Boing Boing
Ghost Town: The Bumpy Road To Bodie

Stephen Worth says:
When I was very small, I had one of those horses on springs. I would jump on it and bounce around furiously while my Dad would urge me on, calling out to me to "Ride that horse down the bumpy road to Bodie!"
Before I was born, my family had taken a trip to the High Sierras and my Dad and Mom never forgot the potholes they had to navigate their 56 Chevy station wagon over. It was a memory they spoke of often. When I got a little older, I got a chance to visit Bodie with them, navigating a slightly more modern Chevy station wagon over those same potholes. Bodie became a lasting part of my consciousness as well.
On my personal blog, Late Night Coffee Shops, I just posted a documentary on Bodie (and its nine inhabitants) from the mid-1950s. If you love the otherworldly feeling of stillness in places like this as much as I do, this video will make your day and fill your dreams with the beautiful sound of wind blowing through sun bleached boards.
Ghost Town: The Bumpy Road To Bodie

The Don Martin Dictionary

Richard Metzger pointed me to the Don Martin Dictionary. Martin was one of my favorite Mad cartoonists. His sophisticated absurdism was the opposite of Dave Berg's middlebrow sitcom humor (but I liked him, too). The Don Martin Dictionary

Music video of stochasticity for Radiolab science podcast
Higher Mammals made a song and video to accompany Radiolab's recent show about stochasticity. If you don't already know about Radiolab, it's a terrific science podcast produced for WYNC public radio.
Radiolab Stochasticity Bonus Video!

Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga

This week, Cory posted a Talking Heads video and I followed up with a Laurie Anderson clip. For the trifecta of posts related to NYC's downtown scene in the 1980s, here is a video of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer at a Commodore press event in 1985.
Previously:
o Andy Warhol and the Commodore Amiga 1000 - Boing Boing
o Debbie Harry in the New York Times - Boing Boing
o Interview with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol - Boing Boing
o Warhol, Spielberg, Bianca Jagger on a hotel bed... - Boing Boing
o Andy Warhol perfume - Boing Boing


Record sleeve table and syringe chandelier

While BB Gadgets' Rob is fond of Bughouse's Album Side Table made from old LP jackets, I prefer the Hypolux Chandelier, constructed from plexiglass plates, commercial syringes, and a ballchain suspension.

Cool projects on Make: Online
Make: Online has published a number of cool projects recently.
Sew a cute Morse code key leg strap
Diana Eng's frilly and fashion-forward Morse code key. Diana Eng (best known from Project Runway and her book Fashion Geek) is our current guest author. Besides being a geek-chic fashion maven, Diana is also a ham operator and on a mission to introduce a new generation of hobbyists (especially women) to ham radio. In this project, she makes a sexy garter strap to hold her new Morse key.

Shrinky Dink gaming minis
Sean Ragan shows you how to make some sweet home-baked gaming components using Shrinky Dink plastic and binder clips.

More on making Light Bricks
As a follow-up piece to Alden Hart's LED Light Brick project in MAKE, Volume 18, the atuhor shares more ideas for molding and casting the acrylic bricks to house your LED board, including using machinable wax to create a life-mask face to house your array. Disco face, baby!

New images of the lunar surface

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first photos of the moon. The photo above was taken near the moon's Mare Nubium region. The man in the moon is just outside the frame. From NASA: Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. (The image) shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. The bottom (faces) lunar north.
LRO's First Moon Images
Previously:
o Lunar junk - Boing Boing
o Secret museum on the moon's surface - Boing Boing
o Lunar home designer - Boing Boing
o Alan Shepard's lunar golf - Boing Boing
o Lunar vehicles that didn't make the cut - Boing Boing
o Lunar "ark" proposed - Boing Boing


World's oldest basketball shoes
These may be one of the oldest pairs of basketball sneakers in the world. The shoes were manufactured by the Colchester Rubber Company which shut down in 1893. Vintage clothing dealer Gary Pifer paid 50 cents for them at an estate sale in Vista, California. From CafeTerra: "In a instant, I knew this discovery would be re-writing basketball and sneaker history, as these sneakers are 25 years older than the 1917 Converse All-Stars", added Pifer. The Colchester Rubber Co. was located in Colchester, Connecticut and was in business from 1888 to 1893.

"World's first basketball sneakers 116 years old found at an estate sale"
Previously:
o Space-sneakers like a Japanese toe-sock - Boing Boing
o Chocolate sneakers - Boing Boing
o Robert Williams line of Vans sneakers - Boing Boing


Summer Reading List by Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher has assembled his annual summer reading list, which includes book recommendations from several of our friends and former guest bloggers.
Gareth Branwyn:
A trend I’m noticing in books recently is that there are an increasing number that trade in danger – anti-Nanny State books. No, not those Dangerous Book for Boys and Girls. Those are rubbish. I’m talking about books like Theo Gray’s tremendously awesome Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home – But Probably Shouldn’t (Black Dog & Leventhal) and Bill Gurstelle’s Absinthe and Flamethrowers (Chicago Review Press). Gray’s book has a bunch of enticing experiments that are so well-documented and gorgeously photographed, you don’t have to do them yourself, but if you decide you want to, Gray tells you the real dangers involved and what you have to find out on your own to do them safely and successfully. Treating us like adults. What a concept.
My friend Bill Gurstelle’s book first looks at reasons for living dangerously, mapping what he calls the Golden Third, those people who take risks, who aren’t afraid to live a certain degree of risk,… but not too much risk. Be too risk-taking and you might not survive, not reproduce, don’t take any risks, and you won’t move the culture, innovation, etc. forward. All the action is in that Golden Third. After these ruminations on the why of living dangerously, he gets into some projects and activities, the “art” of living dangerously, from “thrill eating” (stuff like fugu that can theoretically kill you) to Bill’s main bailiwick, teaching you how to spectacularly blow shit up (hence “flamethrower” in the title).
Richard Metzger: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff (Random House, 2009): Ever get the feeling that you’re trapped on a hamster wheel of predatory “Corporatism”? An unwitting participant in a system that you didn’t sign up for in the first place? What happens when the operating system of the corporate Moloch runs amok.
Never Trust a Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson (Duck Editions, UK, 2001): Great macabre short story collection from the silent member of The League of Gentlemen. “Never trust a rabbit. They may look like a child’s toy, but they will eat your crops.” Hungarian proverb.
Summer Reading List by Roy Christopher

The Choppers (1961)
"The choppers call him 'Torch.'"
Many thanks to the The Isotope Guerrilla Cult Theatre for uploading this 1961 movie about a gang of kids who steal and strip down cars to turn into hotrods.
If you cool cats like classic hotrod cars, bad boys from the other side of the tracks, sexy blondes in tight shirts, insipidly catchy songs, goofy teen idol good looks, and the world's biggest cell phone... this one is for you!
Hot rods, hot rock, and hot hair are the jewels in the juvenile delinquency crown of THE CHOPPERS. This classic drive-in exploitation flick features the debut of sixteen year-old Arch Hall Jr. as Cruiser, the spoiled rich kid with a taste for crime and his band of troubled teens who call themselves cool names like Torch, Flip and Snoop, and specialize in stripping cars in record time. This is the movie that made you mom weak in the knees and your daddy worried about the crowd you run with.
Featuring the some exceptional less-than-hit songs from the awesome Arch Hall Jr, including non-classics like "Konga Joe" and "Monkey In A Hatband".
(Thanks, Brian!)



--------------
powered by mob5