Murray sez, "I recently launched a podcast at the UK-based harmonica website www.harpsurgery.com. The episode here features five young players aged 14-18 (with one 22-year-old to mess up our average) who are playing WAY beyond their years... and in some cases, pushing harmonica-playing into dark scary places where it was never meant to go.
The podcast is a little ragged but the playing is great. I thought it pertinent to send this through after Roger Daltrey's shabby harp solo at last night's Super Bowl show. Any one of these kids could destroy Roger Daltrey with a single fog-horn like blast from their instrument. All he'd leave behind is a smoking pair of hush puppies."
A long-lost Penn and Teller special, "Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread," has resurfaced on YouTube in four parts. Get it while you can! P&T are hustling magicians who find themselves embroiled in a shadowy mystery when the men in black call them in for a consultation. There's magic Marx-Bros-esque shenanigans, grifter humor, and bad eighties hair. It's some vintage funny conspiracy theory stuff -- look for guest appearances from James Randi, Whodini, and Andy Warhol! Man, I want this on DVD.
I know nothing about Bitter Sisters' cocktail mixes -- I don't drink hardly at all (puts me straight to sleep) and for all I know, this stuff tastes like gasoline. But the new packaging, designed by Shane Crawford, tickles my desiderata bone. Sure is purdy.
I didn't watch AMC's remake of The Prisoner when it aired last November, but I was delighted to see that all 17 episodes of the original 1967-1968 British series are still viewable in full for free on the AMC site. If JG Ballard wrote a TV series, I'd imagine it would have been something like The Prisoner. For those who aren't hip to it yet, the show is a trippy psychological drama about a former spy held captive in a mysterious resort-like prison. The Prisoner video player(AMC, apologies if non-US viewers are shut out)
Alan sez, "A Japanese company is producing gramophones with natural touches such as bamboo needles."
The player is produced by world-class hobbyist supplier Gakken, and the quality shows. This gramophone supports all record sizes, features speed and tone adjustment, and even lets you record music! No file formats to worry about, no batteries to replace, and the warm, nostalgic sound of analog - this just might be the perfect music player.
Morgunblaðið, Iceland's oldest newspaper and most-visited website (now co-edited by the former prime minister and head of the central bank) has just announced an anti "deep linking" policy saying that Icelanders aren't allowed to link to individual pages on the site, only the front door. Which is to say, the people of Iceland can no longer talk about any news online unless it happens to still be on the front page of the newspaper. Ah, there's the commitment to public service that makes journalism so critical to a free society! (Thanks, Halli!)
The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition takes place March 12-14 in Emeryville, CA. Organizers promise "the best elements of traditional science fiction and fantasy conventions, [combined] with the passion, ingenuity, and hands-on workshops of Maker events, in a steam-powered, neo-Victorian setting that spans the 1830s through the early 1910s, from the cultured salons of gaslit London to the rugged coast of San Francisco." Sure sounds fun. I'm delighted to see a number of folks we've covered on Boing Boing before, including Jon Sarriugarte, Kimric Smythe, and The Neverwas Haul Crew in the "kinetics" portion of the event.
Welcome on fanzines dot info! Once upon a time, fanzines were technically modest do-it-yourself magazines, put together with a lot of enthusiasm, but generally not much money. Now that the process has been virtualized through Internet, everything is completely different, but everything is still exactly the same... all the same. Fanzines.info is a meta-fanzine, offering you an uncoherent magma of what's going on today in the realm of fanzines in cyberspace. This happens in many languages. Read the ones which you understand. Or viceversa. Enjoy.