https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/toddler-picks-up-snake-instead.html

On Friday, July 3, Hamilton debuted on Disney Plus. On Saturday, July 4, "Weird Al" Yankovic posted a music video for his "Hamilton Polka" using clips from the filmed theatrical production. Of course, it's a lot of fun.

Previously: Just you wait: This Hamilton parody follows 'Weird Al' Yankovic's life Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/weird-al-puts-a-polka-spin-on.html

Fireworks are illegal in Los Angeles, but that doesn't stop the whole city from shimmering with home-grown displays on July 4. Thanks to a recut by Mike Dent, KTLA's viral footage of this year's especially impressive showing looks a lot like the classic Blade Runner opening.

Here's the original for comparison:

Image: Vimeo / Mach_Dent via KTLA Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/blade-runner-opening-redon.html

La T'el'evision is a short film from 1947 that imagines what the world might be like if everyone had handheld wireless devices. It shows people using them in restaurants, on public transportation, and as they walk around in public places. At one point two men bump into each other because they are so immersed in the tiny screens.

Inspir'e d'un essai de Barjavel, le documentaire propose l''evolution de la t'el'evision en format de poche transportable, et la facon dont les humains interagiront avec l'objet. Aujourd'hui, des parall`eles sont trac'es entre l'objet d'ecrit dans le documentaire, et les smartphones.

Google Translation:

Inspired by an essay by Barjavel, the documentary proposes the evolution of television in transportable pocket format, and the way humans will interact with the object. Today, parallels are drawn between the object described in the documentary, and smartphones.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/1947-film-about-the-future-sho.html

When one Boing Boing editor posts about something another editor already posted, we hide it from the front page. But you can see all the duplicated posts here. If we duped something, it must be doubleplusgood, right? Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/if-you-like-boing-boing-you-w.html

My Russian grandmother had these Soviet calendars from the 1960s. I was fascinated with them when I was a small child and studied them almost every time I visited. The calendars have 365 pages, one for every day of the year. I don't read Russian but I can understand what most of the pages are about from the illustrations: profiles of Soviet heroes, chess problems, cartoons, boasts about the Soviet space program, and other nuggets of pro-Soviet propaganda. I now realize the bold red and black graphics had a big influence on my design aesthetic. I also love the cheap newsprint and the way they are bound with big staples. Maybe one day I will self publish a book using this kind of paper and binding method. When my grandmother died at the age of 107, I inherited a few of the calendars and they are some of my most prized possessions. I looked on eBay to see if I could pick up the calendars from other years, but I couldn't find anything like them! Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/look-how-cool-these-old-soviet.html

Jerry Seinfeld once quipped "There's no such thing as fun for the whole family." He probably wouldn't have changed his mind after seeing Ed Emberley's series of simple step-by-step instructional drawing books, but I happen to think they are fun for the whole family. I've owned his books for years, and they are a constant source of enjoyment and inspiration for me and for my daughters. You can apply Emberly's technique of taking simple shapes and building on them, not only in the step-by-step instructions in his books, but in your own creations as well. The more you study his work, the more you can use it in your own style.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/ed-emberlys-drawing-books-ar.html

This is truly a golden age for fans of a big ginormous TV screen. Not too long ago, to buy a television over 40 inches usually meant wheeling one of those massive Mitsubishi or Toshiba projection monoliths into your home, consuming a vast portion of any room at a cost of potentially $7,000 to $8,000.

It’s not often that technology advances actually make it cheaper for consumers, but the advent of thin high-performance LED screens has slashed thousands off the prices of top-end TVs, offering any household the opportunity to up their tech game at a relatively modest cost.

Case in point, a generous display like this Philips Momentum 43-inch LED 4K UHD Monitor would have been a $3K-$5K proposition in 1999. But now, Philips is offering one of their certified refurbished models for an eye-catching $519.99, a nearly $500 savings.

As a living room television or a tricked-out computer monitor, the Momentum display with HDR and immersive Ambiglow lighting serves up a truly immersive entertainment experience. 

