Parker sez,

I'm a summer intern at the Participatory Culture Foundation, who make Miro, and I just launched two new channels that Boing Boing readers might enjoy:

Free Culture TV is all videos about free culture and the copyfight. Check out cool documentaries, videos of lectures or CC Salon discussions, that kind of thing.

Yes, We're Open! Free Movies, Music Videos, and TV (catchy title, eh?) is all openly licensed entertainment... Movies, shorts, music videos, all kinds of fun stuff.

You can subscribe to either or both of these channels in any RSS reader that can handle video and torrent attachments, but they're built for Miro.

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer for Miro's board of directors)

Matt sez, "Michael Moorcock agreed to let me post the introduction to his work in progress, a memoir of Mervyn Peake, author of the "Gormenghast" books and his wife Maeve. It's going to be called "Lovers: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A Personal Memoir." As a fan of both Moorcock and Peake, this is a big thing for me, as I suspect it will be for many other readers." Peake completely torqued my head around backwards when I was about 14.

The Peake parties were lush and rich but never self-conscious. The PreRaphaelite enthusiasms of the 60s, which brought Melvyn Bragg into a room dressed as if for the set of Isodora, which he was then writing, in black velvet, with silver rings, married well with the dark Fitrovian colours of Mervyn’s canvasses, though Peake had no particular enthusiasm for the previous century. His preference was for the present, for Soho and the post-war world of eccentric Londoners whose portraits he collected in what he called his head-hunting sessions. At this stage of his life, however, because it reflected the concerns of his generation, his painting was somewhat out of fashion. England had entered one of her uncertain, self-examining periods of nostalgia, looking back to the fin-de-siecle and Edwardian social certainties.

Mervyn was dramatically handsome and his wife Maeve was dramatically beautiful. They had been a remarkable couple for years, though they had not mixed a great deal with the fashionable bohemians of their day. They had spent quite a lot of time away from London, in Sark in particular. They had come to prefer each other’s company. Although an accomplished painter, she had put aside her own work for the most part, concentrating on her children. He drew her and painted her a lot. She is there in everything he did. He wrote her poems when he was taken into the army during the second world war, he produced fictional versions of her in his Titus Groan, which he wrote when he was drafted into the army. On leave, he would draw her and the children. He was an inexpert soldier. He had a mild breakdown, which kept him away from overseas conflict. Eventually, he was commissioned as a war artist. His pictures of Maeve are not exaggerated any more than the poems for and about her, of which he wrote so many

From the Sociological Images blog: "Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use television commercials. Below is one of his commercials, made by Disney, from 1952. Eisenhower was skeptical about using television and his opponent, Stevenson, wouldn’t appear on television because he thought it demeaning to a man ascending to the presidency. Eisenhower won." Link

Tokyo Disneyland offers many charms, but none so, um, suggestive, as this Johnny Depp branded sausage. Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

Over on Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies has uncorked a hell of a rant on the fatuous absurdity of the old saw that "corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value." He starts off by pointing out that you could maximize the profits of the company for this quarter by, for example, firing everyone -- but that the next quarter would be pretty dismal. Then he gets into the meat of it, how every conceivable action can be justified as "maximizing value."

In real life, the business judgement rule protects more or less anything that the Creative Capitalism gang might want businesses to do. Even the paradigm example used by Posner – of a corporate chief executive making charitable donations and specifically saying that they weren’t doing it for PR purposes and that they didn’t run the company in the interests of the shareholders – doesn’t actually necessarily give rise to a situation which would fail the business judgement test, because that’s pretty much the story of Body Shop, and if the only way that a company can secure the services of a talented and energetic cosmetics executive like Anita Roddick is to give away money without regard for shareholders, then that’s in the interests of shareholders. There is, of course, a cottage industry in business school cases and the funnies pages of the Economist in proving that instances of corporate philanthropy are actually in the interests of shareholders in the long term.

