Boing Boing

Alt Cartoonist Receives High Praise from Establishment

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 16 May 2012 04:00:42 PDT

Stereotypes abound of the political cartoonists found in so-called alternative papers: the weeklies full of escort ads in the back and snarky commentary in the front. Matt Bors, on the surface, seems to embody the characteristics.

He's scruffy, doesn't own a suit, and lives in Portland. He expresses withering contempt at politicians, mainstream media, and what he views as hypocrisy. He's never made more than $15,000 a year from his cartoons, and supplements that income with illustration, freelance editorial jobs, and, possibly, blood plasma—at least he did in college; he has the scar to prove it.

The 28-year-old Bors was thus a bit surprised this year, and occasionally nonplussed, when he won the Herblock Prize for "excellence in editorial cartooning," was a finalist (with Oregonian newspaper staffer Jack Ohman) for the Pulitzer Prize, and received a Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Jesus Christ, Matt, when did you fucking sell out?

He didn't. The establishment came to him after a stellar run of cartoons in 2011, in which he sent up the pope, climate deniers, Ariana Huffington, the death of newspapers, Mitt Romney, marriage inequality, and our Kenyan-born, American-citizen killing, war-loving, extrajudicial president (who we love dearly and are praying, to all our gods and Richard Dawkins, gets re-elected). His style is more in the mold of the daily strip cartoonist, like a Doonesbury, common among alt political artists, and that makes it seem benign even while he jabs out with wounding satire. Bors doesn't hesitate to switch from jokes or bitter irony to a documentary strip, such as one about Portland residents, his trip to Haiti in 2011 (he went with two other cartoonists, unembedded, to Afghanistan in 2010), or insights from his work as an editor at the Cartoon Movement site.

His most significant strip in 2011 arose from a mild disgust at the imaginative limitations of most cartoons following the death of Steve Jobs. Countless panels showed Jobs at the pearly gates with St. Peter holding an iPad. Bors response was a five-panel outing in which St. Peter welcomes him to the "iCloud" and whips out an iPad. Jobs notes flatly that he's a Buddhist, and wants some respect. So St. Peter swipes a gesture on the iPad, and the final panel has the reincarnated Apple chief as a Chinese Foxconn worker.

The Herbert Block Foundation called out the Jobs cartoon in its award citation. The prize came with a hefty trophy and a $15,000 (after taxes) check, an awards ceremony at which Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau delivered a lecture on his career, and a fancy reception in a gloriously decorated room at the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building. Bors was the first alt cartoonist to get the award, given since 2004, although fellow online scribbler Matt Wuerker of Politico (this year's Pulitzer recipient) got the nod in 2010. Matt's co-Portlandian and friend, Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke Comics), was named the finalist for the award, and received a post-tax $5,000. She, too, appears in weeklies and online, but was unable to attend.

It might seem peculiar for a foundation associated with the Washington Post's long-running cartoonist to bestow accolades on someone so far outside the tradition set by the Post and other papers. But the Post's editorialist didn't dispense pabulum. Herbert Block was a demon with a paycheck, back in the day that newspapers remembered people might purchase their fishwrappers specifically for strong opinion presented graphically. He advocated against racism, coined the term "McCarthyism", railed against Nixon, and showed the Supreme Court stealing the Bush-Gore election. Block, active for 72 years, produced 14,000 cartoons for the Post, from 1946 until his death in 2001. Bors and Block actually have a lot in common, despite form (Block used the convention of labeling items in a cartoon with terms like "the economy" and "middle-class voters") and source of income. The truth is there to be told in a way that forces people to cope with its reality, whether in Herblock's or Bors' distinctive style.

Matt is a Twitter buddy, and he even adapted a cartoon (with permission and credit) from one of my tweets ("U.S. out of lady parts"). That's a honor of the highest order. After the Jobs cartoon appeared, I immediately asked Bors if I could buy it; it's sitting in a flat mailer behind me waiting to be framed. When the news came out that Matt had won the Herblock Award, I felt compelled to go as a long-time cartoon fan, and a supporter of his. Despite my living in Seattle and he in Portland, we met in D.C. for the first time, not unusual in our fast-paced 21st century hovercar and jetpack lifestyle. (I had some interviews and tourism to conduct in D.C., too, so the timing made sense.)

The audience at the awards was mostly gray to very gray, with a few people dressed in a fashion that made it clear that they were cartoonists (nice hat, Cavna), and not, say, the founding chairman of the Kennedy Center (also in attendance). The audience laughed long and loud at Matt's jokes, save one at Huffington Post's expense. Matt noted that Politico had won this year's Pulitzer for editorial cartooning by his colleague Wuerker, and the Huffington Post had received a Pulitzer for reprinting Wuerker's cartoons without permission. That provoked low, throaty, growly laughter. In deference to the audience, Matt told me he cut a joke about thanking the vagina haters for providing so much material, being assured that it wouldn't go over well. His talk was captured on video and is already online. (Trudeau's amusing and informative talk is also up; it has nothing to do with Matt, as Trudeau recounts the history of his strip. Make sure and watch Trudeau's answer about Wounded Warriors at the end if you want to see where his passion lies.)

