MrBrickLabel has a Flickr set of absolutely gorgeous vintage Chinese firecracker labels.

I have been collecting firecracker and firework labels since I was 5 years old (1968). I appraise, buy, sell and trade firecracker labels. Everything you see here could possibly be for trade. I will try to post everything eventually. Hopefully more collectors can do the same and we can use this as a trading and sharing tool...

My Collection of Chinese Firecracker Labels (via Neatorama)

I challenge you to un-see this.

I asked photographer Markus Mueller about these hilarious and semi-disturbing shots on his website:

We shot these in different locations in berlin. one day three motives, three locations, a nice and very funny crew and work. we took the portrait pictures from the girls separately some days before. that are original prints on the t-shirts .....nothing with photoshop!

It was a ad campaign for the german client "Das Handwerk" (it is a German union for handcraft companies)
Agency: scholz&friends Berlin
Art Direction: Michael Johne

Gut gemacht gentlemen!

Becky sez,

Almost a year ago, Just Do It!, a film that follows the adventures of direct action environmental activists in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, was unleashed on the world. A joyful romp around the ins and outs of our corrupted political system, the film grants its viewers the kind of access to the young (and not-so-young) ideologues battling the man in their bid to save the planet previously only granted to undercover agents working for the Metropolitan Police. It's a great movie, and last week its makers released it for free download and sharing under a Creative Commons license.

The film has been made for the most part outside of the traditional process, with crowd-sourced funding playing a big role during post-production. Since last July, the tireless team at Just Do It! HQ have been working with fans of the project to get the film screened in local cinemas and at universities, and taken up by Netflix. A CC release was initially delayed to allow a window to the cinema, TV, and DVD releases, and to agitate for inclusion on the American film festival circuit. Now that the CC release is finally with us, the team are soliciting donations from anyone who feels moved by their efforts to get a tale modern outlaws out into the world. And of course, they want as many people as possible to see the movie, and be inspired to join the fight to save the planet.

Download via bittorrent! | Just Do It (Thanks, Becky!)

My co-hosts for episode 58 are:

Ed Piskor, the cartoonist for Boing Boing’s weekly Brain Rot comic strip. Has illustrated 2 graphic novels with Harvey Pekar (Macedonia, and The Beats). His first solo graphic novel, Wizzywig was released today, July 5th in comic shops.

and

Here are a few of the things we talked about in this episode:

Wizzywig: Portrait of a Serial Hacker, a terrific new graphic novel by Ed Piskor.

Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of The Iliad

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series

Seymor Papert’s Mindstorms

Scratch programming language for kids

Cargo-Bot

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

And more!

Lucha VaVoom, Tic Tack Toe w/ Steve O, Tim Biskup, Wayne White, Dave Alvin and Andy Kindler, "The Munster's" DRAG-U-La roadster, and MST3K's Joel Hodgson are just some of wonder at one of the greatest events of the summer, TwentyWonder - A Carnival Of The Mind, on Saturday, July 7, at the Doll Factory in Los Angeles. Benefitting the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles (DSALA), this decidedly oddball spectacle will feature a high-rollin’ matchup between the Los Angeles Derby Dolls and the San Diego Derby Dolls, folks from JPL and NASA, the Future’s Greatest Theremin Player, “When Girls Collide” (a DIY roller derby explanation "on the banked track" about the CERN Hadron Collider by CERN physicist David Saltzberg) and many other offerings of art, science, music and comedy.

Tickets can be purchased online , and enter discount code FRIENDS15 for 15% off tickets for the supporters of BOING BOING!

TwentyWonder

Phonographies is a collection of contemporary audio recordings made on wax cylinder phonographs from more than a century ago. In the late 1880s, Thomas Edison's wax cylinder phonographs were a mass market item. By the 1920s though, gramophone records totally dominated and cylinders quickly became a dead media. Phonographies founder Aleks Kolkowski records numerous musicians using the technology, from a jazz trio to a children's choir to avant-garde electronic composers. You hear many of the tracks above by scrolling up and down in the player. (photo by Helen Petts):

The epoch of sound rendered into physical objects has reached its nadir with the rise of the digital file. Compact discs are devalued while vinyl records and magnetic tapes have become niche products for audiophiles and widely fetishised. This archive began as a response to the increasingly transient nature of digital music consumption by returning to the very first stable recording and reproduction medium of the 1880s – the wax cylinder, in order to create and assemble a permanent collection of material sound objects. It has since developed into a more exploratory project, one that examines the potential of the wax cylinder as a recording medium by employing experimental techniques and pushing the boundaries of its recording capabilities, as well as being a joyful discovery for each contributor who re-enacts for the first time, the bygone practice of acoustically inscribing sound.

