Jake von Slatt's video response to steampunk monologue

Steampunk Maker Jake von Slatt took exception to Merlin Mann's hilarious steampunk monologue and has followed it up with a video-response of his own, noting the upcoming steampunk anthology (which looks frankly awesome -- I have a copy on my desk and I've just skimmed it, but I had to slam it down before I got drawn into it at a time when I've got no spare leisure reading cycles) and Maker Faire. Link

LA Times on home of the French Dip sandwich

Charles Perry wrote a good article for the LA Times about Phillipe the Original, a restaurant that's celebrating its 100th anniversary in downtown Los Angeles this year. The restaurant is probably the origin of the French Dip sandwich. (A nearby place called Cole's also claims to be the creator.)

The restaurant spreads before you, six steps below ground: sawdust floors, lines of people, painted menus and neon beer signs on the walls. The lines--at peak hours there are 10 of them, each up to 20 people long--weave between the tables where scores of others are eating, oblivious to the crush. Pick a line and wait your turn.

When you reach the counter, you don't need to consult the menu on the wall, of course. You've been here before. You make it short and snappy--"Beef, double dip. Coleslaw, blueberry pie, coffee."

This is Philippe the Original, an L.A. institution that will be 100 years old in October. It has been serving French dip sandwiches--single-, double- and even triple-dipped--for 90 of those years.

Link

To do in SF - Tibet rally on April 8, Richard Gere, Desmond Tutu

Pro-Tibetan human rights activists (who also erected the billboard shown above) are organizing a rally in San Francisco this Tuesday, April 8, to be led by Richard Gere, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Tibetan community leaders.

As China prepares to host the Olympics in August, the government is conducting the worst crackdown in Tibet since the 1960s Cultural Revolution. Come show your support for the Tibetan and Chinese people on the eve of the Beijing Olympic torch passing through San Francisco - the only stop in North America.

Where: United Nations Plaza, at Market & Hyde, near Civic Center BART
Rally & Speeches 6:00pm
Culture / Music 7:15pm
Candle Light Vigil 8:00pm

Link (Thanks Jake Appelbaum)

Related BB posts:
* BBtv Vlog (Xeni): Tibet report - monks forced to participate in staged videos.
* BBtv Vlog (Xeni): Tibet's uprising and the internet.

More vintage Epcot art -- Boing Boing Gadgets

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel brings word of reader Willykea's newly discovered trove of vintage Epcot pix:

Miraculously, on the day this was first posted I was cleaning out my garage and found a box containing a thick, full-color brochure from 1982 announcing the opening of Epcot. I immediately thought of boingboing. I was shocked when I saw the headline "Incredible Epcot Concept Painting" the next morning and the associated picture that I had just been admiring the day before. The brochure was buried under a pile of old letters and memorabilia that I had held onto for almost 30 years and I found it a few hours before someone posted the picture of the painting online - amazing coincidence. I went out and bought a scanner so that I could share some additional images from the brochure with you guys

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

See also: Incredible Epcot concept painting

Cross-stitch inspired by Alfred Bester's DEMOLISHED MAN

Kate sez, "I just finished a cross-stitch inspired by the famous Alfred Bester book The Demolished Man. I am a PhD student in cognitive science, so I couldn't resist turning the Greek symbol for 'psi' and logic symbol for negation (the tilde) into decorative details! I hope you like it. I made it for my husband who has inspired me towards post WWII science fiction." Link (Thanks, Kate!)

Mechanical wondercycle exercisulator of 1931

Further proof that physical fitness has gotten less and less fun over the ages: this Popular Science article from August, 1931:

One of the newest of exercising devices is a mechanism that somewhat resembles a hobbyhorse without rockers. Seated in its saddle and operating this odd contrivance, the user can exercise and develop all the principle muscles of his body. A pair of pedals work a crankshaft device which imparts an up and down motion to the saddle similar to that experienced in riding a horse at a trot. Assuming different positions on the machine while working it develops legs, back, stomach, or neck muscles. The machine is designed for the use of invalids as well as for those who wish to reduce with the aid of scientific exercise.

