The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Boris Indrikov's art
• Euthanasia coaster: assisted suicide by thrills
• Desktop trebuchets for science classrooms
• Suspected Wikileaks source Manning to be transferred from Quantico brig to Leavenworth, Kansas
• Report: Apple to begin shipping iPhone 5 in September
• RDTN.org's Kickstarter video
• Nottingham Hackspace loses home, needs £2000 for deposit on new place
• Experiment: scalping postage stamps on tax day
• God Hates Verizon
• Standing desk tips
• Iron And Wine plays New Order
• Transparencycamp unconference in DC, Apr 30/May 1
• The end of "rare" music and other digitizable media
• Reuters staff in trouble after Japan-related jokes in company chatroom
• Happy (early) 4/20 day: "Weed Card" by Garfunkel and Oates
• China: Lawyer linked to "disappeared" artist Ai Weiwei resurfaces after detention
• Why didn't the NYT (or others) earn Pulitzers for Wikileaks reporting?
• Is San Francisco sushi safe?
• The 1917 Clipperton Island tragedy
• Straight outta Laos: Mor-Lum Hip-Hop
• Baby slugs, and what they eat
• James Gleick: What Defines A Meme?
• Bugs and bad attitudes—profile of a renegade entomologist
• TOM THE DANCING BUG: Attend 4-Profit University!
• Liver Loaf: "APPETIZING!"
• Nirvana exhibition in Seattle
• From "You Are Listening To": Ambient music and philosophy
• Photos of "Malls Across America," 1989
• UK gets Viagra-laced beer
• Hipster Animals

Boris Indrikov's art Posted: 20 Apr 2011 04:34 AM PDT

Euthanasia coaster: assisted suicide by thrills Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:34 PM PDT Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, designed this "Euthanasia Coaster" that will kill its riders with a series of brain-scrambling loops: "a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely -- with elegance and euphoria -- take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster's track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death." Euthanasia Coaster (via DVICE)

Desktop trebuchets for science classrooms Posted: 20 Apr 2011 02:24 AM PDT Evan sez, A friend of mine and I switched from doing a software startup to building desktop-sized, laser-cut, snap-together trebuchets, and we're running a Kickstarter campaign to set up a shop to produce a bunch of these for classrooms and enthusiasts everywhere. We're working with the American Association of Physics Teachers to take pledge money to donate trebuchet kits to science teachers, as well as taking preorders. There's only 48 hours left before the project closes, and we've already raised enough funds to build over 250 trebuchet kits for schools, and another 1,700 kits for geeks around the world, so if you think that this is cool, we'd love any help you can give us in getting the word out to more people, so that they can help us donate siege engines to science classrooms, and get one for themselves if they're interested. Trebuchette - the snap-together, desktop trebuchet (Thanks, Evan!)

Suspected Wikileaks source Manning to be transferred from Quantico brig to Leavenworth, Kansas Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:14 PM PDT "Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has spent the last nine months isolated in a Marine jail as the man suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, will be moved from his tiny cell in Quantico to a new Army facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas." (washingtonpost.com)

Report: Apple to begin shipping iPhone 5 in September Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:07 PM PDT Reuters has published an anonymously-sourced item stating that suppliers for Apple will begin producing an iPhone 5 in July, with shipment beginning in September.

RDTN.org's Kickstarter video Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:45 PM PDT Video Link. About the project: RDTN.org is a website whose purpose is to provide an aggregate feed of nuclear radiation data from governmental, non-governmental and citizen-scientist sources. That data will be made available to everyone, including scientists and nuclear experts who can provide context for lay people. In the weeks following launch, it has become evident that there is a need for additional radiation reporting from the ground in Japan. This Kickstarter project will help us purchase up to 600 Geiger Counter devices that will be deployed to Japan. (The project minimum will fund 100 devices). The data captured from these devices will feed into the RDTN.org website and will also be made available for others to use via Pachube, an open-source platform for monitoring sensor data globally. RDTN.org field members will be trained by RDTN.org advisors to properly use these devices. The field members will be required to report to the website 8-10 times per day. More here. (via Joi Ito and Sean Bonner)

