shrapnel

I’ve switched the blog hosting to a Wordpress account. Update your rss feed.

I’ve got a new short story, “Beat the Geeks,” in the Tesseracts Eleven anthology. The Tesseracts series features speculative fiction written by Canadians, and the latest anthology was put together by Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Here’s a snippet from Doctorow’s intro:

I grew up on the Tesseracts anthologies. I was 14 when Judy Merril’s first edition of this series shipped, in 1985. I remember reading it, curled into myself on a TTC bus, heading home on a cold winter night, nothing visible outside the windows except the lightsPaolo of snowed-in houses streaking past as we shushed through the awful, grey snow. In that volume, I found stories that were not quite like anything I ever read before. Of course, I’d read “Canadian” authors all my life — I was already a Spider Robinson fan, I’d always liked AE Van Vogt, and I had really enjoyed Phillis Gotleib’s Sunburst. But I’d never read a collection of works whose unifying theme was that they were written by Canadians. It was a heady experience. It’s not that Canadians write quiet, introspective stories while Americans write stories about kicking ass. It’s not even that Canadian stories are particularly incisive on the subject of what it means to be Canadian. But there’s one thing that Canadian stories get right more than American stories — and it’s the same thing that defines Aussie sf (Aussies being a sort of antipodean Canadian with a higher propensity for skin cancer): we’re good at looking at figuring out what makes other cultures tick.

Tesseracts Eleven is going to have launches in three cities: Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. I’ll be attending the Vancouver one. Here are the details:

Tesseracts Eleven Toronto Book Launch
Nov. 24, 3 p.m.
Bakka Books
697 Queen Street West

Tesseracts Eleven Calgary Book Launch
Nov. 30, 7 p.m.
Part of Hot off the Press Fall Book Launch
Historiic Fire Hall
1111 Memorial Drive
Calgary

Tesseracts Eleven Vancouver Book Launch
Dec. 2, 3 p.m.
White Dwarf Books
3715 West Tenth Ave.
Vancouver

OK, if it’s starting to feel like a phantom limb, it’s time to turn it off for a while.

In certain circles, phantom vibrations are a point of pride.

“Of course I get them,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner of Union Square Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York. “I’ve been getting them for over 10 years since I started with the pager-style BlackBerry.”

I wish North America looked as alien.

one of the war cries of the Russian Futurists was The War of the Worlds‘ Martian roar ‘ULL-AA’, which would in 1919 provide the title for one of Viktor Shklovsky’s manifestos for the alienation effect, ‘Ullya, Ullya, Martians’. In order to truly estrange, to provide the distance from everyday life’s stock responses and learned indifference that, for Shklovsky, is the key element in great art (be it Tolstoy or the circus), the alienation effect is taken literally to mean the visitation by the alien nation. Shklovsky writes of an avant-garde work being ‘worthy of my brothers, the Martians’. This is what much of the Russian Avant-Garde saw themselves as. Like Tatlin’s Third International Tower, whose iron legs and perpetual motion are akin to the Martians’ walking tripods, this was something as fearsome, uncanny and technologically terrifying as the alien invasion, and intended to be every bit as threatening to existing society.

(Via Metafilter.)

 

Apparently boomers’ failing taste buds are making American food spicier.

ANYONE WHO HAS browsed a supermarket in the last few years can’t help but notice the shelves are practically bursting into flames. Spicy Guacamole Pringles. Tyson Hot ‘n’ Spicy Buffalo Style Chicken Chunks. Mo Hotta Mo Betta Cayenne Garlic Hot Sauce.

Restaurants are no different. McDonald’s has its Chipotle BBQ Snack Wrap; Friday’s has its Wicked Wings. The spice-driven cooking of India, Thailand, and Sichuan China is responsible for a growing percentage of American takeout dollars every year. It’s clear that Americans have developed an addiction to food with sinus-clearing pizzazz.

Why is hot so hot? The conventional explanation is that the nation has an increasingly adventurous palate. Immigration and prosperity have made Americans more sophisticated eaters, pushing wasabi peas into the mainstream, along with chili-Thai lime cashews, cayenne chocolate bars, and other high-octane combinations.

But some food scientists and market researchers think there is a more surprising reason for the broad nationwide shift toward bolder flavors: The baby boomers, that huge, youth-chasing, all-important demographic, are getting old. As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.

Check out my blog on Canadian culture at

http://cancult.ca

Vanity Fair looks at Lou Pearlman, the man behind such bands as Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync. And also blimp entrepreneur, airline tycoon and con man.