And, of course, the long term is a terribly difficult thing to forecast. It would, we can presume, be pretty bad for the S&P500 index if the Antarctic ice cap melted and we all drowned. Conversely, if the continent of Africa were to develop a billion consumers in a first world economy, that would be pretty good for the share prices of most companies on the stock exchange. There is a general long time interest of all humanity in doing good (that’s why it’s called “good”) and corporations and their shareholders do, in fact, share in this general interest of humanity. If you want to argue in any particular case that an act of corporate philanthropy isn’t connected tightly enough to a specific benefit which can be appropriated by the company and that this is wrong, then go for it but don’t expect the courts to agree with you.

Check out this 1980s, Soviet-era Estonian commercial for meat and meat products. Now this is what advertising is about: echoing chants, meat slurry being extruded from a machine, and nervous chickens. Link (via Kottke)

Update: This one originally appeared on BB in 2005, thanks to Xeni -- good catch, Mecredis!

It's time again for Sysadmin of the Year nominations:

The SysAdmin of the Year Award shines a spotlight on the IT superheroes behind the scenes working tirelessly to troubleshoot, problem solve and fight fires to keep the world running smoothly. They save the day on a daily basis and we think it’s time they got the recognition they deserve.

It's easy - grab your video camera, web cam, or cell phone and bust out a short 1-2 minute video about how you saved the day for your organization or client. Make us laugh or make us cry, and you could win fabulous prizes including an Apple Laptop, a Wii, xBox or PS3. First 500 entries get a heroic SysAdmin of the Year t-shirt.

John Young has written some cool projects for Make, such as this helmet-mounted water gun. He just alerted me to another nifty thing he made: Commando Nerd patches, which can be scanned with an iPhone.

Here's how he describes them:

You have an iPhone. And that means you're just HOURS away from being able to put a QRcode reader on it (there's one currently under review at Apple.)

Once you have a QRcode reader, what will you do then? Why, you'll wear a stylish Commando Nerd patch all around town, naturally! You can configure the patch to link to anything you want. People can scan your code to see your blog... or buy your art... or watch a YouTube video of you giving them the finger. Here's my blog post taking it out from under wraps.

I have about five or six velcro-backed patches left in the prototype set before I start making and selling them For Real.

This'll be fun; the iPhone provides a lot more, and a lot more interesting, opportunities for offline to online integration than just "here's a link to my facebook page." One thing I want to do is link the patch to a paypal "subscribe to me" link. You know, you could offer help-desk services right there in person:

THEM: "Excuse me, could you install a virus checker on my computer?"
YOU: "Certainly! Just take your mobile phone and scan my patch right here..."
THEM: "What's that?"
YOU: "That will subscribe you to my IT services. Only ten dollars a month for up to three incidents!"
THEM: "Uh... how about I just take my laptop to the Geek Squad?"
YOU: "Oh, gosh, okay."

Or maybe:

THEM: "Hey, man, what happened to your leg?"
YOU: "I broke it in five places. Scan the patch on my cast with your iPhone and watch a YouTube video of me ALMOST making the jump!"

My favorite type designers, House Industries, have a new set of fonts called Studio Lettering. The description is intriguing:

Before the era of digital publishing, highly-trained artists in lettering shops plied their talents to give personality to advertisements, editorials and package designs. While the eye-catching beauty of hand-drawn lettering is still relevant in today’s visual landscape, this bygone skill has sadly fallen to the wayside. Designer Ken Barber brings the lettering artist’s sensibilities back to the modern designer’s desktop with our new Studio Lettering collection. More than three years in development, these fonts use advanced programming to create living and breathing lines of text that escape the rigid constraints of traditional type to flow as they would from an experienced letterer’s hand. The first 200 purchasers receive a free 64-page hardbound Studio Lettering book!

Coop alerted my to this amazing photo of "The Monster Korner" in a New Jersey hobby shop from 1964. Every square inch is a treat to the eyeballs.

The only place a shop like this could exist today is Tokyo.

The text from the photo reads:

Rich Palmer ran the nation's largest volume hobby shop in Parsippany, New Jersey. Aurora hired him to organize its Monster Customizing Contest in 1964. Aurora received national television attention when the CBS Evening News visited his shop. Walter Cronkite and Palmer held a conversation in the "Monster Korner" of the store. Big Frankie occupies the top shelf in the Monster Korner.

