David Pescovitz: Seen below is a portion of a fossilized Walrus penis bone that sold today at auction for $8000. Click image to see the whole photo. This marvel of nature, some 4.5 feet long, was purchased by the holding company that owns the Rilpey's Believe it or Not! Museums.

From the Associated Press:

Discovered in Siberia, the fossilized baculum, or penis bone, is from a species of walrus that went extinct 12,000 years ago. The piece curves to a point and is covered with weathered skin and dry muscle tissue.

The auction house said it was believed to be the largest known mammal penis fossil.

"I'm glad it's going to a museum and not a private collection" so it can on public display, Chait said. "It's definitely something everyone should see once in their life."

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

David Pescovitz: Seen below is a portion of a fossilized Walrus penis bone that sold today at auction for $8000. Click image to see the whole photo. This marvel of nature, some 4.5 feet long, was purchased by the holding company that owns the Rilpey's Believe it or Not! Museums.

From the Associated Press:

Discovered in Siberia, the fossilized baculum, or penis bone, is from a species of walrus that went extinct 12,000 years ago. The piece curves to a point and is covered with weathered skin and dry muscle tissue.

The auction house said it was believed to be the largest known mammal penis fossil.

"I'm glad it's going to a museum and not a private collection" so it can on public display, Chait said. "It's definitely something everyone should see once in their life."

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

VValdo writes "Following a month or so of their Early Access Program, NeoOffice, the free Office suite for OS X, has just released NeoOffice 2.2.1. New features include support for the native Mac OS X spell-checker and address book; support for high-resolution printing (more than the 300 dpi that previous versions allowed); the ability to open, edit, and save most Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; and the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, which is the code base for NeoOffice. X11 is not required, but for those of you who actually want to use X11, check out the new RetroOffice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The French website Deezer.com has struck a deal with the SACEM (the French equivalent to the RIAA) and is now legally providing Internet users around the world with more than 100,000 full songs, streamed on demand and without restrictions. The site, formerly named Blogmuzik.net, had had to close down last March under pressure from the recording industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I obviously hit a nerve with my last post. My index for quality of post has evolved to the number of "you suck", "broadcast.com sucks", "You got lucky", etc posts that are submitted but never confirmed. For this post it was off the charts. Good.

When people resort to personal comments. Its usually a good sign.

Among those I respect, there were a lot of great responses. Let me first say, my position on this has nothing to do with HDNet. I've not abandoned the net. In fact i have more than 100 RSS feeds and untold other sites Im involved with.

Ive been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on.

Honestly, its just a bigger, more time consuming version on CompuServe Forums from back in the day (Find someone who participated in the OS/2 forums if you want to know about social networks). Only back then you didn't call People friends, they were just forum members.

I have a ton of Internet investments that you dont and wont know about.

i have loaded and used facebook apps and I have downloaded the API documentation and actually read it. I'm such an exciting guy, I downloaded Ruby on Rails and read the documentation as well. That's what Saturday Nights are for.

I have bought installed and integrated every imaginable wireless device in my house. I think its fun.

I have invested in and gotten involved with application development on Facebook. Had a serious discussion with Facebook about the revenue opportunities they could achieve if they would license their API for full scale commercial applications on other websites. For example, to me, it would be an interesting and potentially explosive business move for Yahoo to license the Facebook API for their Panama platform. I think the beauty of Facebook is that people for the first time have defined and opened up the "database of their lives". Which if integrated into an advertising platform like Panama would allow advertisers to truly personalize ads, rather than algorithmically present ads. To me it was an interesting conversation.

I think it could change the way advertising is handled on the net. Each user could have the option to publish certain fields/objects which could be replicated/peered to the licensees of the API and then integrated Into the ad serving application. When the user showed up on the licensee site, say Yahoo Finance, the ad server could present a contextual ad chosen based on the published objects within the context of the Yahoo content.

Its one of many good or bad ideas that are feasible because the net is the plain vanilla boring, never really changing platform that it is.

Guess what. When things go from exciting to stable and boring in the technology world, that's a good thing.

Call me a cynic. I feel the same way about Personal Computers. Faster processors dint do it for me. Installing Vista was a disaster till I read a copy of CPU magazine and used the OS mods they had in there to clean the junk up. Its sad but true that a 25 year old platform is more volatile than the Internet. It still takes so long to boot that for the first time since I had a Mac in 1990 I bought a Macbook and junked my Vista Laptop. My time is at a premium. The days of being concerned that if I bought a Mac there might be some apps that I could use but the wouldn't run on the Mac are long gone. Not because the Mac has an Intel processor, but because I cant really think of any new off the shelf software that I would get excited to buy.