The crowds began gathering outside Orlando’s Church Street Station complex early on a sweltering June morning, waiting in line to wander through the abandoned offices of the unlikely multi-millionaire who had transformed this central Florida city into a music-industry mecca. Lou Pearlman, the rotund impresario who created the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync and guided the early recording careers of Justin Timberlake and scores of other young singers, had been an international celebrity, a popular, easygoing local businessman known as “Big Poppa.” In his heyday, 5 to 10 years ago, he was profiled on 60 Minutes II and 20/20 and produced a hit ABC/MTV series, Making the Band.

Pearlman was long gone now, vanished, one step ahead of the F.B.I. and investigators from the state of Florida, who had rocked Orlando months before by accusing him of being a con man. Gone too were Justin and JC and Kevin and all the other young singers he had made into stars. What remained of Pearlman’s empire, mostly memorabilia and office furniture, was to be auctioned later that day. Up in his gaudy third-floor corner office, with its rust-colored shag carpet and walls lined with gold and platinum records, would-be bidders poked into his cabinets and rifled through his desk drawers; the only secret they uncovered, alas, was Pearlman’s passion for breath mints. At the back, a cavernous storeroom was stacked with framed posters of his bands.

Most of those milling about Pearlman’s offices had scant idea what he had done wrong, much less where he had fled to. Some said Israel, or Germany, or Ireland, or Belarus. He had left the country last January, just days before the state sued him, alleging that he had bilked nearly 2,000 investors, many of them elderly Florida retirees, out of more than $317 million in a Ponzi scheme lasting at least 15 years. A dozen banks also sued for more than $130 million in back loans. Later the indictment would come. Big Poppa, it turned out, had been an accomplished swindler long before he formed his first band. His were scams of jaw-dropping audacity. Pearlman’s largest company, a colossus he boasted was bringing in $80 million a year, was … well, not. For years his investors, starry-eyed after rubbing elbows with ‘NSync and the Backstreet Boys, never questioned his promises of forthcoming riches. When they finally did, he fought back with lawsuits, forged documents, and fictitious financial statements. When the truth began to come out, he ran.

Worth1000.com had another redo-the-classics competition.

I can’t wait for the film version of Sweeney Todd.
>

Evolution of a hip, ironic catchphrase (cartoon):

Wired talks to the horny housewives of erotic text messaging:

I thought erotic texting was like phone sex: You answer the phone and have a conversation with the client, trying to give him his money’s worth while keeping him on the phone long enough to make your employer happy.

But with text, it’s not a one-on-one relationship between client and provider. A whole group of text actresses respond to a single client, and each text actress responds to many clients in any given minute.

It’s like that game where everyone tells a story. You start telling it and stop midway and then someone else picks it up,” she says.

The messages come in to a group queue, where a text actress responds; it’s all done through the computer and the internet on the provider side, not mobile devices. When the client replies, a different woman might respond to it. A few minutes might pass and several messages might be exchanged before the same actress answers the same client’s text.

You have to follow the flow of the story and continue where they left off,” says GiGi.

This should be on, well, The Office.

See also outsourcing your life.

Mexico city:

Wired interviews the depraved geniuses behind Robot Chicken.

Emperor Palpatine sits in his office, feet on his desk, telling his how-I-whupped-Yoda’s-ass-in-the-Senate story (again) to a couple of cronies. The phone rings. It’s Darth Vader — calling collect. “Vader! How’s my favorite Sith?” Then, after listening for a few beats, the prune-faced politician slams a tiny plastic fist on his desk in rage. “Whaddya mean they blew up the Death Star?” He unleashes a flurry of V-chipped expletives. “That thing wasn’t even fully paid off yet! Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?” The conversation ends with a sheepish Palpatine grumbling, “I love you, too,” before hanging up the phone.

That scene is just one nugget of Robot Chicken, the Adult Swim network’s hit series that’s about as far, far away from mainstream TV as you can get. The show’s 15-minute episodes are packed with silly superhero riffs and abundant fart jokes acted out by posable action figures. Yet since its debut in 2005, Chicken has helped the cable channel set ratings records and has enjoyed brisk DVD sales. When the Palpatine snippet found its way onto YouTube last year, it generated more than a million views, creating a flock of new fans — and eventually hatching a 30-minute Robot Chicken: Star Wars TV special.

If you haven’t seen Robot Chicken yet, here’s a teaser featuring the Charlie Brown cast:

Real love dolls, however, are easy to order:

When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it’s not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa.

Each has a name. Ta-Bo often watches television with his toys before bathing them, powdering them so that their skin feels more human, dressing them in lingerie and then taking them to bed.

“A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those thing. They belong to me 100 percent,” says the engineer who has spent more than 2 million yen ($16,000) over the past decade on the dolls.