Monster Corner vintage hobby shop (toyranch's photostream)

Here's a short video of the Martin Jetpack that's going to be unveiled at the Oshkosh Airshow next week.

Irene Klotz of the Discovery Space website interviewed Edgar Mitchell about his claims that intelligent space creatures have landed on Earth and that the US government has been covering it up.

EM: My major knowledge comes from what I call the old-timers, people who were at Roswell and subsequent who wanted to clear the things up and tell somebody credible even though they were under severe threats and things -- this was back in the Roswell days. Having gone to the moon and being a local citizen out in the Roswell area some of them thought I would be a safe choice to tell their story to, which they did. Even though the government put real clamps on everybody, it got out anyhow.

Subsequent to that, I did take my story to the Pentagon -- not NASA, but the Pentagon -- and asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told them my story and what I know and eventually had that confirmed by the admiral that I spoke with, that indeed what I was saying was true.

IK: You mean what had been told to you was true?

EM: Yup, in other words. There was a UFO crash. There was an alien spacecraft. This gentleman tried his damndest to get me in and like so many others in the administration over the last 60 years, since JFK's time, was unable to. He was told 'Admiral, you don't have a need to know, and therefore go get lost,' essentially.

Software engineer Neil Fraser made a video that uses domino falls to simulate logic gates, the basic building blocks of digital circuits. Domino Domino Logic (neil.fraser.name, thanks Michelle Hlubinka and Robert Cook!)

Ian Cook puts paints on the wheels of his R/C cars and then drives them to paint pictures. Of cars. (And more abstract pieces too.) Rob has more details and a video over at Boing Boing Gadgets. R/C car painting (BB Gadgets)

Illustrator Patrick Owsley has been showing some of the excellent Flintstone's style guide art he's been working on. Here's a police truck he inked from pencil drawings by Mike Fontanelli and Mark Christiansen. The Flintstones vehicle art (Patrick Owsley)

The woman above left is wearing bioptics, tiny Galilean telescopes mounted on eyeglasses that help some visually impaired people see well enough to drive cars. The problem is, many folks aren't comfortable with the way bioptics look, and they also make eye contact difficult. Researchers from Harvard's Schepens Eye Research Institute are hoping to solve those problems and others with eyeglasses that have much smaller Keplerian telescopes embedded right in the lenses (above right). From a press release:

“This new design has several advantages,” says the inventor of the glasses, Dr. Eli Peli , who is a senior scientist at Schepens Eye Research Institute, a professor at Harvard Medical School, a low vision expert, and the senior author of the paper. “One major advantage is the appearance of the glasses. Because they look almost like normal everyday spectacles, it is more likely that visually impaired people will use them,” says Peli, who adds that the glasses are easier to use than existing telescope models because of a wider magnified view and easier access to that view. Most importantly, shifting the magnified view up leaves the unmagnified view of the road unobstructed, which is important for safety and facilitates navigation...

Not only will the new glasses improve the cosmetics and usefulness of this type of device, the in-the-lens design will make it possible to mass-produce the telescopic magnifier as a standard spectacle lens blank and allow an individual’s prescription to be added using the standard procedure for grinding regular spectacle lenses. This process should also reduce the price of bioptic telescopes.

This sunblock commercial from Japan starring a fembot is creepy, especially the close-up at the end. Link

If James L. Harris really did what police say he did, then I would like to award him a Happy Mutant Criminal Award certificate.
The 18-year-old is accused of stealing at least three Miami-Dade Transist buses, and driving them on their routes.

Poilice say Harris wore a Miami-Dade Transit employee uniform, did not steal the fares, and returned the buses to the depot each night.

He's been charged with three counts each of third-degree grand theft and burglary of an occupied conveyance.

Man Stole Miami-Dade Buses, Drove Them On Routes (News4jax.com) (via Arbroath)

Over on Tor.com, Jo Walton (herself one of my favorite writers) reviews Jack Womack's sorely neglected novel Random Acts of Senseless Violence, a book I rank with Uglies, The Parable of the Sower, and even The Diary of Anne Frank for being an unflinching, engrossing, difficult coming-of-age story. I've read it (at least) a dozen times, and I find new reasons to love it every time.

Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve year old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she's writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can't think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words. (Random example: "Everything downcame today, the world's spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.") I also can't think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvelous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it's bleak and downbeat it's never depressing.

So, why haven't you read it?

Some marriage-crazed brides are demanding that their bridesmaids get laser-surgery, botox, breast-enhancements and salon tans before Der Tag.

Two weeks ago, Health Travel Guides, a medical tourism company, exhibited at the Dallas Bridal Show for the first time. “We received 30 requests for quotes among the bridal show attendees — mostly for plastic surgery such as liposuction and breast augmentation,” said Sandra Miller, the company’s chief marketing officer. “But also many for cosmetic dentistry and inquiries for providing quotes for bachelorette getaways that will feature beauty treatments.”

A bride’s request that you whiten your grayish teeth can strain a relationship. Samantha Goldberg, a wedding planner in Chester, N.J., recalled a bride who asked her attendants to get professionally spray-tanned for a Hawaiian-theme reception.

Alas, two women were claustrophobic and couldn’t bear standing in a tanning capsule. “They asked the bride if they could use regular tanning cream from a salon,” Ms. Goldberg said. The bride refused; she wanted everyone to be the same shade. The women ultimately declined to be bridesmaids. “Friendships of 20-plus years gone over a spray tan?” Ms. Goldberg said. “Sad!”

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 08 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Backstage at The Colbert Report, classic rockers Rush took a shot at playing "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band. Fortunately, they don't play Rock Band on stage. Rush playing Rock Band (Laughing Squid)

(A guest essay by Jasmina Tešanović)

Who was Dragan David Dabic?

For me this incredible story is only beginning. Soon Radovan Karadzic will be safely in Hague behind bars, rambling his strident defense just like his predecessor Slobodan Milosevic.

We here in downtown Belgrade are left with this mysterious ridiculous character, Dragan David Dabic, who will vanish like a soap opera hero. I am sincerely afraid that "Dabic," his traces, deeds and words will be cancelled, manipulated, and abused by the press, by his friends, by his enemies, by his captors. There is a lot at stake with his capture: Unpleasant truths and unanswerable questions. We lived with Dabic for 13 years, he was one of us, among us, in the shadow half-life of Serbia.

Two war criminals lived in my own street. Biljana Plavsic, the former leader of Republika Srpska, took power after Radovan Karadzic left in 1996. She pled guilty in the Hague and is now serving her sentence in Sweden. General Pavkovic was in charge during the pogrom of Albanians in Kosovo. He is sick of cancer.

People in Belgrade feel bewildered and betrayed. For 13 years Serbian officials have claimed Karadzic was never in Serbia. He was hiding in the mountains as an Ali Baba together with his 40 hajduks ( Robin Hoods), he was sheltered in monasteries praying to God for his country. These myths were obviously planted by the people hiding him in downtown Belgrade. There Dabic led his weird public life, while the hapless Serbian population was held hostage for the misdeeds of Karadzic.

Montreal psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold are studying the Truman Show Delusion, a mental illness they've identified where individuals are convinced that they are the stars of imaginary reality TV shows. By the way some people act on Flickr and YouTube, I'd say that this disorder, with varying severity, may be more common than we realize. From Canada.com:

While (Joel) Gold says they could have easily called their new disorder the EDtv Delusion or the Matrix Delusion -- both films that refer to an unreal existence-- three of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.

The five patients Dr. Gold treated were white men between the ages of 25 and 34, the majority of whom held university degrees. "I realized that I was and am the centre, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people," explained one patient, an army veteran who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing.

"My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention...."

"The wish for fame is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia," said the Montreal-based (Ian) Gold, 46, who specializes in delusion.

"New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes."

Today on Boing Boing tv, we are proud to share the sneak-preview of a television pilot, the AQUABATS! SUPERSHOW!, a live-action and animation program featuring the popular superhero ska band, The Aquabats (MySpace).