Phonographies (via The Wire)

Per sez, "Belarus is usually referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe. The opposition is jailed and tortured. The freedom of speech is non-present. Yesterday morning a small airplane entered the restricted Belarusian airspace, heading for Minsk. Flying on low altitude to avoid radar, the plane reached Minsk early morning releasing it's cargo of 800 plush teddybears with protest signs demanding free speech. The plane was able to return to Lithuania without being detected. Later the same day day the Belarusian minister of defense denied anything or anyone entered Belarusian airspace." And if not for the small detail that we filmed everything our guess is that no one would have believed this ever took place. The only thing a dictator can't really survive is when the people are laughing at him, and this is what we people will do when a plane was able to circle over Minsk airdropping teddybears and get away with it."

Teddybear Airdrop

I'll bet you didn't know that, in order to earn a Ph.D. from a major American university, you must first defeat a snake in combat. Don't feel too bad. They almost never mention this until you've already begun your graduate studies. Luckily, Luke Burns has a handy FAQ over at McSweeny's that will make sure you pass both your oral thesis defense and your mandatory snake fight with flying colors.

Q: Do I have to kill the snake?
A: University guidelines state that you have to “defeat” the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window.

Q: Does everyone fight the same snake?
A: No. You will fight one of the many snakes that are kept on campus by the facilities department.

Q: Are the snakes big?
A: We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the smaller the snake will be.

For god's sake, read the full FAQ. You do not want to arrive at your snake fight unprepared.

Street Tucker, a series of photos of "Food found on the streets of New York City." There's a whole genre of "food left on bike seats."

Street Tucker (via MeFi)

In 1851, Henry Mayhew published the four volume London Labour and the London Poor, an influential work of sociology/journalism that documented the life of working class Victorians. He wrote of "bone grubbers," basically dumpster divers seeking food and bits of household detritus, individuals who spent their days seeking cigar-ends for reselling, and scores of others with strange, sad, dirty, and curious jobs. One of the most interesting groups were the "toshers," sewer hunters who traveled the tunnels and sieved the waste for bones, metal, coins, cutlery, or other valuable goods, all the while avoiding the supernatural "Queen Rat" and "race of wild hogs" (predating NYC's alligators!) that roamed the shafts, according to other historians. Apparently, toshers could earn as much as six shillings (approximately $50 today) for their work. Drawing from Mayhew's work and others, Smithsonian offers a fascinating description of what they call "quite likely the worst job ever":

Even after the tunnels deteriorated and they became increasingly dangerous, though, what a tosher feared more than anything else was not death by suffocation or explosion, but attacks by rats. The bite of a sewer rat was a serious business, as another of Mayhew's informants, Jack Black - the "Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty" - explained.

"When the bite is a bad one," Black said, "it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which throbs very much indeed. This core is as big as a boiled fish's eye, and as hard as stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet and squeezes… I've been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can't name to you, sir."

"Quite Likely the Worst Job Ever"

Street artist MEGX converted an unused overpass in Wuppertal, Germany into a LEGO bridge. LEGO-Brücke (via Colossal)

What could be more romantic than a wedding bouquet whose flowers are made from the pages of Sherlock Holmes, and whose handle is a Doctor Who sonic screwdriver?

My Sonic Screwdriver Book Bouquet (via Neatorama)

I just picked up a vinyl copy of Bruce Springsteen's classic 1982 album Nebraska, consisting entirely of tracks that he recorded as demos but decided to release them as-is. My favorite song is "State Trooper" and after all these years, I only found out today that it was influenced by the song "Frankie Teardrop" by the pioneering proto-punk/performance art/electronic duo Suicide, available on their self-titled 1977 album. I had missed that the Boss was apparently a huge fan of Suicide's Alan Vega and Martin Rev. Indeed, back in 2008 he released a live version of Suicide's classic "Dream Baby Dream" for a Suicide tribute EP. The recording includes Springsteen's dedication to Alan Vega who was in the audience that night. Small world.