Of course, if you can’t bring yourself to spend time with a fake woman, you can always hire a real woman that looks like a fake, anime woman:

Anigao Girls offer you the exciting chance to pay a measly 10,000 yen to take photos of an Anigao Girl for one whole hour. The session is 1×1 and you get to choose what costume you want her to wear. It costs 1,000 yen per extra costume and if you bring your own costume for her to wear then its going to cost you an extra 1,500 yen. If you want her to wear a bikini then its an extra 2,500 yen

There are some interesting pics to be found at the new bookmarking service fffound.

Gun makers take aim at women buyers (via Obscure Store and Reading Room).

As Gary Goessner, his buddy and their two pre-teen daughters shopped the Gander Mountain store hunting department in Waukesha Friday afternoon, the two girls were immediately drawn to a rifle and a youth shotgun.

As Gary Goessner, his buddy and their two pre-teen daughters shopped the Gander Mountain store hunting department in Waukesha Friday afternoon, the two girls were immediately drawn to a rifle and a youth shotgun.

The .22-caliber Crickett rifle ($169.99) has a bright pink stock, and the Remington Express Jr. .20 gauge shotgun ($379.99) has a laminated pink-and-black stock emblazoned with the slogan “Shoot like a girl if you can!”

You can run but you can’t hide, Bill Murray.

The comic world’s Thomas Pynchon? Click here for full series of videos.

The Simpsons meet Grand Theft Auto.

It’s OK, she’s got another one. (Via Boing Boing)

As you might imagine, she found the experience very odd and moving. “Seeing my heart for the first time is an emotional and surreal experience. It caused me so much pain and turmoil when it was inside me. Seeing it sitting here is extremely bizarre and very strange. Finally I can see this odd looking lump of muscle that has given me so much upset. It’s tremendous it has become an object of fascination and will get people thinking about the disease, heart transplants and organ donation.”

I’m taking a short holiday. Be back in 10 days or so.

Fraud in the wine trade:

The extraordinary inflation of rare-wine prices—of which the Jefferson bottles are the most conspicuous example—has led in recent years to an explosion of counterfeits in the wine trade. In 2000, Italian authorities confiscate twenty thousand bottles of phony Sassicaia, a sought-after Tuscan red; Chinese counterfeiters have begun peddling fake Lafite. So-called “trophy” wines—best-of-the-century vintages of old Bordeaux—that were difficult to find at auction in the nineteen-seventies and eighties have reëmerged on the market in great numbers. Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, jokes that more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the fiftieth anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to begin with. The problem is especially acute in the United States and Asia, Sutcliffe told me, where wealthy enthusiasts build large collections very quickly. “You can go into important cellars and see a million dollars’ worth of fakes among five or six million dollars’ worth of nice stuff,” she said.

A follow-up post to Secret Underground Cities. BLDGBLOG interviews urban explorer Michael Cook about his journeys in the drain networks underneath Toronto.

We are still finding new tunnels beneath Toronto, and we’re on the trail of others that we know about but just haven’t discovered access to yet. There are also still a few underground gems in Hamilton that haven’t been seen by anyone except municipal workers and a handful of journalists.

Also check out Cook’s site Vanishing Point.

BLDGBLOG has a great post on forgotten underground cities that have recently been discovered. The comments at the end are as interesting as the article itself. Yes, yes, I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum.

Fun painting by ATLbladerunner. See also Zombie Last Supper and Popeye vs. Anime.

I love Tessa Farmer’s nasty little faeries:

Tessa Farmer’s miniscule sculptures reinvigorate a belief in fairies: not the sweet Tinkerbell image in popular conscience, but a biological, entomological, macabre species translating pastoral fable into nightmarish lore. Constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, each of Farmer’s figures stand barely 1 cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass.

Hovering with rarefied, jewel-like beauty, Farmer’s tiny spectacles resound with a theurgist exotica: their specimen forms borrow from Victorian occultism to evolve as something alien and futuristic. Playing out apocalyptic narratives of a microscopic underworld, Farmer’s manikin wonders rule with baneful fervour: harnessing mayflies, battling honey bees, attacking spindly spiders. Presented as wee preternatural discoveries, Farmer’s sculptures conjure a superstitious premise, dismantling the mythos of fantasia with evidence of something much more gothic, sinister, and bewitching.

More here.

I’d love to see the movie.

Kink.com breaks down what they pay per sex act (NSFW). Via Metafilter.

The ramen spa.

My Space for spies.

Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

(Via BoingBoing.)

The Times reports on the home renovations of the uber-rich in London:

Want to keep fit? Why not install an underground squash court – there are several under the streets of west London – or put in a climbing wall? How about a tennis court? One multimillionaire is believed to be considering building one. Fancy a swim? The latest must-have feature is an adjustable-height swimming pool. At the flick of a button – because everything is remote-controlled – the bottom can be raised or lowered by a giant hydraulic jack, forming a deep swimming pool for the heavyweight millionaire or a toddler-friendly paddling pool for his offspring. Optional extras include a retractable glass roof or a discreet cover that will slide over the pool, creating a ballroom or banqueting hall. It doesn’t have to be modern or minimal – one house in Mayfair has a Roman-style pool, complete with wonky columns.

