The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Max Tannone: Ghostface Killah vs. African funk, highlife, and psych
• My Little Pony flash game
• Mystery of the Haunted Mansion Hatbox Ghost: solved!
• Unusual toilets
• Dream anatomy
• Shirky: Cheap, free, chaotic news is better than all-the-same news businesses

Max Tannone: Ghostface Killah vs. African funk, highlife, and psych Posted: 10 Jul 2011 05:06 PM PDT DJ/producer Max Tannone, he of the Jaydiohead and Mos Dub mash-ups, presents his latest creation, "Ghostfunk." Max writes: It is a remix album that combines Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah with the sounds of vintage African funk, high-life, and psychedelic rock. Ghostfunk is free to download and stream. I hope you enjoy it. "Ghostfunk" by Max Tannone   Dub Kweli - Boing Boing Mos Dub: dub remixes of Mos Def tracks - Boing Boing Jay-Z vs. Radiohead - Boing Boing

My Little Pony flash game Posted: 10 Jul 2011 11:12 AM PDT Friendship is Magic, a My Little Pony flash game by Donitz, takes about 5 minutes to play through. At a certain point, I concluded that it is an unofficial My Little Pony flash game. [Newsgrounds]

Mystery of the Haunted Mansion Hatbox Ghost: solved! Posted: 09 Jul 2011 10:11 PM PDT For many years, Disneyland Haunted Mansion fans have debated the truth of the Hatbox Ghost, featured extensively in the Mansion's early publicity. No one was sure if Hattie never made it into the running, public Mansion, or whether he was there briefly and vanished. Now the first known footage of Hattie in situ has surfaced, and is on proud display at the Disney History Institute. Who is the most famous ghost in the Haunted Mansion? Without doubt, the Hatbox Ghost, a ghoul who lived there for only a few days. Short, pasty and decapitated--one of the most frightening figures to ever take up residence in the attic. But for decades fans wondered if this ghost actually existed in the finished attraction. Had it been removed before the Mansion's grand opening? And then four decades after opening day, DoomBuggies.Com posted the first photo of the Hatbox Ghost installed in the Mansion at Disneyland. And now, DHI comes limping into second place with some extremely rare home movie footage of dear, departed Hattie and his amazing hatbox. So rev up your DeLorean and journey with us back to the Summer of Love. Footage of the Mansion (pre-opening) comes from 1968; Footage of the Mansion (newly opened, with its shiny, gilt sign) comes from 1969. And of course footage of Hattie in the attic is marked August, 1969. The footage from my own collection and the never-before-released reference photos from Paul's collection. Actual Home Movies of the Hatbox Ghost - 1969 (via The Disney Blog)

Unusual toilets Posted: 10 Jul 2011 08:30 AM PDT Dezeen selects its top 10 toilets. Here, the P-Tree urinal by Dutch designers Aandeboom.

Dream anatomy Posted: 10 Jul 2011 08:11 AM PDT Google books is great for leafing through old and supremely weird tomes such as Juan Valverde de Amusco's 1559 Anatomia del corpo humano. This picture serves as the cover of Michael Sappol's Dream Anatomy, a history of renaissance anatomical art published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Amazon link) There is an accompanying web gallery, too. [via Chloe via Scientific Illustration]

Shirky: Cheap, free, chaotic news is better than all-the-same news businesses Posted: 09 Jul 2011 10:05 PM PDT Clay Shirky is getting ready to teach NYU's Journalism School undergrads, and he's posted "Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic," a call-to-arms to produce a wide variety of journalisms that -- unlike the newspaper business of yore -- has a wide variety of business models that don't all fail together when technology changes some of the facts on the ground. I could tell these students that when I was growing up, the only news I read was thrown into our front yard by a boy on a bicycle. They might find this interesting, but only in the way I found it interesting that my father had grown up without indoor plumbing. What 19 year olds need to know isn't how it was in Ye Olden Tymes of 1992; they need to know what we've learned about supporting the creation and dissemination of news between then and now. Contemplating what I should tell them, there are only three things I'm sure of: News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free. News has to be subsidized because society's truth-tellers can't be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market. However much the Journalism as Philanthropy crowd gives off that 'Eat your peas' vibe, one thing they have exactly right is that markets supply less reporting than democracies demand. Most people don't care about the news, and most of the people who do don't care enough to pay for it, but we need the ones who care to have it, even if they care only a little bit, only some of the time. To create more of something than people will pay for requires subsidy. News has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now. For all that the Journalism as Capitalism people can sound like Creflo Dollar mid-sermon, they are right to put their faith in new models for news. If for-profit revenue is shrinking and non-profit funding won't make up the shortfall, we need much cheaper ways of gathering, understanding, and disseminating news, whether measured in information produced or readers served. And news has to be free, because it has to spread. The few people who care about the news need to be able to share it with one another and, in times of crisis, to sound the alarm for the rest of us. Newspapers have always felt a tension between their commercial and civic functions, but when a publication drags access to the news itself over to the business side, as with the paywalls at The Times of London or the Tallahassee Democrat, they become Journalism as Luxury. In a future dominated by Journalism as Luxury, elites will still get what they need (a tautology in market economies), but most communities will suffer; imagine Bell, California times a thousand, with no Ruben Vives to go after the the politicians.* The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won't keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved. Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic (via Waxy)

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