The UltraClear 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) display offers extremely detailed images and the DisplayHDR 1000 specs along with the on-board Quantum Dot technology assures brilliant brightness, contrast, and colors to better reproduce the dynamic natural palette of colors in the picture. Blues are bluer, greens are greener and reds are redder than ever before.

This monitor also comes with Philips’ Ambiglow feature, which analyzes the incoming image content and continuously adapts the color and brightness of the emitted light to match the image. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/you-can-get-a-philips-momentum.html

Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old EMT who was killed by 3 plainclothes police officers who wrongly delivered a no-knock warrant (which is already constitutionally questionable) at her home in the middle of the night on March 13, 2020. The whole situation is tragic and frustrating and after 4 months, there's still been very little recourse against the officers responsible.

Aa new report from the Louisville Courier-Journal alleges an even more frustrating, bizarre, labyrinthine, and depressingly plausible scenario to explain how everything went so wrong on that fateful evening. The claims, which come from court filings by the lawyers representing Breonna Taylor's family, are not confirmed, nor do they even necessarily constitute legal evidence of any kind that would hold up in court; the Mayor's office in Louisville has called them "outrageous" and "without foundation or supporting facts." But they are, however, now a matter of record in the case. And while I agree that the whole thing sounds outrageous, it's also entirely believable, because shit like this does actually happen.

The court filings allege that Breonna Taylor's murder was an accidental result of other shady behaviors around the proposed Vision Russell Development Plan meant to revitalize the neighborhood (read: gentrification). The project had previously stagnated, but was finally starting to make some progress earlier this year when eight homes were demolished on Elliott Avenue over the course of a few weeks. One of homes on that street that was purchased by the city, but not destroyed, had been occupied by a man named Jamarcus Glover, an ex-boyfriend of Breonna Taylor's who also had a few small drug offenses on his record. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/new-court-documents-allegedly.html

Nearly 30 years after it started its run as the most dominant productivity software ever created, the Microsoft Office suite of programs are now virtually synonymous with personal computing. 

From its days bundled with Windows to its current life as Office 365 cloud-based apps, there’s no reason to think perennial hits like Word, Excel and Outlook won’t still be helping your grandkids be more productive.

Of course, if you’re still going to be assembling PowerPoint presentations in 2040, you should probably understand everything there is to know about it and all of its Office brother and sister apps with the training in The Complete 2020 Microsoft Office Mastery Bundle.

The package includes nine courses covering six of Office’s most vital programs, offering students almost 60 hours of content on all the basic operating knowledge of each app as well as the hidden tricks and tips that only expert-level Office practitioners ever learn.

While your experience with putting together Word docs probably started in grade school, this Word 2019 training goes much deeper, taking students inside all the hidden features and rich customization options that make Word the world’s top writing productivity tool.

With spreadsheets and data analysis so hot these days, the three Excel courses (Excel Beginner 2019, Excel Advanced 2019 and Excel Beginner 2019 for Mac) offer all the nuanced data manipulation tools where Excel truly excels, from automating data entry to simplifying complex formulas to data visualizations. 

Next, PowerPoint 2019 will help you create multimedia presentations that are clean, visually engaging and packed with important information, while Outlook 2019 will have you composing and sending emails that create the right impression while organizing the chaos that can plague your email inbox.  Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/this-training-package-will-hav.html

Kanye West announced this weekend that he's running for president, winning the immediate endorsement of billionaire socialite Elon Musk. It turns out, however, that West has filed none of the paperwork required to do so. So as of now, it's just a dreamor a stunt.

it's unclear whether West is really running.

He does not appear to have registered his name with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for November's election. The closest name the FEC database shows is a candidate called "Kanye Deez Nutz West", who filed their papers with the Green Party in 2015 under the address "1977 Golddigger Avenue, Suite Yeezus" and appears to have raised no money.

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/kanye-not-actually-running-for.html

Spoken Word with Electronics is an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds

Hi, everyone - Welcome to back to the show. This week is all about noise. Noise in a home can be a disruption, like when an air conditioner cranks on suddenly; that's a common disruptive noise source. But noise in a sculpted sense can add a second layer to your home and help transport a space. Two of my favorite examples of this are the inventions of sound design found in Eraserhead and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both of these films use noise as an core part to the world they present. So for this week's episode, I thought it'd be nice to use only the technology available to Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch at the time of their films to recreate those sonic atmospheres.

