My goodness, but that woman is fond of her underthings.

ROCK ON WITH GRANNY PANTIES

MakerBot has a delightful way of reviving the mixtape: a 3D printed MP3 player kit that looks like an old-fashioned cassette. You can either download and print the chassis yourself and assemble the device, or order the whole thing in assembled form. The Makerbot Mixtape holds 2GB, can be used as a thumb-drive, and plays directly through a headphone jack.

The MakerBot Mixtape

Einstein19 built this home Tardis shed and matching dalek ten years ago, but only recently published it on Tardisbuilders*. It's a magnificent piece -- I only wish I could access the Tardisbuilder forum where it appears, as I'd love to see the interior!

TARDIS shed and Dalek (via Neatorama)

*The existence of an online community for people who make their own Tardises is itself a rather wonderful thing, quite separate from Einstein19's considerable accomplishment

If you've decided to surrender to the squirrels that raid your bird-feeder and just set out squirrel chow instead, why not use one of Archie McPhee's humiliating giant-head-squirrel-feeders, which allow you to chuckle at your pests even as you capitulate to them?

If you get a Big Head Squirrel Feeder, you'll be able to feed and humiliate squirrels at the same time. Hang this vinyl 5-1/2" x 8" Big Head Squirrel Feeder in front of a window or near a porch, fill it with something squirrels like to eat and when they stick their head up there, the squirrel looks like he has a hilariously huge head with a goofy smile. Keep a camera nearby, you'll want to post a picture on Facebook. Perfect for birdwatchers, dads or anyone else who thinks squirrels should be taken down a peg or two. Has holes in the ears for hanging with string (not included).

Big Head Squirrel Feeder (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

The Learning Channel is dabbling in eschatology, and will soon air a programme starring young miss Honey Boo Boo Child, a young beauty competition participant from the Toddlers and Tiaras phenomenon. Miss Boo Boo Child came to notoriety due to her exuberant personality, fuelled by frequent nips from flasks of high sugar/high caffeine pick-me-up, this latter prepared by her doting mother.

In this clip, Boo Boo and family demonstrate the sort of educational material we can look forward to in the future from the pedagogists at the Learning Channel.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: Coming Soon! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

"Very Superstitious," Colin Dickey's essay for Lapham's Quarterly, presents a critical take on The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer's 1890 classic text on superstition. Dickey frames contempt for sympathetic magic and its practitioners in the context of the decline of the British empire, and connects it with earlier critiques stretching all the way back to Plato. The essay ends with a section on witchhunting and the persecution of both midwives and promoters of the germ theory of disease, who were accused of practicing their own form of sympathetic magic.

The conviction that witches were behind dangerous storms and other unexpected perils highlights a curious reversal that had taken place with regard to sympathetic magic. If it had once been used as a ward against uncertainties, against the caprices of nature and sudden death, now many saw it primarily as a cause of these dangers. (The Malleus Maleficarum warns that witches “can also, before the eyes of their parents, and when no one is in sight, throw into the water children walking by the waterside; they make horses go mad under their riders.”) These primal anxieties, of course, hadn’t gone away, and James, afraid of drowning at sea, certainly hadn’t yet learned the Christian art of dying well.

Such subtleties were no doubt lost as the crush and waste of humanity that was the European witch panic took on a logic and inertia of its own. After all, it was good business. Agnes Sampson’s torture and execution, like most witch trials, wasn’t cheap, employing judges, scribes, bailiffs, jailers, and executioners—each of whom had a financial stake in further trials. The trial record of Suzanne Gaudry, executed in 1652 in Ronchain, France, notes that each member of the court was to be paid 4 livres, 16 sous, while the soldier who accompanied her to Roux for the trial was to be paid 30 livres. Around 1593 in Trier, the scholar Cornelius Loos quipped that witch persecutions were a new kind of alchemy, whereby “gold and silver [were] coined from human blood”—before all his books were burned and he was forced to publicly recant ever having said such a thing.

As the world was becoming more ordered and codified via patriarchal religion and a burgeoning system of capitalism, magic was seen as a threat because it circumvented these structures: it offered a life outside the authority of the Church and the hierarchies it had carefully cultivated. Little had changed; people still felt powerless in the face of nature, but now instead of turning to magicians, they blamed them. The Church, after all, rarely attacked sympathetic magic on the grounds that it was empirically fallacious or ineffective—rather, it was a rival source of power. Among the many scandalous aspects of witches’ sabbaths as they were popularly depicted was the commingling of social classes: women—and increasingly men—of all walks of life, from peasants to the aristocracy, all were equal at the Midnight Mass. This vision of a dark Utopia was as threatening—if not more so—than any of the black rites practiced therein.

