The Latest from Boing Boing

Groovy sloppy joes ad
Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things
Bakka-Phoenix, Toronto's science fiction bookstore, is moving
In Praise of Copying, CC-licensed book from Harvard Uni Press
Music video made from re-cut public domain science fiction B-movie

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 10:53 PM PDT

This Libby's Sloppy Joe commercial makes me yearn for the days when all you needed to rock out was a can of beans and a soft roll.

Yes, I'm sure this was a good idea.

Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 10:15 AM PDT

A splendid new Tumblog of Greatness dedicated to MUSLIMS DRESSED IN THEIR GARBS.

Former NPR analyst Juan Williams, among other ignorant people, has an irrational fear of Muslims, and thinks you can identify them based on what they look like. Here I will post pictures of Muslims wearing all sorts of things in an attempt to refute that there is such a thing as "Muslim garb" or a Muslim look.

Above: "Like the king of Jordan, actor Alexander Siddig is also fond of Muslim Star Trek garb."

Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things.
(via Peter Kirn)

Bakka-Phoenix, Toronto's science fiction bookstore, is moving

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 09:37 AM PDT

Bakka-Phoenix, Toronto's wonderful, venerable science fiction bookstore (and my former employer!) is moving from its Queen Street West location. Manager Chris Szego sez, "Tuesday evening, October 26th, we're going to close the doors for a few days, so we can pack up the store. On Saturday October 30th, we'll move from Queen Street into our new location at 84 Harbord (just west of Spadina, on the north side of Harbord). The plan is to reopen in our new digs on Wednesday November 3rd. Our phone, fax, and email will remain the same (though if our last move is any indication, reception may be spotty at first). Since we're going to be off-line for a bit, we wanted to throw out a first alert that on Saturday November 20th, AT 3:00 p.m. we will launch KILLER OF MEN, Christian Cameron's newest book. It'll be the first event in our new place. You should come!"

In Praise of Copying, CC-licensed book from Harvard Uni Press

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 09:34 AM PDT

Pidg sez, "Harvard University Press have released author Marcus Boon's new book, In Praise of Copying, under a Creative Commons license - and decided to release the full text as a free PDF."

"Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn't especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It's recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.
Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more "at hand" something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out - on this webpage and elsewhere." --Marcus Boon

In Praise of Copying

Download PDF

(Thanks, Pidg, via Submitterator)

Music video made from re-cut public domain science fiction B-movie

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 09:29 AM PDT

Noah from the Skull-a-Day project sez, " I thought you would enjoy this video I made for my new project, League of Space Pirates. It's a track from our recently released digital Hypertrophy EP and the video was made entirely with footage of the public domain film Assignment Outer Space which I got from Archive.org. I was interested in seeing if I could find enough footage within the film to carve out a new totally different story that related to the song."

League of Space Pirates - Constant Reminder (Thanks, Noah!)