Beyond Office and email, I spend a ton of time on the net. That boring platform that ain't gonna change and is dead in the excitement category.

What do I get excited about ?
I'm excited about Virtual Machines, as I have written before, and the changes and impact they could have on all of us. I get fired up about the continuing decline in flash and hard drive prices. Its amazing to me after all these years of watching drive prices fall that I can buy more than 500gigs of drive for under 100 bucks. That i can buy a 16gig flash drive for not much more. and it still pisses me off that i have to deal with file size limits that require me to manage my email files when I back them up.

And of course I'm excited about the HDTV space and whats happening there. Maybe some people dont think peoples media consumption patterns change when 70" HDTVs are installed in their homes, I do.

Which brings me to why I said that "The Net is Dead and Boring"

The best way to sum up how I feel about the excitement and opportunities on the net compared to the many other personal and corporate technology options out there is to use a Yogi Berra quote.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded"

When everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities are somewhere else.

But hey, that's just me.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Xeni Jardin:
Go on, click for large size, I imagine you may need it right about now. And you know I'm talkin' 'bout the Cruggs. Came from these guys.

Xeni Jardin:
Go on, click for large size, I imagine you may need it right about now. Came from these guys.

Xeni Jardin:
[ Image: Fakir Musafar, "modern primitive." ]

PART 3 OF 3

Louis Rove, the man identified as the adoptive father of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, apparently lived the latter part of his life as an out gay man who was deeply involved in body piercing culture.

That's what we've learned this week, through a first-person essay posted on BMEZine by Yard[D]og, who identifies himself as a former friend of "Louie" Rove, and through an audio interview posted here on BoingBoing with Jim Ward.

In 1975, Ward founded The Gauntlet, widely considered to be the first professional piercing shop in America. The "grandfather of the modern piercing movement," as Ward is known, personally administered 37 (mostly genital) piercings to Louis Rove.

Another pioneer in those early years of ampallangs, dydoes, and nipple rings -- intimate ornaments we now take for granted in alt circles -- was Fakir Musafar. As you can see from the image above, he is most committed to the art and experience of piercing, beyond mere ornamentation.

Musafar began experimenting with body piercing at age 11, growing up on a Native American reservation in South Dakota in the 1930s. Now, at age 77, he teaches body modification workshops at the Bay Area school he founded: bodyplay.com. Image at left: a live piercing event overseen by Musafar.

Musafar also knew Louis Rove. He photographed Rove's piercings (in great detail) for a 1983 issue of the fanzine Piercing Fans International Quarterly, or PFIQ. Rove wrote an essay about his piercings for that same issue (links to scans at the foot of this post, images are very NSFW).

In this audio interview with BoingBoing, Fakir Musafar tells us about what drew him to his lifelong fascination with body modding; about the formative years of the piercing industry; and about the quiet, curious, friendly, and very heavily pierced man he knew as Louie "Indy" Rove.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

AUDIO interview: FAKIR MUSAFAR
(duration - 23:12)

[Browser-compatibility note -- The audio link in this post appears as embedded Flash, and is brought to you by our sponsor: HP's iPaq 510 Voice Messenger. If your web reader doesn't allow you to access Flash, here's the MP3 LINK. ]

Section index:

* 0:00-5:23 (Growing up in Indian country, childhood experimentation)
* 5:23-9:34 (Early piercing photos, moving to CA, new "modern primitives movement," Muzak founder whose nom de kink was Doug Malloy provided essential funding)
* 09:34-14:00 (Meeting Louie Rove, "T&P parties," early '70s WeHo piercing scene, first piercing shop The Gauntlet)
* 14:00-18:00 (Contents of a 1983 PFIQ issue in which Mr. Rove, and his pierced genitals, were cover story)
* 18:21-23:12 (Piercing goes commercial, but Musafar and others work to preserve the esoteric aspects)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Back in the early days," Musafar explains in our interview, "people who were interested in piercing were a very small, insular community."

Not anymore. Body piercing is big business now, and a more visible part of popular culture.

"Back then, none of us dreamed it would come to this," Musafar says. "Kids these days who come to my [piercing] school haven't a clue how this started, they don't know who Jim Ward is. They should understand and appreciate something about their ancestors, people who lived 20 years ago at least."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

SCANS of Piercing Fans International Quarterly
Issue #17, 1983
Cover story and 6-page feature on Louie Rove (aka "Indy"). Photos by Fakir Musafar, contents shared here by permission of PFIQ founder Jim Ward.

NSFW warning: contains graphic images of genital piercings. Inappropriate for children, and may be disturbing for adults. Do not click if you are easily offended, or squeamish about body piercing.

