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| Long as I got my plastic hulavader, wobblin' on the dashboard of my car Posted: 29 Mar 2009 08:32 AM PDT Flickr user Monkeyjen has uploaded a short video of a surprisingly entertaining and simple gag: stick a Darth Vader action-figure top on a dashboard hula-girl bottom, and voila, mesmerizing video gold! Watch Darth Vader Hula (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Brain Rules: Oliver Sachs meets GETTING THINGS DONE, paperback ships, DVD goes free Posted: 28 Mar 2009 07:42 PM PDT Avi sez, "John Medina, author of Brain Rules, an excellent summary of 13 neuroscience hacks applicable in daily life, has put the cool companion DVD online for free as an introduction to the paperback release of the book." Here's what I wrote about Brain Rules when the hardcover came out: Brain Rules in paperback   |
| Amazing art made with old audio cassette tapes Posted: 28 Mar 2009 12:05 PM PDT Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger Wow, this sure is a fun new use for an old media relic. |
| Brother Theodore on David Letterman Posted: 28 Mar 2009 06:26 PM PDT Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger I'm not sure this story is an actual anecdote or just a meandering way of introducing an amazing YouTube clip, but here goes nuthin' :  Fruitatarian, almost a raw foodist, years before this was common. What influenced my twelve year-old mind to do something like this was an obscure book I found in the local library called "The Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Dr. Arnold Ehret. I won't go into the details of the diet, which extols the value of avoiding "mucus" and "pus" in your food --sounds like an admirable goal, right?-- but suffice to say that while Dr Ehret's work still has many followers --he's thought of as the founder of Naturopathy -- some diet experts consider him a total quack. But I am not here to debate the merits of his ideas, pro or con, merely to offer some brief context before I send you off to read this short essay, The Definitive Cure of Chronic Constipation. Okay? You got that? At the very least skim it. The language he uses is quite distinctive isn't it? The total disgust he expresses about the digestive system is almost Nietzschean in its peculiar character. The absolutist tone must've contributed greatly to my pre-teen interest in the diet.  Now flash-forward to the late 1990s, New York City. I had become friends with the then 91 year old Theodore Gottlieb, better-known as the infamous dark comedian Brother Theodore, a big influence on Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch and Spaulding Gray, who had been performing his totally insane one-man show at the tiny 13th Street Theater for ages and was a frequent guest on David Letterman's show during the 1980s. No exaggeration to say that Theodore had been around forever. He was delivering lines like "The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young" long before I was born. What was a great gag when he was, say, 50 years old, and then to STILL be delivering a line like that at the age of 93, as he did on my UK television series, well that existential tension is what made his nonagenarian performances so incredibly spell-binding. The show was in the form of a stern lecture. It was impossible to tell if this was an act you were seeing or if he was utterly batshit crazy, a berserk "genius" impervious to the laughter as long as an audience bought tickets. The props were a chair, a table, a chalk board and a stryrofoam cup. There was a single spotlight. If you were anywhere near the stage in that little theater he could totally scare the shit out of you. Of course, whenever I brought friends, I took them right down the front!  It was an act, I can assure you. Theodore in real life was a mellow old bohemian guy who lived several lives in his 94 years. He'd been in Dachau and he'd also been on Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and most famously on Late Night with David Letterman. He was in "The Burbs" playing Tom Hank's great uncle and was the voice of Gollum in "The Hobbit" cartoon. He had a cameo in Orson Welles' "The Stranger." Theodore was an old Beatnik, that's the way I saw him. (He was even in a porno movie! An X-rated parody of "Jaws" called "Gums." Theo plays the boat captain, in a thankfully non-balling role. In "Gums" he is seen, rather inexplicably, wearing a Nazi uniform for most of the film). In his nineties he was dating a woman in her mid-forties. He rode a bike around New York City until he was late in his eighties. He really wasn't anything like his crazed monk act in real life, though. And let me tell you, when you are in your thirties and have a friend who is in their nineties... you learn things about life. Not all of them good, either. 94-years is a long time to live. Too long, if you ask me. I'm quite sure he felt that way, too. Theodore apparently had great difficulty memorizing lines, even his own material and so he only really ever did two major monologues --he'd switch off between them when he felt like it-- for over 40 years. One was called "Foodism" -we'll get to this one in a minute and the other was called "Quadrupidism" where he'd extol the virtues of human beings getting down on all fours. One day I was visiting Theodore at his apartment and I was looking at his sparse book shelf. On it sat "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley," Baudelaire's "Les Fleur du Mal," an Edgar Alan Poe anthology, The Portable Nietzsche, St Augustine, and... ta da... "The Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Dr Arnold Ehret. I remarked to him that I myself was a pre-teen adherent to Arnold Ehret's ideas about diet and he replied that it was the inspiration