Nottingham Hackspace loses home, needs £2000 for deposit on new place Posted: 19 Apr 2011 09:37 PM PDT David Hayward writes, Nottingham Hackspace was set up just over a year ago, and in that time we've found a band of incredibly talented geeks, hackers and makers, also expanding from just a store room to a well equipped hackspace with a teaching room and a workshop. Among many other things, we've taught people how to solder and use Arduinos, built a giant Rube Goldberg machine, placed third in the global hackerspace cupcake challenge, staged a real laser assault course, and built a fully functioning RepRap. It's been an awesome year, but the owners of our building have just turfed out both Nottingham Hackspace and our landlords in order to redevelop. We've found a new home that could be *the* perfect hackspace, with room for both large events and small gatherings. We've already negotiated a deal with the building management, but there's just one thing we need help with in order to keep the Hackspace alive and kicking: A little help raising the rather large deposit. Without that, the Hackspace will be homeless at the end of April. We've been fundraising hard, and the members have been very generous so far, but we have a little way to go before we can sign contracts. They're only after £2000; raising this should be pretty straightforward! Nottingham Hackspace Needs Your Help

Experiment: scalping postage stamps on tax day Posted: 19 Apr 2011 04:25 PM PDT My favorite amateur sociologist, Rob Cockerham, scalped postage stamps on tax day. If you live near Sacramento, California, and you wait until the very last moment to mail your taxes, you are in for a special trip to the main Post Office in West Sacramento. This particular post office is open until midnight, so you can drop off your tax return at 11:59pm on April 15th and still get the necessary postmark. On tax night, traffic is so heavy that the local police set up something like a tax-return drive-thru checkpoint, where post workers will snatch the envelopes right out of your window. Unfortunately, they don't sell stamps. To get stamps, you have to drive past the envelope drive-thru snatchpoint and discover the secret post office entrance. Then you have to park and wait in line to buy some stamps from the human tellers, because they replaced all the vending machines with a single automatic postal machine (APM), and that machine was stolen last year. The no-stamp oversight annoyed me so much that this year I decided to try selling stamps myself. Early in the day, I bought one hundred first class (44¢) stamps. Then I went home and made myself a sign. Note the hefty price markup. That's right. I was scalping postage stamps. I was going to be rich. Read the results on his website, Cockeyed.com

God Hates Verizon Posted: 19 Apr 2011 01:59 PM PDT Sara Rogness doesn't care for the Westboro Baptist Church, but she had a little fun by embedding herself into one of their boring homophobic protests. After a customer service call gone wrong, I was very angry and couldn't seem to get a grip on it. I called Katherine and the plan was born. Most anyone who has lived in Topeka awhile knows about the angry corner: 17th & Gage. That's where (or across the street at 15th & Gage) Westboro Baptist Church holds their week-day 15 minute protests. You've seen the signs. God hates this and God hates that. I decided that it would be cathartic and funny if I could join in with a God Hates Verizon sign. So I did (I got about 10 minutes of protest in before the cold got to me). God Hates Verizon (Thanks, Bill!) God hates figs God Hates Signs protest waged against Westboro Baptist Church God hates shrimp God Hates Signs protest waged against Westboro Baptist Church

Standing desk tips Posted: 19 Apr 2011 01:43 PM PDT Benjamin Palmer says: I saw your post about a standing desk, I've got a custom made standing conference table as a desk (i'm the one behind the large monitor, the guy to my right is CJ Chivers the NY Times war writer). Notice I have a foot rest rail going around the bottom -- this is pretty critical for long term comfort. I also have a stool I sit on for maybe 1/4 of the day, but the rail is really the key thing. Also I run a company that has a lot of meetings, and having a standing meeting desk means meetings in my office last from 3-20 minutes instead of 15-60 minutes. I have a tip for you and your readers! A very cheap way to get started with a standing desk is to buy a cheap coffee table and just put it on top of your desk, similar to what you've made and posted on Boing Boing. It's usually just the right height, and you can get them in a wide variety of sizes and finishes to fit your gear and match your existing desk, and its usually pretty cheap. This one for instance is the right height for an average person and matches a basic light wood ikea type desk and is $57! A lot of people in my office have tried this out before they commit to a full size desk, to experiment with size and placement. I've been standing for a couple years now and I feel really amazing, and I've not experienced any of the tiredness or back pain I would in the past from a day walking around a new city, or museums, or ten days at sxsw ;) See also: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Iron And Wine plays New Order Posted: 19 Apr 2011 12:55 PM PDT [video link] Sam Beam, aka Iron and Wine, plays his gorgeous cover of my favorite New Order song, "Love Vigilantes." The studio version is available on his 2009 album, Around the Well.

