Greg Brotherton is a sculptor who recycles retro-futuristic vaccuum cleaners and other industrial detritus into breathtakingly cool, highly polished rayguns and robots.
I call this look "future sarcastic," and it's just about my favorite aesthetic. It says: "Well, it's the twenty-first century, where the fuck is my jetpack?"
Extremely cool online gallery of '50s and '60 commercial art and photography. Link, Discuss (via J-Walk). 
My first short story collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," is out! It should start appearing on store shelves this week. As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I've made a bunch of the stories in the collection available online for free, under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
I'm trying some different stuff this time around. For starters, I'm only making one format available: ASCII text, wrapped to 80 columns. If you want another format, you're invited to do the conversion yourself and post a link to a downloadable version on the page for the story in question.
Short stories are naturals for electronic distribution. For starters, they're short. Durr. More important is that they're ephemeral. Short fiction is the cutting edge of the field, but the stories themselves usually vanish along with the current ish of the magazines in which they appear. That's depressing as hell, but it's also infopocalypic. I learned a lot of my form by reading and dissecting stories, and by writing them, iterating through different experiments quickly. Those stories are gone -- might as well be gone forever.
Electronic editions mean that the stories will be in print forever -- or for as long as there's an Internet. I'm really glad to have the collection on the stands and the stories on the Web. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. (Oh, and don't miss Bruce Sterling's intro, it's killer).
Optical illusions for endless hours of zoned-out, timewasting pleasure. Included in this online gallery of tasty visual teases, "Rotating Snakes." Click thumbnail at left for full-size image and full, freaky visual impact. The static, "coiled" shapes appear to writhe on-screen. Link, Discuss (Thanks, KK!)
The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the privileged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes -- the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.
(Thanks, Lisa!) [Boing Boing]
Hi Xeni -- pretty remarkable, these panoramas of a volcano in eruption by a French guy, here. And new on my blog lately a panorama of an art installation, in a log cabin, a real log cabin, a couple on a bed surrounded by taxidermy."
(at least twenty of you suggested this, but Thomas was first!) [Boing Boing]
SUBJECT 4: TOM AMMIANO
It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
Tom Ammiano: I'd look for money.
TW: You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
TA: I'd think this was Blade Runner. That's my reaction.
TW: You're watching television. Suddenly you realize there's a wasp crawling on your arm.
TA: Call 911.
TW: You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tom, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tom. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Tom?
TA: That's interesting. I don't know. I'm a republican?
TW: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
TA: Tenderness. Yelling.
(Thanks, JeremyT) [Boing Boing]
SUBJECT 4: TOM AMMIANO
It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
Tom Ammiano: I'd look for money.
TW: You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
TA: I'd think this was Blade Runner. That's my reaction.
TW: You're watching television. Suddenly you realize there's a wasp crawling on your arm.
TA: Call 911.
TW: You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tom, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tom. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Tom?
TA: That's interesting. I don't know. I'm a republican?
TW: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
TA: Tenderness. Yelling.
(Thanks, JeremyT) [Boing Boing]
"We have almost 30 percent of our prison population in Texas infected with hepatitis. That’s not so different from the numbers you see in the Dark Ages with the plague."
...
"[Correctional Medical Services] is an HMO with a captive audience," says David Santacroce, the professor who is spearheading the Michigan lawsuit. "The fewer patients they treat, the more money they make."
