As the proud owner of five Plymouth Barred Rock chicks, I was interested in this post on Homegrown Evolution about a magazine called the Plymouth Rock Monthly, which had a circulation of 40,000 in 1920. Maybe I should re-launch it with the goal of 200 subscribers.

What magazine had 40,000 subscribers in 1920? Answer: the Plymouth Rock Monthly, a periodical devoted to our favorite chicken breed. We have two "production" Barred Plymouth Rocks in our small flock of four hens, and we've found them to be productive, friendly and, with their striped plumage, an attractive sight in our garden. While the internet is an amazing resource for the urban homesteader, there are a few holes in this electronic web of knowledge. In short, would someone out there please get around to scanning and putting online the Plymouth Rock Monthly? All I can find are images of two covers lifted off of ebay.

The February 1925 issue, at right, promises articles on, "Selecting and Packing Eggs for Hatching", a poetically titled essay, "The Things We Leave Undone", "Theory and Practice in Breeding Barred Color", "White Plymouth Rocks", "The Embargo on Poultry", and "Breeding White Rocks Satisfactorily". Incidentally, the Embargo article probably refers to a avian influenza outbreak of 1924-1925 that repeated in 1929 and 1983.

By the 1950s interest in backyard and small farm flocks vastly decreased and the Plymouth Rock Club of America, the publisher of the Plymouth Rock Monthly, collapsed down to 200 members from a peak of 2,000. Thankfully, interest in keeping chickens is now on the rise again and an informative magzine, Backyard Poultry has been revived. Plymouth Rock fans can read an article about the breed in the latest issue of Backyard Poultry. Plymouth Rock Monthly

If you're a fan of "Borat" you'll love "Shirley Ghostman" the spoof telepsychic created by edgy British comic genius, Marc Wootton. "Shirley" -- who is a man, an extremely effeminate man with nail polish who'll have you know he's not gay, okay? -- is the Liberace-esque host of High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman. Shirley makes contact with the spirits of Elvis Presley and Lady Diana, reads the minds of pets and takes hapless contestants through a maze of humiliation in a reality show-within-the-show "Spirit Academy," the American Idol of psychic talent. As with Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" character, the people "Shirley" interacts with -- and the studio audienc e-- have no idea they're being put on. They might figure it out as it's going on, but sometimes they don't!

To one dumb-founded audience member "Shirley" suggests a dead relative was trying to tell him: "You like a drink, but you will not like waking up on the bathroom floor with a black eye and shit in your pants." In a bit taped at a vet's office, he informs a pet owner that her dog has asked him to ask her if she and her husband can knock it off with the anal sex when the dog is in the room. There are tons of these kinds of moments in "High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman."

I've inflicted "Shirley" on many a friend and everyone agrees: This is one of those "pee in your pants funny" shows. An absolute must see if you are a fan of humiliation comedy like Ali G or Larry David. It's the equal of both.

Shirley auditions the psychic talent | Shirley helps her apprentices channel dead celebrities | The Spirit Academy finale | Shirley Ghostman Channels Lady Di | Shirley meets the Skeptics | A Skeptic writes of his "psychic" encounter with "Shirley Ghostman" | More Marc Wootton: "My New Best Friend" (insane humiliation reality show)

In 1975, when I was nine years old, I discovered Lou Reed from reading about him in CREEM magazine. It was probably the very first rock magazine that I ever bought. The article, titled "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves"really captured my young attention. It was the coolest thing I'd ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, conjured up a spectacularly ghoulish portrait of a totally disheveled, wasted and just plain old mean Lou Reed even as he hurled drunken druggy insults right back at him throughout the entire interview. The writing was sublime. I'm not saying I realized this when I was nine, btw, but even that young, I knew I was reading the unfiltered thoughts and opinions of someone who seemed to know about, and feel passionately about, a heck of a lot of really cool things. In his writing on rock and roll, he could really convey strong emotions. Bangs didn't hesitate to let you know where he stood on groups like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer (that would be two thumbs down) but when he loved a record or a group, his rhapsodic gonzo prose was worthy of being compared to Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. Sometimes his writing was even better when he hated a group!

When each new issue of CREEM would come out, I'd go straight for the Lester Bangs articles and record reviews and I'd obsess on owning the albums he liked. This was back in the days (ahem) when you couldn't find anything like an Iggy Pop or Velvet Underground album outside of a specialist shop in a big city or through mail order, but the writing of Lester Bangs inspired you to want to have the same experience he had listening to groups like PiL, The Clash, The New York Dolls and The Stooges. He never, ever steered me in the wrong direction and not only do I see that my own passion for deviant culture comes from a crucial young connection to the mind of Lester Bangs, but also that he's one of the stylistic voices I've most emulated in my own writing.

