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Keith Loutit is back with “Metal Heart” a wonderful tilt-shift video of a Monster Truck event in Australia. The song is “Robot High School” by My Robot Friend.
See Previously: Amazing Tilt-Shift Time-Lapse Videos by Keith Loutit
A Joe Strummer and Clash Tribute is taking place this Sunday, December 7th at The Bottom of The Hill in San Francisco. The event is a benefit for Strummerville, an organization that helps create new opportunities for aspiring musicians.
Every year since his untimely death, the San Francisco music community has come together to celebrate the life, music and spirit of Joe. All proceeds go to Strummerville, the foundation in England set up in Joe’s name that aims to create new opportunities for aspiring musicians.
This year, Eric McFadden, The Armagideons (w/ members of The Black Furies), The Hooks, Dead Ringers, Ferocious Few and Rubberside Down are donating their time and effort for the love of Joe at The Bottom of the Hill on Sunday 12/7, Pearl Harbor Day.
photo by Marcy G.
Here’s the trailer for “Stingray Sam”, the new musical space western written and directed by Cory McAbee, with music by American Astronaut and narrated by David Hyde Pierce. Stingray Sam will be premiering at Sundance Film Festival 2009.
A dangerous mission reunites STINGRAY SAM with his long lost accomplice, The Quasar Kid. Follow these two space-convicts as they earn their freedom in exchange for the rescue of a young girl who is being held captive by the genetically designed figurehead of a very wealthy planet. This musical space-western miniseries is designed for small screens and perfect for screens of all sizes.
Cory’s last film “The American Astronaut” (2001) was amazing, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what he has in store for us in “Stingray Sam”.
Thanks to Because We Can for the tip!
guest post by Aaron Muszalski
Mission Bazaar returns to San Francisco’s historic Armory this weekend, December 6th & 7th. A unique hybrid of craft fair, performance event, and community center, Mission Bazaar seeks to showcase an incredibly diverse range of vibrant Bay Area creative talents.
Mission Bazaar features a diverse collection of artisans exhibiting their creative works, products, fashion and accessories. There will be over 20 hours of live performances on three stages featuring live music, circus and dance acts, performance artists and DJs, including gypsy jazz, bellydance, spoken word, beatbox, choral ensembles, fashion shows, puppetry, flamenco guitar, and much more. In addition, Mission Bazaar has invited a cross-section of Mission-based non-profit organizations to attend.
Worth checking out, if for no other reason than to see inside of the State Armory and Arsenal building, one of the city’s most unusual historic landmarks, which was purchased in 2007 by local netporn success story Kink.com, and is currently being reborn as the Armory Community Center.
guest post by Aaron Muszalski
On his blog, UK-based web developer and hobbyist photographer Jeremy Keith recounts how a vacation photograph he took inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building came to be used in the 2008 blockbuster Iron Man.
Three minutes into the movie, there was my photo. It fills the screen.
The camera lingers over it while performing its best Ken Burns effect. Not only was Robert Downey Jnr. photoshopped onto the picture, Jeff Bridges was on there too! The Dude!! …On my picture!!! My Flickr pictures have been used in some pretty strange places but this must surely be the strangest …and the coolest.”
via Flickr blog
image via Jeremy Keith
I Can Has Cheezburger has posted the world’s oldest LOLcat, a postcard from 1905.
image via I Can Has Cheezburger
Pownce co-founder Leah Culver has just announced that Pownce will be shutting down as of December 15 and they they have sold their technology to Six Apart. Leah and Pownce developer Mike Malone will be joining Six Apart’s engineering team.
If you are a Pownce user, you can export your files through their website before it shuts down.
More Coverage:
Roboexotica 2008, the 10th annual festival for cocktail robots organized by SHIFZ, monochrom and Bureau of Philosophy, kicks of this Thursday, December 4th at Freiraum in Vienna’s Museumsquartier and runs through December 14th.
Here’s a gallery of photos and video from previous Roboexotica events.
Until recently, no attempts had been made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out.
Kal Spelletich of SEEMEN will be presenting his new cocktail robot “Sloth” at Roboexotica. Speaking of monochrom, Eddie Codel and Bre Pettis are this year’s artists in residence.
“Sloth” photo and video by Kal Spelletich
CupcakeCamp, a BarCamp style event focusing on cupcakes, returns to San Francisco for CupcakeCamp2 this Sunday, December 7th at The Satisfactory (the offices of Get Satisfaction). See the wiki for more info, including cupcake registration.
Here’s GETV’s coverage of the very first CupcakeCamp that took place at Citizen Space in San Francisco back on June 1st.
Last Gasp founder and publisher Ron Tuner will be giving a gallery talk this Friday, December 5th at the Oakland Museum of California. Ron will be discussing the current L.A. Paint exhibition with the museum’s Chief Curator of Art Phil Linhares.
illustration by Frank Bella
Last night’s episode of The Simpsons (“Mypods and Boomsticks”) showed the citizens of Springfield getting their very first “Mapple” store, complete with MyPods, MyPhones, MyCubes and a Brainiac Bar. Even Steve Mobs appears to make an announcement.
You can watch the full episode on Hulu.
via Nick Douglas
Last year when we were in Florida, I posted some photos of McGuire’s Irish Pub in Destin, including a video of the creepy double-decker bus parked out front.
