DirtyCarArt
From today's nytimes.

Good TV: Ian Sevonius from the Make Up talks with Ian MaKaye from Fugazi
Part 1 of 4. Others to follow.

Last night I went over to a little club in Trenton to hear Jello Biafra give a 'spoken word' performance that was pretty amusing. The guy is (obviously) a genuine freak and it's good to see he hasn't mellowed with age, although he's under the delusion that everyone else is as hellfire-outraged as he is about earth-shattering subjects such as his relationship with former bandmates (kids were generally like 'whatever dude, just sharpie my Frankencrist). He's got no shortage of material. It was 90% political commentary, which was generally great, and while he had his targets set on anti-environmentalists and Republicans in general, he didn't spare the Democrats any wrath either. With the non-topical stuff, he came off like an overwound crank. God forbid somebody gives him Powerpoint or he'd be a real menace. The other cool thing was the crowd and 'scene' there. Definitely an 80's underground punk feeling to the whole thing, which I haven't seen in a long time.

Lowlights from my failed hidden-camera show (McSweeneys)

The Hole - video powered by Metacafe
Robotic Beer-Launching Fridge

The Impossible Triangle, rendered in AutoCAD (youtube)
History of the Impossible Triangle. Others have tried.

Tricks with Google Maps
I'd like to know what this is.

DHS releases internal passport rule.
All right, Democrats. Put your money where your mouth is and get rid of this piece of garbage legislation.

Beautiful black and white photography at Outofcontxt

Top 10 modern delusions. (Guardian)
Dylan wrote a great song about #1.

Conceptual art: a shape for every human on the planet

Last fall, at a small gallery on West 22nd Street in New York, the artist Allan McCollum exhibited his new system for producing unique two-dimensional shapes. Developed using vector files on his home computer, McCollum organized a “system” to produce over 31,000,000,000 different shapes and has, to date, set aside 214,000,000 for creative experimentation.

But that’s not all. McCollum aspires to an unprecedented scale with this system: his goal is to make enough shapes, assuming a population of approximately 9.1 billion by the year 2050, so that everyone on the planet can have one.

Send the YOUR FACE blog a photo of your face, and he'll draw and post it. (apparently with 70's facial hair)

New York Bridges slideshow
historic photos of NYC bridges from the NewYorker

Comics artist Chris Ware on French TV 2005 (english content starts a couple minutes in)
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

The anti-KandyChopper movement is going strong at ratbike

Chicken-Fried Bacon with Cream Gravy (youtube)

Some great ferrofluid vids at youtube

Math and islamic tiles

What's special about this number?

"Finding His Voice" Fleisher 1929

"Nobody gets boo'ed down here"
The music scene in Antarctica (Pitchfork)

Huge Laser Graffiti (via mefi)
Instructions. Start tagging.

Beijing is on the hunt for bad translations. (WSJ)
For years, foreigners in China have delighted in the loopy English translations that appear on the nation's signs. They range from the offensive ("Deformed Man," outside toilets for the handicapped) to the sublime (on park lawns, "Show Mercy to the Slender Grass"). Last week, Beijing city officials unveiled a plan to stop the laughter. With hordes of foreign visitors expected in town for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing wants to cleanse its signs of translation nonsense. For the next eight months, 10 teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.

Early Aircraft Design at Adventure Lounge
(found link-hopping thru the always necessary coudal)

Websters needs to update their definition of "gall".

An excellent Daily Kos article on the seemingly bizarre resurgence of geocentrism within the Christian right. The author thinks its a pretext to a movement designed to actively accelerate the Apocolypse.
Wikipedia on modern geocentrism.

There are an estimated 250,000 vintage American vehicles within Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean and home to 11 million people. Some are relics rusting in the streets, but most continue to rumble along, a testimonial both to American manufacturing know-how and Cuban inventiveness.

A flickr set of cuban cars

Wordie: Like Flickr, but without the photos
Free word association.

Spiders on drugs
Someone just yanked a good Youtube doc on same

Is your cell phone bugged? (youtube)

Squeaking alien eaten
vid on Pravda.

Overheard (SFGate)
"I'm getting a dog on Saturday to replace my wife.'' (Man to man, overheard at Starbucks by Shirley Norton.)

Pictures that become something else when rotated upside down or sideways

How to build an offshore wind farm.

Build a better tinfoil hat...

Large body of water in earth's mantle.
I was hoping for a chewy caramel center.

Pentagon: no intelligence linked Iraq/Al Qaeda

The U.S. sent tons of cash to Iraq. Literally. Not figuratively. On Pallets. With forklifts.

The question:
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

The GOP response?
"We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive," said Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican.

America's 150 favorite buildings

It seems that there's a movement of fundies jumping on the big-energy anti-Global Warming bandwagon. While the Christian right's anti-intellectual stance has never been a secret, this descent into abject hatred of science and reason is phenomenal in its implications.
This truly amazing open letter to the faithful tells all. (pdf)

“It does not seem likely to me that God would set up the world to work in such a way that human beings would eventually destroy the earth by doing such ordinary and morally good and necessary things as breathing, building a fire to cook or keep warm, burning fuel to travel, or using energy for a refrigerator to preserve food.”