Herbert Block's foundation is run by his old pals, and Matt said over coffee the night after the award that he was told openly and politely by board members that they really didn't know his stuff, although the board is passionate about strong opinion and social issues. But the foundation is smart, and picks contemporary peers that know the lay of the land. (Last year's Herblock Award winner Tom Toles was on the panel, along with the Philadelphia Daily News's Pulitzer-prize winning Signe Wilkinson, and Jenny Robb, a cartoon collection curator from Ohio State University.)

Political cartoons haven't gone out of style, but the ability to make a living while creating them has largely eroded in this country. As Matt noted in his speech, dictatorships don't crush people's hands because the cartoons they drew have no impact. But the high-profit-margin structure that allowed newspapers both the funds and the independence to compete to hire editorial cartoonists is now long past. Matt is on the board of the editorial cartoonists' association, and tells me that at the peak of opinion comics, at least 1,000 illustrators were employed in the U.S.; the number might even have been as high as 2,000. There are now 60 full-time staffers in that role.

Both the alt-weekly comic artists and their mainstream comrades have been looking for a path out of the darkness. Web sites, besides Politico, don't have regular cartoonists. Matt is one of several artists now syndicated at Daily Kos, where Dan Perkins ("Tom Tomorrow" of This Modern World) edits, appears, and gathers Matt, Wuerker, Sorensen, friend of Boing Boing's Ruben Bolling ("Tom the Dancing Bug"), and others. But all of them complain that editorial sites that commission original print work seem to forget about the popularity of political cartooning.

Matt estimates his Jobs cartoon was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, with many of those even at his own Web site. Editorial cartoonists know how to create memes and the power in images that lampoon the mighty. The disconnect between the audience for such work and the organizations that could fund it seems huge. I congratulate Matt on receiving recognition for his craft, but he and his colleagues know all too well that the hard work of figuring out how to keep at it continues, every day.

Police loom over Byron Sonne's victory party

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:10:44 PDT

Uh-oh. A tweet from Toronto notes that weirdly, there are 4 cop cars outside #hacklabto as they are having a party for #freebyron. HackLabTo is the Kensington Market hackerspace that Byron Sonne (who was acquitted yesterday on all counts related to his emperor-wears-no-clothesery of the Toronto G20 summit in 2010) is affiliated with. Update: they're gone now.

Clay Shirky on the relationship between physical space and creativity

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:43:55 PDT

I really liked Clay Shirky's essay on the relationship between physical space and creativity. It's one of those classic, Shirkian riffs that includes a bunch of seemingly glib and merely clever ideas and culminates with a thing that ties it all together and makes you realize that a bunch of stuff you've been taking for granted is REALLY important and a bit weird.

In this video of his talk at PSFK CONFERENCE NYC, Clay Shirky talks about the work of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. After working there as an assistant professor for almost ten years, Shirky describes five student projects that he thinks are pushing the creative boundaries - from interface design to how people cluster to build new work. At the end of the talk, the technology thought-leader compares creatives as members of a philharmonic orchestra and wonders if any rules can be drawn from looking at such an ensemble.

Clay Shirky: What I Learned About Creativity By Watching Creatives (Thanks, Avi!)

History of gendering in Lego

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:50:54 PDT

On Sociological Images, David Pickett is tracing the history of gendering in Lego toys, from the early efforts to produce girl-sets and boy-sets before 1988, to the full-blown gendering watershed attending the release of the Pirates minifigs, which had definite "girl" and "boy" characters. It all went downhill from there, too. He's got two parts posted, with more to come. It's engrossing stuff.

This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.
The following graphs represent masculine minifigs in blue, feminine minifigs in red, and gender neutral minifigs in gray. I have also calculated the masculine to feminine ratio (m/f ratio). Ideally this should be 1, indicating that there are equal number of masculine and feminine figures. This chart shows the aggreagate across all themes for the five key years between 1989 and 1999. The m/f ratio for this data is 3.74 (which is a lot better than the initial 13.5 it starts at in 1989, but not exactly something to celebrate).
The trend to unrepresent feminine figures in the main LEGO product line is mirrored by a tendency to overrepresent them in the “girls only” lines. LEGO released four major “girls only” themes through this time period: Paradisa, Belville, Scala Dolls, and Clikits. Here’s a quick run down of the “girls only” themes:

Part I: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

Part II: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:08:57 PDT

Artist Carrin Welch's first foray into sculpture is a marvellous set of "Four Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse," made from wood. They're nearly finished, and eminently ridable.

My interpretation of these horsemen from Revelations in the Bible is very loose, it's an artistic idea based mostly on how I want them to look, and less on the many academic and theological interpretations. I want them to appear ominous and imposing, but the catch is that they are giant toys. They are meant to be fantastic and absurd, but also beautiful and magical. You cannot ride one of the mammoths without feeling a little joy. With this world feeling so unstable, and all the theories of its end, the rocking horses bring light to a dark time.
All four horses are expected to be completed by end of May 2012, when they will travel to Burning Flipside for their collective debut. After that I will be collaborating with fellow artists to produce some fun, fantasy images of the rocking horses, and seeking opportunities to show them and let people interact with them.

Welch completed the horses during a period of unemployment, thanks to funding provided by her fans on Kickstarter.

