The Peppermint Gates of Fun Valley

gh-sailors  gh-peppermint  gh-granny

Not only is 1964’s Little Golden Book The Good Humor Man a great example of early product placement (masquerading as a treatise on the delights of suburban life in the summertime, there’s hardly a page that doesn’t sing the praises of licking Good Humor brand ice cream), it’s also riddled with vague and not-so-vague homoerotic references (see images). At least they seem that way to us, seen through modern eyes conditioned by media to scan constantly for veiled references. We could be wrong – it could all be completely innocent, the naive voice of an older writer creating a children’s book in the early 60s. Regardless, the book is a gas. Miles, of course, is blissfully unaware of the undertones – he’s more concerned that Bobby left his boats to go get ice cream, and the fact that the bunny rabbits hanging out by the fence didn’t get a lick.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Drinking Wine Spodyody

Induce This

If passed, the Induce Act would make it possible to sue anyone who makes a device that can arguably be used to “induce” a consumer to infringe copyright. That, by many people’s reckoning, would apply to DVD burners, iPods, copy machines, word processors, and even the pencil.

Ernest Miller points to a mock lawsuit (fake Apple complaint) drafted by EFF attorneys to show what a case against the iPod might look like under the Induce Act.

Before the introduction of portable digital music players, the value of the music files derived from infringing sources was limited by the fact that computer users generally had to be sitting at their computers in order to play and enjoy them. Defendant Apple knew this and hence made the calculated decision to intentionally induce and enhance the attractiveness of infringement by providing these infringers with a device to enhance the rewards of their illegal labors – the iPod.

Good discussion following Miller’s post. But Brad Hutchings note that the RIAA has actually endorsed Apple’s FairPlay DRM model is beside the point — open this door and The Man gets an opportunity to block any manner of innovative technology equally capable of respecting or breaking the law (the crowbar and spraypaint also come to mind as examples of technologies that have both legal and illegal applications).

Thanks mneptok.

Music: Black Sabbath :: Electric Funeral

Replacement Jaw Grown in Man’s Back

From CNN:

A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years — a bratwurst sandwich — after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an “ambitious” experiment.

The guy lost a jaw and half his tongue to cancer, didn’t eat a solid meal for nine years, had a new jaw grown in his own back, and can now eat steak! But he complains to his doctor that since he has no teeth, he has to cut the steak into such tiny pieces that it gets cold before he’s finished. Now that’s what I call grateful!

Music: Scarab :: Fall of the Towers of Convention

nonfictionphoto

Birdhouse hosting welcomes nonfictionphoto.com — absolutely stunning images by recent J-School graduate Scott Squire. His photographs of street kids in Bucharest, Romanian orphanages, Cairo cafe culture, and portraits of life along the Nile river nail the gap between fine art and hard photojournalism. Amy and I recently purchased a print of one of Scott’s images from the Cairo cafe series – will be hanging in our living room soon. Welcome, Scott.

Update: Scott was at the Republican National Convention, photographing both the protest scene and images from the convention floor. He’s added images from the RNC to the site.

Music: Erik Truffaz :: Bending New Corners

phpScheduleIt

At the J-School, we loan out tons of equipment to students and faculty – still and video cameras, projectors, laptops, minidisc recorders, microphones, etc. We’ve long struggled to find ways to keep track of everything, and to prevent items and rooms from being double-booked. There are a bunch of commercial apps out there (like ye olde Meeting Maker) designed for resource scheduling, but they’re expensive, and we’re dealing with a deep UC budget crunch.

Last week I went looking for open source solutions – just knew there had to be a free equivalent of Meeting Maker out there. Found and tried several, but settled on phpScheduleIt. We’re blown away. This app is of such high quality – cleanly designed, object-oriented, manages unlimited numbers of schedules (so we can have one for multimedia skills students, one for the radio program, one for faculty, one for booking classrooms, etc.), fine-grained permissions system… And because it’s written in PHP, I’ve been able to hack out a few features that didn’t suit our needs. Slowly but surely, I’m going to automate myself out of a job (yeah, right).

