The napkin project

Why your pee is yellow.

DieKu - poetry made from tombstone text segments

Telephone Exchange Name Project

Possibly the most insanely great hip-hop album cover (and there are quite a few) I've ever seen. I have so many questions, not the least of which is why there are cigars on the fruit tray. Also to discuss: Where do you shop for bear-sized diamond sunglasses and japanese leisure robes?

Virtual Haircut. Put your headphones on
(via bifurcated rivets)

[Spaceship Earth] I've always admired the jam-packed craziness of the Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap label. A new film profiles the man behind the label.

Whoa, Kate.

Optimus Prime has a bigger wikipedia entry than Jesus

7-11 Kwik-E-Mart Conversion! (flickr)

Room-sized mechanical binary K'Nex calculator
(gizmodo)

Deathbed confession: Roswell UFOs real

The Taliban's Opium War (New Yorker)
Doug Wankel walked up to an angry-looking farmer who was watching his field being destroyed and asked him, through an interpreter named Nazeem, how much he got for his opium. Twenty-one thousand Pakistani rupees for a four-kilo package, the farmer said, and he harvested three to four kilos per jirib (a local land measurement equivalent to about half an acre). He added, “I get only a thousand rupees per jirib of wheat, so I’m obliged to grow poppies.” That comes to about thirty-three dollars from an acre of wheat, and between five hundred and seven hundred dollars from an acre of poppies.

The End-Timers are hanging their tinfoil hats on a new date: 12/21/12
(NYTimes)

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

From "Leaving No Tracks", the environmental segment of the Washington Post's excellent 4-part overview of Cheney's reign as VP.

Yeahh.... about that whole "Don't Be Evil" thing...
Google has a solution for the healthcare industry in the face of Michael Moore's amazing "Sicko" bombshell. Buy ads.

Pay attention: This is what selling your soul sounds like:

Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network

"The Sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all. The sky was never blue. Stars are raindrops looking for a place to fall, and I never cared for you."

Minutemen - This Ain't No Picnic

Lonely Too Long - The Young Rascals

A few thousand science fiction magazine covers
(via coudal)

Paul McCartney interviewed by the AVClub

Worst. Cocktail. Ever.
But the Sourdough Saloon is most famous for a drink far more lurid than beer: its “sourtoe cocktails” are the drink of choice, garnished with a genuine severed human toe.

Gallery of GM concept cars, starting beautifully with the 1938 Buick Y-Job and ending with Satan's own Hummer H2 SUT piece of shit.

Traffic - Light Up or Leave Me Alone

Last gasps of a dying argument:
"P2P is hurting corn farmers."
Their idea is that if more people went to the theaters to watch movies then more people would therefore buy popcorn and put more money in the pockets of farmers who could then "...earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment."

Ah, leave him alone.

Unlock your car with a tennis ball


Blondie Unlocks Car - video powered by Metacafe

An explanatory page on google that deals with linguistic connotations, anti-semitism, and unintended outcomes of their ranking algorithms.

A nice designobserver piece on Sun Ra
If you were in Chicago in 1958, you might have happened into a jazz club on the South Side to find a band of musicians dressed in outer-space costumes, chanting “rocket number nine, take off for the planet Venus,” and setting loose battery-driven robots. On another day, on a stroll through Washington Park, kitty-corner from the Baptist preacher and across from the Nation of Islam representative, you could have come upon a street-corner lecturer in a flowing faux-leopard cape and black beret, detailing the etymology of the word “negro” and the coded meanings of the Bible. In both cases, the same mastermind was responsible: Sun Ra.

Life Undercover as one of DC's Sleaziest Lobbyists

Box makes a movie of itself being mailed

I know that Sopranos speculation is a couple of weeks old at this point, but this guy makes a really good case that Tony got whacked.

Yeah! Daft Hands!!!!

Thomas the NJ Transit Train (McSweeneys)
Thomas is a passenger train who works on the Northeast Corridor Line, shuttling commuters between New York City and Trenton. One day, in the Trenton station, Thomas sees two passengers quarreling. It appears to be a Trenton man and a woman from the city. The man wants her purse bad. He runs away with it, and Thomas speeds up to catch him. After a long chase, the man runs to Centre Street, commonly referred to by the police as "Cocaine Avenue." The Fat Controller tells Thomas to stop immediately and turn around. It isn't worth going into that area for one purse. Thomas goes back to the city, his head hung low. "Guess it should be, 'The World Makes, Trenton Takes,'" thinks Thomas.

A Month of Sundays: 31 writers; 31 churches in Seattle

Tom Kenny - the mouth behind Spongebob (avclub)

Interview with MoveOn's Eli Parser (mojones)

The Generals Report (New Yorker)
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties

Homemade mini B-29 powered by 4 chainsaw engines
(.wmv vid)

Top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills (computerworld)

After much travel, the Jive is back.