So what an incredible thrill it was to come across a 90-minute interview with Lester Bangs himself on a Bit Torrent tracker recently. To finally, at long last hear the speaking voice of one of my literary heroes --it was like having a mental orgasm. Pure joy! Bangs and the interviewer cover a lot of ground in the two part interview including the state of the music industry at the time, whether or not the Rolling Stones ought to retire (in 1980!), John Lydon's PiL and what music Lester was listening to himself. It's a wonderful, articulate and thoughtful interview with a great writer whose speaking voice we rarely hear.

Someone at at website called The Interview Archive has posted the interview online. It's absolutely worth listening to, a rare treat.

Lester Bangs Interview | Lester Bangs, King of the Noise Boys | Let Us Now Kill White Elephants

Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group sez,
I've just come back from Parliament Square in London, where about 30 of us have spent the morning building a giant picture of Prime Minister Gordon Brown out of photos of CCTV cameras and other surveillance state ephemera. Take a look at some of the photos of the day (http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=FnFBigPicture&m=tags) - it looks fantastic (and the great weather helped!)

Last week, Boing Boing helped us put out a call for people to capture the database state on their cameras.

Today, to celebrate an international day of action for democracy, privacy and free speech, we put those images together into a huge 4m x 6m collage, depicting a very Big-Brother-esque Gordon Brown against a background of barbed wire, handcuffs and double helices. Our message was that although as individuals we only see incremental invasions of our privacy, put together, these creeping changes constitute a wholesale shift towards a society predicated not on freedom, but on fear.

As you can see from the photos of the event, despite the seriousness of our message, we had a lot of fun delivering it to Parliament. Thanks to Christopher Scally for artwork and Tom Ackers for coordinating the collage, and to everyone who contributed photos of surveillance state ephemera, or turned up the day to help us build the "Big Picture". Freedom Not Fear: the Big Picture unveiled on Parliament Square (Thanks, Becky!)

A nice way to end the week. Congratulations to Boing Boing pals Sean Bonner and Tara Brown. (Some related tales of love and photons in this cute WIRED item.)

(Image by Kate Black). In Alaska, a legislative panel investigating vice-presidential Sarah Palin has issued a report finding the governor unlawfully abused her authority by firing the state’s public safety commissioner. Also, remember that hacked Yahoo Mail account she used to hide correspondence from subpoenas? Snip from NYT:

In another setback for Ms. Palin, a judge on Friday ordered the state of Alaska to preserve any government-related e-mail messages that Gov. Sarah Palin sent from private accounts. The ruling, by Craig Stowers of Anchorage superior court, came as the result of a lawsuit brought by a resident, Andree McLeod, against Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Ms. Palin has occasionally used private e-mail accounts to conduct state business, and her Yahoo accounts were hacked last month. The judge ordered the attorney general to contact Yahoo and other private carriers to preserve any e-mail messages sent and received on those accounts. An assistant attorney general told the court that the governor was no longer using here private e-mail accounts to conduct state business. Legislative Panel: Palin Abused Authority (New York Times)

Related: Wired reported earlier this week:

David Kernell, the student indicted this week for gaining unauthorized access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, was allegedly involved in computer intrusion about eight years ago when he was in middle school. He and another student guessed the password of a school server while attending Eastern Hills Middle School in Texas, and gained access to some lesson plans, according to one of Kernell's former teachers. . Palin Hacker Allegedly Involved in Another Computer Intrusion (Threat Level/WIRED)

Yesterday, I blogged about Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book hitting number one on the New York Times young adult list. Neil read the entire book aloud, a chapter at a time, on his book tour, and uploaded a nightly video, so that when it was done, his reading of the whole book could be viewed for free as a series of video streams.

Coincidentally, I also finished listening to the HarperCollins audio edition of Neil reading The Graveyard Book yesterday, and was overwhelmed with delight at what a wonderful, magical, sweet story this is when it's all done. The Graveyard Book retells the Jungle Book, but instead of an orphan boy lost in the jungle, raised and tormented by animals, the Graveyard Book's orphan, Bod, is orphaned by a serial killer and raised in the graveyard by ghosts (thousands of years' worth -- from pre-Roman to Victorian).

Like the Jungle Book, the Graveyard Book's story takes the form of a series of loosely linked scenarios describing the childhood and coming of age of the orphan boy, in which his mischief and adventures teach him about the world he lives in and what his place in it must be. It's filled with compassion, mystery, wonder, humor (lots and lots and lots of humor), mythology, and a rich, dark, velvety spookiness that makes it especially lovely when read aloud.