You have to blow Danny DeVito — it’s in the contract (NSFW).

No, really, I’m stuffed.

Anthony Bourdain suffered quietly as he dined on wart hog — encrusted with sand, fur and fecal bacteria — in the African country of Namibia.

Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations,” finished the meal knowing he would become terribly ill. But who was he to complain as a VIP guest of the same arid landscape where Angelina Jolie delivered Brad Pitt’s baby?

Spitting out nasty bits of wart hog would be rude to the locals he was dining with.

Ballistic bookbags are popular sellers. Adam Johnson’s “Trauma Plate” has come to life:

I only rented one vest yesterday, and doubtful I’ll rent another today, await its safe return. There aren’t many customers like Mrs. Espers anymore. She’s a widow and only rents vests to attend a support group that meets near the airport. The airpark’s only a medium on threat potential, but I always send her out armed with my best: thirty-six-layer Kevlar, German made, with lace side panels and a removable titanium trauma plate that slides into a Velcro pocket over the heart the size of a love letter. The Kevlar will field a .45 hit, but it’s the trauma plate that will knock down a twelve-gauge slug and leave it sizzling in your pant cuff. I wear a lighter, two-panel model, while Jane goes for the Cadillac — a fourteen-hundred-dollar field vest with over-shoulders and a combat collar. It’s like a daylong bear hug, she says. It feels that safe. She hasn’t worn a bra in three years.

Can you tell the difference?

Most olive-oil frauds are easy to detect using chemical tests. In February, 2005, the N.A.S. Carabinieri broke up a criminal ring operating in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand litres of fake olive oil, with a street value of six million euros (about eight million dollars). The ring, which allegedly sold its products in northern Italy and in Germany, is accused of coloring low-grade soy oil and canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, flavoring it with beta-carotene, and packaging it as extra-virgin olive oil in tins and bottles emblazoned with pictures of Italian flags or Mt. Vesuvius, and with folksy names of imaginary producers—the Farmhouse, the Ancient Millstones.

  

Now you can rock your kids to sleep with Metallica, Radiohead and many more — including Tool! They’ll thank you when they’re older.

Pixellated stained glass by Gerhard Richter.

Woman marries sex doll made to look like her.

AMBER HAWK SWANSON met Amber Doll on January 25 and the two were married the next day in matching rented gowns at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Swanson noted a few gawkers as she wheeled her bride through the casino and into the chapel, “but people who are in Vegas are already ready to sort of have something wild come at them,” she says. “I only got one real look of disgust.” Swanson, a video and performance artist, had ordered her bride online: Amber Doll, a lifelike sex doll, was specially made to look just like her.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Even better than the real thing. (Via BoingBoing.)

The Homicide Map, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (click on the names for details).

Young stormtroopers in love.

And Office Snapshots has the photos to prove it. (Shown here: Pixar “cubicles.”)

It’s all about the marketplace.

The book. The blog. The excerpt.

Many media-savvy organizations take advantage of the fact that poop makes news. Organizers of the World Toilet Summit know that “The World Public Sanitary Health Summit” wouldn’t get nearly as much press; they must feel the publicity the name generates is worth the tone by which it’s delivered. The First Church of God in Pendleton, Oregon, lit up the AP Wire in January 2006 with the news that it was raising money for a mission to Costa Rica by selling Angel Soft toilet paper. And in September 2005, two Norwegian politicians used poop to get their names and pictures all over the world. Norway’s Oppdal party member Joakim Lund bet his colleague HÃ¥vard Holden that he would “shower in shit” if Holden’s Center Party won more than six percent of a particular vote. When the Center Party did indeed achieve that milestone, Lund honored his end of the bargain by standing under a manure pump on a Norwegian farm wearing only snorkeling gear and a swimsuit — a disgusting fate, but earning worldwide media attention.

Geek is the new barbed wire. (Link via Metafilter.)

Every day, millionaires trudge off to work in “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” hoping to one day have enough money to be financially secure.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — By almost any definition — except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley — Hal Steger has made it.

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

I’ve given up on watching television, largely because I’ve already bought everything in the infomercials, but also because of the quality of the short films being released online. Giant Nazi robot attacks Pearl Harbour! Some futuristic big-game hunters chase a robot dragon! Two aristocrats duel over a woman — in giant robots! Hell, these are better than most movies these days.

“Night photography of the abandoned west.”