Transparencycamp unconference in DC, Apr 30/May 1 Posted: 19 Apr 2011 12:00 PM PDT Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, I wanted to share with you details on the upcoming "unconference" the Sunlight Foundation is hosting in DC. Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1 will be our fourth TransparencyCamp; an "unconference" that brings together government officials, technologists, journalists and grassroots advocates to share best practices on the ways new technologies and effective policies can make our government really work for the people TransparencyCamp will also highlight what's happening beyond the federal government with the incredible momentum across the state-level, as groups rally and organize to demand greater transparency and accountability among their local public officials. And the equally driven transparency advocates who are using new technologies and social media to enact change outside of the U.S. Transparency Camp 2011 (Thanks, Nicko!)

The end of "rare" music and other digitizable media Posted: 19 Apr 2011 12:22 PM PDT This Rolling Stones former-rarity is easy to find online. My consciousness was forever altered when I happened on Kamandi #3 at age 11. I wanted to read every comic Jack Kirby had created up to that point. But early issues of Fantastic Four were rare and expensive. I bought what I could afford and treasured them. Today I'm sure I could get my hands on PDFs of every issue of Fantastic Four in short order (but I don't have to because I bought the cheap pulpy Essential Fantastic Four anthologies - the ones to get are Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 -- after that Kirby jumped ship for DC). Rare old comics, along with music and cult films, are no longer rare. Bill Wyman of Slate explores "what it means to have all music [and other digitizable media] instantly available." A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it's no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there's very little out there you might want that you can't find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art? ... In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the poet Dan Chiasson wrote at length about Keith Richards' autobiography and made an interesting point near the end, about how scarcity and rarity, long ago, actually fueled artistic endeavor: [T]he experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn't match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records. Point taken--but let's remember it's a small sacrifice. I have this or that fetish object--the White Album on two 8-tracks in a black custom case, for example, or a rare Elvis Costello picture disc. And I remember the joy of the find. But it's hard to feel bad about the end of rarity; didn't a lot of the thrill come from feeling superior when you had something others didn't? You really want to get nostalgic about that? We're finally approaching that nirvana for fans, scholars, and critics: Everything available, all the time. (Certainly Richards and Jagger would approve.) It's not an ideal state of affairs for a rights holder, of course. But for the rest of us, what is there to complain about? Lester Bangs' Basement

Reuters staff in trouble after Japan-related jokes in company chatroom Posted: 19 Apr 2011 12:01 PM PDT Reuters editor Andrew Marshall was reprimanded after making a Japan/nuke-related joke in an internal company chatroom, while stressed out and sleep deprived, working the night shift. His comment about radiation levels in Tokyo following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown - "Is your hair starting to fall out?" - was directed to a bald colleague in Japan. It was in the middle of the night on the Asia desk in Singapore where he was alone on the overnight shift that had been started after the Japan crisis hit. There were about 25 to 30 people in the Reuters messaging chat room created specifically for journalists involved in the Japan disaster story. All were Reuters journalists, mostly in other regions. "I was feeling slightly miserable alone on the Asiadesk in the middle of the night watching images of death and suffering on multiple TV screens ... I thought my message might raise a few smiles, and I know from extensive experience working in war zones and disaster areas how important this is for team morale," he said. More here at thebaron.info. A related post, and a Guardian item here says that Reuters bureau chief David Fox was fired over a "crude remark" he made in the online exchange (the remark was not reprinted).

Happy (early) 4/20 day: "Weed Card" by Garfunkel and Oates Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:44 AM PDT [Video Link] Riki "Garfunkel" Lindhome and Kate "Oates" Micucci sing about the perils of obtaining medical marijuana in California. Featuring David Koechner. Directed by Raul B Fernandez. (thanks, Mark Day)

China: Lawyer linked to "disappeared" artist Ai Weiwei resurfaces after detention Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:46 AM PDT Liu Xiaoyuan, the human rights lawyer associated with the recently-"disappeared" artist Ai Weiwei, today tweeted that he is back in Beijing. The attorney had gone missing for the five previous days. "He told the Guardian he was fine but did not want to give any more details of what had happened." Ai Weiwei remains missing.