The Four Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse (via Neatorama)

Excerpt from Coldest War, sequel to Tregillis's fantastic supernatural alternate WWII novel Bitter Seedss

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:53:21 PDT

Tor.com has just posted an excerpt from Ian Tregillis's The Coldest War, a sequel to his smashing debut Nazi X-men vs English warlocks alternate history, Bitter Seeds. I've got a review queued up for Coldest War (which is a captured-Nazi-Soviet-Xmen-Ninjas v English warlocks novel), and I just loved it. Tregillis is one of the most exciting new writers in the field today, with a gift for history, storytelling, and action rarely matched. Coldest War is out on July 17, which gives you plenty of time to read Bitter Seeds.

Warlocks do not age gracefully.
Viktor Sokolov had drawn this conclusion after meeting several warlocks. Now he watched a fourth man from afar, and what he saw supported his conclusion. Age and ruin lay heavy over the figure who emerged from the dilapidated cottage in the distant clearing. The old man hobbled toward a hand pump, an empty pail hanging from the crook of his shriveled arm. Viktor adjusted the focus on his binoculars.
No. Not gracefully at all. Viktor had met one fellow whose skin was riddled by pockmarks; yet another had burn scars across half his face. The least disfigured had lost an ear, and the eye on that side was a sunken, rheumy marble. These men had paid a steep price for the wicked knowledge they carried. Paid it willingly.
This new fellow fit the pattern. But Viktor wouldn’t know for certain if he had found the right person until he could get a closer look at the old man’s hands. Better to do that in private. He slid the binoculars back into the leather case at his waist, careful not to rustle the mound of bluebells that concealed him.
The clearing was quiet except for the squeaking of rusted metal as the old man labored at the pump, a narrow pipe caked in flaking blue paint. But that noise felt muted somehow, as though suffocated by a thick silence. Viktor hadn’t heard or seen a single bird in the hours he’d lain here; even sunrise had come and gone without a peep of birdsong. A breeze drifted across his hiding spot in the underbrush, carrying with it the earthy scents of the forest and the latrine stink of the old man’s privy. But the breeze dissipated, as though reluctant to linger among the gnarled oaks.

Ian was one of my Clarion writing workshop students, and was, even then, a remarkable writer.

The Coldest War (Excerpt)

Airplane converted into Space Shuttle food truck

David Pescovitz — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:52:22 PDT

The out-of-this-world Space Shuttle Cafe can be yours for $150,000. It sure would make a far-out food truck. (Sweet old car not included.) From the eBay listing:

This kitchen is built inside the only road worthy DC3 Airplane licensed for street use in the world that we know of, painted in the theme of NASA’S Space Shuttle.
This is a once in a life time opportunity to own not only a great money making business, but a piece of American History also. This aircraft was built in 1944 and flew during World War II. It also flew as an airliner during the 50’s and 60’s and was alleged to have been hijacked to Cuba during that time.
It was converted for street use in 1976, mounted on a GMC Bus frame. We purchased the vehicle in 2001 and converted the empty shell into this completely self-contained commercial kitchen…

"THE SPACE SHUTTLE CAFE~ONE OF A KIND MOBILE FOOD KITCHEN!!!!"

Paranoid, claustrophobic short film: The View From the Closet

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:49:36 PDT

Tomek sends us his claustrophobic short film "The View From the Closet" ("A disturbed, paranoid individual enters his apartment to find himself being watched by something hiding in the closet"), which is an official selection at Los Angeles Short Film Festival.

View From The Closet is now online (Thanks, Tomek!)

iPod Body Mod: magnetic wrist piercings become mount for Apple iPod Nano

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:45:42 PDT

REUTERS/Keith Bedford

Tattoo artist Dave Hurban displays an iPod Nano which he has attached to his wrists through magnetic piercings in his wrist in New York, May 14, 2012. Reuters has an interview with him here.

"I just invented the strapless watch," he said on Monday of his Apple Inc device, set to display a clock.
Hurban cheerfully recounted how he mapped out the four corners of the iPod on his arm and then inserted four titanium studs into his skin. Once the incisions healed, he popped on his iPod, which is held in place magnetically.
"It's way simpler than you think it is," said Hurban.

Below, Durban's HOWTO video for the project he calls "iDermal," explaining how he pulled it off. Not that he can just, you know, pull them off now.

"How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet"—Mat Honan

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:35:06 PDT

An excellent long-read about Flickr and Yahoo by Mat Honan at Gizmodo today. Anyone who has loved and been let down by the once-great photo-sharing site now caught in the purple zombie's death spiral will nod in agreement throughout. The opening graf:

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

Read: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. (Gizmodo)

How Mitt Romney "created jobs"

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:00:57 PDT

Gazillionaire financier Mitt Romney is the latest "CEO President" offered up by the GOP, on a platform of "job creation." When Romney oversaw Bain capital, he supervised the takeover of American Pad and Paper. When the deal was complete, the 258 employees were marched out of the Marion, Indiana factory, told they were fired, and told they could re-apply for their jobs at lower salaries and with fewer benefits. They were warned that some of them would not be re-hired. A long piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Scherer and Leigh Montgomery consider the record of his imperial corporateness:

“We were told they bought the assets, not the union or the [labor] contract,” recalls Randy Johnson, who at the time worked as a machine operator and was a union shop steward. The workers – some the third generation in their families to have jobs there – eventually went on strike, and Bain closed the factory 5-1/2 months after acquiring it...
In an analysis of Bain Capital under Romney, the Journal estimated that Bain made $2.5 billion in profits on $1.1 billion invested in 77 separate deals. Of those 77 transactions, 22 percent ended with the firms in bankruptcy after the eighth year of the Bain investment. Bain disputes the Journal’s account as inaccurate.