Jon Berrett of Yo Gabba Gabba explains:

This spring the Aquabats completed a pilot for a new television show based on the misadventures of rock and roll's greatest super dude men. The Aquabats have been a band for over a decade, have toured the world, and put out 5 full length studio albums.

The AQUABATS! SUPERSHOW! TELEVISION PILOT will have a special screening at the San Diego House of Blues show on July 25th, 2008 [during Comic-Con]. If you already have tickets, you are STOKED!

IO9's done a roundup of their favorite opening lines from science fiction. Some good reading here (and I'm flattered to have been included):

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." — William Gibson, Neuromancer. People always cite this as a great opening line, and it's easy to see why. It's such a vivid image.

Happy Sysadmin Day! Today is the ninth annual sysadmin appreciation day and I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the systems administrators who keep my life running, especially Ken Snider, who is the technical bedrock upon which Boing Boing is built, and Mark Perkel, who hosts my mailing lists, and Chris Smith, who makes our submission queue spam-resistant, and all the other tireless toilers in the bowels of the Internet. You truly rule the Earth, thou latter-day morlocks. Link (Thanks, Jono!)

An 82-year-old woman in Southampton, UK was told she couldn't take photos of an empty wading pool because she might be a paedophile. Because, you know, anything that children touch regularly becomes part of their souls, and if a paedophile looks at those objects, it's just like sexually assaulting a child.

Makes me glad, as a father, to live here in the UK, where the clear-eyed, sensible view of paedophilia is doing so much to ensure the safety of my daughter from assaults by strangers (an occurrence that is so rare as to be practically nonexistent) while doing practically nothing to protect her from the people who are statistically most likely to assault her -- her family, her friends' parents, her teachers, and other people known to her, who account for the overwhelming majority of assaults on children.

> An amateur photographer was told she could not take snaps of an empty paddling pool because she might be a paedophile.

Betty Robinson was ordered to put away her camera by a council worker when she began snapping the outdoor pool.

'It's absolutely ridiculous – it's bureaucracy gone mad,' said the 82-year-old widow from Southampton.

She was with friend Brenda Bennett as she took pictures of the city's common – where the pool is situated.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we looked at a Mondrian MP3 player and catalogued Congress' fight with evil robots. There was a gorgeous birdsong box automaton and an iPhone 3G that comes in Brownlee's favorite color, whore red. And laboratories at night sure are pretty.

We liked the Periodic Coffee Table, although it couldn't help but get us wondering how much cooler an Periodic Coffee Table of Imaginary Elements would have been. That's a project for you boys and girls at home... don't forget the Cavorite. But we digress. The hirsute and porcine finally lasered off his Zune tattoos. Brownlee really likes Half-Elf Tentacle Assault, surprising no one.

Sprint is bizarrely selling its towers, only to lease them back. A racing game is giving testers epileptic seizures. Corn plastics do not make good water bottles and Toshiba says "this is not the UMPC you are looking for." And Neil Young doesn't understand anything about digital audio.

From Joel, an ode to bacon. From Rob, the skewering of a PS3-loving bumpkin. From John, Elder's Game meets Lord of the Flies at summer camp.

Finally: half a terrabyte of foot fetish porn for your perusal. We were really on a roll today.

Link

Here's some (way shakycam) video of Danny O'Brien's OpenTech presentation, "Living on the Edge," an extremely provocative and interesting talk about how we might restructure the Internet so that our personal and important moments aren't hosted by YouTube, Flickr, and Blogger, but rather on our own machines. Link, Link to slides

Matt sez, "When I was in fifth grade, Mississippi Public Broadcasting decided to introduce a series of short films to educate children on how to use the library. For some godforsaken reason, the people at MPB decided that the best way to do this would be through a post-apocalyptic science fiction serial with children roaming the blasted earth in a… bookmobile… like a cross between 'Reading Rainbow' and 'Damnation Alley.' Confused? So was I. I loved the library and post-apocalyptic movies and television programs, and even I was completely nonplussed. Apparently someone has uploaded the entire run onto YouTube. The music still gives me the creeps!" Link (Thanks, Matt

The Camerahead Project is a Seattle protest group upset about the growing prevalence of CCTV cameras there -- they're staging a bit of theater tomorrow in Cal Anderson Park, walking around with giant cameras on their heads to get people thinking about what it means to have their public spaces under constant surveillance.