The New Yorker traces the origins of spam and looks at the “losing war on junk e-mail”:

Spam’s growth has been metastatic, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent—more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day. The flow of spam is often seasonal. It slows in the spring, and then, in the month that technology specialists call “black September”—when hundreds of thousands of students return to college, many armed with new computers and access to fast Internet connections—the levels rise sharply.

When you grow tired of ink tattoos and body piercings, you can always move on to scarification — cutting designs into your body. (Don’t click the link if you’re squeamish.)

Just remember the WD-40. Pictured here: position 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010010 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110011 01100101 00100000 01010000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101100 01100101 00100000 01000001 01100011 01100011 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010.

What happens to web pages that live on past their owners’ deaths? They wind up at MyDeathSpace.com.

Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers’ lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.

The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It’s also a place where the living — those who knew the deceased and those who didn’t — discuss this world and the next.

There’s a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There’s a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive — frozen in time, for all the world to see.

Citizens dutifully hand over free cash to police….

On Wednesday, bills worth 960,000 yen were inexplicably seen “falling” in front of a convenience store.

“We can just say the money came from the skies,” a puzzled police official said. “There were other passers-by outside and customers in the store but the incident caused no confusion,” he said.

“People thought it was too eerie to touch.”

The world of Japanese host men. (YouTube link.)

The online world Second Life has become a popular meeting place for people whose interests are not widely accepted in Real Life — such as furries. Of course, some of them are just experimenting, but what happens when the experimentation crosses over to virtual bestiality? (Images possibly NSFW.) A brave new world indeed.

what if someone looks for an avatar that looks less like a cartoon and more like a real animal? With some shopping, one can find avatars that will turn one into an anatomically correct dog or horse. Having sex with one of these creatures for real in many US states and foreign countries is a crime. Certainly many people find the idea of coupling with a dog or horse to be offensive. Will these avatars soon be banned? Can we logically assume that if the realistic animal costumes are banned then a case can be made to ban all furries in order to avoid the “gray area” that would ensue should the Lindens choose to ban “realistic” animal avatars?

Crop circles have got nothing on rice-paddy art.

The Telegraph takes a tour of multimillion-dollar homes (aren’t all homes in L.A. millions of dollars?) with some “high-end” estate agents.

Stars can be exacting. Their fame allows them to indulge in idiosyncrasies that probably wouldn’t be accommodated in a regular buyer. John Travolta likes to takes his shoes off and lie on the master bed to see what the view would be if he were waking up there in the morning. Madonna insists on a closed set: houses must be cleared of owners, employees and children before the star will set foot inside. Actors and actresses are more likely to venture out alone or with one or two ers, whereas music-industry types often travel with retinues of assistants, friends and a bodyguard or two.

The article also mentions The Real Estalker, a blog dedicated to getting you inside the homes of celebrities.

The latest trend among the rich and powerful is owning dinosaur bones.

The bidding war between the two Hollywood stars was intense as the price soared for the 67 million-year-old dinosaur skull.

Dinosaur bones the new ‘must-have’
The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research has unearthed a jumble of dinosaur remains

Only when it reached $276,000 did Leonardo DiCaprio blink – and Nicolas Cage walked away from the Beverley Hills auction with a ferocious-looking addition to his fossil collection.

As this recent battle of the celebrities for the head of a tyrannosauras bataar — the Asian cousin of T-rex — proved, dinosaur bones are emerging as the new, collectible must-haves for the multi-millionaires of Hollywood, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The Google News Cushion. (Did Irak actually beat Iraq for searches?) (Via Gizmodo.)

Finger vein money. (Via BoingBoing.)

Finger vein money relies on Hitachi’s finger vein authentication technology, which verifies a person’s identity by reading the pattern of blood vessels in his or her fingers. These blood vessel patterns are unique to each individual, much like fingerprints or retinas, only they are hidden securely under the skin, making them all the more difficult to counterfeit. Hitachi’s finger vein authentication technology is already being used to verify user identities for ATMs, door access control systems and computer log-in systems in Japan and elsewhere.

In the finger vein money system, consumers first register their finger vein pattern data with the credit card company. The data is then entered into a database along with the individual’s credit account information. Later, when shoppers want to pay for something, they simply go to the cash register and place their finger in a vein reader, which uses infrared LEDs and a special camera to capture a detailed image of their vein structure. The image is converted into a readable format and sent to the database, where it is checked against the records on file. When the system verifies the identity of the shopper, the purchase is charged to the individual’s credit account.

There’s a lovely post over at Metafilter about acts of vandalism against famous works of art. Pictured above: two performance artists piss on Marchel Duchamp’s Fountain.