Is Mitt Romney really a job creator? What his Bain Capital record shows. (via Reddit)

Doc Sendof's "Turn On Kit," 1969: "Eleven far-out symbols!" (vintage ad)

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:26:02 PDT

From Boing Boing reader MewDeep's stupendous collection of scanned ads from the 1960s and 1970s, "Doc Sendof's Turn On Kit, 1969: "Eleven far-out symbols!" with which one could upgrade one's "Bug, board, or boudoir." We should be selling these in the Boing Boing Shop. This image shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Thanks, MewDeep!

GM to end display ads on Facebook

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:07:37 PDT

The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors will soon stop advertising on Facebook "after the auto maker's executives determined their paid ads had little impact on consumers' car purchases." GM will, however, engage in Facebook's "pages" that allow marketers to display promotional content at no cost. The news comes just days before Facebook's planned IPO.

New Skype malware threat reported: Poison Ivy

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:02:42 PDT

Dancho Danchev reports an incident in which a friend pinged him at an odd hour on Skype "with a message pointing to what appeared to be a photo site with the message 'hahahahaha foto' and a link to hxxp://random_subdomain.photalbum.org." Yup, malware. The Poison Ivy trojan is spreading across Skype. [webroot via Joseph Menn]

Ripped skull tee

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:43 PDT

A nice t-shirt mod from the folks at Hurley -- the rip-skull. I don't expect it would survive a lot of washings, though.

DIY SKULL T-SHIRT (via Crazy Abalone)

Vinyl LP AT-AT clock

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:16 PDT

Here's a nice twist on the traditional vinyl-LP-as-a-clock craft: a cut-out AT-AT mod. From Etsy seller NotByLaser (which implies that this was not cut by a laser!).

Star Wars AT-AT: Hand Crafted Vinyl Record Clock - Made To Order (via Neatorama)

Animated Russian "Winnie the Pooh" from 1972 is quite the Nietzschean bummer

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:36:21 PDT

[Video Link] SoyuzMultfilm's "Adventures of Winnie the Pooh," 1972, presents the iconic tale of Pooh and pals with a tone very different from more familiar adaptations. For starters, Pooh is an annoying, aggressive hedgehog of a bear; Eeyore seems to be paraphrasing Nietzsche, and needs antidepressants even more badly than his English-speaking cousin. Here's another, and another, and another, and another. (thanks, Rusalka!)

Mexican drug cartels now using Claymore mines

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:27:12 PDT

Just after a horrific week of news about mounting body counts in Mexico from the drug war, Danger Room points to news that at least one narco arsenal was found to include Claymore Mines. The mines can be triggered with an electronic remote, and are capable of spewing 700 steel balls in any direction, with a wounding range of 50 yards. Here's a video.

56-year-old Texas grandma gets life without parole on first-time drug charges

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:10:48 PDT

In Fort Worth, Texas, Elisa Castillo—a 56-year-old grandmother with no prior drug offenses— has been sentenced to life without parole. She maintains her innocence, and never "touched the drugs that sent her to prison," points out the ACLU; "Her fate was sealed, in large part because she didn't have a card to play when negotiating her sentence." The Houston Chronicle has more.

Columbia Human Rights Law Review devotes entire issue to wrongfully executed Carlos DeLuna

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:14:02 PDT

The entire current issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is given over to the tragic wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna, an almost certainly innocent man who was murdered by the state of Texas on 8 December 1989. DeLuna's case is one where "everything that could go wrong did go wrong" in the words of Columbia law Professor James Liebman, who, with 12 students, wrote the 436-page issue. None of the evidence that would have exonerated DeLuna was considered by police or the prosecution, and the likely culprit, a man who was also named Carlos, and who was frequently mistaken for DeLuna, went free. It's a nightmarish account of a man whom the authorities "knew" to be guilty, who was killed despite his innocence. It's a chilling reminder where laws like the UK's stop-and-search rules (which allow police to stop and search without suspicion, if they "just know" there's something wrong) and the no-fly list (which allows for the arbitrary removal of the right to travel without any public airing of evidence or charge, when authorities "just know" you're not safe to fly) will inevitably end up.

From a Guardian story by Ed Pilkington:

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn't committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.
The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez's lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna's sister Rose.
At his 1983 trial, Carlos DeLuna told the jury that on the day of the murder he'd run into Hernandez, who he'd known for the previous five years. The two men, who both lived in the southern Texas town of Corpus Christi, stopped off at a bar. Hernandez went over to a gas station, the Shamrock, to buy something, and when he didn't return DeLuna went over to see what was going on.
DeLuna told the jury that he saw Hernandez inside the Shamrock wrestling with a woman behind the counter. DeLuna said he was afraid and started to run. He had his own police record for sexual assault – though he had never been known to possess or use a weapon – and he feared getting into trouble again.

