cheesebikini?

Here’s some strong Halloween music.

Enjoy the chills while they last. I’m hoping the world will become a bit less scary after November 4.

“…a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.

Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

 – Sherlock Holmes, in “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle

Meet the Arc Attack musical tesla mojo. It was my favorite innovation at Flipside 2008. More will spring from this.

It’s a giant sculpture controlled by DJs/musicians who use the electric bolts generated by two big tesla coils as instruments.

“…two specially designed DRSSTC’s (Dual-Resonant Solid State Tesla Coils) act as separate synchronized instruments. These high tech machines produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt which puts out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers.”

– Arc Attack

More about them here.

Zimbabwe democracy and human rights advocacy group Sokwanele built a compelling Google maps hack that visualizes news reports of the election-related human rights violations in Zimbabwe.


Such a high-bandwidth service won’t enjoy much viewership in Zimbabwe, where mobile phones and SMS are the new political technologies of choice.


But the Sokwanele map is a powerful way to reach international audiences. In one glance it conveys the larger patterns of what’s going on, and it lets people zoom in and link off for more detail about individual events.


(“Sokwanele” means “Enough is enough.”)

I’m an optimist, so I’m going to assume this Dunkin’ Donuts photo is a coincidence – unlike the Bush product-endorsement shots.

Congratulations to Peter Bober, who was just elected mayor of Hollywood, Florida.

Pete was my college roommate in Austin and one of my best friends going back to high school days in Florida. Best of all, he unseated Mara Giulianti – a notorious mudslinging, scandal-plagued mayor who sold out to shady condo developers and other unsavory interests.

Giulianti spent nearly four times more than Pete on the campaign, but the underdog toppled the 20-year incumbent.

I’ve got to respect a business whose motto and mission statement is:
“Everything should taste like bacon.”

And it’s kosher.

baconsalt.com

Within five minutes I learned two astounding things:

Crackers broke into Earthlink Web servers this morning and replaced the front pages of many (all?) of their customers’ Web sites with this message:

One of my clients is hosted by Earthlink and was compromised. I’ve got everything back up and running, but the tech support folks at Earthlink seem completely confused and can’t tell me what’s happened, beyond the fact that many customers were affected, so I’m not confident the breach has been fixed.

If you know anyone hosted at Earthlink, tell them to check their Web site to be sure they’ve not been owned. And hails out to the W32-Gen crew for pointing out those security holes.

For several weeks it seemed the Shaker thang going down around here was just another flash-in-the-pan San Francisco quirk:

But now our correspondents are chiming in about similar happenings from the sidewalks of Milan:

…to the boutiques of Shibuya:

Now the pattern is clear. For Spring 2007, woodcut is the new black. You heard it here first.