Local artist Paul Strong, Jr. says he’s holding the demonstration, called the Camerahead Project, to remind people that video surveillance cameras are recording their every move at Cal Anderson Park and three other parks around town. “The project not only raises the questions of who is watching who and who is watching the watchers, but also … why we are being watched at all,” he says. “There is so much going on in the news about wiretapping and data mining, all these little thing that happen locally go right by.”

Yahoo Music just announced that it's pulling the plug on its DRM server -- that means that as of September 30, everyone who bought Yahoo Music will lose the ability to recover it from backup or transfer it to a new PC. Like I said when MSN Music proposed to do the same thing: "All those years the music industry spent insisting that the only way they'd sell music is with crippling DRM attached managed to totally discredit the idea of buying music at all."

Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

No, you were one of the digital pioneers, and in this brave new frontier world, a few people are just going to get malaria. Fact of life. And someone will step in a bear trap, and then it's time for the bite rag, the alcohol, and the saw. Just the price of progress. And yes, some poor group will get trapped in snowfall when crossing the pass, and cannibalism may or may not be involved by the time they stumble barefoot from the mountains next spring. No one can prevent such tragedies.

Modofly -- who laser-etch designs into moleskine covers -- are hosting a contest for new designs for the next batch -- one of the themes is steampunk:

Get your steampens and steambrushes (maybe steampunked computer?) ready artists! We are looking for steampunk art in a BAD way. We are really excited about this. We already have some of the hottest steampunk artists working with us, but maybe we don’t know about you, we have been trying to get you, or maybe this will be your first steampunk attempt. We are looking for artwork with airships, gears, steam engines, steampunk fashion, anything fun and retro-futuristic (we aren’t going to get too picky as long as its super cool). We can’t wait to unveil these books and showcase the artists, so make sure you have a shot at the action and send your stuff in today!

See also: Dan Hillier's tentacle horrors -- now on moleskine notebooks!

Tim sez, "Ruth Whiting show's 'Plug In' is a show oil paintings at the Wedge Gallery in Asheville, NC. Ruth Whiting's paintings create a luscious mythology surrounding the ordinary plugs and cables that connect our technological lives. Liberated from their mundane function and rendered in glowing colors, these every day objects assume an almost sacred quality." Link (Thanks, Tim!)

See also: Oil paintings of giant power-cables

Jake Bronstein says:

Wait, you ran some pictures of my Fun Idea machine the other day before I'd even posted it. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that that might happen... I watched people take pictures of it all day... but how about some linkage? People seem to like it, huh? Maybe you could even share the whole story.

Zak-n-Wheezie is a two-headed Bearded Dragon lizard that lives on the Wittes family farm in Fowler, California. They (it? he?) just turned one. From McClatchy Newspapers:

When Zak-n-Wheezie were younger, the Wittes laid low to make sure no one searching for an oddity would find their one-in-a-million (actually, statistically speaking, two-in-a-million) pet.

"There were numerous circus-sideshow people looking for me," Barbara Witte says. "But I'm not looking to get them in the sideshow world."

Frank's brother did some research and told the Wittes not to sell Zak-n-Wheezie for anything less than a million dollars — that there were people out there who would pay that much to eat the Wittes' pet.

"There are people who will pay large amounts to eat a two-headed critter. They think it will give them eternal life," says Frank Witte, shaking his head.

A friend of mine, a journalist, recently emailed to tell me he likes the Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder I recently recommended. He said:

I just wanted to thank you for guiding me to try the Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder for interviews, using ffmpegx to convert the audio to MP3, and then Listen&Type to transcribe.

I've been using all three for a couple of weeks now, and have been very happy with the results. The recorder in particular has been great: tiny in size, it holds more hours of audio than I could ever need, and has been able to clearly record both sides of an interview.

Being able to store interviews on my computer as MP3 files is also a great benefit.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm really set to record interviews.

Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device ($16.99 at Amazon.com)

Reason TV has a story about Owen Beck, a 17-year-old high school kid from California who got bone cancer and had to get his leg amputated. The medicine Owen was taking was making him very sick and and lost a lot of weight, so his parents decided to try medical marijuana. The marijuana greatly helped Owen, easing his pain and nausea.
The owner of the dispensary, Charlie Lynch, often gave the marijuana to Owen without charging his parents. But the local Sheriff (who doesn't like the fact that medical marijuana is legal in his town and the state of California) called the DEA. They raided the dispensary and arrested Lynch. He's now under house arrest, attached to an extension cord for 2 hours a day, and is facing 100 years in prison.

Owen's parents knew the idea of giving medical marijuana to a 17-year-old strikes many people as scandalous. Local Sheriff Pat Hedges even asserts that allowing medical marijuana is "not in the best interest of a community that prides itself on providing a healthy, family environment."

But the Becks weren't concerned about what other people thought; they were focused on helping their son. So with a written doctor recommendation in hand, they purchased medical marijuana for their teenage son. The new medication eased Owen's pain and nausea like nothing else had, and the Becks grew fond of Charlie Lynch, who would sometimes refuse payment because, says Steve Beck, "He was just a compassionate kind of a guy."

But one day, Owen's life took another abrupt turn. Federal agents and local sheriff deputies raided Charlie Lynch's dispensary, and seized nearly everything inside, including Owen's medicine. "He had a prescription from a doctor at Stanford, and they took his stuff!" says Debbie Beck. Federal agents cuffed Lynch, and put him behind bars. Even though state and local laws allow for it, medical marijuana is still illegal under federal law. And because he had clients like Owen who were under age 21, Charlie Lynch faces heightened penalties. In California the average first-degree murder serves 20 years behind bars; Charlie Lynch could face a sentence as long as 100 years in prison.

The trial of Charlie Lynch begins this July.

Everyone's seen those "living statue" street performers who pretend to be sculptures and then try to surprise you by moving. A few weeks ago in Barcelona, prankster artist Mark Jenkins installed a real sculpture of a strange donkey and disguised it as a "living statue." What fun! The Golden Ass (YouTube)

Previously on BB:
• Mark Jenkins: cafeteria pranks
• Mark Jenkins: Traffic-Go-Round
• Mark Jenkins: Meter Pops
• Mark Jenkins casts a human head in packing tape
• Mark Jenkins: Tape Babies
• Mark Jenkins: Fake People

In the 1960s, retired US Army colonel James S. Ketchum led efforts to develop a nonlethal incapacitating agent as a weapon for a "war without death." Along with LSD, they experimented with synthetic cannabis, apparently similar in effect to hash oil but much stronger. Alternet published a great profile of Ketchum who paints a vivid picture of those strange daze with the Us Army Chemical Corp. From Alternet:

In an interview videotaped seven hours after he had been given EA 2233, one soldier described feeling numb in his arms and unable to raise them, precluding any possibility that he could defend himself if attacked. "Everything seems comical," he told his interlocutor.

Q: How are you?

A: Pretty good, I guess. ...

Q: You've got a big grin on your face.

A: Yeah. I don't know what I'm grinning about, either.

Q: Do things seem funny, or is that just something you can't help?

A: I don't -- I don't know. I just -- I just feel like laughing. ...

Q: Does the time seem to pass slower or faster or any different than usual?

A: No different than usual. Just -- just that I mostly lose track of it. I don't know if it's early or late.

Q: Do you find yourself doing any daydreaming?

A: Yeah. I'm daydreaming all kinds of things. ...

Q: Suppose you have to get up and go to work now. How would you do?

A: I don't think I'd even care.

Q: Well, suppose the place were on fire?

A: It would seem funny.

This handsome Periodic Coffee Table contains samples of all stable elements. The radioactive elements are not included. Boo. Brownlee has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Periodic Coffee Table (BB Gadgets)

One Step Beyond, billed as "your guide to the supernatural," was a docudrama TV program airing from 1959-1961. The episode about psychedelic mushrooms and psychic experiments is a trip to watch. It features Andrija Puharich, MD, a parapsychology researcher most famous for bringing Uri Geller to the US. Puharich also invented technology relating the the affect of low frequency electromagnetic wave emissions on the brain. As a result, tinfoil beanie folks love to hate him. You can view this episode of One Step Beyond in three parts on YouTube.