* SCAN #1
* SCAN #2
* SCAN #3
* SCAN #4

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Previously on BoingBoing:
(1) Essay: I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring
(2) Karl Rove's Pierced Family Jewels: Jim Ward interview (audio)

(Images in this post provided by Fakir Musafar. Very special thanks to Shannon Larratt, founder of BMEzine.com, who kindly offered to host the PFIQ scans on our behalf, and who introduced me to this story in the first place -- and to Mr. Ward and Mr. Musafar.)

Xeni Jardin:
[ Image: Fakir Musafar, "modern primitive." ]

PART 3 OF 3

Louis Rove, the man identified as the adoptive father of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, apparently lived the latter part of his life as an out gay man who was deeply involved in body piercing culture.

That's what we've learned this week, through a first-person essay posted on BMEZine by Yard[D]og, who identifies himself as a former friend of "Louie" Rove, and through an audio interview posted here on BoingBoing with Jim Ward.

In 1975, Ward founded The Gauntlet, widely considered to be the first professional piercing shop in America. The "grandfather of the modern piercing movement," as Ward is known, personally administered 37 (mostly genital) piercings to Louis Rove.

Another pioneer in those early years of ampallangs, dydoes, and nipple rings -- intimate ornaments we now take for granted in alt circles -- was Fakir Musafar. As you can see from the image above, he is most committed to the art and experience of piercing, beyond mere ornamentation.

Musafar began experimenting with body piercing at age 11, growing up on a Native American reservation in South Dakota in the 1930s. Now, at age 77, he teaches body modification workshops at the Bay Area school he founded: bodyplay.com. Image at left: a live piercing event overseen by Musafar.

Musafar also knew Louis Rove. He photographed Rove's piercings (in great detail) for a 1983 issue of the fanzine Piercing Fans International Quarterly, or PFIQ. Rove wrote an essay about his piercings for that same issue (links to scans at the foot of this post, images are very NSFW).

In this audio interview with BoingBoing, Fakir Musafar tells us about what drew him to his lifelong fascination with body modding; about the formative years of the piercing industry; and about the quiet, curious, friendly, and very heavily pierced man he knew as Louie "Indy" Ward.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

AUDIO interview: FAKIR MUSAFAR
(duration - 23:12)

[Browser-compatibility note -- The audio link in this post appears as embedded Flash, and is brought to you by our sponsor: HP's iPaq 510 Voice Messenger. If your web reader doesn't allow you to access Flash, here's a direct MP3 Link. ]

Section index:

* 0:00-5:23 (Growing up in Indian country, childhood experimentation)
* 5:23-9:34 (Early piercing photos, moving to CA, new "modern primitives movement," Muzak founder whose nom de kink was Doug Malloy provided essential funding)
* 09:34-14:00 (Meeting Louie Rove, "T&P parties," early '70s WeHo piercing scene, first piercing shop The Gauntlet)
* 14:00-18:00 (Contents of a 1983 PFIQ issue in which Mr. Rove, and his pierced genitals, were cover story)
* 18:21-23:12 (Piercing goes commercial, but Musafar and others work to preserve the esoteric aspects)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Back in the early days," Musafar explains in our interview, "people who were interested in piercing were a very small, insular community."

Not anymore. Body piercing is big business now, and a more visible part of popular culture.

"Back then, none of us dreamed it would come to this," Musafar says. "Kids these days who come to my [piercing] school haven't a clue how this started, they don't know who Jim Ward is. They should understand and appreciate something about their ancestors, people who lived 20 years ago at least."

"They don't know why you do this or how it started out," he says. "But this isn't about jewelry. All of these things have to do with making magic marks and rites of passage."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

SCANS of Piercing Fans International Quarterly
Issue #17, 1983
Cover story and 6-page feature on Louie Rove (aka "Indy"). Photos by Fakir Musafar, contents shared here by permission of PFIQ founder Jim Ward.

NSFW warning: contains graphic images of genital piercings. Inappropriate for children, and may be disturbing for adults. Do not click if you are easily offended, or squeamish about body piercing.