Students are back in full force and we’ve hit the ground running — yet another summer passes without touching 95% of my to-do list.

Music: The Pogues :: 5 Green Queens And Jean

Hamster Power

Otherpower.com has cool photo essays on dozens of home-brew alternative energy sources, most of which are actually in use, supplying power to a collective of inventors / fringe-dwellers. Their newest addition (although this one is more of a joke than a viable power source) is the hamster-powered alternator. Also dug the two-way Banki turbine (which turns water energy into power on both the inflow and the outflow), and the Volvo disk brake alternator.

Otherpower.com’s headquarters is located in a remote part of the Northern Colorado mountains, 15 miles past the nearest power pole or phone line. All of our houses and shops run on only solar, wind, water and generator power…not because we are trying to make some sort of political or environmental statement, but because these are the only options available. And we refuse to move to town.

Music: The Pretenders :: Pack It Up

Mars Rover’s Daily Boot

Scientists are pretty convinced at this point that Mars once held water, but other curious features on the surface have turned out to be the mission’s own footprints — strange flower-like patterns in the Martian dust are imprints from seams in the landing airbags, and shiny objects in the distance turn out to be discarded heat shields.

Unfortunately, the operating system on the Rover has taken to rebooting itself every time they download data from the craft. Appears there’s an issue with the FAT-formatted memory card in the craft, which leads to the OS thinking it’s out of memory when it isn’t. Talk about shipping with bugs.

Note: This post has been changed from the original – the cnet article implies that DOS was involved, when the OS is actually by WindRiver — I was taken aback. Nevermind…

Music: David Thomas & the Two Pale Boys :: Nowheresville

Mtn Summer

A couple of days with Dad at his place in Pioneer, last hurrah before the students return. So much woodland you’d expect to find mostly hippies and Grizzly Adams types, but there are flags flying over every unpaved driveway. Deer and dogs dart in and out of yards. Neighbors stop to visit in the middle of dinner, make themselves comfy. Neighbor nails a sign to a tree: “Parking reserved for world’s best grandpa.” Another neighbor “invents” a mechanized, driveable rake from spare Jeep parts for scooping up pine needles. A rough-hewn, hand-carved bear holding a freshly caught fish… with a flag sticking out of its head. Smell of propane wafts from motor homes. Dad at 70 cutting down trees from his own proppity for firewood, splitting massive slices with a hydraulic log splitter (impressive power!). He had forced air installed but after a few weeks decided it was making him a nancy boy, and returned to the pot-belly stove for warmth. Bees are having a field day this summer, worse than flies. Sirloin injected with teriyaki sauce, hot summer corn, perfect watermelon. Miles collecting pine cones, thrilled to spy deer in the trees. Pictured: Jeep rake and Saddest. Yard ornament. Ever.

Go, Empire!

News.com on Microsoft’s record of cultural insensitivity – some examples of which have cost the convicted monopolist big time. Examples cited include a game in which the chanting of the Koran was used as a backing track, and another in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques.

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Blah Blah Magazines

380,422 Teeth

Artist Jeff Johnson created a poster to advertise an upcoming gallery show. The poster was a set of statistics — just words and numbers, artfully presented — cataloguing the toll of war on both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi fighters and civilians. But rather than stopping with the usual body count, Johnson’s poster:

… goes on to deconstruct the carnage in exhaustive physical detail: 3,042 pounds of brain matter, 380,422 teeth, 983 tons of flesh and bone, 131,180 fingers.

The newspaper it was supposed to run in refused to publish the ad, saying it was “in poor taste,” though they refused to divulge their “Standards of Good Taste.”

No profanity. No graphics. Just a set of statistics. How can statistics be in poor taste? I suppose a pro-war poster would be in good taste? Some people have a funny sense of taste. The poster is reproduced here.