Gaiman's reading is, of course, superb. He's part of a very small group of writers who really bring their work to life when they read it aloud (you can hear this for yourself in the videos from the tour). The spooky hurdy-gurdy music on the chapter breaks is also a nice flourish. This is fine work, from beginning to end, and the best bedtime story read-aloud material I've encountered in a long time. Can't wait until my daughter's old enough to read this to. The Graveyard Book audiobook on Amazon The Graveyard Book on Amazon

Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez takes a long, investigative look at the entertainment industry's claim that piracy costs the American economy 750,000 jobs and $250 billion and discovers the truth: they made it up and repeated it until they forgot they had made it up. With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."

Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim—or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy—but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill...

The number the ITC actually came up with, based on a survey of several hundred business selected for their likely reliance on IP for revenue, was $23.8 billion—the estimated losses to their respondents. That number was based on industry estimates that the authors of the study noted "could admittedly be biased and self-serving," since the firms had every incentive to paint the situation in the most dire terms as a means of spurring government action. But the figures at least appeared to be consistent and reasonable, both internally and across sectors.

The $60 billion number comes from a two-page appendix, in which the authors note that it's impossible to extrapolate from a self-selecting group of IP-heavy respondents to the economy as a whole. But taking a wild stab and assuming that firms outside their sample experienced losses totaling a quarter to half those of their respondents, the ITC guessed that the aggregate losses to the economy might be on the order of "$43 billion to $61 billion." 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy

A fifteen year old girl in Newark, OH faces being labelled a "sex offender" for sending naked cellphone photos of herself (a minor) to other minors. If convicted, she'll spend the next ten years on public registries, classed as a producer of child pornography. No word on what compensation she (as the victim of the crime) will be able to get from herself (as the perp). According to Ohio law, 2907.323(A)(3) states anyone possessing material that shows a minor in a state of nudity is guilty of a fifth-degree felony. The violation also might qualify the juvenile as a Tier I sexual offender, which requires annual registration for a decade.

The section of the law the girl, who is a foster child, was charged with allows parents or guardians to take photos of their unclothed children for a list of acceptable purposes but does not provide an exemption for the child themselves. Law didn't anticipate cell phone photo case

Ars Technica's Frank Caron plunges into the stormy seas of terrorism recruitment video games, reviewing such modern classics as Night of Bush Capturing, Quest4Bush, War on Americas, and Rescue The Nuke Scientist ("the player is an Iranian soldier seeking to rescue two Iranian nuclear experts who were kidnapped by U.S. forces. The game was designed in response to an American-made game called Assault on Iran that featured almost exactly the same situation, but in reverse").

Bottom line seems to be that jihadis can manage to produce workmanlike first person shooters, but fall flat when it comes to using humor, sarcasm, and novel game-mechanics to drive the point home. Of course, the same can be said for the producers of America's Army -- a recruiting tool produced by the US military tool to fight people recruited by these video games.
NBOC's final boss fight is by far the most disappointing part of the game. The game's central encounter —the final showdown with George W. Bush—simply falls flat on its face. Though the boss's character model bears the likeness of Bush and stands about three feet tall, you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish him from any other enemy in terms of both his AI routines and his in-game demeanor.

The developers started down the right path: Bush's evil lair is hidden underneath an abandoned port-a-potty out in the middle of the desert. Within this lair are a variety of pictures depicting a distinguished-looking Bush in the company of various world leaders and diplomats, so it has all the makings of a dramatic final encounter. But the developers, for whatever reason, completely passed up the opportunity to stoke their target audience's anger at the American president as a way of motivating them to defeat the final boss. For instance, they could have had him spout random Bushisms as he attacks (might we suggest, "Bring it on!"), but there's nothing so creative about this fight. Bush simply attacks you with no apparent master plan, shooting away with his M16. Osama bin Fragged: a review of terrorist propaganda games

Sydney, Australia-based photographer Keith Loutit creates lovely tilt-shifted time-lapse short films. His aim, he says, "is to present Sydney as the Model City, and help people take a second look at places that are very familiar to them." You can see more of his films on the Keith Loutit Vimeo page.