The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death

Making Shelter Simple: An Interview with Lloyd Kahn

Avi Solomon — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:07:11 PDT

Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. His latest book is Tiny Homes: Scaling Back in the 21st Century.

Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took?

Lloyd Kahn: When I was a kid I had a little workbench with holes in it, and the holes were square or round or triangular. And you had to pick the right little piece of wood block and hammer it in with a little wooden hammer. And so I'd hammer with it, put the round dowel into the round hole, and hammer it through. And then maybe the most formative thing was when I was twelve - I helped my dad build a house. It had a concrete slab floor, and concrete block walls. And my job was shoveling sand and gravel and cement into the concrete mixer for quite a while. We'd go up there and work on weekends. One day we got the walls all finished, and we were putting a roof on the carport, and I got to go up on the roof. They gave me a canvas carpenter's belt, a hammer and nails, and I got to nail down the 1" sheeting. And I still remember that, kneeling on the roof nailing, the smell of wood on a sunny day. And then I worked as a carpenter when I was in college, on the docks. I just always loved doing stuff with my hands.

Lloyd Kahn Interview Audio Excerpt

I like the smell of wood, and the moment I like best when I'm building is when I get the foundation done and get the floor joists on and nail down the flooring and stand on the floor. That's just a wonderful moment: I did this myself. You have these good experiences when you grow up that carry over. So even while I was a businessman I was still leaning towards building. I like builders and I like farmers, because they have to deal with the real world. It's not like buying and selling stock options. The farmer's crops have to grow, and he has to deal with the wind and the sun, the temperature and rain. The building has to stand up. It can't fall down on people.

Avi: You made an interesting career change in 1965 from working as an insurance broker to being a carpenter.

Lloyd: Things were starting to happen then in San Francisco! The cultural revolution really started in 1963. People started moving to San Francisco and living in the Haight-Ashbury district. When I was an insurance broker, I used to go up to upper Grant Avenue which was kind of the artistic and beatnik center of the city, at a place called the Coexistence Bagel Shop. In 1965 I decided I wanted to think about what I was doing with my life, and I hitchhiked across the country, and went to New York, and went out to Cape Cod, and came back about a month later and quit my job and went to work as a carpenter. I was a lot happier working with my hands than I was wearing a suit. I was making pretty good money then, and I would have made a lot of money if I'd stayed in the business world, but it just wasn't what I was interested in doing.

Avi: What was the first day like working as a carpenter?

Lloyd: There wasn't any first day. It was just that I worked on odd jobs, and also did gardening work. As soon as I got out of the Air Force in 1960 I had started doing an extensive remodel on my house which was in Mill Valley about a half hour out of San Francisco. So I'd been building all along. I would come home from my job early and work on the house, and I'd work on weekends. So when I quit, I just kept on working on the house, and I got jobs doing gardening and carpentry. It was a welcome change.

Avi: You got into building domes and then wrote an remarkable essay called "Smart But Not Wise" .

Lloyd: I'd been building domes and after a few years of building them, started to see that there were problems with them, and with using plastics. And also seeing problems with Buckminster Fuller's ideas, that they weren't really the kind of ideas that I was in favor of. So then I went to a conference at MIT on shelter. And at that conference I saw the scientifically oriented people, architects who were working with plastics and things like that. It was somewhat of an epiphany. By that time I'd seen that there were a lot of drawbacks to using plastics, and to using mathematical formulas for making the frameworks of buildings. So I wrote "Smart But Not Wise", whose title was based on the saying of the Indian Ishi, who was the last of a tribe discovered in California probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s. He said that the white men were smart, but not wise. We had the mathematics and the plastics, and the technology, but it just didn't work out with homes. And so I wrote that essay saying hey, you know, we were wrong here. And shortly after that I stopped the printing of Domebook 2, which had sold about 160,000 copies by then.

Avi: How did your audience react?

Lloyd: Well the Dome groupies were not very happy with me. When I took the Dome book out of print, I had an audience of maybe a quarter of a million people, and Domes were the countercultural icon of building in those years. I thought well, I'd better show these people that there are lots of other ways to build. So I took off and went to Europe with cameras, and traveled across the U.S., and photographed all styles of buildings. I came back and went to a Los Angeles conference in 1967 called Habitat For Humanity, and people were expecting me to talk about Domes, but by that time I was completely off Domes. The place was packed and for my presentation there I showed slides of Irish thatched cottages. I said, you see that cottage in the field there? You see how good it looks? It just looks like it's part of the surroundings. And I said, that's because the materials all came from the area. They planted barley in the fields, and after they harvested the barley, they took what was left over, which was the straw, and they made the thatched roof out of that. And they also built the walls out of stones that came from the fields when they cleared the fields so they could plow them. And they also used the stones for the fences around the fields. Everything is harmonious, and everything looks right because the materials are local. And this is totally different with Domes, which are made out of highly manufactured materials. So people were pretty upset with me for going in that direction. It was kind of the math science guys who really wanted to use an abstract concept like icosahedrons, that appealed to people who were left-brain oriented.

Avi: So you rediscovered vernacular architecture?