Why didn't the NYT (or others) earn Pulitzers for Wikileaks reporting? Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:11 AM PDT Andy Greenberg, blogging at Forbes: "WikiLeaks wasn't dissed by the Pulitzer judges. In fact, the New York Times, which dominated WikiLeaks coverage in the U.S., never submitted its reporting on WikiLeaks for the prize." (via Greg Mitchell/The Nation)

Is San Francisco sushi safe? Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:14 AM PDT BB contributor Jess Hemerly wanted to take her fiancee for a sushi birthday dinner, but she was concerned about whether the rolls would be radioactive. When she inquired at the restaurant, they responded by asking if she was a reporter working on a story. So she said, "Sure!," made a couple more calls, and posted what she learned on the 7x7 blog: We also spoke with the Director of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State and an expert in radioecololgical benchmarks, Professor Kathryn Higley. "People need to understand the iodine releases have basically stopped from the plant," she says. "There might be some runoff, but the hefty discharges stopped over a month ago. Dilution is a pretty phenomenal thing." While she cannot 100-percent guarantee that it's impossible for Cesium-137 to show up in area wildlife, she does say that it's unlikely anyone would get a "whopping high dose." She also emphasizes that toxic organisms and mercury, which are regular risks associated with sushi, are far more of a concern than radiation. As for the cooling water dumped into the ocean, Higley assures us it's not a concern either. And while to some it may seem like an irresponsible decision, Higley says, "The doses generated are very low, so while it's not the most desirable solution to dump that water into the ocean, considering the situation they were dealing with, it was the best choice." She also notes that problems would occur only if people in the area ate and continued to eat contaminated fish, but that is unlikely to be a problem. While she hasn't seen good data, she assumes that due to the tsunami, "the fisheries in that area are trashed." "Is It Safe to Eat Sushi?"

The 1917 Clipperton Island tragedy Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:36 AM PDT During the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, settlers on the atoll of Clipperton Island were abandoned by resupply ships, and left to fend for themselves. Within two years, all but one of the men had died. This last man set himself up as "king" and embarked on a reign of terror over the surviving women and children that only ended when one of the women killed him. (Via Tim Heffernan)

Straight outta Laos: Mor-Lum Hip-Hop Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:49 AM PDT Video Link: "Morlum/hiphop infusion." No further information about the artist (or the dancers, or the song) is provided in English, but I'll gladly update the post when I learn more. Mor Lum (aka mo lam, or mor lam) is a traditional form of song from Laos and Isan. From the surprisingly informative wikipedia article: The characteristic feature of lam singing is the use of a flexible melody which is tailored to the tones of the words in the text. Traditionally, the tune was developed by the singer as an interpretation of gon poems and accompanied primarily by the khene, a free reed mouth organ, but the modern form is most often composed and uses electrified instruments. Contemporary forms of the music are also characterised by quick tempi and rapid delivery, while tempi tend to be slower in traditional forms and in some Lao genres. Some consistent characteristics include strong rhythmic accompaniment, vocal leaps, and a conversational style of singing that can be compared to American rap. Typically featuring a theme of unrequited love, mor lam also reflects the difficulties of life in rural Isan and Laos, leavened with wry humour. In its heartland, performances are an essential part of festivals and ceremonies, while the music has gained a profile outside its native regions thanks to the spread of migrant workers, for whom it remains an important cultural link with home. (thanks, Alexander Ringis)

Baby slugs, and what they eat Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:27 AM PDT This image of baby leaf veined slugs, taken by evolutionary genetics Ph.D. student David Winter, is oddly adorable. And Winter's story of his quest to figure out what leaf veined slugs eat is oddly fascinating. Apparently, there's a surprising amount we don't know about slug behavior. Slug diets, in particular, are a black box about which very little is definitively documented. Sure enough, searching through the literature on the 30 or so species of leaf veined slug in New Zealand, there is no indication of what it is that they eat. That was too depressing for me, we know so little about the biology of our native invertebrates, but this species (Athoracophorus bitentaculatus) isn't particularily rare, we should at least know what this one eats. So, I took to stepping outside an night time, finding a couple of slugs, and placing them in a bucket. In the morning I'd move them back to the shrubs from which they'd been plucked and collect [from the bucket] a few fecal samples to inspect ... The Atavism blog: The Sight of a Wild Slug Eating Via hectocotyli

