The Latest from Boing Boing

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• How a comics legend got canned from Whole Foods for inappropriate signage
• EFF: FBI may have committed more than 40K intelligence violations since 9/11
• Giant Diesel loco throws a piston
• Kitty Midnight Madness!
• Egypt: 8-year-old girl lectures Mubarak (video)
• Following events in Egypt on Twitter
• Report: Fearing spark of unrest, China blocks the word "Egypt" on Twitter-like microblogging service
• Letter from fmr. US Deputy CTO to Egypt's IT Minister who shut off Internet
• Notes on the Egyptian internet, censorship resistance, and Tor
• Live From the Egyptian Revolution
• Reports of damage, and civilians preventing damage, to Egyptian Museum antiquities
• Pharaoh's army got drowned
• Robert Fisk in Egypt: "Death throes of a dictatorship"
• Modern homes are firetraps?
• Axe Cop fan-film
• Three Little Bops: 1957 Looney Tunes jazz version of the Three Little Pigs
• Denim in the 17th century
• Egypt (video): Army intervenes to protect protesters from police
• Stratfor: In Egypt, plainclothes security forces are looting
• Exorcist Kitteh
• Kickboxer champion club-bouncer defeats a loudmouth
• Egypt: The Twitter-less revolution
• Egyptian and US military forces are totally friendsies
• Francis Ford Coppola, copyfighter
• Revolver that fires shotgun shells
• What the LibreOffice fork means for Oracle's shabby treatment of Sun's free software projects
• SPECIAL FEATURE: Monté: King of the Atom-Age Monster Decals!
• Using a BS detector on popular science reporting
• Photographer's bust-card silkscreened on white-balance cards
• Fair use for poets, demystified

How a comics legend got canned from Whole Foods for inappropriate signage Posted: 30 Jan 2011 05:01 AM PST Comics artist Paul Maybury is a sought-after talent in the industry, but Whole Foods, one of his early employers, sure failed to recognize his potential! This Mr T sign he drew for the grocer got him fired after complaints from a vegan shopper. Check out Maybury's tumblr for lots of other examples of his Whole Foods signs, each more delightful than the last. This sign apparently got Paul Maybury fired from Whole Foods   Whole Foods CEO caught bashing Wild Oats stock on Yahoo forums ... Boing Boing: Whole Foods' useless wind-power cards

EFF: FBI may have committed more than 40K intelligence violations since 9/11 Posted: 30 Jan 2011 04:34 AM PST A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes more than 2,500 pages' worth of FBI documents extracted using Freedom of Information Act litigation and finds disturbing, system-wide violations of civil liberties on a scale that is far beyond anything reported to date: Using documents obtained through EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the report finds: • Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board • Reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant • Indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11 Release: EFF Uncovers Widespread FBI Intelligence Violations Report: Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001 - 2008 (Image: FBI, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from groovysoup's photostream)   Neo-nazi hate blogger paid by FBI to incite, says attorney - Boing ... FBI raids TX-based server hosting business in "Operation Payback ... RIAA, FBI issuing takedown requests for Radiohead's "In Rainbows ... Celebrated civil rights photographer outed as paid FBI informant ... FBI ignores DoJ report, raids activists, arrests Time Person of ... Boing Boing: DoJ: FBI misused Patriot act in domestic spying ... PATRIOT Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10000 percent - Boing Boing

Giant Diesel loco throws a piston Posted: 30 Jan 2011 12:33 AM PST This 2010 message-board post allegedly details the mayhem wrought when CN locomotive 2699 ("a 212 ton, 6 axle machine powered by a 4400 hp V16 4 stroke Diesel") threw a piston while passing through Independence, Louisiana. The piston punched a hole in the roof of a nearby house, ploughed through the upper story and came to rest embedded in the wall of the ground-floor living room. I can't find any news reports to substantiate the description, though. Locomotive Engine Failure - Blown Piston (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)   Videos on bus capture disaster when driver falls asleep Boing Boing High-speed camera shooting FROM a train - Boing Boing Train nearly runs over idiots (video) - Boing Boing

Kitty Midnight Madness! Posted: 30 Jan 2011 12:03 AM PST Banjo. Rocking chairs. Puns, oh the puns. Winnipeg. Sound effects. Censored cursing. Transitions up the wazoo. I think there may have been a cat in there somewhere too. No trade-ins though. [via Reddit]

Egypt: 8-year-old girl lectures Mubarak (video) Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:28 PM PST Video Link. "And by the way, some of your police officers removed their jackets and they're joining the people." Juju, who is 8, and from Saudi Arabia. (via Ahmed Al Omran)

Following events in Egypt on Twitter Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:17 PM PST Trying to sort out who to follow on Twitter to keep up with the fast-moving events in Egypt? Andy Carvin at NPR has a good list and overview post here, and the Washington Post has a curated Twitter list here.

