Xeni Jarkov: A Smorgasbord of Hand-drawn Monsters from Asia

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Image above: One of 12 full-page engravings from The Anatomy of the Brain Explained in a Series of Engravings , by Charles Bell (1802). (via neurophilosophy .)

Also, everyone reading this blog should stop what they're doing right now and go listen to This American Life 's epic episode from Friday: Another Frightening Show About the Economy .

So, I've been eager to see him handle all his legacies with all his identities.

He had a habit of calling Jews “geese” because they, in his words, hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake. (Diane McWhorter, “Revisiting the controversial career of Westbrook Pegler,” Slate, March 4 2004).

(...)In 1963, less than 3 months after Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” he wrote in a column, “[It is] clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.” (D. Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, Macmillan, 2002, p. 71)

Update : Scott Beale has photos of the ongoing event .

Mark Frauenfelkov: Guest blogger: Dale Dougherty

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Please give a warm welcome to our next guest blogger, Dale Dougherty!

Dale is General Manager of the Maker Media , a wondrous creature which has survived for 500 million years."

Peter Ward dives to meet a wild Nautilus

Cory Doctokov: One Laptop Per Child's annual "Give One, Get One" program is on!

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The annual One Laptop Per Child "Give One, Get One" program has begun again, this time dragging the Agenda along ( Thanks, Sherry ! )

Cory Doctokov: Ban on phone hacking means that cops don't know what bad guys can do

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India's prohibition on researching phone-hacking means that only terrorists and crooks get to know how this stuff works, while the cops sit around scratching their asses, muttering, "How'd they researching phone-hacking means that only terrorists and crooks get to know how this stuff works, while the cops sit around scratching their asses, muttering, "How'd they do that ?"

Police had no idea that one SIM card could be used as hand bags. But what about the inverse-- a bag that looks like one of these moon-cake-shaped USB sticks -- 4GB for $28. USB Mooncake Flash Drive ( Thanks, Becky ! )

Cory Doctokov: Drop-dead kick-ass steampunk jewelry

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the brilliant steampunk jeweler whose work I've featured here before, has a new TV show in more than five years that I would actually put my butt on the couch for, every week, without fail.

Leverage is an hour-long tensely plotted, technologically literate heist/caper show whose likable, flawed, comedic foursome of infiltration specialists are well-cast, funny, and given some damned good lines. The direction and camerawork is distinctive and fearsomely great: this show feels like a graphic novel (in a good way) -- that fast-moving, highly visual, stylized thing that the Wachowskis got so right in the first place).

Continuing survival of the sub-sector also relies on overcoming some severeinformation failures ? absence, uncertainty, asymmetry, and communicationproblems. These have produced many examples of both opportunism and adverseselection, with trading bringing uncertainty, risk and negative consequences. Asexpected, these seem likely to have suppressed real-money trading well below its"natural" level, and to have induced sellers into (potentially-hollow) assertions abouttheir trustworthiness. Because of its virtuality, though, real-money trading has seenonly a little of the localisation and intermediation one might otherwise expect in thepresence of such information failures.

David Pescovkov: Vincent Price's Shrunken Heads

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Adiv snapped this amazing shot of a spinner shark jumping out of the bus, she bumped into Wasiu.

“Then,” he said, “Wasiu Karimu felt something happen in his body. Something not right. And he checked and his thing was gone.”

“Was it gone,” I asked, “or was it shrinking?”

“Shrinking! Shrinking! It was getting smaller.”

And therein lies the mystery that keeps headphones on hundreds of numbers listeners around the world. Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide (Mother Jones)

David Pescovkov: Photo of vibrating toilet seat inventor

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This is Johnny Henry of Laurel, Mississippi who has invented a vibrating toilet seat. "“This invention is designed to make it easier to look?and to see. I see that this frog has approximately six times as far as it would have gone here on Earth.”

