant markups. Hotels in Las Vegas and elsewhere, meanwhile, are imposing "resort fees" for the use of facilities (in other words, raising room rates without admitting they're raising room rates). The chiseling dishonesty of these tactics rankles, and every one feels like another nail in the coffin of travel as something liberating and pleasurable. And in that light, Taschen's new clip book 20th-Century Travel: 100 Years of Globe-Trotting Ads just feels sad. Who really wants to be reminded that, as Flavorwire puts it, there was a time in recent memory "when Amtrak and even Greyhound were classy, airplanes had lounges, and Conrad Hilton wanted to build a hotel on the moon"? Who wants to dive into the lavish design and vivid four-color art of a time when travel was an adventure, something average people looked forward to all year long, something memories were made of? Not me. I'll just be here in my middle seat, thanks, clutching my $12 pillow and crying. (Illustration via TravelHistory.org) |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 01:12 PM PDT QUEST on KQED Public Media has a nice video about jellyfish (and jelly kin) research. Visit the site for a high-res video. They are otherworldly creatures that glow in the dark, without brains or bones, some more than 100 feet long. And they live just off California's coast. Join two top marine biologists who have devoted their careers to unlocking the mysteries of jellyfish and alien-like siphonophores.Amazing Jellies |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 01:00 PM PDT |
| Automotive journalist's son crashes $180,000 test car Posted: 26 May 2010 12:45 PM PDT Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail wrote a piece about how his teenage son drove a $180,000 test Porsche through the garage door, causing $11,000 damage to the vehicle. Cheney's article includes other humorous stories of kids wreaking havoc: Globe journalist's son crashes $180,000 Porsche (Thanks, Alan!) |
| Organized crime museum to open in Vegas in 2011 Posted: 26 May 2010 11:01 AM PDT  A 41,000 square foot space in downtown Las Vegas will be transformed into a museum of organized crime and law enforcement. The museum presents a bold and authentic view of organized crime's impact on Las Vegas history and its unique imprint on America and the world. The museum presents the real stories and actual events of mob history via interactive and engaging exhibits that reveal all sides of the story about the role of organized crime in the U.S. The Mob Museum offers multiple perspectives and provides a contemporary, engaging, challenging and educational experience.It opens in 2011. |
| Crayons made from delicious foods Posted: 26 May 2010 10:53 AM PDT |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 10:25 AM PDT |
| Chramer, gip die varwe mir! Germans and Colors Posted: 25 May 2010 11:57 PM PDT
Chramer, gip die varwe mir (Shopkeeper, give me color!) is a line from a drinking song in the Carmina Burana, a medieval collection of songs and poems in Old Latin and Middle High German. The 'color' requested is rouge to redden the face of a young working woman in order to make her more appealing to the boys. This 'red' means life, vitality, strength, and in the Middle Ages being able to make it through the next winter was particularly attractive. Part of my research into Computer Assisted Language learning deals with the effects that colors have on people and how these difference among cultures can be used to assist in language learning. My own passion lies in the German speaking world and in reflection on my own language learning experiences, I started thinking about color difference in German. My awesome wife Christy recently gave me an imported Bavarian folding table, aka Bierbank, Fest oder Bierzeltgarnitur for our anniversary. Besides being TÜV engineered to carry a load of twelve adults standing and jumping on the table during a bit of German Gaudi fun, the particular brand of Orange struck me. I was reminded of the specific beer garden tables I had seen in Munich on my first trip there. Upon investigation, the color is labeled "Löwenbräu Orange", or "Traditional Orange" which begs the question, why? Could it be that the orange color was the most readily available in Southern Germany and therefore defined as traditional, or does the normally pale Munich Helles look orange in the summer light of a Biergarten?