So this week you'll learn how to use noise to modify your home, including a tutorial on how to make your kitchen sound like a room from Eraserhead or turn your attic into a control center from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turns out limiting the techniques and tools to those eras is not very restrictive. Both Kubrick and Lynch had some of the finest gear in history to work with. It's my guess that they both used noise generators along with a 907 or 914 Moog Fixed Filter Bank. We'll use an inductor based 907A FFB to replicate the steps involved in The Lady in the Radiator scene and get a nice space sound aboard Discover One on your trip to Jupiter. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/sound-design-how-to-make-your.html

An absolute favorite piece of music to cranku-up while driving around in my Volkswagen Vanagon... for some unknown reason. Not nearly as good in other, less dopey and pokey cars. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/ennio-morricones-rabbia-e.html

As long as statues of historical figures (and what to do with them) is at the forefront of our cultural conversation, there's this from Smithsonian Magazine:

The busts are all that remains of Virginia’s Presidents Park, a now-defunct open-air museum where visitors could once walk among the presidential heads. Presidents Park first opened in nearby Williamsburg in 2004, the brainchild of local landowner Everette “Haley” Newman and Houston sculptor David Adickes, who was inspired to create the giant busts after driving past Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

But their presidential visions soon (literally) went bust. The park, which cost about $10 million to create, went belly-up due to a lack of visitors in 2010. Doomed in part by location—it was hidden behind a motel and slightly too far away from colonial Williamsburg’s tourist attractions, the park went into foreclosure.

But something had to happens to all those heads when the park closed down. And what follows is a fascinating look at preservation, in a cemetery-like field that's both sweetly patriotic and incredibly creepy.

How 43 Giant, Crumbling Presidential Heads Ended Up in a Virginia Field [Jennifer Billock / Smithsonian Magazine]

Image: Mobilius in Mobili / Flickr (CC 2.0) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/there-are-43-giant-stone-presi.html

Thank the maker for this Nylabone pacifier and teething ring!

View this post on Instagram

Watch as the adorable @electra___cute chews. #puppy

A post shared by Jason Weisberger (@jlw) on Jul 3, 2020 at 12:00pm PDT

We have an insanely cute new puppy, her name is Electra. You may follow her on Instagram @Electra___Cute. She is teething and, I understand Golden Retrievers chew a lot anyways. Bitter Apple and an endless supply of chew toys have been employed. The most popular is the Nylabone pacifier.

I have recently renovated a shotgun shack. The puppy is the piece de resistance for my new life. I had forgotten and/or ignored the challenges of new puppy ownership. Electra seems to want to chew the corners of the new cabinets, the edging on the new rugs, and literally anything else she can get into her mouth. My daughter and I take shifts keeping wires, chair legs, and patio umbrellas out of Electra's mouth.

Most toys get picked up and dropped, the endless energy of a young puppy moves on to find something else. While she has occasionally stopped to gnaw on a Kong or pair of sandals, jamming the Nylabone pacifier in her mouth usually gets a few moments of peace. Occasionally she settles down with it and chews until she falls to sleep.

Right now time and this pacifier are the only hope for my furniture.

Nylabone Just for Puppies Extra Small Pacifier Bone Puppy Dog Teething Chew Toy via Amazon Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/this-teething-ring-is-the-only.html

A statue of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester's Maplewood Park was vandalized on the anniversary of the "What to a slave is the Fourth of July?" speech that he gave in Rochester  in 1852.