* SCAN #1
* SCAN #2
* SCAN #3
* SCAN #4

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Previously on BoingBoing:
(1) Essay: I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring
(2) Karl Rove's Pierced Family Jewels: Jim Ward interview (audio)

(Images in this post provided by Fakir Musafar. Very special thanks to Shannon Larratt, founder of BMEzine.com, who kindly offered to host the PFIQ scans on our behalf, and who introduced me to this story in the first place -- and to Mr. Ward and Mr. Musafar.)

jpatokal writes "Singapore Airlines will be rolling out the A380 superjumbo on October 26th, and a surprise awaits in the seat of every passenger: their personal Linux PC, running Red Hat. In addition to running the in-flight entertainment, passengers can also use a full copy of StarOffice, and there's a USB slot for importing/exporting documents or plugging in your own keyboard/mouse. Screen size is 10.6" (1280x768) in economy, 15.4" in business and a whopping 23" in first class (along with free noise-canceling headphones). The system is already available on current B777-300ER planes and will also be outfitted on the upcoming B787 Dreamliners."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

BoingBoing reader Michael Shaughnessy says,

Greetings from Cologne, Germany. Yesterday the new Gerhard Richter glass window was unveiled at the Cologne Cathedral. It looks like a group of pixels and is stunning to look at. The line to get in was over an hour and even today, hundreds of passers by simply were staring at the window in amazement. It is great to see how a modern application of old technology can have a positive effect on people. The artist Gerhard Richter, designed the window for free as a gift to the city of Cologne and the over 1 million people who visit the cathedral each year. Here is one high res version and I am sure many other images will appear soon on Flickr.

Link

Xeni Jardin:

BoingBoing reader Michael Shaughnessy says,

Greetings from Cologne, Germany. Yesterday the new Gerhard Richter glass window was unveiled at the Cologne Cathedral. It looks like a group of pixels and is stunning to look at. The line to get in was over an hour and even today, hundreds of passers by simply were staring at the window in amazement. It is great to see how a modern application of old technology can have a positive effect on people. The artist Gerhard Richter, designed the window for free as a gift to the city of Cologne and the over 1 million people who visit the cathedral each year. Here is one high res version and I am sure many other images will appear soon on Flickr.

Link

hhavensteincw writes "Only two weeks after Wal-Mart launched its latest forway into Web 2.0 land, Facebook users have hijacked a page aimed at selling back-to-school supplies to college kids to instead post rants about the company's labor practices. Of the 100-plus comments, none relates to dorm decorating as Wal-Mart had originally envisioned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: The Boston Globe's Peter Bebergal has a long feature on steampunk -- including a nice little section on the literary roots of the field -- that discusses the work of makers like von Slatt, Datamancer, Kaden, i-Wei and other Boing Boing favorites:

"The iPhone might be sleek and well-designed within its mode, but there's no way it can compete in luxe qualities with some Victorian equivalent," said author Paul Di Filippo, the first to use the term "steampunk" in a title of a book, "The Steampunk Trilogy." Steampunk "embodies both handicraft and mass-production elements in a rich visual vocabulary totally lacking in today's plastic, cheap-jack gadgets." Article Tools

These steampunk engineers are also part of a broader surge in the do-it-yourself mind-set, fueled by the sharing spirit of the Web. It was the do-it-yourself spirit that powered the first Apple computers and the early days of the Internet, but much of the technology developed from these things has become a closed system: DRM-protected music, Microsoft's proprietary nature, even the dependence on single carriers for cable television and cellphones. There is a punk ethos to the social communities of today's Web, in which users are trying to wrest content away from the marketers and commercial media. But hard technology has mostly resisted this little rebellion. When opening up your computer to hack around a little bit for fun voids your warranty, better to leave it alone until it's time to buy a new one.

Link (Thanks, Jake!)

One metric assload of steampunkery

Cory Doctorow: The Boston Globe has a long feature on steampunk -- including a nice little section on the literary roots of the field -- that discusses the work of makers like von Slatt, Datamancer, Kaden, i-Wei and other Boing Boing favorites:

"The iPhone might be sleek and well-designed within its mode, but there's no way it can compete in luxe qualities with some Victorian equivalent," said author Paul Di Filippo, the first to use the term "steampunk" in a title of a book, "The Steampunk Trilogy." Steampunk "embodies both handicraft and mass-production elements in a rich visual vocabulary totally lacking in today's plastic, cheap-jack gadgets." Article Tools

These steampunk engineers are also part of a broader surge in the do-it-yourself mind-set, fueled by the sharing spirit of the Web. It was the do-it-yourself spirit that powered the first Apple computers and the early days of the Internet, but much of the technology developed from these things has become a closed system: DRM-protected music, Microsoft's proprietary nature, even the dependence on single carriers for cable television and cellphones. There is a punk ethos to the social communities of today's Web, in which users are trying to wrest content away from the marketers and commercial media. But hard technology has mostly resisted this little rebellion. When opening up your computer to hack around a little bit for fun voids your warranty, better to leave it alone until it's time to buy a new one.

Link (Thanks, Jake!)

One metric assload of steampunkery