James Gleick: What Defines A Meme? Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:47 AM PDT Smithsonian Magazine has posted a fantastic excerpt from James Gleick's new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. In this piece, he presents a popular yet fresh introduction to the concept of the "meme," crediting Richard Dawkins, of course, but also going back years before The Selfish Gene, to French biologist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, who said that ideas have "spreading power." "Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet." He continues with several fascinating examples of memes (see video above) and lands on Twitter as a powerful meme incubator. From Smithsonian: Inspired by a chance conversation on a hike in the Hong Kong mountains, information scientists Charles H. Bennett from IBM in New York and Ming Li and Bin Ma from Ontario, Canada, began an analysis of a set of chain letters collected during the photocopier era. They had 33, all variants of a single letter, with mutations in the form of misspellings, omissions and transposed words and phrases. "These letters have passed from host to host, mutating and evolving," they reported in 2003. Like a gene, their average length is about 2,000 characters. Like a potent virus, the letter threatens to kill you and induces you to pass it on to your "friends and associates"—some variation of this letter has probably reached millions of people. Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. Like genomes, chain letters undergo natural selection and sometimes parts even get transferred between coexisting "species." Reaching beyond these appealing metaphors, the three researchers set out to use the letters as a "test bed" for algorithms used in evolutionary biology. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees. If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures. Still, most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators. They are rarely as neatly fixed as a sequence of DNA. Dawkins himself emphasized that he had never imagined founding anything like a new science of memetics. A peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics came to life in 1997—published online, naturally—and then faded away after eight years partly spent in self-conscious debate over status, mission and terminology. Even compared with genes, memes are hard to mathematize or even to define rigorously. So the gene-meme analogy causes uneasiness and the genetics-memetics analogy even more. "What Defines a Meme?" (Smithsonian) "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick (Amazon)   James Gleick's tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history ... Freeman Dyson reviews Gleick's book on information theory - Boing ...

Bugs and bad attitudes—profile of a renegade entomologist Posted: 19 Apr 2011 01:16 PM PDT A couple of weeks ago, I posted a video from the World Science Festival, in which naturalist and photographer Mark Moffett recalled an ill-fated trip to Colombia to photograph poison dart frogs. I'd not previously heard of Moffett, but he turns out to have a very interesting backstory. A protege and favorite student of E. O. Wilson, Moffett has become a polarizing figure in the world of entomology—someone who is able to tell the stories of science in an engaging way, but who is also well-known for making scientific pronouncements without basing them on real scientific study. Over at The Atavist—a site that publishes long-form, narrative non-fiction and sells these longer-than-a-magazine but shorter-than-a-book pieces to readers for a couple bucks a pop—you can read a preview of a story about Moffett, written by Nicholas Griffin. The full thing is an intriguing story, all about the conflict between observation-based popular storytelling and detailed research, centered around a man who is controversial not only because of his ideas and way of working, but also because of his personality. And it starts with everybody's favorite tropical insect, the bot fly. When I shook Mark Moffett's right hand, I glanced at his left and noticed it was swollen with a distinct red mound the size of a grape. He followed my gaze. "Have you met my botfly?" he asked, grinning. It was late October, and we were standing outside a research station at the foot of the Sierra Nombre de Dios, in northern Honduras. Or at least Moffett and I were standing: His botfly, a white maggot that had been implanted through a mosquito bite and had grown to three quarters of an inch in length, was apparently dead. "I could see its breathing tube, but then I banged my hand on a door, and I think I've killed it," he said, sounding disappointed. "Does it hurt?" "No ... it's dead." "Should it be removed before we head into the rainforest?" "No," said Moffett. "I'm waiting for my body to absorb it." The Atavist: Before the Swarm

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Attend 4-Profit University! Posted: 19 Apr 2011 10:56 AM PDT

Liver Loaf: "APPETIZING!" Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:53 PM PDT This 1942 Life ad for "Morrell EZ-Serve Liver Loaf" manages to make what amounts to pate sound like something really, really revolting (perhaps because of the ad's mention of sister products like Tongue Loaf). Notably, Liver Loaf hails from Radar O'Reilly hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa -- perhaps it was a favorite of the M*A*S*H writers. Life, January 12, 1942