Lloyd: Yes, I discovered it for myself. And building Domes for five years was good in a way, because then I went out and looked at all these other ways of building. I'd drive down a country road and see farmers' buildings and I'd think gee, that's got a vertical wall, and it's rectangular, and building materials are rectangular. And you don't have problems sealing the roof. Especially in England, I kind of went back to the roots of building from the times when people started farming. They were living in round houses and then they expanded to rectangular houses when they had to have shelter for the animals. So it was this wonderful rich world of all these different styles of building all over the world. They were not alternatives to Domes, because Domes were really pretty silly as far as homes go. And that's when we did the book "Shelter", which became a great popular favorite.

Avi: What's the strangest place that people have read "Shelter" in?

Lloyd: I don't know! I'm sure there's plenty of strange places because it sold over a quarter of a million copies, and we get feedback two or three times a week even now from the book. People saying that it changed their lives. And it wasn't me, it was all the people that we showed in the book that were inspiring to people. It was translated into French, German, and Spanish. And more recently it's been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. The thing about "Shelter" is that it captured the spirit of the times. It had primitive building in it, builders making mud huts in Africa, or thatched buildings in the South Seas. But it also had the young people from the hippies, the counterculture of the day, and what they were doing. So it was a combination that just everybody loved, and they still do almost forty years later.

Avi: Your new book "Tiny Homes" is kind of similar, but different.

Lloyd: It's similar to "Shelter" in the fact that the heart of the book was small buildings. We drew up five small buildings with different roof shapes, and showed people exactly how to make the structure. How to frame the buildings. And we wrote in the book, start out small if you're going to build a house. And if you have a piece of land, everybody isn't going to be able to have their own land to build on, but if you do, build something small and have a kitchen and bathroom back-to-back so that you can live in there, and then you can expand. But the small house was really sort of the heart of that book. So now forty years later, we do a book on very small houses. And the four building books we've done all kind of have a connection between them. And this book has a connection back to "Builders of the Pacific Coast" and then the book "Home Work", and then back to "Shelter". If you look through "Tiny Homes", you'll see all the people in there saying that they were inspired to do this by one of our books. And it's also similar in the sense that the way we do books is with a lot of photographs and interviews. It's kind of a scrapbook in a certain way, although there is an underlying order of things. Nobody really does the kinds of books that we do, and it takes us a really long time to get them done. It took around four years of work in between each of these last three building books.

Avi: You have a unique way of editing your books.

Lloyd: For years I 've used a $175 color copy machine that I could blow things up and reduce things on. So say I'm working on a section about a woman from Hornby Island in Canada who is building caravans on wheels to sell to people. I'll get out all the photos of her and I'll print them out like a contact sheet, and then I'll lay everything out on a table and I'll have a two-page spread in front of me and I'll decide what to do, and then I'll blow up or reduce the photos on my color copy machine and I'll tape them down with removable Scotch tape. Then I'll write the text if it's not written already. I'll print it out in two and three columns and I'll paste it, I'll tape it down and move things around until I get things the way I like them, and I'll maybe sketch in the headline in pencil. For the earlier books, I had a portable Adler typewriter on a table I made out of recycled wood with wheels on it. I would type stuff on that. The way I would do cut and paste was I would cut and paste! I would cut up the manuscript with scissors, and then I would tape it back together. I'd say oh, I want this paragraph up here, so I'd cut it out and tape it in. I would get these manuscripts of maybe eight feet, ten feet long flowing text. When I get things the way I want them, and if they're good enough, they go straight to Rick, our digital maven, who imports the photos into the computer and gets things ready for the printer. But maybe half or more of them go to David, our artist, who will go over them and refine them, and shift things around, and make them look better.

It's a pretty good process because I think there's a different quality you get when you're not working on the computer. I have coffee and play rock and roll, and get inspiration that way, and so I have fun when I'm doing the layouts. So it's kind of delaying the entrance into the digital world. It's not like you're going to start doing everything the old way, but it's taking another look at some of the old ways of doing things and seeing how you can blend those with the modern world. Maybe I can do a few of these things to connect with the real world, or do things the way they were done before, while I've still got my MacBook Air and InDesign and Photoshop, and am in touch with the world instantly.

Brian "Ziggy" Loloia built his cob house for less than $3,000.

Avi: "Tiny Homes" has a very interesting subtitle "Scaling Back in the 21st Century". It points to the importance of not having debt and having creative ways to get access to land.

Lloyd: One of the powerful things about the concept is not to get involved with a bank. Don't get a mortgage if you can. Tiny homes may not be for a whole lot of people. But if you're young, and you're facing either getting a mortgage, and we've all seen how that worked, or paying high rents, here's an alternative. And it doesn't have to be that you build a house on a piece of land. It can be that you build a house on wheels. You build a house on a float and have it in the water. Or you have an apartment in the city that's small. You just kind of go the opposite direction from what they call McMansions. It's a different way of approaching life. I mean, I don't live in a tiny home, but I'm in my seventies. But you can start out small. And it's an incredibly powerful movement right now. I like the idea of starting out with your core, which is your kitchen and bathroom, and your wood heat if that's what you're going to do, and your solar heated water, all in this core. Then you've got a place to sleep and cook and eat. And then you start adding on. With rectangles, they're easy to add onto, as opposed to polyhedral shapes.