for his "Foodism" monologue. "I merely exaggerated his writings. Just slightly. That was all it took!" My jaw hit the ground. He'd managed to craft one of the most brilliant comic monologues of all time based on Ehret's zany diet-sprach. I was awestruck at how amazing this revelation really was. I mean... how creative!! You read that essay about constipation, right? Promise me? Now go watch this extended excerpt from "Foodism" performed on Letterman in the mid-80s. A Secret Noodle Ring in Minnesota New York Times obituary for Theodore Gottlieb Brother Theodore is Dead by Nick Mamatas Brother Theodore by Jon Kalish (the "TV producer" referred to here is probably me) A radio tribute to Brother Theodore on WNYC's "The No Show" Tears from a Glass Eye... with a Tongue of Madness! (Brother Theodore record) O Brother, Where Art Thou? (on the Theodore documentary) To My Great Chagrin (Brother Theodore documentary) Note that there are several torrents of Brother Theodore performances out there on the Interwebs.  |
| Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers Posted: 28 Mar 2009 07:35 AM PDT Security expert Ben Laurie has a scorching indictment of the "Verified by Visa" program used by British banks. This system is basically the perfect system for phishers and identity thieves, and conditions honest people to behave in foolish ways that leave them vulnerable to having their life's saving taken off of them. "Frame inline displays the VbV authentication page in the merchant's main window with the merchant's header. Therefore, VbV is seen as a natural part of the purchase process. It is recommended that the top frame include the merchant's standard branding in a short and concise manner and keep the cardholder within the same look and feel of the checkout process."More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa   |
| British cops identify 200 schoolchildren as potential terrorists Posted: 28 Mar 2009 07:29 AM PDT 200 children in the UK, some as young as 13, have had files opened on them by the British anti-terror cops as potential terrorists -- even though they have committed no crimes. The children were reported to the anti-terror squad by their teachers on the basis of school work, journals and conversations that, in the teachers' view, indicated that the children were susceptible to extremist beliefs. The programme is only 18 months old and has already identified 200 children who should be treated as terrorism suspects. At this rate, every child in Britain should be on the watch list by, what, 2018? The police say it's all right, though, so that's OK. A Home Office spokesman said: "We are committed to stopping people becoming or supporting terrorists or violent extremists. The aim of the Channel project is to directly support vulnerable people by providing supportive interventions when families, communities and networks raise concerns about their behaviour."Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists   |
| Psychology of nerding and the joy of reckless tech Posted: 28 Mar 2009 07:23 AM PDT Wormbook has a lovely meditation on the hacker mindset and the satisfaction of breaking and fixing computers, quoting from Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine, "still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding:" "My computers are not broken, but at times like these I like the look of delicate circuit boards open to the naked air. Several hours ago, in a fit of restlessness, I decided to install a pre-release version of a new operating system. Then there seemed to be problems with some of the internal devices. So I took them out, one after the other. Now they lie all around me—cards, wires, memory modules, screws—all in a jumble. To test components, I do what I'm absolutely not supposed to do: run the machines with the covers off. I'm supposed to discharge static electricity before touching anything. But I scuff around on the carpets, grab things with two hands, hold metal to metal. I recognize the nastiness of this mood, reckless and rebellious, like I could get away with breaking the laws of physics. There's a perverse comfort in broken machinery." Creative destruction (via Memex 1.1)   |
| Bletchley Park rebuilds the bombes -- code crackers that won the war Posted: 28 Mar 2009 07:12 AM PDT Make Blog has a great roundup of links and coverage for the opening of Bletchley Park's recreation of the Polish "bombe" code-cracking devices that were instrumental in breaking the German Enigma cipher in World War II. Bletchley's curators gathered all the surviving scientists from the original effort to lead the project, and the result is beautiful and inspiring. Bletchley Park is a national treasure. Every visitor to Britain should go. Code cracker remade Previously:
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Reading this, I realised that the rage is itself an attractive part of the process because it feels so good when it is over, and everything dissolves into order. There is something in this process of destruction and recreation that resembles the state that long articles and still more radio programmes get into, just before they get right: everything is spread out in ways that look chaotic to everyone except me, and even I can't quite explain how they will go back together. I can only show, if I keep my concentration. The element of risk makes it far more attractive than the times when everything goes smoothly and by routine. You feel you have discovered a hidden order to the universe. Alternatively, as sometimes happens, you take it all apart and it never ever goes back together properly. All you are left with is a heap of broken junk. But that's more common with words than with computers. 
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