Note the conspicuous lack of smut! Frame from a Seattle Post-Intelligencer gallery of Playboy founder hugh Hefner's teenage doodles, sent to his high school sweetheart in the early 1940s. The full collection is for sale at a price well into the 6 figures. Apparently, rare book dealer Lux Mentis will send you a PDF of the contents upon request. (Via Roger Ebert)
[Update: Oh no, the uploader just made this video private! I hope they change their mind, it was such a cute video. Sorry for the tease. —XJ ]
The adorable little boy in this video, whose name is Calen, is sorting out what it means when two fellas get married to one another.
At one point, while face-palming, he says pensively: "I always see husbands and wifes, but this is the very first time I saw husbands and husbands! That's so funny. So—so you love each other! [...] I'm gonna go play now."
Video: Husbands and Husbands. Flip-cammed and uploaded by YouTube user TheColonelFrog. (Dangerous Minds via Oh Have You Seen This, thanks Tara McGinley!).
Holga, © Stavro Papadopoulos, from an image gallery curated by Sean Bonner of work by various photographers using toy cameras, over at Magnesium Agency.
I don't know where this came from, or if it is from a real choose-your-own-adventure book, but as Margaret Wise Brown might say, the important thing is that it is funny.
Boing Boing readers are interested in Edgar Allan Poe (examples 1, 2, 3, and 4), so I suspect you'll want to be the first to know about 4 by Poe, an upcoming collection of four Poe stories designed and illustrated by Eric Mongeon.
Mongeon is best-known 'round these corners as a fabulous magazine designer and art director (and as the man behind the look of a record that's particularly close to me), and this is a new project for him, although one that has haunted him since design school. Each story will be published quarterly as an individually-bound limited-edition softcover volume. Mongeon promises surprises:
"4 by Poe isn't going to be yet another cinderblock tome, printed on crummy paper, typeset by a designer who dares you to actually read the text, and embellished by an illustrator who operates from a safely detached position of irony. This is going to be an illustrated collection for us grown-ups. One that approaches Poe's stories of murder, mystery, and mayhem on their own beautiful, sensationalistic terms. One that highlights the black humor, celebrates the philosophical insights, and yes, revels in the violence ... Poe's deviants lived in the real world, and that's how I'm going to show them."Subscribe. I just did. 4 by Poe: A collection of four short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
"The man from whom he had bought the drugs was upset and invited him over to his house and upon arrival struck him in the head several times with a handgun and other people jumped into the fray," said Gordon Bassham with the Wichita Police Department."Wichita man pays crack dealer with Monopoly money"The victim was able to get away and escape serious injury.
At this point police say he's being uncooperative.
Victor doesn't think that this is a copyright violation (I think he's right), but it does smack of plagiarism and intellectual dishonesty. It's possible that CNN was inspired to write the extremely similar piece at the same time, but the more likely explanation is that CNN just ripped Victor off. Victor couldn't find any contact info for the author and when he posted a question about it to the article's comment thread, it was rejected.
We often hear big media companies talk about how bloggers rip them off by posting fragments of their articles, but there's a well-developed practice of linking and crediting in blogging that often doesn't go the other way, and it sucks that media companies don't play nice in link economy.
Copycat Articles Trample Bloggers: PWND By CNN (Thanks, Victor!)
Had the article I'd penned been something more general or topical, I wouldn't have batted an eye. But I'd researched the topic before writing the post, and found almost nothing on geek anthems- and no articles at all in the past few years. It was a niche I was excited to fill. The post I wrote did well, getting picked up by Veronica Belmont and BuzzFeed among others, and garnering close to 20,000 visits at last count. Not Gawker numbers, but for our young blog it was a nice spike that's resulted in substantially more regulars. CNN's article, however, stopped the post's momentum dead in its tracks.Talking over my discovery with a prominent journalist buddy, she told me it was a common occurrence. More and more she noticed big media borrowing unique topics and ideas from viral blog posts in the hopes that they'd go unnoticed. With all the recent search-term omniscience being developed, it's getting harder to hide that sort of thing. And what about the little guy?
The real issue here is search rank. For young blogs hoping for traction, SEO is king, and knock-off articles pose a much greater threat to scrappy bloggers than old media. We scramble to find topical/SEO niches and plant our flags with posts like "Top Ten Depressing Songs" or "How to Prepare For a Steampunk Prom", using each as a foothold to climb higher up Mt. Blogosphere. But a copycat article by one of the big guys immediately supplants that flag, and incinerates it with the ensuing ripple effect. In this case, CNN's article wrested the top "geek anthems" search spot from mine, and the flood of blogs linking to it filled up the rest of the first page.