This brings me to the issue of how colors vary in the German speaking world and how the language reflects this variance. Having spent a great deal of time in the German speaking world as a student I was always taken by small differences in things that I apparently took for granted. I remember once getting scrambled eggs once and thinking, "Wow, they are orange!" Although the word for "yolk" itself is "Eigelb" (literally egg-yellow), it has a distinct orange tone in my view. I have heard that is due to the feed in Germany or perhaps our yellow yolks are due to the inorganic nature of American egg farming. In any event, I know that many US Americans remark on this and wonder if the yolk is in some way tainted. When we look at foods, the color does matter and in the US and I have heard in the UK, a yellow yolk is the standard. In Germany, they prefer their yolks orange.
So do Germans indeed see the world differently? You can insert your joke of choice now, but there are some distinct variances in how colors and their linguistic labels are different. To stay with food, one finds that there are relatively few foods in English that have 'blue' in word except the obvious Blueberries. Is it that the color itself is an appetite suppressant, or do we label items that border on the red / blue hues more often red than purple or blue? In Germany, particularly in the south German speaking world, it looks like they don't have this problem as there are several examples of this in blue onions (blaue Zwiebeln), blue cabbage (Blaukraut), and blue grapes (blaue Weintrauben).
It should be noted that these are mostly regional differences in German, as northern Germans, much like the English speaking world, label these 'blue' foods as red. In Northern Germany, the Blaukraut, becomes Rotkohl. It makes me wonder if our red onions are truly red. Words, impacted by the visual, often vary at the crossroads between colors. This is evident in English as well as in German. If you are interested to find out where 'red' ends and 'blue' begins, check out the Color Label Explorer.
Not everything that is labeled with a color has to do with what you see, however. "White" beer, otherwise known as Wheat beer, Hefe-Weizen, Weissbier, Witbier, etc. is a fine, delicious example. The term "White" comes from the brewing process when the wort boils to a point when the top foam becomes a particular 'white' color. This is when the brewing takes on another stage, and the beer has 'whitened'. In Berlin, however, there are two varieties of this "Weisse Bier": Red White beer and Green White beer. The color is achieved through Raspberry and Woodruff syrup additions.
These culturally based color perceptions lead to interesting linguistic differences between English and German, two closely related languages. Beyond the visual, there are associated idiomatic expressions that highlight slight perceptual differences such as the English bruised "Black eye" that is in German a "Blue Eye-blaues Auge". To be "blue" in English is to be a bit sad, while in German it means to be intoxicated (blau sein). "Green with envy" is "Yellow with envy -Gelb vor Neid" in German. Perhaps my favorite old-time example is the term the "Black arts" or "die Schwarze Kunst." While in English you may be in league with the devil, in German you are in league with Mr. Gutenberg. The black arts are the act of being a "Gutenberg fanboy" (ein Jünger Gutenbergs) means you are a book printer, presumably covered in the ink of your trade.
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| Boy falls off escalator in Turkey Posted: 26 May 2010 10:06 AM PDT In this terrifying video, a four year old boy playfully climbs up the outside of a mall escalator and falls from a height of about 15 feet. A shopkeeper was passing by and caught him. The kid was apparently visiting the mall with his dad — where the heck was he when this happened? |
| Did methane hydrates cause Deepwater Horizon explosion? Posted: 26 May 2010 04:17 PM PDT  Last fall, I told you about methane hydrates—solid, ice-like lumps that form when molecules of methane are encased in a tasty candy shell of water molecules, kept at low temperatures and under high pressure. These deposits are common in the Gulf of Mexico, and they're now playing a role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The formation of methane hydrate crystals was responsible for dooming efforts to cap the broken, bleeding well with a containment dome. And there's some speculation that methane hydrates might have caused the blast that touched off the whole disaster. Remember, the hydrates are essentially compressed gas. And while they can sit, stable and safe, at the bottom of the ocean, changes in temperature or pressure can quickly launch an explosive breakdown. While hydrates have been considered as a source of energy, themselves, they're a big concern for oil drilling in deep waters where the hydrates can form fast enough that you can watch them plug up a test tube in less than 10 minutes. The Deepwater Horizon was drilling in a region known for methane hydrate formation—less than 20 miles from a similar site where researchers are studying methane hydrates. An expert with access to BP's internal documents told Science that there are signs the Deepwater Horizon was having problem with hydrates before the deadly explosion happened.