This guy really hates taxes.
"Do not under any circumstances make any attempt on this land. We will not accept any tomfoolery by any criminal element, be it federal, state or local," said Ed Brown in a press conference from the stoop of his concrete-clad home in Plainfield, N.H. "We either walk out of here free or we die."

Origins of MS Surface?
Looks like Microsoft bit this guys ideas.

The Jive will be out for a few days.

eBay-Nomics
Now, however, economists and other social scientists are as likely to be interested in the quirks and inefficiencies of auctions -- and the irrationality of bidders -- as in their elegance. And since eBay, the hugely successful online auction site, offers a mountain of data about sellers and bidders every day, its glazed-eyed devotees are the guinea pigs for this new wave of research.The new work -- call it "eBay studies" -- highlights the degree to which human psychological quirks, and not just supply and demand, drive auctions.

Some people collect floaty pens

Why DRM won't ever work
(via /.)

13 Ways of looking at a typeface
(designobserver)

DuPont marked Corian's 40th by commissioning work from 40 designers.

Winslow Homer in the Tropics

How not to display your artwork on the web
(lines & colors)

The London Olympics logo is some designer's joke, right?
Looks like the took the 'edgy' thing literally. I see the SS, or an unsolved child's shape puzzle. 400,000 pounds. Tell me it's a joke. Really.

Archive of 60's Realist satire magazine
(via boingboing)

Putting a face on corporate greed.
If you've ever wanted solid evidence supporting all of the complaining that citizens groups do about how lawmaking has been utterly compromised by special interests, look no further than AT&T chief Ed Whitacre's parting rant to his board on the topic of outlawing Net Neutrality:

“With all of our generous campaign contributions, I’m quite certain that Congress will see it our way,” he said during his farewell speech. “Who else they gonna listen to? The public?!?”

and how about this little gem?:

“Will Congress let us do it?” Whitacre asks his colleagues. “You bet they will — cuz we don’t call it cashin’ in. We call it ‘deregulation.’ ”

Jawdropping.

''We are in a war with terror, we will do whatever is necessary to fight terrorism.''
Now the Turks are using this B.S. line to march into Iraq to kill their bogeymen - the Kurds.
(nytimes)

Stop King Coal

In the next few weeks, Congress could vote to DOUBLE the amount of greenhouse gases America produces from our cars and planes.1
It's the greatest single threat to solving the climate crisis in a decade. It sounds crazy. But Congress is rushing through a package that could lock us into liquid coal as our country's new energy source for transportation. For every mile driven, coal-based fuels produce as much as twice as many greenhouse gases as petroleum.2 That means even a Prius would drive like a Hummer

Sign the petition to make Congress reject it's gift to the coal industry:
http://pol.moveon.org/stopkingcoal/one_click_sign.pl?id=10484-8000014-8RAymB&t=3

In other news, distrust-inspiring Bush tries to convince Russia that he knows what he's talking about, and comes off looking like a total amateur with a string of quotes so simultaneously stupid and arrogant, it boggles the mind.
“My message will be Vladimir — I call him Vladimir — you shouldn’t fear a missile defense system,”
(really? I thought he called him Pootie-Poot?)
After this display of buffoon-statesmanship, we're lucky if Moscow doesn't double their missile order.

List of places blurred on google maps

The Profit Calculator (NYMag)
This city makes money, loses money, houses money; lately, with luxe condos stacking up like casino chips along the waterfront, the city looks like money. What’s amazing, then, is how little we truly know about the inner workings of this beast we feed, and milk, daily: How does New York make its money?

The bill to make gasoline price gouging a federal crime has been weakened by oil industry lobbyists and their Republican cronies to the point that it would be unenforceable in it's current state.
Send a letter to congress (via moveon) requiring them to strengthen the language of the bill.

Putin: Partying like it's 1959

Some amazing pen and ink work from GoldenAgeComicBookStories. The site features pulp and ad-art as well as the eponymous content.

Is Apple watermarking their DRM-free iTunes songs? (EFF)

screwy (via rivets)

Act Naturally - Buck Owens and the Buckaroos

R.I.F.

New Instrumental video from the Beastie Boys:
Off the Grid

In the U.S., doors are something of a lost art.
Asian Doors

shadow illusion

How to talk to a climate skeptic (grist.org)

Hate to say it, but Microsoft Surface looks pretty cool.
Video demos:
Teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3g4pXdXRo

"The Magic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYrJ1IkPNLc

"The Possibilities":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5y7yp06n0

Apparently, the Bush administration doesn't mind getting false positives among the law-abiding citizen population when looking for "terrorists".

The same folks, however, will under no circumstances tolerate false positives when ID'ing cows.