Report: Fearing spark of unrest, China blocks the word "Egypt" on Twitter-like microblogging service Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:12 PM PST Not sure how widespread this is, or whether it's still the case, but Al Jazeera is reporting that at least one popular internet service in China now blocks the word "Egypt," for presumably political reasons.

Letter from fmr. US Deputy CTO to Egypt's IT Minister who shut off Internet Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:07 PM PST "Egypt's Cabinet has just submitted its resignation, and a new Prime Minister has been appointed. As Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology since 2004, you are now most likely heading back to private life. As a friend, I write to urge you to take one final action before you walk out the door of your Ministry: Give the order to reconnect Egypt to the global Internet, and to drop all remaining blocks on wireless networks."—Andrew McLaughlin, in the Huffington Post. You can follow him on Twitter. (via Anil Dash)

Notes on the Egyptian internet, censorship resistance, and Tor Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:14 PM PST Jacob Appelbaum, a developer with the Tor project, says, "I've written up a quick series of notes about the Egyptian internet, censorship resistance, and Tor." You can follow Jacob on Twitter.

Live From the Egyptian Revolution Posted: 29 Jan 2011 08:55 PM PST "I grew up in Egypt. I spent half my life here. But Saturday, when my plane from JFK airport touched down in Cairo, I arrived in a different country than the one I had known all my life. This is not Hosni Mubarak's Egypt anymore and, regardless of what happens, it will never be again."—Sharif Kouddous, of "Democracy Now," writing in The Nation. You can follow him on Twitter.

Reports of damage, and civilians preventing damage, to Egyptian Museum antiquities Posted: 29 Jan 2011 08:56 PM PST Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic points us to the photo above making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook today, and explains: Citizens linking arms in front of the Egyptian Museum to prevent looters from entering. I found this photo on Twitter, posted by @theplayethic, who also tweeted, "Power memes in #Egypt. Reports of soldiers roaming damaged Cairo museum, armed criminals in suburbs." Related, BB reader charlesj says, Margaret Maitland, an Egyptology student at Oxford University, examines Al Jazeera video to assess what has been damaged during rioting at the Cairo Museum. She thinks the damaged objects include items from Tutankahmun's tomb. Here's a link to Maitland's blog post. I see there's a similar report on MSNBC, with before/after photos of some of the same items. And BB reader Jack points us to a related NPR report: Would-be looters broke into Cairo's famed Egyptian Museum, ripping the heads off two mummies and damaging about 10 small artifacts before being caught and detained by soldiers, Egypt's antiquities chief [Zahi Hawass] said Saturday.

Pharaoh's army got drowned Posted: 29 Jan 2011 08:28 PM PST [Video Link] "Oh Mary don't you weep," an early film recording of unknown origin, found on YouTube with the description "Georgia Field Hands, recorded 1928-1935." More about the song, which was a sort of coded message of resistance in the American South, and seems timely today, with current events in Egypt. Thanks to NPR's Andy Carvin for the inspiration. Lyrics here. There have been many great renditions of this song throughout the ages; Aretha Franklin's from 1972 is one of the finest to be found on YouTube.

Robert Fisk in Egypt: "Death throes of a dictatorship" Posted: 29 Jan 2011 08:04 PM PST "The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship." Robert Fisk, in Egypt.