Tonight we took a rainy night trip over to the original McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola and I shot a few photos while there as well. Both locations are home to “Feasting, Imbibery & Debauchery”, including great Irish food, a brewery on site where they make amazing beer and tricky bathroom signs.
See Previously: Creepy Double-Decker Bus at McGuire’s Irish Pub in Destin, FL
photos by Scott Beale
Here’s a KTVI news story on Chuck Kalert, the guy who has changed the light bulb on the top of the Saint Louis Gateway Arch each year for the last 15 years. The top of the Arch is 630 feet above the ground.
via The J-Walk Blog
Over the years various computer and electronic detritus has been accumulating at the Laughing Squid headquarters, so it’s time to get rid of bunch of it. I’ll be periodically updating this blog post to list items for sale.
Interested in any of this stuff? Contact us.
Please Note:
All payments are via PayPal.
Shipping is not included and is via FedEx (Ground or Home Delivery) in the US only.
All sales are final. We do not have a return policy.
Here’s the current list as of November 29th, 2008:
Canon EOS 1D Mark III Digital SLR Camera - $3400.00
- full product info
- body only, no lenses included
- includes original packaging
Canon PowerShot 950 IS - $250.00
- full product info
- works great, but the body is scuffed up a bit from being in pocket
- includes original packaging
Apartment Therapy Los Angeles has posted a great series of photos by John Olson featuring 1970’s rock musicians at their parents homes that they discovered while going through the amazing LIFE Magazine photo archive.
via WFMU
photo of Frank Zappa and his parents by John Olson
A time-lapse video of a giant wall painting in Berlin recently completed by Blu.
See Previously: MUTO, Amazing Animation Painted on Public Walls by Blu
guest post by Charlie Todd
Earlier this month a massive group of pranksters led by members of The Yes Men and The Anti-Advertising Agency printed up and distributed copies of a spoof New York Times. The paper featured the headline “Iraq War Ends” and 14 pages of unbelievably good news for any left-leaning reader. The paper, which was also reproduced online, also included some very clever fake advertisements for real corporations, including the De Beers ad above. While the real Times called the prank a “Grade-A-caper”, De Beers did not find it as funny.
Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains:
Not surprisingly, the corporate targets of the parody were not pleased. Now, in what is becoming an all-too-familiar trend, one of those corporations has attempted to shut down the site by putting pressure on what is often the weakest link in the online speech chain: the domain name registrar. Stymied by the First Amendment and other legal impediments, those who don’t appreciate critical commentary and other “objectionable” online content have found intermediaries — providers of indispensable technical services like domain name registration and web hosting — much easier to intimidate.
This time, the complaining (and overreaching) party was the South African diamond conglomerate De Beers, the target of a critical fake ad on the web version of the New York Times spoof announcing that diamond purchases “will enable us to donate a prosthetic for an African whose hand was lost in diamond conflicts.” Miffed by the criticism, De Beers responded not by confronting the authors (whose parody is protected by the First Amendment) but instead by threatening their Swiss-based domain name registrar, Joker.com. De Beers has demanded that Joker.com disable the spoof website’s domain name or face liability for trademark infringement.
You can read the EFF’s letter to De Beers, attached at the bottom of their coverage.
I’m reminded of the nastygram Laughing Squid received last holiday season from Best Buy.
See Previously:
- Fake New York Times Distributed With Headline: “Iraq War Ends”
- Best Buy Cease & Desist Letter For Blog Coverage of Parody
image via nytimes-se.com
guest post by mikl-em
We’re In Your Thanksgiving Parade, Rolling Your Rick
As David Crosby said Everybody’s been burned. And okay, maybe not everybody has been Rickrolled, but earlier this year SurveyUSA estimated that 18 Million people in the US have had the video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop gem Never Gonna Give You Up foisted upon them by a surreptitious href.
For anyone who is unfamiliar this phenomenon, I won’t bother explaining. But instead suggest you check out the trailer for “Wench Patrol” the awesome Jennifer Aniston / Paris Hilton heist flick directed by Quentin Tarantino shot entirely in IMAX. Go ahead take a look. We’ll be waiting.
Got it?
But until Thanksgiving Day 2008 (the American one not the Canadian one) few if any people had been Rickrolled live by the real Rick Astley (who hereby joins the ranks of The Real Roxanne and The Real Slim Shady as individuals whose reality must be explicitly asserted). Astley, who has said of this fad it’s a bit spooky innit?, popped up on the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends‘ float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and chortled those immortal words A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of, amongst others, for the assembled masses (up to a quarter million live plus however many on the TV & youtubes).
Online predecessors of such bait-and-switchery include Goatse.cx (which we of the mirthful squid have chronicled in its many forms) and napster bombing which was invented by squid-pal Evolution Control Committee as a way to broadly distribute their audio offerings thinly disguised as more mainstream songs. Offline predecessors include surprise parties and walking in on co-workers making out at the company Christmas party.
And on an entirely unrelated point, have you seen these Hilarious Muppets Bloopers?
Ariel Waldman has just launched the new website Spacehack, an online community for space exploration, covering topics such as competition, data analysis, education and open source.
Spacehack is a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, interact + connect with the space community and encourage citizen science.
image via Spacehack