Given the current cultural conversation that the United States is having around statues and memorials that commemorate people who did terrible things alongside their other accomplishments, this unfortunate act is being held up as some kind of monolithic indicator of the eeeeeeevils of "cancel culture" and whiny liberals who want to get rid of statues. Consider these tweets from Yascha Mounk, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and Senior Advisor for Protect Democracy:

"Removed" is quite the euphemism here, by the way. As best I can tell from this terrible news report, it has been smashed to pieces. https://t.co/qMgUwazdRl

 Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) July 6, 2020

As of this writing, it's not clear who destroyed this statue — one of fourteen Douglass statues in Rochester, where Douglass lived and was buried. In 2018, two drunk college kids also destroyed a Frederick Douglass statue in the city. Eyewitnesses claimed the students were shouting racial slurs, but the vandals themselves insist they were just drunk and did it for the lulz. They pled guilty, and had to participate in a restorative justice program to learn more about Douglass and his contributions to the world.

In other words, even that situation wasn't an indicator of anything other than the seeping subtleties that empower entitled white dudes to do dumb shit and get away with it. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/the-last-time-a-frederick-doug.html

Video editor Matt Dent posted this video to Twitter showing the LA skyline on July 4th, fireworks ablaze, to the tune of Vangelis' 1982 Blade Runner soundtrack.

The footage was from KTLA.

More LA as real-world Blade Runner. [H/t Laurie Fox]

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/la-cityscape-with-fireworks-go.html

Within an hour after a Martinez, California community came together to paint -- with the city's permission -- Black Lives Matter on the street, a hateful MAGA man (oops, that's redundant) and Karen sidekick begins to cover it in black paint.

People are shouting at the couple to stop what they're doing, to which the red-capped man says, among other things, “We’re sick of this narrative...The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”

“Your ancestors aren’t from here,” Karen says. As if hers are.

After much back and forth, and after the B and L are painted over, a woman grabs the paint away. Now the Martinez police are looking for the vandals.

From The New York Times:

“The community spent a considerable amount of time putting the mural together only to have it painted over in a hateful and senseless manner,” Chief Manjit Sappal of the Martinez Police Department said in a statement. “The city of Martinez values tolerance, and the damage to the mural was divisive and hurtful.”

The mural was painted on a one-block stretch of Court Street in Martinez, which is about 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. The city selected the location after Mr. Gomez, the lead organizer for Martizians for Black Lives, asked the city for permission to paint the message, he said.

“We asked to do it on our city’s main street,” Mr. Gomez said. The city, he said, offered the street in front of the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse instead.

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/angry-couple-tries-to-paint-ov.html

I'm looking forward to playing Hideous Abomination [Kickstarter], because it combines two of my favorite things: games where you build something piece by piece out of cards or tiles, and grotesque cartoon creatures that defy the imagination.

Hideous Abomination is a tile-laying game for 2-5 people, aged 12+ (but with simplified rules for younger players), generally running about 15-30 minutes. You’re in fierce competition with the other players to construct and complete an abomination that matches certain criteria - some of which are randomized per game! You’ll take turns rolling the die and playing, stealing and bolting tiles. There's plenty of player interaction and end-game scoring. It's fast-paced fun for social gamers, but the randomized win conditions and variables mean it's deep enough for more strategically-minded gamers, too

Here's how it's played:

The creator, Judson Cowan (previously at Boing Boing) is responsible for the gameplay, the artwork, the milieux, the song in the ad, the everything, which is why it already has such a coherent and finished look to it and why I have no doubt it'll ship promptly.

Hideous Abomination [Kickstarter] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/hideous-abomination-a-tile-la.html

Aerial America is an informative and relaxing look at each US state entirely via aerial footage. The series is gradually being posted to YouTube, and as of this writing they have added all states alphabetically through Louisiana. Alaska's Call of the Wild is particularly nice.

Via the series page:

For centuries, thousands of adventurers have answered Alaska's "call of the wild," seeking thrills and fortunes in a state rife with postcard-perfect beauty... and lethal dangers. Take flight across ancient glaciers, rugged mountain ranges, primeval forests, and pristine waterways. Then discover how the state's unique charm has attracted bold visitors, from Russian fur traders to a young survivalist on a one-way trip "into the wild" to the thousands of dog sledders facing off in the "Last Great Race on Earth!"

Image: YouTube / Smithsonian Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/aerial-america-series-is-n.html