The Latest from Boing Boing

London police brutally kettle children marching for education
Escaped mental patient straitjacket combat game
3D printed gifts
Crap Hound #5 Kickstarter project: "Hands, Hearts & Eyes (3rd ed.)"
$1.2M accordioning brass musical watch
TSA on Twitter. What could go wrong?
Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson: a remembrance from Chris and Cosey
A Thanksgiving Prayer, from William S. Burroughs
Turkeybot
TSA MadCivLibs
Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community -- the book!
Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?
Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil: 1955-2010

London police brutally kettle children marching for education

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 10:19 PM PST

Writing in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny documents the brutal, savage treatment dealt to the London demonstrators who marched against cuts to education and found themselves "kettled" (detained without arrest, toilet, shelter, or charge) for eight hours in freezing weather; many of those kettled were children and young teens, as well as pregnant women.

The chant goes up: "what do we want? The right to protest!" At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they can't get through. Then they all seem to get some sort of signal, because suddenly the polite copper in front of me is screaming in my face, shoving me hard in the back of the head, raising his baton, and the protesters around me are yelling and running back. Some of them have started to shake down a set of iron railings to get out, and the cops storm forward, pushing us right through those railings, leaving twenty of us sprawling in the rubble of road works with cracked knees. When they realised that they are trapped, the young protesters panic. The crush of bodies is suddenly painful - my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son - and as I watch the second line of police advance, with horses following behind them, as I watch a surge of teenagers carrying a rack of iron railings towards the riot guard and howling to be released, I realise they're not going to stop, and the monkey instinct kicks in. I scramble up a set of traffic lights, just in time to see a member of the Metropolitan police grab a young protester by the neck and hurl him back into the crowd...
As darkness falls and we realise we're not going anywhere, the protesters start to light fires to keep warm. First, they burn their placards, the words 'rich parents for all!' going up in flames, with a speed and efficiency gleaned from recent CV-boosting outdoor camping activities. Then, as the temperature drops below freezing, they start looking for anything else to burn, notebooks and snack wrappers - although one young man in an anarchist scarf steps in to stop me tossing an awful historical novel onto the pyre. "You can't burn books," he says, "we're not Nazis."

Inside the Whitehall kettle (via Reddit)

(Image: London Protest 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from selena_sheridan's photostream)

Escaped mental patient straitjacket combat game

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 10:11 PM PST

Mowdown is a cute little Flash game where you play an escaped mental patient in the creepy dungeon of a mental institution, and you flail the long, flapping arms of your straitjacket to sent laundry tubs careening into sadistic fetish nurses and thuggish interns.

Mowdown (via Super Punch)

3D printed gifts

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 10:04 PM PST

Shapeways, the 3D print-on-demand shop, has his and hers holiday gift guides sporting a wide variety of 3D printed desiderata in polymers and metals, like these Klein bottles from Bathsheba.

Crap Hound #5 Kickstarter project: "Hands, Hearts & Eyes (3rd ed.)"

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 09:51 PM PST

Chloe from Portland's Reading Frenzy sez, "Help us Kickstart Crap Hound #5: Hands, Hearts & Eyes (3rd ed.) into existence! Crap Hound is an astounding compendium of line art collected from various vintage and obscure sources, artfully arranged around a variety of themes. A great resource for artists, crafters, and designers, Hands, Hearts & Eyes is our most coveted issue yet! This time around in addition to the zine, we're offering the 1st ever Crap Hound t-shirt, three brand new prints, a bonus digital package and more as rewards for your support."

Crap Hound No. 5: Hands, Hearts & Eyes, 3rd Edition! (Thanks, Chloe, via Submitterator!)