Modern homes are firetraps? Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:56 AM PST A Canadian wire-service article claims that modern composite materials used in house construction drastically accelerates the pace of house-fires when compared with traditional solid wood and other materials. What that means for firefighters is the amount of time they can safely be inside a house on fire has dropped from about 17 minutes to three minutes or less. That's when flashover happens -- the moment when a room or building is fully engulfed in flames... [Ottawa Fire spokesman Marc Messier] said unlike 30 years ago, when homes, furniture and appliances were made of solid wood and steel, modern day versions are made with glue, plastics and synthetic materials. Such synthetics not only burn faster but produce carcinogenic emissions as they burn. "One of the biggest examples is floor joists," said Messier, who himself dabbles in home renovations. "They used to be 2x8s and 2x10s, and now we're looking at composite materials which for the most part are made of wood particles, mixed in with glue. They're cheaper, which is probably why the industry is using these products." New homes burn faster (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (Image: House on Fire, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dvs's photostream)   End of fire poles - Boing Boing Agriculture fire-guns of yore - Boing Boing Disney World's awful Tiki Room catches fire - Boing Boing It's hard to fight a fire you can't see - Boing Boing Detroit police and fire HQ move to old casino - Boing Boing Radio announcer undisturbed by studio fire - Boing Boing Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Flour On Fire Boing Boing

Axe Cop fan-film Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:49 AM PST Peter Muehlenberg's short fan-film adaptation of the dementedly brilliant Axe Cop webcomic is bang-on perfect. I love the blood-spurting dino-heads, and the "I'll chop your heads off!" battle cry is exactly as I heard it in my head. Bravo! Axe Cop: The Movie - Part 1 (via IO9)   Axe Cop: insane comic collaboration between 5 year old and his 29 ...

Three Little Bops: 1957 Looney Tunes jazz version of the Three Little Pigs Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:45 AM PST My three-year-old has been having awful insomniac spells at two in the morning all week and we're at a loss for getting her back to sleep . Last night, when she came into our room, I desperately grabbed my phone off the bedstand and went YouTube spelunking for something to get her calmed down enough for a story and (maybe) sleep. We found our way to this 1957 Warner Brothers/Fritz Freling Loony Tunes classic, The Three Little Bops, which is just outstanding. It's a 7-minute musical retelling of the Three Little Pigs in which the pigs have grown up to be successful jazz musicians, and must contend with a (clearly stoned!) Big Bad Wolf who keeps trying to sit in with his trumpet, which he sucks at playing. Eventually, the wolf blows himself up with a mistimed bomb-fuse, descends to hell, learns to play his horn, and his ghost is welcomed back in to sit in with the boys. The music is brilliant, the animation is hilarious, and we both loved it. After Poesy and I watched this, we downloaded my free audiobook of Alice in Wonderland, a story she loves from picture-book abridgments, and listened to it together as a bedtime story and we were both asleep in short order. Let's hope she makes it through the night tonight! If you like this one, also try 1943's Pigs in a Polka, another Three Little Pigs Looney Tune which features Carl Stalling's musical adaptations of Brahms's "Hungarian Dances." Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Two (includes Three Little Bops) 3 little bops   Help select the 100 greatest Looney Tunes - Boing Boing Skeletal Looney Toons sculpture from Hollywood Day of the Dead ... Looney Tunes lyrics - Boing Boing Looney Toons characters in the 28th Century - Boing Boing Abominable Snow Rabbit cartoon - Boing Boing Looney Tunes composer profiled in Slate - Boing Boing Raymond Scott tribute concert footage - Boing Boing

Denim in the 17th century Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:31 AM PST A show at the Didier Aaron gallery highlights the use of denim in centuries gone by, with 17th century paintings depicting familiar indigo-dyed denim shifts, hosiery (which look suspiciously like skinny jeans!) and dresses. Le Maître de la toile de jeans (via Craft)   Photos from the denim distressing factory - Boing Boing Denim motorcycle helmet - Boing Boing Gibson's ZERO HISTORY: exciting adventure that wakes you to the ...

Egypt (video): Army intervenes to protect protesters from police Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:33 AM PST Video Link (via John Perry Barlow)

Stratfor: In Egypt, plainclothes security forces are looting Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:21 AM PST Egypt: "Security forces in plainclothes are engaged in destroying public property in order to give the impression that many protesters represent a public menace."—"Red Alert: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood," STRATFOR (via @theharryshearer).

