By Cory Doctorow at 7:38 pm Wednesday, May 23
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Miss Cakehead sends us these "Incredible and gross chicken feet cake pops created for the Evil Cake Shop by Miss Insomnia Tulip."
The feet are made from vanilla & raspberry cake, triple dipped in white chocolate with the pop hand painted to resemble a boiled chicken foot; the chicken dipping sauce pop (top) covered with coloured piping gel; the battered chicken foot pop is covered with the dipping sauce and crushed citrus sprinkles to resemble batter. Ruddy amazing Yorkshire based baking talent and a really innovative cake pop design to boot.
Boiled Chicken Feet – Extreme Cake Pops
(Thanks, Miss Cakehead)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Monday, May 21
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This is the ultimate in aspirational automotive paintjobs, surely. It's more unsourced net.stuff -- anyone know where it originated?
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:09 pm Sunday, May 20
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In National Geographic, a rare moment of marine nomadism, as a sea nomad child called Enal hitches a ride by holding onto the tail of his friend, a tawny nurse shark. The picture is by James Morgan, submitted to the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest (Top prize: Photo expedition for two to the Galapagos with a National Geographic photographer).
Enal, a young sea nomad, rides on the tail of a tawny nurse shark, in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Marine nomadism has almost completely disappeared in South East Asia as a result of severe marine degradation. I believe children such as Enal have stories that could prove pivotal in contemporary marine conservation.
Spontaneous Moments—Week 4 Gallery
(Thanks, Marilyn!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:01 am Friday, May 18
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Spider Robinson writes:
I just received word that Jay Kay Klein, THE photographer of science fiction
and fantasy, passed away on Sunday morning, May 13, in a Catholic hospice (a
"Francis House") in Syracuse, NY, at age 80, of esophageal cancer.
This sad news came to me today by phone from Craig Peterson, a local plumber
and a great-souled man, whom Jay Kay originally hired to fix a bathroom
faucet in his longtime home in Bridgeport, NY....and who then, miraculously,
took it upon himself to become Jay Kay's final friend, exactly what he
needed, helping him with his constrained living situation (Jay Kay's late
wife had been a serious hoarder), plowing his driveway, and (all gods be
thanked) helping him get his immense and precious collection of over 65,000
negatives of virtually everyone in our field over a 40-year+ period safely
to the University of California's Riverside Libraries Eaton Collection of SF
& Fantasy. Jeanne would have called Craig a true bodhisattva.
Craig's been going through Jay Kay's address book all day, calling people
like Fred Pohl, Bob Madle, and me. He tells me an exhibition and
celebration of Jay Kay's photos will be mounted at Chicon 7, the 70th World
Science Fiction Convention (Aug 30-Sep 3), by Melissa Conway, the Head
Librarian at Riverside Libraries, who now has charge of the collection.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 7:58 am Thursday, May 17
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Julian Cash's The People of Burning Man is a beautifully produced photo-portrait book shot over many consecutive years at Burning Man, the giant, weird, delightful art and culture festival that takes place every summer in Nevada's Black Rock desert. Cash -- who's quite an accomplished and experimental portraitist -- does a wonderful job of bringing out the decadence and playfulness of Burning Man. There's plenty of the nudity that often comes to mind when people think of Burning Man (this is, after all, the home of the Critical Tits topless bicycle ride), but Cash manages the fantastic trick of allowing his nudes to be sensual and sometimes sexy without ever being pornographic or salacious. These aren't "tasteful" nudes -- but they are exuberant and above all, fun.
People of Burning Man is to be celebrated also for its admirable lack of text. There's very little narration here, because very little is needed. The pictures tell their own stories -- sometimes in a frozen snapshot, and sometimes over time, as we visit with the same Burners over consecutive years (including one woman who appears first in a very pregnant state, and then with a babe at her breast). What little text there is -- a bit of background on the art of shooting portraits in a harsh desert, a little bit of biography supplied by the subjects -- complements the images without upstaging them.
Cash was good enough to supply a gallery of (NSFW, naturally) photos that are included below. There's plenty more -- and lots more material, besides -- at his The People of Burning Man site. The book was independently published with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it's both a beautifully made thing and a thing of beauty.
The People of Burning Man
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By Cory Doctorow at 8:55 am Saturday, May 12
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Here's Kitt and his delightful progeny cleverly disguised as a tauntaun and Han Solo on the frozen ice-world of Hoth: "His tauntaun even had removable guts to warm your hands with."
Happy House Warming, Kitt!
(via Super Punch)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 pm Wednesday, May 9
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Emmanuel Goldstein from
2600 magazine writes, "We've begun work on the 2013 Hacker Calendar after a really good response to the 2012 edition.