$1.2M accordioning brass musical watch

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 11:14 PM PST

Manufacture Royale's Opera $1.2 million tourbillon watch accordions open to create a resonating chamber for its little repeaters -- the minute hand is in C#, the hour is in A: "The watch case itself is 50mm wide done in 18k rose and gray gold. It has three sapphire crystals and 60 pieces in its construction. Everything about this watch is crazy. It is weird and wonderful. Ugly and beautiful. A novelty for true collectors, only 12 of these watches will be made - making way for other future Manufacture Royal watches. I really do appreciate the audacity of the men behind this watch and brand. There is a hefty amount of silliness here. They make little attempt to hide the fact that this is one eternally ostentatious toy. The watch comes in a veneered wooden box that is said to be a reproduction of the Bastille Opera House in Paris. In case you didn't detect it yet, the French are behind this timepiece."

Manufacture Royale Opera Time-Piece Watch (Thanks, Ariel!)

TSA on Twitter. What could go wrong?

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 08:39 PM PST

Imagine a teenager's text message chats, garnished with Bob Hope-esque jokes about terrorism. Now behold the TSA's freakishly misguided twitterings.

Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson: a remembrance from Chris and Cosey

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 02:13 PM PST

(Photo: X-TG 2010, photographed on 05-11-2010, "Our last official photo together," says Chris Carter. Photo by Paul Smith)

Early this morning came sad news that one of the great pioneers in electronic music has died: Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson.

Longtime friend and collaborator Chris Carter now shares this remembrance.

Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson
27th February 1955 - 24th November 2010
Peter Christopherson, affectionately known as Sleazy, died peacefully in his sleep on the 24th of November at his home in Bangkok, Thailand.
The music and art world has lost a great talent whose unique approach ignored the conventions of the day and often challenged the status quo.
Sleazy's playful and inspiring creativity saw him pushing boundaries as a musician, video director and designer throughout his life. He had recently returned to Thailand from Europe, where he had played a short but spectacular series of live shows as a member of Throbbing Gristle and in the newly formed trio X-TG with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter.
Sleazy's visual art career included work as a member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis, creating iconic record sleeve artwork in the 1970s for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and, later, Factory Records. He took the first promo photographs of the Sex Pistols, created a highly controversial window display for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothing shop, SEX, and went on to design the logo of the hugely popular fashion company, BOY. In 1976 Sleazy met Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Genesis P-Orridge and together they formed electronic music provocateurs Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, creating one of the first independent record labels of the era and laying the foundation for a new genre of music. The band was infamously described in the Daily Mail by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as "the wreckers of civilisation".

TG ceased operations in 1981, after which Sleazy formed Psychic TV with Genesis P-Orridge and they produced two albums. The second, Dreams Less Sweet included his future life partner Jhonn Balance as a member, with whom he went on to form Coil and to release an extensive body of work up until Jhonn's passing in 2004. Subsequently, Sleazy left the UK to live in Bangkok, Thailand and to continue his artistic and musical vision in the guise of The Threshold HouseBoys Choir and Soisong.
Following their original break-up, Throbbing Gristle's legacy steadily grew within the music and art world, leading to their reformation in 2004 and a series of sold-out performances, including in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

At the time of his death, Sleazy was in the midst of assembling what was to be Throbbing Gristle's next project: a cover version of Nico's Desertshore album.

Peter was a kind and beautiful soul. No words can express how much he will be missed.

Throbbing Gristle / X-TG

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Chris Carter

Fans are leaving remembrances of Sleazy in the comments for this photo portrait.

Previously on Boing Boing:

• Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil: 1955-2010

• YouTube: Boing Boing - The Throbbing Gristle Interview

•
Throbbing Gristle: What A Day. (Boing Boing Video shoot notes)

A Thanksgiving Prayer, from William S. Burroughs

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 10:13 AM PST

This year, "A Thanksgiving Prayer" by William S. Burroughs is presented in memory of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson.

Turkeybot

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 09:47 AM PST

Did you know that one of the most significant planar bipedal walking robots was modeled after a turkey and kind of moved like a Star Wars AT-ST or an ED-209 when walking? Check out the MIT Leg Lab for more cool walking robots.

TSA MadCivLibs

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 09:30 AM PST

If you can't get enough of TSA "scope and grope" outrage -- or maybe if you're sick of hearing about it -- you'll enjoy this randomly filled-in Homeland Security Mad CivLib sheet.

Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community -- the book!

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 07:36 AM PST

Threadless co-founder Jake Nickell's Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community is just what you'd want in a history of one of the Internet's most consistently interesting and creative commercial endeavors. The text combines a potted, year-by-year (and blow-by-blow) history of the site's founding, growing pains, successes and setbacks; interleaved with these are short essays from entrepreneurs, employees, designers, and journalists about the significance of Threadless, as well as interviews with Threadless designers from Malaysia to Wisconsin to New Zealand.

The book reproduces hundreds of the site's best t-shirt designs from over the years, with notes from each of designers, as well as photographs of the amiable chaos that seems to have characterized the company and the site's lifecycle.

Threadless has an astonishing story to tell -- a story about business and community co-existing and even thriving, a story about naive entrepreneurs who were able to iterate quickly using the power of the Internet to get it right, a story about art and fun and creativity. My favorite quote came from Sonmi (a rare female voice in the book, which has a regrettable whiff of sausagefest about it), one of the site's successful designers: "I love nice people who make cool things" (itself a quote from Will Bryant). From what I can tell, that about sums up the Threadless ethos.

The Threadless book is a treat -- more informative than an artbook, less boring than a Harvard Business Review case-study, a sweet-spot between commercialism and passion, like the site itself.

Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community

Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 07:22 AM PST

In my latest Guardian column, "News Corp Kremlinology: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?" I have a good rummage around the mysterious figures released by The Times earlier this month on the performance of its vaunted pay-for-news scheme. The Times released the numbers with a lot of triumphant accompaniment, but I'm not clear on whether their figures can be taken of indication of anything, except, perhaps, a reluctance to report in full on their experiment's performance.

Here's what the Times will say: about 50,000 of the current paid users are on a monthly subscription of some sort: £8.66, £1, or free with a TalkTalk subscription. They will not disclose how many £1 trial users turn into £8.66 users, or how many sustain their £8.66 subscription into the second or third month. However, the anonymous official spokesperson did say that whichever users are remaining after three months are more than 90% likely to stump up for a fourth month. From this, I think we can safely assume that lots less than 90% of paid users stick around for a second month, and of those, less than 90% sustain themselves for a fourth month.
But the Times isn't saying.
The remaining 50,000, of course, are people who paid £1 for a single day's access. Some number of these converted to monthly subscribers.
Some number bought a second article. How many? The Times isn't saying.
So, best case: there are 50,000 paid subscribers, all of whom got there by paying £1 for an article, converted immediately to £1 monthly subscriptions and now pay £8.66 every month (or £9.99 in the case of iPad users who want to pay extra for the privilege of not being allowed to access the website).
Worst case: 50,000 people tried a day pass and left. 20,000 TalkTalk subscribers got a free subscription with their phone which they may or may not know or care about. 5,000 people use it with an iPad.
75,000 people tried a £1 month trial. 40,000 of them signed up for a second month, 30,000 of them for a third, and 25,000 stayed on for a fourth month.

News Corp Kremlinology: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil: 1955-2010

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 09:03 AM PST

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, musician, designer, and member of the pioneering "industrial music" band Throbbing Gristle, of Coil, and related projects, has died.

A message on the TG website reads:

"We are saddened to announce the death of Peter Christopherson.
Sleazy passed away peacefully in his sleep on the 24th November 2010 at his home in Bangkok."

Our respect and condolences to his friends and creative partners.

(Photo courtesy Chris Carter; more portraits of Sleazy by Chris on Flickr)

Link to a BBC 6Music Tribute broadcast today for the passing of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson.
(audio)

Guardian obituary.

This summer, after Throbbing Gristle concerts were cancelled amid rumours of an illness, Christopherson insisted: "We are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so all the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do but will be just starting a new (and hopefully even better) adventure ... "

Throbbing Gristle: What A Day. (Boing Boing Video shoot notes)

Boing Boing Video: The Throbbing Gristle Interview