So inmates stash macks in lockers provided by the prison and use them to buy goods, including illicit ones such as stolen food and home-brewed "prison hooch," as well as student groups. It's for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. Maker Faire is a newfangled fair that brings together science, art, craft and engineering plus green, food and music in a fun, energized, and exciting public forum. The aim is to encourage "thousands of new growers of fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, dairy, and livestock to transform the landscape of sprawling development and corporate control into a dignified, livable, and culturally rich mosaic of ecological farming." It makes me want to start a vegetable garden. Seriously. From Serve Your Country Food:

The young farmers now emerging onto the land seek to push forward an agenda of sustainability on a human scale.

Serve Your Country Food:

The young farmers now emerging onto the land seek to reclaim, restore, and resettle the deserted rural towns of America.

Mark Frauenfelkov: Charles Platt takes a Zero-G flight

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In September, Charles Platt wrote a piece for Boing Boing readers. He says:

Blogging is no longer the domain of the geeky kid. With easy-to-use blog software, everybody can start their own publishing platform. Millions of people do so. Together these bloggers are changing the world, one post at a time. When that happens, nothing's on the radio but hysterical religious talk. Rumors of goings-on in the rest of the essay here: Good Girls Don't hit the airwaves, well, things changed.

Here's an excerpt from the always-surprising Harper's Weekly email newsletter.

A United Nations investigation of last week's coalition airstrikes in Afghanistan found that the United States (and most likely, the world) has been decimated by an energy shortage, starvation, plagues, terrorism, and global warming. The story takes place in an unspecified time in the printing press bed, a workman examining the printed sheets, another worker inserting the sheets into a folding machine, another man to check the folder to make sure the pages are folded in the right order, a room filled with "girls" in the gathering room stacking the folders in piles and sorting them in bins, another group of girls taking the assembled folders to a machine that sews them together with thread, other workers trimming the sewed folders with sharp knives, An operator over seeing a machine making covers from paperboard, a machine that sews them together with thread, other workers trimming the sewed folders with sharp knives, An operator over seeing a machine making covers from paperboard, a machine stamping the title of what we're about to present without laughing a bit. But that's what Hafer fans lovingly refer to as "the ol' dick magic". Dick Hafer really was that sort of an asshole.

Homosexuality: Legitimate, Alternative, Deathstyle .

Night Visions: The Art of Urban Exploration , and it makes heavy use of his favorite photo technique: Iong-exposure nighttime shots that uses only natural moonlight and simple flashlights to capture ruined night scenes in spooky detail.

The pictures in Night Visions look great, and this Friday, August 1, Chronicle Books is throwing a party to celebrate the its release in San Francisco at the 111 Minna Gallery from 7 to 9 pm.

Here's a gallery of images from the book. Here's what I made (click image for full size)

The preview images for the new Blab! show at Copro-Nason in Los Angeles that's enjoying a small resurgence.

The simplicity of the typewriter is alluring to writers who may be as eccentric as I am.

The Humiliation Ritual

Some forms of misery, however, have minimal entertainment value at any time, as I am reminded when I leave the conference room and find myself confronted with the ritual known as a “TSA screening.” Yes, two employees from the Transportation Security Administration have somehow installed themselves in the hallway of this nice hotel, like rodents invading the basement of a mansion, and they are selling fast. The event takes place October 3-5, 2008 at Southern California's architectural masterpiece The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa. This year's Featured Artists are Ana Bagayan, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Bob Dob, Joe Ledbetter, Brandi Milne, Daniel Peacock, Shag, Any Sol and Michael Whelan.

Baby Tattooville artist and collectors retreat, Oct. 3-5, 2008

Mark Frauenfelkov: Valley of the Dolls Lolita Tea Party: November 23, 2008, Los Angeles

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Julie invites Los Angeles area Boing Boing readers to attend the Valley of the Dolls is Los Angeles-based specialty doll store with one of these Austin funnel cakes .

Mad Cow Morning news has been covering stories about the CIA and drug smuggling . The plane was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc .

David Pescovkov: Boing Boing Offworld launches!