Previously on BB:
• Cranford Rose Garden tilt-shift timelapse

Harvard architecture student Bryan Boyer redesigned the US Capitol building for a grad school project. His motivation is that the US House of Representatives stopped growing in 1911 simply because the building couldn't hold any more seat. As a result, he says, "the US Capitol changed from monument to memorial." More interesting than the elevations and photo illustrations though are the souvenir plates and $50 bill that Boyer designed to support his big vision. Over at the Sceptical Futuryst, Stuart Candy digs into this example of "architectural time travel." From the Sceptical Futuryst: It's not by the "direct" schematic and traditional design representations of the building that we get a feel for it. Instead, it's through the mediation of the new Capitol building's role as a cultural force -- one iconically reproduced on currency, commemorated in tacky souvenirs, and glimpsed through grubby windows from the backseats of cars -- that the presence of his future makes itself felt. In cinema and television, the artifacts of documentary (jerky camerawork, imperfect vantage points, bad sound fidelity) can sometimes lend a more nuanced and lifelike texture to the story than squeaky-clean realist cinema, with the camera always positioned just-so. Boyer has found his way to a sort of architectural equivalent of documentary, and I think it works.
Architectural Time Capsule (Sceptical Futuryst), Our New Capitol (bryanboyer.com)

Jesse Thorn says: This is the new project from the guys who invented "Look Around You," Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. It's a religion/television program called Tarvu.

They're working on an Adult Swim series right now.

Say 'Hebbo' to Tarvuism!

Earlier, I posted about artist Kristin Baker's paintings inspired by auto racing. My wife Kelly Sparks had turned me on to Baker a few months ago. But Kelly, a fashion designer, was reminded of the paintings again when she saw Hussein Chalayan's spring 2009 ready-to-wear collection. The abstract nature and colors of the prints align beautifully with Baker's paintings (example at left). And Chalaya's remarkable garment structures definitely convey the motion of a speedway. Hussein Chalayan spring 2009 collection (style.com)

Previously on BB:
• Kristin Baker's speedway racing-inspired paintings

Halloween is decidedly a makers' holiday, ripe for DIY costumes, ghoulish gadgets, high-tech hauntings, and general mischief making. To celebrate, our pals at Instructables are holding a DIY Halloween Contest! To enter, just submit an Instructable, photos, or video in any of the following categories: Hack-o-Lantern, Costume, Gadgets and Gizmos, Decorations, Food, and Green Halloween. (For example, above left, Frankenberry mask. Above right, Creepy Cobweb Shooter made from a hot glue gun.) The prizes include gift certificates to the Maker Shed, vouchers for Ponoko, EL-wire from Cool Neon, Etsy shopping sprees, ThinkGeek zombie gift packs, a DNA kit, and a Singer swing machine. We at Boing Boing are honored to be part of the judging panel. The entry deadline is Novermber 9, so head over to your mad scientist's lair and get making! Instructables DIY Halloween Contest 2008

Russian biker busted for driving a non street legal bathtub. Shots from the life of Road police service from Russia and other post Soviet countries.

(Video: Interview with former Alaskan Independence Party chairman Mark Chryson)

Esther Kaplan, Investigative Editor for The Nation Institute, says:

While the McCain camp continues to hammer home Barack Obama's ties to a former '60s radical, the press corps has yet to report on how far-reaching Sarah Palin's ties are to contemporary radicals -- specifically, the paranoid anti-government figures behind the Alaskan Independence Party. Reporters Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert found that AIP activists played a critical role in Palin's election as Wasilla mayor and that Palin in turn sought to reward them with plum political appointments and appearances, as recently as this year, at AIP conventions.

Their story, "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals," below, was supported by a research grant from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and appeared this morning at Salon.com.

Meet Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing pals

Leah of Current says: I thought you might get a kick out of this literal animated remake of Aha’s "Take Me On." Take On Me: literal video version

I was Googling to see how people used the word "subterranea" and I stumbled across the fantasitc Subterranea Britannica, the Web site for a 35-year-old society "devoted to the study and investigation of man-made and man-used underground places." Here are some of the categories of underground sites that interest them: Adits, Air Raid Shelters, Cave Dwellings, Chalk Wells, Control Cenres, Earth Houses, Fougous, Funicular Railway Tunnels, Mines, Mushroom growing, Priest Holes, Sallyports, Secret Hiding Places, Show Caves, Souterrains, Subways, Underground Railways, Wells. And that ain't the half of it. These folks dig deep into, er, underground culture. Their site is filled with site records, photos, and maps. The England-based society also has a zine, Subterranea, and hosts conferences and field trips in the UK and Europe. Subterranea Britannica

My wife just ran into the office and excitedly told me about this new video that Eric Wareheim of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show -- Great Job!" fame directed and posted on his Facebook page this morning. "It's really trippy, dude. I think Boing Boing readers will love it." I think she might be right. Check out this amazing video for "The Youth." (Thanks Tara McGinley!)