Science: Did Pesky Hydrates Trigger the Blowout? Longer analysis explaining the evidence in-depth at The Guardian Image taken by Ian MacDonald, via Samantha Joye. |
| Man infected with computer virus Posted: 26 May 2010 09:49 AM PDT In the future, we could all become walking computer viruses, according to Reading scientist Mark Gasson. Gasson is supposedly the first human being to be infected with a computer virus. |
| Gulf oil spill: Be prepared for the worst Posted: 26 May 2010 09:09 AM PDT  Climate Progress makes a point that I've been thinking a lot about lately...
Even best-case scenario, only a small percentage of the oil could be cleaned up—and we're long past best case. I'm on to wondering about what happens if we can't cap the well at all. National Geographic offers a partial answer: The well could pump out oil for years, and the Gulf of Mexico would be left with the kind of devastation still seen in the Persian Gulf where the Iraqi army intentionally dumped some 336 million gallons during the 1991 Gulf War.
There is no easy fix. The problem isn't that BP should have run their business without any accidents, the problem is that they seem to have had no backup plan for how to stop an accident that went beyond "normal". There is no technology that's proven to cap or even mostly clean up spills of this magnitude. That's the reality we're facing, and it isn't pretty. |
| Tom the Dancing Bug: Lucky Ducky in "Slick Deal" Posted: 26 May 2010 09:07 AM PDT 
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| Airplane! side by side with original 50s flick Posted: 26 May 2010 09:12 AM PDT Neatorama points us to an interesting fact about the movie Airplane! — it's essentially a remake of a 50s flick called Zero Hour!. You can see some side by side comparisons in the video above. |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 08:41 AM PDT  Adam 'Hot Meteor' Campbell -- the designer behind the vintage Dharma ads and NES boxart -- posts this image that's looking more and more suspiciously like an actual playable 8-bit Lost game, complete with cartridge, giving all now-aimless fans of the show new hope for more fictional nostalgia. |
| Funny photo-essay on how things are against us Posted: 26 May 2010 08:28 AM PDT  I'm not sure if Christoph Niemann knows about the theory of Resistentialism (in a nutshell: inanimate objects conspire to make our lives difficult), but he nails it in this funny photo-essay in The New York Times about how things are against us. It's called The Haunted Household. (Related: the Things Are Against Us blog, where I feature some of my favorite examples of Resistentialism.) |
| Posted: 26 May 2010 08:25 AM PDT  You can now buy dried zombie meat at your local convenience store in Japan. The packaging claims it contains blue flesh aged to perfection in the graveyard. via Pink Tentacle |
| Hot Pocket Ingredients poster in Boing Boing Bazaar Posted: 17 May 2010 02:15 PM PDT  This Hot Pocket Ingredients poster is $30 in the Makers Market / Boing Boing Bazaar. A poster detailing every ingredient in a Ham & Cheese Hot Pocket. A typographic beauty of food chemicals! Horrify your friends and yourself!Hot Pocket Ingredients Poster |
Main outcome measures: Head Injury Criterion and Neck Injury Criterion were derived for head banging styles and both popular heavy metal songs and easy listening music controls. 
As the dust settled, my wife and I confronted the parenting issues that attended the disaster. What was the appropriate punishment for a boy who trashes a car worth $180,000? Friends were flooding us with stories of costly child screw-ups – like the son who flushed an action figure down a toilet, creating a deluge that caused more than $100,000 damage to their house. A colleague told me how she damaged her parent's brand-new van – she got distracted and rear-ended a truck filled with huge stones (driven by two women who were starting a rock garden project.) 
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