Link

Gogol Bordello's punk gypsy

Today, my family rode the carousel in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Usually, the soundtrack is recorded organ and calliope music. But this morning, Abraham, the cool clown who was at the helm, was playing awesomely insane music that reminded me of the Pogues vs. a crazy circus sideshow band. He told us the music was by Gogol Bordello, a Gypsy punk band of Eastern European immigrants now living in New York City. I looked them up online and they're terriric. Oddly, I also read that Gogol Bordello performed with Madonna last year at the London Live Earth concert. Apparently, their live shows are insanely exhilarating musical extravaganzas too. (Live photo from Wikipedia.)
Link to Gogol Bordello's site, Link to their MySpace page

Craiglist stoner thanks pizza guy for best pizza ever

This Ann Arbor, MI Craiglist "missed connections" ad is a sincere and lovely note of thanks from one toker to another:

I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.

When you answered and said, "Whatsup?" I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.

We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: "Sun dried Tomatoes." When you said: "We'll bake that right up for you," we both started laughing uncontrollably.

It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.

Link (via Growabrain)

CHAIRman Mao

Artist Gerald Scarfe created this chair/sculpture that looks like Chairman Mao (by way of Jabba the Hutt), so you can be cushioned by the gentle curves of the Great Helmsman as you play on your Xbox. Link

Lost mechanical servant of 1961

In July, 1961, Popular Mechanix brought its readers "a life-size, remote-controlled servomechanical robot built by Vienna engineer Claus Scholz. The MM47 can do almost anything from housework to handling radioactive materials or fighting fires from the inside while the operator stays at a safe distance. The 105-pound plastic robot cost about $760 to build."

Another one lost to the ages. Link

Steampunk comedy monologue

Merlin Mann's hilarious steampunk comedy monologue had me laughing hard enough to burst my gauges. Link

The Mike Wallace Interview

My friend Craig showed me this utterly fascinating archive of Mike Wallace Interview videos from the 1950s, which are hosted online by The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.

It's astonishing to watch television in which the host asks real questions and the guests answer in full sentences. Wallace never lets people off the hook and he smokes cigarettes like the world is ending tomorrow, piling on fulsome praise for his beloved Winstons before each interview begins.

And what a list of guests! He interviews Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvadore Dali, Leonard Ross (a 12-year-old California school boy who won a total of $164,000 on the game shows The Big Surprise and The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Challenge), Aldous Huxley, Gloria Swanson, Tony Perkins, Eldon Edwards (Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), Philip Wylie, Jean Seberg, Earl Browder (former head of the Communist Party in the United States), Mary Margaret McBride (the "First Lady of Radio"), David Hawkins (the youngest of 20 prisoners to defect during the Korean War), Dr. Henry Kissinger, and many more.

Mike Wallace rose to prominence in 1956 with the New York City television interview program, Night-Beat, which soon developed into the nationally televised prime-time program, The Mike Wallace Interview. Well prepared with extensive research, Wallace asked probing questions of guests framed in tight close-ups. The result was a series of compelling and revealing interviews with some of the most interesting and important people of the day.

Link

Steve Steinberg on "Crowd Dynamics"

Wall Street hacker Steve Steinberg, a former BB guest-blogger, has finally started a blog. From his teenage days with legendary hacker gang Legion of Doom, to his influential Worm and Intertek zines, to his years at Wired, Steve has always managed to grok complex technologies and illuminate them for the lay-person. He really gets what's going on under the hood of the tech itself but also how it may intersect with culture and business. He is a master at showing why most conventional wisdom is anything but wise, and he does it without the typical snarkiness of most tech trendspotters. Steve's new blog is called .csv, for "comma separated values." From his latest post, on the buzz around "crowd dynamics":

The tools and theories needed to analyze social interactions are just now reaching the level of sophistication — in accuracy, in robustness – necessary to leave the lab and enter commercial duty. We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing "crowd dynamics" are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious....