    

If you’ve ever made a sex tape, don’t be surprised if it turns up on new video-sharing websites such as YouPorn or PornoTube.

She’s naked and posing suggestively, but otherwise she doesn’t resemble the average Playboy model. Yet this “ex-girlfriend” has been viewed by 138,629 people on YouPorn, the new, German-based Internet aggregator of amateur-generated porn.

She’s not the only one to have a former lover post her most intimate moments for the world to google. There are over 250 ex-girlfriends currently featured among the tens of thousands of sex videos on YouPorn.

Some people hike for the scenery, others hike for the plane wrecks:

He’s been to more than 250 wrecks since he found that P-38 back in 1984. He’s looked for planes up and down the PacificCoast and across the Southwest, climbing mountains, scouring deserts, once even trying to haul scuba equipment by hand up to a remote alpine lake in Nevada. He sometimes searches alone, but more often hooks up with other wreck chasers, members of a far-flung community that stay in touch through the Internet.

Professional comics vs. professional comics professional joke thieves.

While most comics take pride in performing their own material, many have built lucrative careers on borrowed bits. Robin Williams, for example, has long been lauded for his ability to instantaneously improvise scenes and gags. But while few question his gifts as a live performer, there’s no way to know how much of his sharp-minded inspiration over the years has been provided by an unwitting writing staff. “I’ve been in clubs in L.A. where Robin’ll walk in the room and whoever’s on stage will just get off,” says Boston comedian Kevin Knox. Ritch Shydner, a former Improv regular and coauthor of the book I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America’s Top Comics, agrees. “Robin is a ferocious performer,” he says, “but he isn’t the kind who can generate material, material, material. His style is to watch people and regurgitate what he sees.”

Documentary about “the American style of debt.” (Google video.) Interesting viewing in these subprime disaster days and worth watching just for the yuppie pawn shop. Also comes in book form for just one low payment. (Image is of the national debt clock.)

Here are a few more Che parodies I had kicking around a folder on my computer.

Edge has posted details about the Tesseracts Eleven anthology, due this November, on its website. My story “Beat the Geeks” is included in it. Here’s a tidbit from the introduction by Cory Doctorow:

I grew up on the Tesseracts anthologies. I was 14 when Judy Merril’s first edition of this series shipped, in 1985. I remember reading it, curled into myself on a TTC bus, heading home on a cold winter night, nothing visible outside the windows except the lightsPaolo of snowed-in houses streaking past as we shushed through the awful, grey snow. In that volume, I found stories that were not quite like anything I ever read before. Of course, I’d read “Canadian” authors all my life — I was already a Spider Robinson fan, I’d always liked AE Van Vogt, and I had really enjoyed Phillis Gotleib’s Sunburst. But I’d never read a collection of works whose unifying theme was that they were written by Canadians. It was a heady experience. It’s not that Canadians write quiet, introspective stories while Americans write stories about kicking ass. It’s not even that Canadian stories are particularly incisive on the subject of what it means to be Canadian. But there’s one thing that Canadian stories get right more than American stories — and it’s the same thing that defines Aussie sf (Aussies being a sort of antipodean Canadian with a higher propensity for skin cancer): we’re good at looking at figuring out what makes other cultures tick.

This one is particularly beautiful.

By now you’ve all seen the Chetrooper that’s taken the web by storm. But have you seen Che as corporate logos? I’m partial to the Che coffee cup myself.

Are we becoming overcaffeinated?

Everywhere you look, people are wired on caffeine or touting its benefits—or both. Tabloids run images of celebrities sipping Red Bull or toting Starbucks venti lattes; Dunkin’ Donuts ads feature a coffee-swilling Rachael Ray, who moves so fast she leaves tread marks on the floor. There’s no shortage of ways to get your caffeine fix. Sales of energy drinks like Red Bull and Full Throttle have grown tenfold since 2001, and new ones enter the market weekly. Products that already have caffeine are adding more—in the past few months Diet Pepsi, Jolt and Mountain Dew have all rolled out extra-caffeinated versions. Novelty items, like caffeinated lip balm, caffeinated sunflower seeds, caffeinated beer and even caffeinated soap (”Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew?”) are also popping up in retail stores and nightclubs.

Image is a tattoo of the chemical symbol for caffeine.

A couple of people have pointed out to me that Amazon.ca already has an entry for my new book, The Warhol Gang. I better get working on those edits.

In 1996, a BBC film crew accompanied Russian scientists inside Chernobyl. The resulting documentary (45 minutes) could have been an inspiration for Silent Hill. And here’s Chernobyl 20 years later. (Pic is Ratcliffe Power Station by Michael Kenna.)

Over at my other blog I’ve got an article about Peter Watts and David Wellington, a couple of writers who give away their novels for free online. Their charity has paid off for them, with Watts earning extra sales and Wellington scoring book deals out of it. Welcome to the future present.