One Step Beyond: Psychedelic Mushrooms and ESP part 1, part 2, part 3 (YouTube, via Further)

Daniel Larusso says:

William Hope "Coin" Harvey was a businessman, author and former Presidential candidate. He was also a first-class eccentric, building a large (now underwater) resort in the middle of the then Arkansas wilderness and partially building a "knowledge pyramid" -- a time capsule of sorts set to house the collected knowledge of our civilization. Harvey was sure our civilization was headed for collapse and he wanted our knowledge found by our distant descendants so they could start over.

My friends at Xoom, investigators of the unexplained, just did a quick post on Harvey -- the first of several planned -- and they are about to take a trip to Monte Ne, Arkansas and do some fieldwork on the matter.

Avon and Somerset Police are running the recordings of telephone calls from foolish (and probably drunken or drugged) people who want to report trivial problems, such as losing eyeglasses, wanting to know when the Internet started, or having sore feet.

The thing that surprises me is the politeness of the emergency line operators.

Avon and Somerset Police publish 999 (911 in US) calls from foolish people (via Arbroath)

To promote the Beijing Olympics, a city in China has erected several statues depicting a cartoony athlete mouse with curious square holes punched in its ears. Here's the YouTube video.

Fake Mickey Mouse statues at the Beijing Olympics (Japan Probe)

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, told a radio station yesterday that he knows for a fact that space aliens exist and have visited Earth. From Wikipedia:

On July 23, 2008 Edgar Mitchell was interviewed on Kerrang Radio. Mitchell claimed the Roswell crash was real and that Aliens have contacted humans several times but that governments have hidden the truth for 60 years stating "I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real". In reply, a spokesman for NASA stated "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."

Jen sez, "This is a link to a Times Online article describing an ISP surveillance and throttling scheme announced by the UK government today. It's unclear what proof is required before you're 'blacklisted.' Seems to be what the UK decided to do instead of 'three strikes, you're out.'"

Parents whose children download music and films illegally will be blacklisted and have their internet access curbed under government reforms to fight online piracy.

Households that ignore warnings will be subjected to online surveillance and their internet speeds will be reduced, making it very difficult for them to download large files.

The measures, the first of their kind in the world, will be announced today by Baroness Vadera, who brokered the deal between internet service providers and Ofcom, the telecoms body.

Update: Danny sez, "ORG has links to the consultation, the memorandum of understanding the ISPs have signed, and how to get involved."

A group of esteemed British scientists and academics have sent an open letter calling on the British government to give more financial support to Bletchley Park, the site of the Allied WWII codebreaking effort and the birthplace of modern computing.

They say Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, should be put on a secure financial basis like other "great museums"...

Many of the buildings on the Bletchley estate were in a state of serious disrepair, she said. One building, where code-breakers worked during World War II, was falling apart, said Dr Black, and was protected by a blue tarpaulin that was nailed down over it.

Describing Bletchley as a "gem", Dr Black said it was a "national disgrace" that such a historic site was being allowed to fall into ruin.

"I do not know why they do not have funding as a national museum," she said.

See also: Bletchley Park kicks so much ass

Damien from Amnesty UK sez,

Binyam Mohamed - an Ethiopian national, and a former resident of the United Kingdom – has been detained at Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.

Amnesty International is seriously concerned for Binyam Mohamed’s health and well-being, particularly following the US government's announcement that it has charged him for trial by military commission. His mental and physical health are reported to be precarious after years of indefinite detention, and alleged torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.To raise awareness of his plight we are asking people to visit the Unsubscribe action page and Digg it.

On 24 July 2008 Binyam Mohamed is 30 years old. To mark this day, the London Guantánamo Campaign are holding a demonstration to call on the UK government to do more to secure Binyam’s release from Guantánamo Bay and return to the UK.