It wasn't long after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that US military theorists began to realize that our soldiers were completely lost amidst the country's byzantine tribal structures, religious factions, and internecine feuds. They needed tools to help navigate these social structures that were as effective as their GPS devices and laser-designators were at guiding them through the local geography. DARPA moved quickly, creating a half-dozen social science programs, all of them focused on near-term research with mostly tangible deliverables. The mission became known as "human terrain mapping", sure to be one of the most important neologisms of this decade.

It's interesting, if unsurprising, that DARPA had focused on the social sciences only once before: in 1962, during the Vietnam War.

Link

Fun 1981 sci-fi home movie: Asteroid

James Leatham says:

Howdy!

Remember me?

The Apple //e computer animation . The film described in the Flickr posts of CineMagic Magazine has been 'special editioned' and posted in its entirety at Google Video.

That's me near the end as a government official.

Link

Orlando-area builders stay step ahead

More than $2.5 billion worth of single-family homes were sold in Orange, Seminole and Osceola during 2007, a survey shows.

Production builders in the Orlando area built and sold more than $2.5 billion worth of single-family homes in 2007, averaging $373,000 per home, a new survey shows.

2001: A Space Odyssey revisited after 40 years

Scott says: "This is a great commentary on the 40th anniversary of Kubrick's masterpiece."

The site includes this YouTube clip from an interview with Kubrick.

The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does not really serve unless it can be verbalized."

Link

Judge orders Starbucks to pay more than $100 million in back tips

A Superior Court judge on Thursday ordered Starbucks to pay its California baristas more than $100 million in back tips that the coffee retailer paid to shift supervisors.

Logo carved onto human hair

Boing Boing Gadgets' Joel Johnson was at McMaster University yesterday where he met a researcher who used a focus ion beam microsocope to carve his school's logo on a human hair. I would love one for my wunderkammer! More info over at BBG. Link

University prof says students can't sell notes from his classes because it violates his copyright

Michael Moulton, a prof at the University of Florida, is suing a company tha republishes his students' notes from class, because he says that taking notes on his classes and selling them violates his copyright.

Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor's copyrighted lectures.

If successful, the suit (.pdf) could put an end to a lucrative, but ethically murky businesses that have grown up around large universities to profit from students who don't always want to go to the classes they are paying for.

The suit could also have ramifications for more longstanding businesses such as Cliffs Notes, which summarize copyrighted novels.

Faulkner Press publishes two e-textbooks that Moulton wrote and uses in his classes, and sells its own set of class notes for the course.

Link

Children's Place seeking to return Disney Store business to Disney

Children's Place Retail Stores Inc. is ready to let the Walt Disney Co. take back control of about two-thirds of the 335 stores in the Disney Store chain.

Woman bites dog

A pit bull attacked Amy Rice's canine companion Ella. Rice couldn't get the dog off Ella so she bit it on the nose. Ella is recovering with staples and stitches while the pitbull is in quarantine. From the Associated Press:

"I didn't plan it, that's what happened. I broke the skin and had pit bull blood in my mouth," she said.

"I knew what happened, and I knew that it wasn't good..."

Rice said her doctor will have to determine whether she should get shots for rabies.

Link

Lockheed's Orlando training unit wins 3-year Saudi military contract

Lockheed Martin Corp. 's Orlando training systems business has landed a three-year contract with Saudi Arabia to produce weapons-training systems for Saudi military pilots, the company said today. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Clay Shirky on Colbert

Hurrah for Clay Shirky for pulling off a masterful stint on The Colbert Report, promoting his new book Here Comes Everybody, one of the tightest, sweetest explanations of What The Internet Is For that I've ever read. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

See also:
Clay Shirky's masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky's Harvard talk: Here Comes Everybody
Shirky talks activism: how group forming networks change protest

T-Rex restaurant rising at Downtown Disney