Zookeeper reportedly licks baby monkey's anus for over an hour

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:05 PDT

A rather implausible report in Chinasmack (translated from the Chinese journal 163) says that a zookeeper saved a rare, born-in-captivity baby Francois Leaf Monkey from surgery by licking its anus until it passed the whole peanut it ate after a thoughtless patron tossed it to him. Reportedly, the anus-licking proceeded for over an hour.

50-year-old Zhang Bangsheng used warm water to clean a small Francois’ Leaf Monkey’s buttocks, then began using his mouth to lick it, not stopping for over an hour, until the little monkey defecated a single peanut. Only after the peanut was defecated did Zhang Bangsheng laugh with satisfaction.
As it is understood, this small Francois’ langur is only 3 months old, and is the first Francois’ Leaf Monkey to be born in nearly 10 years at this animal park. The Francois’ langur is a rare primate from Guangxi and Guizhou and is amongst the nation’s most protected animals. Because it is so precious, the zoo gave it to model worker and high-level expert Zhang Bangsheng to care for and raise.

The accompanying photo is rather ambiguous.

Zoo Caretaker Licks Monkey’s Butt To Help It Defecate (via JWZ)

Custom-engraved sf ring with Tardis, Starfleet badge, Space Shuttle

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:51:10 PDT

On Engravers Cafe, Harpuahound shows off this kick-ass custom-engraved stfnal ring, which sports a TARDIS, a Starfleet insignia, and a Space Shuttle.

Sci-Fi Ring (via The Mary Sue)

Moonshiners' Cow Shoes

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:00:59 PDT

The May 27, 1922 issue of The Evening Independent carried a story about moonshiners wearing "cow shoes" to trick revenuers -- rather than leaving suspicious footprints leading up to their secret stills, they'd leave innocent-looking hoofprints in the dirt and grass. The New Yorker's "Photo Booth" had a good snap of one of the shoes (above).

Shiners Wear "Cow Shoes" (via Kottke)

Public protests at the Dallas meeting on secret TPP copyright treaty

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:07:32 PDT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton has a long, engrossing account of the popular protest at the Dallas session of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive treaty negotiation that includes a set of copyright rules that leave SOPA and ACTA in the dust. TPP's organizers -- especially in the USA -- have been hostile to any public participation or transparency. They even ordered a hotel to cancel the reservation made by activists who wanted to host their own parallel information session and then lied about it. Undaunted, activists, civil society groups, copyfighters, and other interested parties continue to dog TPP's heels. The Dallas meeting saw the notorious Yes Men "Corporate Power Tool" award ceremony. Even better, the hotel's bathrooms had their toilet paper replaced with TPP TP, custom-printed rolls that explained the problems with TPP.

Since the official planned event was scarcely sufficient to make a significant impact, Public Knowledge and American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property co-hosted a side event for negotiators to learn about the threats of harsh copyright enforcement. The panel included EFF’s International IP Director, Gwen Hinze, who spoke about the unbalanced outcomes non-U.S. Internet users and innovators would face if the current version of the IP chapter were passed. While the event was well-attended, civil society were ultimately forced to bear all the costs to put on this event.
Last week, 32 legal scholars sent a letter to the office of the USTR demanding transparency in the process. Including the release of the text and demand for real participation from civil society, they demanded the immediate release of “reports on US positions and proposals on intellectual property matters that are currently given only to Industry Trade Advisory Committee members under confidentiality agreements.” This is key because there is nothing that could justify the withholding of such reports that simply outline the U.S. position on intellectual property from the public. This is especially true given the fact that the U.S. government’s proposals could impede Congress from engaging in domestic legal reform of legislation regulating IP.
The USTR sent them a preliminary response the following day. Ambassador Kirk essentially blew them off, claiming that they have taken “extraordinary efforts” to have the whole negotiation process inclusive of civil society and the public. In the letter, he compared the level of transparency to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) meetings, which indeed have always been top secret and therefore offer a laughably low bar of comparison.

TPP: Internet Freedom Activists Protest Secret Trade Agreement Being Negotiated This Week

Marc Jacobs turns graffiti into $680 t-shirt

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:23 PDT

Marc Jacobs's SoHo boutique was graffitied by Kidult, who painted ART in giant pink letters across the storefront. Jacobs had the graffiti photographed, removed, and printed on a t-shirt, which he offered for sale for $689, or "Signed by the artist, $680."

Earlier this week, on the night of the Met Ball, the Marc Jacobs boutique in SoHo was hit by French graffiti artist Kidult, who has famously vandalized Supreme, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton, among others. The hit? Kidult took a fire extinguisher filled with pink paint, and sprayed the word ART over the front of the store (seen above).
As a crew cleaned it up the next morning and Kidult took to Twitter to brag, Marc Jacobs and his canny reps turned the stunt on its head, capitalizing on the graffiti artist’s own work to the benefit of their own marketing: By Tweeting it out as “Art by Art Jacobs” and Instagramming an ‘artsy’ picture of it. Kidult, clearly on the scene, tried to make his presence known, but it was too late: Jacobs had won that one.