My new novel, The Warhol Gang, will be published by HarperCollins in Canada in spring 2009. Some details are here. More to follow.

The excerpt from my new book is now live at Taddle Creek.

I’ve got a new short story, “Beat the Geeks,” coming out in the Tesseracts Eleven anthology sometime later this year. The editors are Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. I don’t know who the other contributors are yet, but I’m looking forward to checking out the other works in the collection. I’ve always liked the Tesseracts books, and the publisher Edge has been doing great work lately, like Jason Christie’s I, Robot. I’ll post an update when I have more details.

(”Beat the Geeks” is in the same vein as “Has the World Ended Yet?” and a few other stories I’m working on for a collection.)

I’ve also got an excerpt from my new novel coming out in the next issue of Taddle Creek. I’ll post more information about that when I have it. In the meantime, pop over to Taddle Creek and check out some of the fine writing they have online right now.

I’ve added a couple of shorts to the library. “Has the World Ended Yet?” was originally published as an Amazon Short and is still available for purchase at Amazon.com for 49 cents. Unfortunately, Amazon changed its administrative procedure after publishing the story, and you can only buy it from them now if you’re a U.S. resident (or you can trick the apps into thinking you’re a U.S. resident).

The other add is a little oddity that came to me the other day: 10 Things Horatio Didn’t Tell the Police. Don’t know what to say about it other than that.

It’s been five years since my first book, Please, was published, and it’s starting to get a little hard to find in bookstores. So I’ve decided to jump on the Creative Commons bandwagon and release Please for free online. You can download it in PDF or text form, or you can read it in episodes here. Enjoy.

First Cormac McCarthy’s The Road gets the nod from Oprah, then from the Pulitzer judges (although Oprah probably counts more). In honour of the occasion, here’s a link to the interview I did with the band Blood Meridian about The Road over at my other blog.

READ THIS: So what do you think caused the apocalypse in the book?

MATT: It doesn’t matter. That’s what so timeless about it.

SHARIA: You can project your own fears on it.

MATT: When you’re reading it, it’s not so much as “I wonder what happened to make this world” as “Ah, so this is what it’s going to look like.”

JEFF: In Blood Meridian, I had a better idea of where and when it took place, and in that way it just a brutal image of a time and a place, whereas The Road was more like —

SHARIA: It’s tomorrow.

Or maybe a fetish party.

The Superman outfit worn by the late actor Christopher Reeve and the latex creature suit from Alien sold at auction for almost $250,000 US ($287,600 Cdn) combined…

The Superman outfit fetched $115,000 US, while the creature costume from the 1979 Alien film starring Sigourney Weaver sold for $126,500 US.

Families go to the cinema to see a wholesome movie for the kids — and are shown The Hills Have Eyes 2 by mistake.

The moviegoers were expecting to see The Last Mimzy, the PG-rated tale of a brother and sister who discover a mysterious box of toys and become endowed with superhuman powers to help preserve humanity’s future.

Instead, the crowd saw the opening scene of The Hills Have Eyes 2, the R-rated sequel to a recent remake of a 1977 horror classic by the genre’s renowned director, Wes Craven. The film centers on National Guard troops who stumble on a clan of mutant cannibals and starts with a chained woman giving birth to a mutant.

Hey, they have to learn about adult life sometime.

I posted about the new book Blackwater, which looks at the U.S. government’s use of “private contractors” — mercenaries — over at my other blog.

In 2004, a group of Americans drove into the Iraqi village of Fallujah and a deadly ambush by insurgents. The men were killed and two of their burned corpses hung from a bridge. Video of the scene made its way around the world, and many commentators compared it to the footage of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in the Black Hawk Down battle.

But there was one key difference: the men killed in Fallujah were not soldiers. They were mercenaries, private contractors employed by the private-security firm Blackwater

Sex offenders living under a bridge.

MIAMI – Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children made it nearly impossible for them to find housing…

The five committed such crimes as sexual battery, molestation, abuse and grand theft. Many of the offenses were against children. The state moved the men under the bridge from their previous home — a lot next to a center for sexually abused children and close to a day care center — after they were unable to find affordable housing that did not violate the sex-offender ordinance.

First there was Craigslist Missed Connections, now there’s Craigslist housewreckers.

TACOMA, Wash. — Many people have had success buying, selling and swapping goods on the Web site craigslist, but one Tacoma woman says she was robbed.

Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on the San Francisco-based Internet site, a collection of online classifieds.

“The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me,” Raye told Seattle television station KING.

A Swedish couple wants to name their daughter Metallica, but the government is opposing the move.