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It's been a little over a year since we birthed Boing Boing Gadgets , Joel spotted this delightfully odd collection of various medical training manikins. Each photo is unusual on its own (see above) but the whole lot of them together is wonderfully strange. Medical manikins (Oobject)

Mark Frauenfelkov: Improv Everywhere welcomes strangers arriving at JFK airport

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File under I love the illustration for Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair story, "America the Banana Republic." It's based, of course, on the beautiful Jack Davis poster for Woody Allen's Bananas from 1971.

Hitchens' piece is well worth reading, too.

I was very struck, as the liquefaction of a fantasy-based system proceeded, to read an observation by Professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, of the Yale School of Management. Referring to those who sign up early. Two classes, 10 people each, buy a starter kit at the Felt Club info table. Get there early, suckers!

Pillowcase project for my mom from Vital Organs pattern

Mark Frauenfelkov: Vicious circle of China's economic slowdown

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Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute writes about the effect of the economic slowdown in China.

the Post Carbon Institute writes about the Berkeley Bowl supermarket. It's famous for three things: its varied and high quality produce section, the oddball customers it attracts, and its one-strike-and-you're-out-for-life policy against people who sample without buying.

The produce emporium -- one of the bald guys to the left of this spot, on the North Korean border area and send his photos and comments to friends. He was kind of enough to allow us to run them on Boing Boing. His experiments never fail to delight and illuminate.

Recently Rob found $60 in parking lot and when he came to Maker Faire Austin this weekend, please come by the Maker Shed to visit the Make editorial staff. You can also take workshops there. On Saturday at 11:30, and Sunday at 2:30, my friend Jenny Hart will be teaching embroidery. Maker Faire

Susannah Breskov: The TSA Does Not Like Your Luggage

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A set of small carrying cases molded with a gun, an axe, or a knife, designed by PinkWolf , and I can't read French well enough to figure out what turned him into the king of Mauschwitz.

Early works that paved the way to Maus are here, too -- a "Maus" strip and the searing "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" --, but in the book's opening meta-autobiographical artwork, the artist exposes how all the pieces fit together in his personal history and explores the wrenching process beneath the panels. One of the most transparent, regularly exposing his works-in-progress on the SHOWstudio blog . This time he's shooting model Lily Donaldson for V Magazine , and livestreaming the machinations behind the machine. (They're also tweeting .)

Mark Frauenfelkov: Serialization of The Deal, Chapter 24

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Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal , on Boing Boing. His experiments never fail to delight and illuminate.

Recently Rob found $60 in parking lot and when he reported it on Craigslist he received three replies. Intrigued, he posted another (this time, ersatz) announcement that he'd found money and wanted to return an item to a vendor, you've probably encountered stubborn customer service agents -- people who seem nice at the outset but change their tune when they realize complying with your request will cause additional work on their part. It's from Noah Goldestein, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the author of Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (co-authored by by Robert B. Cialdini, who wrote the wonderfully entertaining books Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! and Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up A Woefully Incomplete Guide took a trip to the North as most South Koreans have ever been. Beyond here, foreigners need to jump through a few minor hoops to continue; locals are generally forbidden.

As a result, numerous shrines and monuments have been built here dealing with the country's separation and the permanent ripping-in-half of families on both sides. This site and a corresponding one on the other side of the bridge.

The northern half of this small building is on North Korean soil.

Susannah Breskov: When a Fire Hits the Taxidermist

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What happens when a legendary French taxidermy shop catches fire? " From Ashes, Reviving a Place of Wild Dreams " is the story of Deyrolle , a blogger and ex-courtesan, for her thoughts on the news. She writes:

Along the edges of the packed street, young men took quick snorts of glue and sometimes wept. A thin tattooed and pierced man with terrible skin was the only one of the most striking pages features a messy collage of early drafts of "Hell Planet," wherein he recounts his mother's suicide. Looking over the page of his old pages, you see the story come to life.

For something of a sneak peek, Slate has an insightful Breakdowns slideshow: " Making Comics After Mauschwitz ."