Update: Aaand now Wilfry is selling a $35 "meta-tee." (Thanks, Emily!)

Marc Jacobs vs. The Graffiti Artist, Round 2: When Jacobs Turns Vandalized Store Into $680 Shirt (via Kottke)

Awesome Tapes From Africa and beyond

David Pescovitz — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:33:20 PDT

Brian Shimkovitz was on a Fulbright scholarship in Ghana when he got hooked on the cassette culture of the region. Street vendors hawked West African recordings in myriad genres, from highlife to African disco, old left-field soul to curious local pop. Shimkovitz started a blog, Awesome Tapes from Africa, and a record label to share his passion for this music, much of which is unheard outside of West Africa. In the new issue of The Wire, Shimkovitz shares some of his fave Web sites where he gets turned on to new sounds from around the globe, such as…

Somali Music
There are an unbelievable number of websites that stream Somali music, this is just one of them that I have been enjoying. It's completely overwhelming and fun: from Minneapolis to Stockholm, expatriate Somalis are able to hear their hometown sounds with ease on sites like this. The rest of us can try and keep up.
Cosmicmantova This astounding archive of cosmic disco DJ sets from the late 70s and early 80s could you busy for a while. Anyone who loves cosmic disco needs to go here and die happy. The most epic and thorough way to explore the sounds that made Daniele Baldelli and co. so exciting and visionary, from obscure soul slams to Afro-inspired synthed-out dreams.

Brian Shimkovitz's choice links (The Wire)

Awesome Tapes from Africa

Byron Sonne is an innocent man

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:23:39 PDT

Twitter's #freebyron hashtag is alive with the news that Byron Sonne, the Toronto-area security expert who was incarcerated and treated as a terrorist for pointing out and making fun of the security flaws in the $1.2B security scheme for the Toronto G20 summit, has been found Not Guilty on all counts.

A moment of sanity from the Canadian judicial system, and all it cost was Sonne's marriage, house, and freedom.

Here's our earlier Sonne pieces.

#freebyron

What do astronauts and the Holocaust have in common? "An Article of Hope"

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:55:07 PDT

Filmmaker Dan Cohen is the guy behind "An Article of Hope," a feature film project seven years in the making. The documentary is done, but Dan's got a Kickstarter to raise funds to get it on television and into schools. Below, some words from Dan for Boing Boing readers about the film:

What could space shuttle Astronauts and the Holocaust possibly have in common? When I began my research into my documentary An Article of Hope, I thought I was making a film about a Holocaust story. But I soon unraveled a story that was much more than that. It is a story that crosses generations woven by the lives of three men, born at a different time, but brought together by a twist of fate.
At the center of the story were the Astronauts of the Space Shuttle Columbia. All from different backgrounds from around the world, magnificently diverse, yet threaded by a moment from the Holocaust, a horrific attempt to stamp out diversity.
Israeli Astronaut Ilan Ramon was a hero fighter pilot, a man who had the ability to rise to the moment. By the time he launched into space he was more than that, he was the representative of his country, his faith, and in his eyes perhaps, humanity. He searched for a symbol of this responsibility, and found a little Torah scroll given to a boy in a secret Bar Mitzvah in a Nazi concentration camp.

The boy survived to become a scientist – working on the mission. So Ramon wrapped around him the story of the scroll, demonstrating to the world what can happen when, in his words, “You go from the depths of hell, to the heights of space.”
In today’s fractious world, An Article of Hope is a story that needs to be told, a story about hope for the future. Our Kickstarter campaign will help us raise the underwriting we need to bring this story to millions across America on PBS. We are two-thirds of the way there. The campaign kicked off with a jolt, support from all over the world. We have just a bit more than a week to go to meet the goal of this 9-year project, to continue to tell the story of An Article of Hope.

And, why the Kickstarter if the documentary's done?

It took 7-years to make the documentary. We did it by raising a little money here, borrowing a little more money there, and a lot of love and un-reimbursed time from the director. Now the final challenge is to get it on television before millions. PBS is a non-profit network, which means we must bring underwriting to the agreement. With your help, the funds we raise here go toward final editing to conform the documentary to PBS technical requirements, broadcast rights and fees, promotion, web site, all of the things that would normally come from a traditional agreement, we must fund it all.

(Thanks, Miles O'Brien!)

Jordan cave on CouchSurfing.com

David Pescovitz — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:45:04 PDT

Ghassab Al-Bedoul, 42, offers up his cave in Petra, Jordan, for visitors on CouchSurfing.com. It looks like a fantastic experience. In the four years he's been registered on the site, Al-Bedoul says he's hosted more than 1,000 people. From CNN:

The cave, which is no larger than 150 square feet, is uniquely modern. A row of solar-powered lights, a gift from a couch surfer, encircles the front of the cave entrance. When the sun sets past the Petra mountains, they are the only visible lights.
The outside of the cave is hard stone, but Al-Bedoul has done some decorating on the inside. The roof is painted black with stars circling the room. Candlelight glows just bright enough to see some of the traditional Jordanian paintings he's placed inside; not included in that collection is the large Bob Marley poster near the cave's entrance…
When asking Al-Bedoul for the washrooms, he points to the mountains, and says, "far away please."

"Couch surfing a cave in southern Jordan"