To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

A must-read belated Memorial Day letter from a father who lost a son
(Washington Post)

Film subtitling as art

Pictures of chicks playing banjo. (via J-Walk)

Declaring email bankruptcy (Washington Post)

No Honor No Degree for Andrew Card (youtube)
Every once in a while, someone from the despicable Bush administration crawls out of the isolation of his information-proof bunker and hears what the public really thinks.
Card last made press when it was revealed that he pressured a then-critically ill John Ashcroft - in his hospital bed - to reauthorize Bush's illegal secret domestic wiretapping program.

Red Raven animated records
(RetroThing)

Pic courtesy of moteldemoka, where you can hear some great music.

Toast Printer. Indeed.

The crack editorial staff at the Daily Jive is always out looking for oddball audio clips... Despite the pervasiveness of youtube and the gazillion or so audio blogs, true weirdness is getting harder and harder to come by. What promises to be interesting often turns out to be half-assed attempts at cutesy irony, or annoying geek humor.

So - we were delighted to find The Shemp Tapes on WFMU's blog.

Here's the description:
A microphone pointed in the general direction of a TV set unspooling videotaped Shemp-era Three Stooges two-reelers, quarter-inch reel-to-reel Ampex tape running down the hallway at seven and a half inches per second--Mousetrap-like, speeding past pencils sticking out of thread spools held down to the floor with duct tape, bounced into two reverb guitar pedals, ricocheted into a Radio Shack 4-track mixer and then knocked back into the Old Man's reel-to-reel Sony Furshluginner from Nineteen-fifty-something. What led to and what happened after that, I couldn't tell you--especially today. I was on a sleepless Shempified mission back in my clueless youth and fully under the impression that I was not alone. I listen back to these tapes and wonder what the hell I was thinking about. I realize now that neither mind nor flesh could resist the ethereal Eee Beee Beee Beeee--the calls to arms for chucklefucks everywhere to rise and to conk their collected coconuts to the funny sound effects glory of OW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW!!

I'm warning you - this is the most batshit-insane audio you'll ever hear.
Shemp in Pain: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/MS/PAIN.mp3

Put it in the mix at full clockwise at your next barbeque, and watch the fun blossom.

If you're an internet pirate, don't blow up toilets.
(NYTimes)

Yeah, baby!

Real-life pirate hangouts (via boingboing)

Your #1 source for your #2 business. Nuff said.

Summer 67, 40 years later
A series of articles on the Summer of Love from the San Francisco Chronicle

A massive archive of Currier and Ives prints

Mingering Mike - Imaginary Soul Superstar
I just checked out the new book that catalogs the 1968-1977 discography of Washington D.C.'s Mingering Mike, and I'm blown away by the man's commitment to a career that never existed. I've known people that never worked half as hard at jobs they were paid for. Mingering Mike created an astonishing array of artwork for singles, albums, and soundtracks - none of which he ever recorded, or even intended to record. Through his magic-marker artwork, you can trace the career of a would-be showbiz dynamo, as he cruises effortlessly from soul to funk to disco to the white satin champagne jams that drive ladies wild. We should all minger so well. I wonder what his imaginary backing band is doing these days?
Get it.
NPR covers Mingering Mike

A Note Placed in the Pay Envelope of Billy "The Piano Man" Joel
(McSweeneys)

A huge article on the Power of Networks (social) from Forbes

P-Soup is cool flash that plays with layered, interfering patterns.
(from Potatoland)

Four must-see videos from late-50's brother-sister rockabilly act, the Collins Kids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyLA81eLr8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er9NrY1czV4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk2Hxp2tdic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9cACWeSPGE

Thanks, Daddy-O.

"This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Sen. Robert Byrd, D, WV, prior to the Iraq invasion.
From the forthcoming book "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore, excerpted in Time

Taking the fantasy out of fantasy football
50,000 MyFootballClub members are about to bid for an English football club. They will make history together, voting on team selection and on which players to buy and sell.

Members will attempt to guide the club up the leagues, sharing equal ownership and control. Just like a football management game – but for real

"Tinky Winky sad whenever someone dies, but ..." He left it hanging there.

Tinky, you're too kind. Good riddance.

Cigarette card gallery

Bush administration proposal would criminalize "attempted" copyright infringement.

Microsoft is making noise about Linux patent violation again. (money)
Well worth reading.

And here's a nugget of that Ballmer charm we've all come to expect:

In the meantime, with Microsoft seemingly barred from striking pacts with distributors, only one avenue appears open to it: paying more friendly visits to its Fortune 500 customers, seeking direct licenses.

If push comes to shove, would Microsoft sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has?

"That's not a bridge we've crossed," says CEO Ballmer, "and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you."

No wonder software developers with a soul hate Micro$oft so fiercely.

Slate's Illustrated Guide to GOP Scandals!

Trikke - Cool human powered trike based on using angular momentum for forward propulsion.