Exorcist Kitteh Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:17 AM PST GOD IS NOT HERE, PRIEST. Video Link (thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Kickboxer champion club-bouncer defeats a loudmouth Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:12 AM PST Here's a video capturing one of life's glorious moments: a loudmouth jerk shows up at a Berlin nightclub where the bouncer happens to be Michael Kuhr, a champion kickboxer. Kuhr defeats the jerk handily -- but not the way you'd expect. Bouncer (kickbox world champion) vs loudmouth - Vol. 01 (via Super Punch)

Egypt: The Twitter-less revolution Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:11 AM PST "[I]f protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of information, yesterday's massive demonstrations happened in a literal vacuum. Suddenly dragged back to the land-line communications era, the protesters didn't know about Alexandria or Suez; they didn't even know what was happening across the river. It didn't matter. Protest organisers basically bypassed the idea of coordination altogether and just told people, Protest everywhere." (Index on Censorship, via @blakehounshell)

Egyptian and US military forces are totally friendsies Posted: 29 Jan 2011 11:07 AM PST "The officer corps of Egypt's powerful military has been educated at defense colleges in the United States for 30 years. The Egyptian armed forces have about 1,000 American M1A1 Abrams tanks, which the United States allows to be built on Egyptian soil. Egypt permits the American military to stage major operations from its bases, and has always guaranteed the Americans passage through the Suez Canal." (New York Times)

Francis Ford Coppola, copyfighter Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:28 AM PST In this interview with The 99%, Francis Ford Coppola says some extremely thought-provoking and sensible things about creativity, mastery, copyright, the business of the arts, collaboration, and life. It's always great to learn about seasoned, accomplished artists who refuse the lure of reactionary, knee-jerk get-off-my-lawnery: I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, "I was so happy when this young person took from me." Because that's what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice. And that's how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don't worry about whether it's appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that's only the first step and you have to take the first step... You have to remember that it's only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n' roll singer being rich, that's not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I'm going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration (via Kottke) (Image: Coppola Francis Ford at Cannes in 2001, Ed Fitzgerald/Wikimedia Commons)

Revolver that fires shotgun shells Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:26 AM PST This whopping handgun, called "The Judge," has been designed to fire shotgun shells. Taurus, who briefly imported the gun from Brazil, has withdrawn it from sale following a visit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. According to Neatorama, "The Judge shoots .410 gauge shells as well as .45 Long Colt cartridges. 'The Raging Judge', pictured above, goes even further in this approach, firing the much larger 28 gauge shell." Big gun, Short lived. Taurus 28 Gauge Revolver. (via Neatorama)   Police revolver muzzle-cam from 1938 - Boing Boing Chocolate guns and ammo - Boing Boing Building a better Nerf gun - Boing Boing

What the LibreOffice fork means for Oracle's shabby treatment of Sun's free software projects Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:19 AM PST Glyn Moody's analysis of the LibreOffice fork from OpenOffice is a good guide to the resilience of free/open software projects, and the pitfalls awaiting corporations (like Oracle) that seek to compromise or shut down their open projects: That is, LibreOffice has moved beyond just a bold idea to doing stuff, including boring stuff like setting up infrastructure to carry the project forward. The significance of this goes beyond the fact that it provides users with a free alternative to OpenOffice (which has also just released its latest version.) Choice lies at the heart of free software, so that's certainly good news, not least because of the way LibreOffice handles copyright, which I discussed previously. But I think that LibreOffice possesses an additional importance because it represents a conscious strike against Oracle's handling of its open source portfolio. Sadly, the discontent that drove people to make that stand extends well beyond those working in the field of office suites. As is becoming apparent, Oracle's behaviour towards the open source community seems to be going from bad to worse. This is nicely summed up in this characteristic post from Marc Fleury. As the founder of Jboss, and one of the real innovators in terms of business models based around open source, he certainly knows what he is talking about when it comes to managing open source coders in a corporate context, which makes comments like these particularly significant - and ominous for Oracle... The Deeper Significance of LibreOffice 3.3 (via The Command Line)   LibreOffice turns 3.3, now ready for general use - Boing Boing Oracle's lawsuit preventing Google from participating in JavaOne ... Boing Boing: Repuslive opportunism. Larry "Oracle" Ellison

SPECIAL FEATURE: Monté: King of the Atom-Age Monster Decals! Posted: 28 Jan 2011 06:07 PM PST For the past five decades, mystery has surrounded the identity of Monté, the reclusive decal master who tossed a cherry bomb into the toilet of Eisenhower-era conformity, and then vanished. Now, author Bill Selby's Monté: King of Atom-Age Monster Decals uncovers the remarkable and ultimately tragic story of Monté, from his early roots pinstriping cars and motorcycles in Los Angeles to his eventual rise and fall as America's decal king -- including Monté's ill-fated team-up with Ed "Big Daddy" Roth to create the iconic Rat Fink. Read the rest