Very Superstitious (via Kottke)

A 30-page document containing the master anti-piracy strategy for IFPI (the umbrella group for all the record labels' national associations, like the RIAA and BPI) has leaked. The document, written by IFPI chief anti-piracy officer Mo Ali, has gotten into the hands of TorrentFreak. TorrentFreak's Enigmax summarizes the document in some detail:

Dealing with Internet service providers

In common with cyberlockers, IFPI have a set of rules they’d like to impose on Internet service providers. According to the industry group, ISPs should not provide Internet access to infringing sites, services or even unidentified customers. Furthermore, ISPs are required to “Implement a system of graduated response for infringing P2P users including warnings to an effective deterrent sanction.”

Site Blocking

ISPs are also required by IFPI to block access to infringing sites and services “located outside the local jurisdiction.” The chart below shows where blocking orders have been obtained (prior to April 2012) and how they are carried out.

Surprisingly, despite reports mounting to the contrary, IFPI seems to think that site blocking is an almost perfect solution to counter infringement.

“The effectiveness of such a ‘block’ will depend on the determination of the ISP subscriber and the content/website provider to maintain access to each other and to use circumvention techniques to bypass blocking techniques,” they write.

“There is evidence to suggest that there is limited (between 3% and 5%) adoption of these circumvention techniques although subscribers with more technical knowledge could look to circumvent ISP controls using virtual private networks (VPN) or anonymous proxies.”

Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy (via /.)

Paper Passion, a scent from Geza Schoen for Wallpaper* magazine, makes its wearers smell like freshly printed books. I suppose it can be alternated with "In the Library," a perfume that smells like old books.

Paper Passion fragrance by Geza Schoen, Gerhard Steidl, and Wallpaper* magazine, with packaging by Karl Lagerfeld and Steidl.

“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.” Karl Lagerfeld.

It comes packaged with inside a hollow carved out of a book with "texts" by "Karl Lagerfeld, Günter Grass, Geza Schoen and Tony Chambers."

Paper Passion (via Kottke)

Intel futurist Brian David Johnson continues his excellent "Tomorrow Project" with the first of a series of videos of his dialog with Bruce Sterling. In this opening installment, Sterling describes the impact that technology had on the science fiction writers of his generation (specifically, what the word processor did to cyberpunk) and how that figured into the process deployed by him and William Gibson as they worked on The Difference Engine.

Embracing the Future – Part 1: Conversation with Bruce Sterling & Brian David Johnson | The Tomorrow Project (Thanks, Brian!)

I haven't been to a comic book convention in over 15 years. I don't want to deal with the crowds. But after listening to Benjamen Walker (host of the terrific WFMU radio program Too Much Information) report on the academic comic book conference, Comics Philosophy & Practice held at the University of Chicago in May, I think I would love going to it. Small attendance, no hype, and my favorite cartoonists.

The Kogeto DOT is a $49 gadget that lets iPhone users shoot 360° panoramic videos.

(Via Blame it on the Voices)

MTV is apparently developing a new series called The Experiment that will be shot in the style of The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity franchise, incorporating the scary, creepy element of found footage. I'd turn my nose up at this idea if I didn't think it was so groovy -- if it was executed well.

For those of you keeping score, NBC will attempt to revive the '90s through sitcoms, MTV will do it with horror. Advantage: MTV. I never thought that would happen.

Read the rest

Above: Christian Morgenstern’s 1905 poem “Fish’s Night Song.”

Heinrich Plett in Literary Rhetoric, points out the obvious: “the referentiality of this isographemic configuration is polysemous.”

Fish's Night Song

NBC is rebooting The Munsters as a new series called Mockingbird Lane, created by Bryan Fuller (Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies), and incorporating Universal's stable of classic monsters. JoBlo's Alex Maidy has some information from Fuller on his vision for the series, and it sounds pretty swell to me:

According to Fuller "The Munsters actually do what monsters do. They eat people and they have to live with the ramifications of being monstrous. It's like grounding it in a reality because the half-hour was a sitcom, we saw the monsters: they were monsters on the outside and weren't monsters on the inside. For us, they're monsters outside and inside, and we get to double our story."

Sounds good to me. Fuller also says "Everything is a metaphor for something that you can identify with in a relationship. The fact that Herman is in a constant state of decay and he's married to someone who doesn't age. We get to play with all those insecurities. The fact that he was made by his father-in-law and then has to live up to those standards; he's always trying to find his own identity."

NBC's Munsters reboot Mockingbird Lane to capitalize on the Universal Monsters characters (via Super Punch)