“It suits her,” Karolina Tomaro said Tuesday. “She’s decisive and she knows what she wants.”

The Tomaros have been locked in a battle with Swedish officials over their six-month-old daughter’s name.

In Sweden, parents must have their baby’s name approved by the country’s tax authority, which keeps track of the population registry and issues personal identification numbers.

Ikea moves into the housing business.

BoKlok (pronounced “book look”, Swedish for “smart living”) is Ikea’s biggest idea yet. Having seized the market for affordable home furnishings in the past decade, the Swedish retail giant is now planning to provide the homes themselves. They’ve already built some 3,500 BoKlok dwellings across Scandinavia – and now they’re coming to the UK.

BoKlok homes don’t exactly come in flatpacks, but they’re not far off. The timber-framed buildings are almost entirely prefabricated. They are usually brought to the site on the back of trucks as pre-assembled units, like Portakabins, with the interiors already fitted out. Each apartment is made up of two of these units, which are simply moved into position by crane. Put on the roof and exterior wall cladding, plumb and wire it in, and it’s ready to live in. The typical BoKlok arrangement is an L-shaped, two-storey block with three apartments on each floor. One such block can be put up in a day.

Cleaning sewers full of blood.

A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

“We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood,” said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

(Via Boing Boing)

The Craigslist Missed Connections now come in the form of comics. Note: the Missed Connections are not your usual classifieds:

You write a lot like the boss I had on the job I just quit.

If that is the case and you are he, just know that I did see through the web and that is exactly why I left. Not interested in being set up to take the fall for something that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Too much like the blind venom on the job at my previous life.

You are still a great guy, though. I will miss seeing you, what little of you I saw. You got a problem, pal… it’s called “denial”. I hope to God you figure it out before your most trusted employee steals you beyond blind. I’d much rather have dated you than worked for you, but I wasn’t your type in either event, unfortunately.

(Via Metafilter.)

A new book looks at exactly what goes in to making a Twinkie. It’s good to know the cockroaches will have something to eat after the end of the world.

“Despite Hostess’s secret recipe, most food scientists will tell you that while the main ingredients in the filling are superfine sugar, shortening (oil), corn syrup, water, polysorbate 60, and salt, the key is that old pastry standby, cellulose gum, which can absorb 15 to 20 times its own weight in water. A pinch sprinkled on water floats like a jellyfish. A moistened spoonful becomes a clear, gelatinous, slimy glob in a matter of minutes. Cellulose gum hangs on to the water in Twinkies’ filling, and thus, like so many other ingredients, keeps it slipperier longer. Its fibers plump the filling up, replacing fat (that is, real cream) with a moist, glossy, fatlike texture, without contributing a single calorie to the cake, because cellulose gum is not digested.”

There’s a scene involving plane spotters in the “Jesus Cured My Herpes” episode of my book Please. I didn’t make these people up.

The New Yorker profiles psycho chef Gordon Ramsay.

The sacking of the “cancerous” Gregory had a bracing effect. A prep cook made the mistake of complaining about his commute (“What? He wants the restaurant to come to him?”) and was told he didn’t have to do it again. Two guys making the amuse-bouches, a small version of the reinvented Caesar salad, dressed the croutons in advance. “So you work for a Subway sandwich shop? Pretend you’re the customer. Why would you want a soggy crouton?” Ramsay asked and, without moving, shouted for Neil, somewhere behind him, and asked him to pay their salaries. “I’ll give you back the money next week,” he said, still staring at the two cooks. “I just want you to know how stupid it feels to be paying these cunts out of your own pocket so they can then come here and not do their job.” But it wasn’t just staffing. At three in the morning, Ramsay (in his fiftieth hour without sleep) went through the fridges and found them filled with lobster and foie gras that had been prepared but weren’t being used: no one knew they were there. (“I could have pissed myself. Neil, I wanted to phone you, even at that hour.” Neil was looking beaten. “I wish you had, Gordon.”) Ramsay examined Gregory’s wine cellar—bottles everywhere, no locks (“Don’t think for a moment he’s the only one who stole something”). He went through the reservations. The restaurant was losing twenty thousand a week in no-shows (fourteen on New Year’s Eve), and every Monday Ramsay was ordering a hundred thousand dollars from the U.K. He called a meeting.

See also the Anthony Bourdain throwdown. 

Following up on my earlier post about industrial decay, here’s the Detroitblog.

The British Psychological Society reports about a man whose brain damage causes him to change his identity according to the situation around him:

When with doctors, AD assumes the role of a doctor; when with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. AD doesn’t just make these claims, he actually plays the roles and provides plausible stories for how he came to be in these roles.

(Via Boing Boing)

Discover breaks it down for you.

Stock-market celeb Jim Cramer reveals how the game really works.