Afghan youth have learned to recover almost instantly from such routine violence. One person determined to inject some normalcy into their lives is Oliver Percovich. A 34-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, he plans to open this country’s first skateboarding school, Skateistan, this spring. He sees sport as a way to woo students into after-school activities like English and computer classes, which are otherwise reserved for the elite.
“Teenagers are trying to dissociate from old mentalities, and I’m their servant,” Percovich said. “If they weren’t interested, I would’ve left a long time ago.”
Now, when he pulls his motorcycle into a residential courtyard here, a dozen youngsters pounce before it comes to a stop, yanking six chipped skateboards with fading paint off the back. The children, most participating in a sport for the first time in their war-hardened lives, do not want to waste any time. Their skateboard park is a decrepit Soviet-style concrete fountain with deep fissures. The tangle of novice skaters resembles bumper cars more than X Games.
But Percovich has raised the money needed to build an 8,600-square-foot bubble to house the nonprofit Skateistan complex, and the Kabul Parks Authority has tentatively donated land. He is still waiting for official permission to begin the project. And since a spate of kidnappings and the car bombing in late November, he has reduced his daily sessions at the fountain to once or twice a week.
Among those who look forward to his visits is Maro, an elfin 9-year-old girl who was terrified of skateboarding at first. “It gives me courage, and once I start skating, I completely forget about my fears,” she said.
The photographer and craftsman Todd Schellinger asked me to design some metal business cards for his studio Hand + Eye. He gave me pretty broad creative license, asking only that it speak to the tradition of craftsmanship that he brings to each job.
Designing for metal presents many challenges and opportunities. I knew from the start that I wanted to make something that would transform from one state of being to another. What I ended up producing was a semi-articulted metal hand that could hold onto an envelope or an invoice.
Kristen's Zombie Hello Kitty cake combines every wonderful thing: zombies, Hello Kitty, ganache, and trademark infringement. Well done that cake-maker!
Wikipedia's list of confidence tricks is a globe-spanning journey through con-jobs ancient and modern. Required and fascinating reading:
A clip joint or fleshpot is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service, in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor, or no, goods or services in return. Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money. The product or service may be illicit, offering the victim no recourse through official or legal channels.
The Melon Drop is a scam in which the scammer will intentionally bump into the mark and drop a package containing (already broken) glass. He will blame the damage on the clumsiness of the mark, and demand money in compensation. This con arose when artists discovered that the Japanese paid large sums of money for watermelons. The scammer would go to a supermarket to buy a cheap watermelon, then bump into a Japanese tourist and set a high price.
A million congrats to Neil Gaiman for winning the prestigious and much-deserved Newbery Award for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, a magical ghost-story retelling of The Jungle Book. You earned it, Neil!
The Places We Live is an utterly riveting narrated Flash slideshow of the world's slums. It takes the form of a series of panoramic photos of slums around the world, with voice-over from people who live there (in translation). I'm currently watching the segments on Dharavi, in Mumbai, said by some to be the largest slum in the world. I visited Dharavi with an NGO last September while researching a book and it made quite an impression on me as a place of immense self-reliance and industry, but also bitter poverty. I'm working on a scene set there now, so this could not have come at a more opportune moment for me.
At an indoor minimall in Aomori I found this skin-tight black-and-gold-printed t-shirt, apparently catering to a Japanese teen subculture that pays lifestyle homage to punk bands of the 1980s, especially the Sex Pistols. I couldn’t resist buying it even though the idea of wandering around my neighborhood in the USA with “LOvE HErOiN” on my chest seems a little unwise. (Of course, confessed cocaine user Barack Obama will be ushering in a new regime of tolerance real soon now.)
Among the various incantations on the shirt, “Have a nice punky day” seems not quite congruent with the message that Sid Vicious delivered—but the Japanese always tend to add a feelgood spin. This is, after all, the nation where even the shrine at Hiroshima sells key chains with a happy Hallmark-style romantic message on the back (see below).
If I were more of a global traveler, I’d like to compile a book of pictures of table settings in different nations, showing the remarkably different ways in which human beings eat on an everyday basis.
This picture is of a typical evening meal at the house where I stayed in Aomori. For reasons that seem primarily rooted in tradition, economy, and availability, fish is the primary source of protein. Local supermarkets offer at least ten times as much space for fish compared with meat (whereas in the United States, the ratio is reversed).
It’s hard to find anything unhealthy in this setting. The caloric content is minimal. Nothing is fried, and nothing is heavily loaded with fat or sugar. I guess it’s no surprise that the Japanese still show few signs of obesity, unlike the populations of most western nations, and have an astonishing average life expectancy of 79 for men, 85 for women. (In the United States, the average numbers are 4 years lower.)
In part because my books have had a habit of weaving multiple disciplines together, and in part because I've written quite a bit about technology, I'm often asked about the tools I use to research and write my books. Given that Boingboing has its own wonderful multi-disciplinary sensibility, and of course a major obsession with DIY movements, I thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books.
My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)
Since I wrote that essay, I've developed a new approach to using Devonthink that was enormously helpful in writing Ghost Map and Invention. The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink.
When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. With Ghost Map, for instance, there's a cool little trick I figured out before I started writing where each chapter maps to a single day in the epidemic, but also connects to one of the themes of the book: the shit and scavengers, miasma, the map. (No one seemed to notice this in any of the reviews, but it's one of the things that I'm most proud of with that book.) And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. And as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful. Some snippets get dragged to multiple folders; most don't make it into any folder. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.
And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.
This long NYT retrospective on the seminal news-photos of some guy named George Bush during his presidency ends with photos of the man on his way to his farewell address, during which it appears that he's been crying in the bathroom. I've looked at it several times now and I'm not sure I agree that's what's going on -- this facial expression seems to contain a lot more than mere sorrow.
And I turned to one of my editors – First I said, “Oh, my God.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “You’ve got to see this picture of Bush. This is really stunning.” And I flipped it over to him to process and his first reaction was, “Wow.” And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.
Hello, I am a ukulele player I lives in Tokyo , Japan.
This ukulele is "Cake ukulele" I decorated.
It might be tasty. But I can not eat.
This cream is Imitation and
ice cream is made of clay.
This ukulele can be good played.
I played "Crazy G" with this cake ukulele.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
BB pal Jess Hemerly has become fascinated with "cop talk" as of late. She's even been practicing the skill in instant messages to me. Yesterday, she found this helpful insider's discussion of "cop talk" in a 2008 article from Officer.com, the "source for law enforcement." The article, titled "Cops Talk Funny," was written by a law enforcement training expert. The author discusses officers using cop talk on the stand might hurt an officer's credibility. She advises unlearning the language and suggests a fun exercise to help. From Officer.com:
Make up some flash cards. On one side, write a phrase or sentence the way you now talk on the stand. On the other side, write the same phrase in plain English. Have one of your kids work with you with your flash cards. It'll be a nice Hallmark family moment. I'll help you get started.
* He indicated... He said
* I have been employed by... I worked for
* I exited the patrol vehicle... I got out of the car
* I observed... I saw
* I ascertained the location of the residence... I found the house
* I proceeded to the vicinity of... I went to
* I approached the entrance... I went to the door
* The subject approached me... She came up to me
* I apprehended the perpetrator... I arrested the man
* I obtained an item that purported to be an envelope from the individual... I got the envelope from her
* I observed the subject fleeing on foot from the location... I saw him running away
A million congrats to Neil Gaiman for winning the prestigious and much-deserved Newbery Award for his young adult novel 
Phone is tapped and I don't care (2x)