This time the theme is surveillance, something near and dear to all of us. We're looking for ideas for calendar photos that capture some of the surveillance technology that's so pervasive - cameras, sensors, microphones, and a whole lot more. We have a team of photographers ready to capture all kinds of images of the watchers. Anyone who knows of particularly egregious, ironic, frightening, or silly examples of surveillance that we can photograph, please send an email to calendar@2600.com. (We're also looking to document some of the historical hacker-related events that took place in the past year so we can mark those on the next edition.)"
(
Thanks, Emannuel!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:00 pm Tuesday, May 8
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Nicola Schiavone is the recently jailed Camorra mafioso. His Naples home was photographed by the Italian tax police who raided it. It's quite an eyefull of Mafia-chic strangeness. The Guardian has the story.
Criminal? Italian mafia interior tastes exposed - in pictures
By Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Tuesday, May 8
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Here's a photo of the Jewel Caterpillar (Acraga coa), snapped by Gerardo Aizpuru near Cancun, and submitted to Project Noah. Be sure to click through for other views. Wow.
Photo take in a mangrove area , found this Stoning translucent caterpillar lay on a Red Mangrove tree leaf this morning early. Just can believe there is some species like this around the world. looks like made of glass whit small red mushroom inside every pic. about 3 cm long.
Jewel Caterpillar
(via Geekologie)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Saturday, May 5
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The Long Forgotten blog -- the world's greatest source of informed critical speculation about the design thinking behind the Haunted Mansions at the Disney parks -- has just put up a smashing post about dueling theories of the intentions (conscious and subconscious) of the Mansion's creators. In the middle of that post is this remarkable photo, showing the Mansion's facade, and the ride building behind it, outside the railway berm, in what was once the parking lot. I've never seen this shot before -- I'm riveted by the sight of the ride's apparent structure and the huge, actual structure behind it.
Add to this the surprisingly flexible limits of "realistic" presentation under any circumstances, not just haunted houses, and things really become loose. Few films or rides concern themselves too much with reconciling inside and outside architecture. Someone with a perfect sense of architectural space may wince once in awhile, "knowing" that if the character really did turn left down that hallway, he should by rights walk smack into the outer wall of the house, but for the most part such concerns are ignored. This includes size considerations. With the HM, even if we discard about a third of the show building as housing an outdoor scene (the graveyard), the square footage of the house we experience is still much larger than anything that could pass for the "original" house remodeled into the current Mansion.
Long-Forgotten: The Ghostland Around Us, Beneath Us
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:20 pm Thursday, May 3
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Today, I got to tour several particle accelerator research labs at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including an inside look at a working accelerator, something I'd never seen up close before. Suffice to say, it was awesome, and I will be posting more on that here after I'm able to do a few more interviews.
I wanted to show you something real quick, though, from early in the tour. Postoc Daniel Bowring showed me a display, seemingly set up in the corner of a random hallway, where LBNL keeps a collection of segments from different types of particle accelerators.
If you're anything like me, when you picture a particle accelerator what you think of is something like the image above—a metal donut, or rather, a tube. What I learned today: Accelerators don't have to look like that. In fact, they come in a delightful variety of shapes.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 1:44 pm Thursday, May 3
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I love the Lego wigs used in this Elroy Klee campaign for Mindplay. They've got the perfect mix of impracticality and strikingness to qualify as gen-you-wine coo-choore.
Mindplay: bricks on me
(via Geekologie)
(Photo: Niki Kits-Polman & Ebo Fraterman)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:28 am Friday, Apr 27
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Seth Schoen snapped this Vatican City ATM that displays instructions in Latin.
Latin ATM
(via Kottke)
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:33 am Friday, Apr 27
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Image: The Baraboo Range, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from crisp_air's photostream
On Wednesday, I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, to give a talk based on my book, Before the Lights Go Out. I took the train to get there, traveling south from Minneapolis along the Mississippi River before jumping the border into Wisconsin at the town of La Crosse.
This isn't a region I've spent much time in before, and I was struck by the landscape, which felt exotic and foreign—adjectives that are seldom applied to southeastern Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin. The Mississippi here looks less like a river and more like a series of interconnected lakes dotted with sandbars, narrow peninsulas, and forested islands. Looking across the water, into Wisconsin, a line of strangely shaped tall hills (or maybe small mountains) run along the shore—all severe, sharp angles covered in a fuzzy looking blanket of trees. It almost looks like somebody cut a patch out of Appalachia and dropped it into the middle of the prairie.
This is the Driftless Area, a part of the upper Midwest that combines some wonderfully weird geology with a truly kick-ass name. I did a little research on the region during the rest of my trip and I wanted to share a couple of the cool things that I learned.
First, about that name ...
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, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.