A very cool RC dragonfly toy (accompanying nytimes article)

Giant stringed instruments of the Yi people of China (via fmu)

US/Iran openly threatening oneanother (cnn)
This is getting ridiculous.

cube mellons

Crappiest toys in the world

Space Junk threat (NYTimes)

Tycho Brahe: gold prosthetic nose: check. beer-drinking moose? yep. Clairvoyant dwarf who sits under the table during dinner? sure. more

Camera Tossing: Put your camera on auto, toss.

The Iraq Trillion

While government and academics intellectualize over whether or not climate change is real, the insurance companies, who can map risk to dollars, are already taking action.

"And in the coast-hugging states of Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut, the company will not write new business no matter where the property is."

Self-balancing skateboard (google vid)

A few from the UK's Angry Young (then) Men.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Oliver's Army

I remember seeing this video on MTV as a kid and thinking that this cat was the coolest looking guy I've ever seen.

Graham Parker and the Rumour - Don't Bother With the Local Girls

Joe Jackson - Different for girls

I've always been a Joe Jackson nut.

Steampunk laptop

A large index of free stock art and photo sites

New Camille Rose Garcia paintings at mkgallery

A Century of Chairs at the digital design museum

Innignotz detonated?!

Shiftspace promises that you'll be able to create and trade content on top of other people's pages.

Some great new stuff on the Jim Flora website, including artists sketchbooks and some new prints from old blocks. (found on boingboing)

Giant, unblinking eye
Lockheed won a $40M contract to spy on you from a giant blimp.

Adam Koford's Hobo Flickr set
(heard about it on drawn.ca, which currently features an animated illustration of #600)

Imetthewalrus
"War is big business" --John Lennon

The GOP shills at Diebold have done some inept things in the past, but this is staggering.
They put a picture of the key that opens their voting machines online. On their own site's store. A closeup. Someone cut one. It works on every Diebold machine.
More at bradblog

The most horrible sound is...

Readymech 002
Print, cut, fold from 8.5x11 paper

Designer shed

Why packing tape is attracting designers like flies (Id)
“Tape is a cheap and therefore democratic object that can be easily mass-produced,” she explains. “Plus, it’s not too intellectual, which can be a nice break from the other projects that designers work on.”

11 intriguing lost albums (from avclub)

“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”

A great NYTimes piece about a Georgia town that is banning children's soccer because it's players aren't American enough.

Colbert explains AT&T (Youtube)

January is nearly over and I'm just getting around to last year's 50 most loathesome people.
Utterly harsh and often spot-on.

3d illustration of Carlo Giovani (from Drawn)

Ricky Gervais interviewed on the OnionAVClub

Olberman on the "Surge" (MSNBC)

Through a Glass, Darkly (Harpers)
How the Christian right is reimagining US history.

Target price-drop hack (from boingboing)

Marc Newson's work in marble, from Dezeen

A relatively dark conversation with Frank Gehry

Typo-cheesecake from TwentyFour

Bill of Wrongs The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006

The Holy Blitz Rolls On
A fantastic article from salon that casts the moral bankruptcy of the fundamentalist right in the light of past fascist movements.

Since the midterm election, many have suggested that the Christian right has peaked, and the movement has in fact suffered quite a few severe blows since both of our books came out.

It's suffered severe blows in the past too. It depends on how you view the engine of the movement. For me, the engine of the movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. You can't deform your society to that extent, and you can't shunt people aside and rip away any kind of safety net, any kind of program that gives them hope, and not expect political consequences.

Democracies function because the vast majority live relatively stable lives with a degree of hope, and, if not economic prosperity, at least enough of an income to free them from severe want or instability. Whatever the Democrats say now about the war, they're not addressing the fundamental issues that have given rise to this movement.

The Beach Impeach project

The Merry-Go-Round, featuring Emitt Rhodes, live at the Hollywood Palace

The ollllld "giant sheet of glass" prank

Another nice little wood radio gallery. 2

Edison's Frankenstein (1910)

Willie Nelson is playing "I Never Cared..." uptempo these days.

Jet-man (actually more of a Wing-man). If he could only land it without the 'chute

Hurdy Gurdy Girls

Bush quietly authorizes opening American's mail.
President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the New York Daily News has learned.

The president asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

The first year of Thrasher Magazine (1981) is now online with great ads (above). There needs to be an 80's xerox-zine repository. Somebody get on this.
(via boingboing)

So God told Pat more stuff.
While sane people were wishing one another a Happy New Year, Pat Robertson was busy concocting sociopathic (yet safely Christian) fantasies about millions of dead Americans. Prophet or weasel-faced enemy of mankind?

Huge Diesel
(via /.)

Line Rider has me hooked.

Who needs a police state when you can have a private patrol state ?
(Washington Post)

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets.

Tickle me emo

Ways to go, and by the numbers