Nirvana exhibition in Seattle Posted: 19 Apr 2011 09:51 AM PDT Seattle's Experience Music Project has just opened a major exhibition celebrating Nirvana. The show, titled "Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses," including original art by Kurt Cobain, video interviews, memorabilia, show fliers, smashed guitars, and other iconic artifacts related to the band and the explosive Seattle music scene of the early 1990s. My friend and longtime MTV music writer Gil Kaufman spent several days in Seattle immersing himself in the exhibit. (While there, he also toured the offices of legendary grunge label Sub Pop and the world headquarters of Pearl Jam, complete with a half-pipe for skateboarding and the "honorary Johnny Ramone baseball lending library.") From MTV: The concept for the Nevermind album came, as with nearly all of the band's imagery, from Cobain himself, who was inspired by a documentary he watched with drummer Dave Grohl about water births. He mentioned it to (DGC Records art director Robert) Fisher, who found plenty of stock photos of underwater births, most of which were too graphic for label DGC's taste. With the costs too high to obtain a photo Cobain liked of a baby chasing a dollar underwater, Fisher sent a photographer out to recreate the image, settling on a shot of then 3-month-old Spencer Elden, the son of the photographer's friend. Even that innocent image of the cherubic, naked baby paddling underwater spooked DGC, which feared that it might offend some people. According to rock writer Michael Azerrad's 1993 Nirvana bio, "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," the label prepped an alternate cover without Elden's penis showing, but shelved it when Cobain said the only compromise he would make to the nudity was to cover it with a sticker that read, "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile." "We have a couple iconic pieces here, all related to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit," (says exhibit curator Jacob McMurray). "We have the sweater that Kurt Cobain wore on the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video, the guitar that Kurt played on that video and also the MTV Video Music Award for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' which weirdly enough says, 'Smells Like Team Spirit' on the award, as if the engraver was politely correcting the title for the band. "Nirvana Exhibit Leads Fans Through Band's Humble Start, Meteoric Rise"

From "You Are Listening To": Ambient music and philosophy Posted: 19 Apr 2011 09:16 AM PDT Last month, BB pal Andrea James turned us on to "You Are Listening To Los Angeles," an eerily engaging mix of police radio chatter and ambient music. New streaming is "You Are Listening To Deep Thought," in which big thinkers like Bucky Fuller, Terrence McKenna, and Aldous Huxley lay out their cosmic raps (snagged from YouTube) on top of ambient soundscapes culled from SoundCloud. "You Are Listening To Deep Thought"

Photos of "Malls Across America," 1989 Posted: 19 Apr 2011 08:58 AM PDT In 1989, Michael Galinsky toured the malls of the US with a cheap camera in-hand. Years later, he's launched a Kickstarter project to compile those images into a photo book celebrating these dying bastions of American culture. As my pal Koshi who sent me the link said "I can smell the Hickory Farms and corn dogs." From Kickstarter: I shot about 30 rolls of slide film in malls from Long Island to North Dakota to Seattle.  It was hard to tell from the images where they were taken, and that was kind of the point. I was interested in the creeping loss of regional differences.  I thought a lot about (photographer Robert) Frank's "The Americans" as we drove from place to place without any sense of place. "Malls Across America"

UK gets Viagra-laced beer Posted: 19 Apr 2011 08:36 AM PDT Royal Virility Performance, a limited-edition beer soon to be made available in the U.K., will contain lashings of viagra, which is available without a prescription there. According to the specially commissioned label, the Royal Virility Performance contains Viagra, chocolate, Horny Goat Weed and 'a healthy dose of sarcasm'. The beer is a 7.5% ABV India Pale Ale and has been brewed at BrewDog's brewery in Fraserburgh. With this beer we want to take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon being jumped on by dozens of breweries; The Royal Virility Performance is the perfect antidote to all the hype. Quite the hard sell. Product page [Brewdog.com]

Hipster Animals Posted: 19 Apr 2011 07:37 AM PDT Here are some anthropomorphic animal hipster archetypes, drawn in a style roughly approaching Richard Scarry by way of 1960s commercial illustration.

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