Using a BS detector on popular science reporting Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:15 AM PST Ben Goldacre's latest "Bad Science" column for the Guardian is "How to read a paper," a great editorial explaining how to critically evaluate scientific claims that are printed in the newspaper: Our next case takes more elaborate checking, since it involves an experiment and its interpretation. Scientists at Lancaster University, say the Daily Mail and the BBC, have devised an amazing piece of paedophile identification software. It reads your messages and decides if the person you're chatting to on the internet is another young person, or an adult who is pretending to be young. This is a tricky problem to solve on a handheld device, or indeed anywhere. There is a press release on the Lancaster University website explaining that this device has been studied and found to work. I asked for details. The methods and results of this study are secret. No paper has been submitted for publication. So actually there's no complicated interpretation problem here: nobody can know what these scientists measured, how they measured it, what the numbers were like, how closely the experiment mirrored a real world situation, or anything at all. When the Raelian cult said they'd cloned a baby, but we weren't allowed to see it, nobody took them seriously. Until someone's willing to tell me what they measured and how they measured it, they might as well be Raelians. A useful, but admittedly more blunt heuristic might be: "If it's in the Daily Mail, it's probably not true." How to read a paper (Image: Mail Online screengrab)   Bad Science comes to the USA: Ben Goldacre's tremendous woo ... Ben Goldacre: bad science kills - Boing Boing Woo-fighting scientist takes the funny high-road when libeled by ... Pseudoscience's "Awful Poo Lady" can't flush twitterings - Boing Boing The Doctor Will Sue You Now: the missing chapter of Ben Goldacre's ... Bad Science versus the piracy scare story Boing Boing Science by press conference: a modern scourge - Boing Boing

Photographer's bust-card silkscreened on white-balance cards Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:08 AM PST PetaPixel sells a set of white-balance cards that are (handily enough) silkscreened with bust-cards spelling out US law regarding photography in public places. Stick 'em in your camera-bag and you'll always have balanced whites and balanced rights! Photographers Rights Gray Card Set (via Iz Reloaded)   World's greatest photographer's bust-card - Boing Boing Photographers' bust-card screened onto a lenscloth - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Photographers' bust card I'm a Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign for photographers ... HOWTO beat the London cops on a BS terrorism stop - Boing Boing NYPD directive on the legality of public photography to print and ...

Fair use for poets, demystified Posted: 29 Jan 2011 04:04 AM PST Pat from American University's Center for Social Media sez, "We're excited to announce the launch of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry, cofacilitated by WCL-AU's Peter Jaszi, UCB's Jennifer Urban, Kate Coles from the Poetry Foundation, and Center for Social Media's Pat Aufderheide. The hashtag is #fairusepoetry" Why would poets need fair use? Consider: Mark Taylor has been asked by a major press to assemble a collection of the essays on poetry he has written over the years and add several more to make a book. He can't decide what selections he needs to license, and which ones he can use under fair use. If he licensed everything, he would be paying thousands of dollars more than he would ever see in royalties. Julie Blake decides to do erasures--taking words out of existing poems, and so making new ones--of the poems from her own collection of sonnets. She thinks the new work is both an evolution from and a critique of her earlier work. When she places the collection with a new publisher, the publisher of the sonnets claims copyright infringement. Does she have a fair use claim to do what she did? Kurt Flanagan is a collage poet, making poems out of bits and pieces of existing work. His new work addresses war in the first decade of the 21st century. His book-length collage poem draws on news sources and also on literary sources, including but not limited to poetry. One of the poets whose work has been used in fragments sues for copyright infringement. Does he have a fair use argument? Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry (Thanks, Pat!)   The "fair use economy" is enormous, growing, and endangered by the ... Hitler's pissed off about fair use - Boing Boing Google highlights fair use defense to YouTube takedowns - Boing Boing Happy World Fair Use Day! - Boing Boing Fair use for the 21st century: if it adds value, it's fair; if it ... Video explains fair use for video (video video) - Boing Boing Associated Press loves fair use (we just wish they'd share ...

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